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Don’t let your dreams give up on you – Austin Kleon

I got rear-ended at a stoplight on the drive out to the Frio Canyon last weekend. I’m fine, but I’ve spent the week thinking about whiplash. Not just physical whiplash, but spiritual whiplash — when we feel the jolts of being whipped back and forth by life. “Sharp, sudden movements can cause your brain to smack against the inside of your skull.” How does one recover? In the short term, there’s no way to treat it directly: You have to be still, deal with the pain, and let the injury heal before you figure out what further action is needed and how to get up and moving again…

Austin Kleon’s always excellent newsletter often brings joy. But this… This is exactly how I’ve been feeling and what I’ve been doing to treat it.

Alan Jacobs – periodicity

The more unstable a situation is, the more rapidly it changes, the less valuable minute-by-minute reporting is. I don’t know what happened to the hospital in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Economist shows up I will be better informed about it than people who have been rage-refreshing their browser windows for the past several days, and I will have suffered considerably less emotional stress.

This could help.

Ridley Scott on ‘Gladiator II,” Denzel Washington and Joaquin Phoenix – The New York Times

No need to read the whole interview (unless you’re a fan of the Director as I am) but it has what must be the most topical, timely, and thought provoking closing question and answer I’ve read in a while.

Your mother lived all the way into her mid-90s, right?

Yeah. She said to me, “This is ridiculous,” held my hand and died. Isn’t that great?

Totally Fucked (Original Broadway Cast Recording/2006)

MELCHIOR
There’s a moment you know you’re fucked
Not an inch more room to self-destruct
No more moves
oh yeah, the dead-end zone
Man, you just can’t call your soul your own

OTTO (Spoken)
But the thing that makes you really jump
Is that the weirdest shit is still to come
You can ask yourself: ‘Hey, what have I done’?
You’re just a fly ? the little guys, they kill for fun

I’ve been on the fence for a long time. Both sides seemed equally bad to me. A choice between two evils. But now, after waiting for years for change in what has become a broken system and not addressing the issues that affect me and my family, I’ve finally decided…

Zoom meetings are evil.

“Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be… defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

— Ronald Reagan