30 Years of Diaries

I've kept journals since 1993.
This one just happens to face outward. Notes on what I read, watch, think about, and notice.
Whatever holds my attention long enough to make a home in my memory.

Great Ave Ruins is exactly what it sounds like:
the remnants of a previous business, a space for my neverending-hardly-cohesive thoughts on wellness culture, on books that take fiction seriously, on travel as flâneur rather than tourist, on journaling, and always something about life that’s beyond optimisation. I have been an educator. A facilitator. A retailer. I left each, in turn, when the leaving became necessary, when the staying would have required a smaller self than I was willing to inhabit. Now I write longform copy, design websites, serve businesses that seek clarity without the dulling language of corporate propriety. But here — here is where my thinking lives unedited, unmanaged, accountable only to what holds my attention long enough to require written form. The essays are slower here. Longer. Less interested in arriving than in noticing what appears along the way, what complicates, what refuses to simplify even when simplicity would be kinder. I call it witness attention, though I resist — how I resist — calling it anything at all, giving it a name, making it a method, a thing one could teach or learn or perfect. But there must be words, mustn't there, even for what refuses them. So: witness attention. To see what is there. All of it, the contradictions especially, the parts that will not fit together, that refuse the neat arrangement. This is not mindfulness, that polite cousin of actual attention. It is not detachment, which is merely attention's refusal. It is the opposite of both: full presence to complexity, the refusal to collapse ambiguity into narrative, into lesson, into the tidy shape that allows one to move on, improved, transformed, done with looking. It shapes everything I am. It has ruined relationships. How could it not, this insistence on seeing what one is supposed to overlook, on staying with what one is supposed to resolve. It has shattered goals, those neat trajectories that require one to stop noticing the contradictions in order to arrive somewhere clean. But it is what happened when I decided to stay true to myself, and I find now — now that the practice has become inseparable from thinking itself — that I am no longer interested in doing anything else.