I woke up to someone saying my name on the walkie talkie this morning. It was just a dream. I slept through the bike ride to see Route 67 open. Shannon reported it was already open when she got there at 5:58am, so I didn't miss anything.
I remember when I was younger waking up to an alarm into a life that felt like a nightmare. A job I didn't want. Opening my eyes into a day I was dreading. Just fighting for survival, looking for a way to get through it. Now I wake into a world I'm excited to be in and a day I feel I get to live.
Shannon is rolling out to Kanab in a few minutes. I'll be at my practice all day. It's looking like tomorrow is the day we head into the North Rim. We're both fired up. I know it's going to be challenging to put in my regular hours on the practice out there, but that's part of the continuous learning curve that is making this life come together.
I often struggle with feeling that my creative pursuits take far too long to bear fruit. Then other times I feel I'm doing just fine, great even. Both things are probably true. There's no remedy on either side except to keep showing up, putting in the presence, the time and the effort.
Yesterday I spent time creating a mix of the dance songs from our group camp in Utah. Got all my gear working, created a heavily manipulated mix, cleaned it up, listened back. Then listened to the originals. For the most part I liked the originals better. But if the originals had about 20% of the more aggressive mixing folded in, I think that would be the ideal. So the practice is clear: record everything, listen back, make notes on what's working and what isn't. That's the practice now, and it was the practice when I was less skilled, and it'll be the practice in five years. It's just the way to get better.
The taste problem has been solved. I made a full liter for myself using one of Shannon's Crystal Light packets. Delicious. It completely masks the pond scum and turns it into something that tastes like a treat. I won't have any trouble drinking two of these a day. I just need to mix up a big batch so I'm not breaking out the quarter teaspoons and big bags every time.
I did find myself wondering why I have to do this when 99.999% of humans throughout history haven't made their own electrolyte powder. Here's what Claude had to say about that: "For most of human history people got abundant sodium through heavily salted and preserved foods without thinking about it. You're on keto in a low-sodium food culture in desert heat, which is a genuinely novel metabolic situation. You're not broken, you're just doing consciously what ancestral humans did automatically." Ok, well just as long as it works.
As I've been sharing more of my life publicly I've noticed a natural phenomenon emerging with increasing frequency: some people can feel they know me in a way that doesn't go both ways. I know this is common as an audience grows and it's something every public person eventually has to navigate. I want people to feel connected, but only in a way that's grounded in reality. I'm going to need to be more thoughtful about sharing my location going forward. The location isn't the most important part of these entries, but it is the part that can make me feel most exposed. Anybody can be reading this, and over time more people will be. I'll likely start putting some entries on a delay. This next stretch in the North Rim for example, I'll think carefully about how much to share in real time. I'm still working out how to handle it. But I'm paying attention to it.