Introduction

I am starting this diary because I have had the urge for several years to maintain some kind of blog/diary/thought dump that is personal but also public. This is under the assumption that I can garner the willpower to have thoughts and follow through with flushing them out in writing. I guess I‘m making the first step at least.

I get into these modes where I will spend three days in a Wikipedia hole, consuming everything I can about a topic; envisioning how it all fits into the bigger picture, wondering at the significance of a subject no one talks about, using my thrifted new lens to reexamine everything. And then I promptly move onto something else, or go into a gaming hole, or get occupied by a million other things that don’t interest me at all, only consume my attention.

It is a fantasy of mine to be able to track all of it; to actualize the web as it weaves itself through all the little pieces of knowledge that have laid themselves out, patiently and without expectations of acknowledgment, throughout history. I know that‘s a fool‘s task. It takes a lifetime to even conceptualize a fraction of the things that you will not ever be able to know, let alone actually know anything. But I think it can be fun, the action of finding out and putting pieces together and seeing a greater pattern to everything.

I am not an academic, nor do I find myself amongst academics except for the occasional friends-of-friends. I most often come across the self-taught geniuses of particular subjects: classical art, noir films of the 70s, dolly-stacking, etc., and most often enjoy listening to the little passion pieces they spin over a coffee. This is to say that I do not experience a lot of academic topics in real life, at least not anymore. I went to college, a very “liberal” one that attracted students stuffed to the teeth with sociopolitical theory and rhetoric. They read too much and said too much, but I did envy the way that they could speak with such certainty on topics that they were statistically unlikely to watch manifest in real life. I have always been better at writing than speaking, and even my writing has fallen off a bit at this point.

If I do not actively try to engage in topics that exist outside of my day-to-day existence, I run the risk of becoming somebody who doesn’t change their mind. And that cannot be tolerated. So I am intentionally setting the goal to write about something I have learned about the world as frequently as possible (I will not say daily because the only thing I can consistently do daily is breathe). This serves two purposes: to keep track on how often I am actually learning new things, and to keep track of the things I have learned so that they are less likely to return to the swirling abyss of ignorance.

So I suppose I will have to learn something new today since I have nothing to write about at the moment.