Another Week: Number 126

Like you, I have two conflicting models informing my state of mind at all times.

Part of me believes that there is some hidden, long-term purpose behind everything, and that we can occasionally pick up signals from the command center even if we can’t always decipher them.

The other part knows that everything dies, often after suffering, and that the whole universe is just a ridiculous and cruel coincidence, like the Easter Bunny bringing a basket of chocolate eggs to commemorate the execution of an obscure preacher in Israel 2,000 years ago — or a one-man version of the Three Stooges being elected President of the United States. Twice.

I’ve mentioned this before, but in December of 2023, The National posted a conversation between frontman Matt Berninger and David Letterman in which Letterman brought up one theory of depression:

Depression is life — is actual human existence — with twenty-twenty vision. You’re seeing the real thing, and it’s a mechanism in you that keeps you away from that.

That is to say, depression is seeing without your rose-colored glasses.

My favorite rose-colored glasses were fashioned by Joseph Campbell, in his “hero’s journey” formula, and by Bruce Springsteen, in songs like “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run.”

This week, I read a thoughtful essay by Eliane Glaser arguing that the “hero’s journey” plot is ubiquitous, infantilizing, dumb, and even dangerous:

Stories, as Vogler told me, function as ‘a kind of wish fulfilment’, meeting the human craving for ‘order and a purpose’. Regarding life as simply chaotic or meaningless is, he says, a ‘dangerous mental condition, … a horrible place to be’. Real life, of course, doesn’t have a shape as such. As Aristotle put it in his Poetics: ‘infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity’. Things don’t happen for a reason.

So: Rose-colored glasses on — or off?

On Sunday, Joe Biden’s people announced that he has been diagnosed with advanced-stage prostate cancer that has spread to his bones.

Weatherwise, our week started extremely cold and rainy, and slowly improved to sunny and chilly.

The impatience is palpable as my fellow Racinians wait for either America’s Golden Age or summer to finally begin. Cars and motorcycles accelerate furiously up my street headed west — where they’ll find a stop sign, and another stop roughly every two blocks after that as they’re pulling out of here to win.

Several fireworks (or perhaps pipe bombs) exploded nearby on Saturday night to herald the eve of the day before the official start of fireworks season.

I went for zero walks this week — but I did drive out to Richmond, Illinois for a consultation with a potential client.  I can report that road construction season is in full swing.

Web bookmarks: Goodbye Pocket, hello Anybox

Two people can accumulate lots of miscellany over 42 years while they’re busy working and going to cancer appointments. Some of this is material stuff stashed in drawers or in the basement. Other bits are digital — texts, photos, emails, and documents stashed in folders on the computer and in the cloud.

For years, Amy and I used Pocket to store our web bookmarks. Recipes, stories, gardening ideas, tech tutorials, cool people, restaurants to try, books to read — all of those URLs went into Pocket.

Pocket was not perfect. Adding items wasn’t always the easiest. For this reason, I have several hundred tabs open on my phone’s browser waiting to be added to Pocket. As with the basement, I have been making very slow progress — during which it occurred to me that Pocket could go away someday.

Less than 24 hours after that thought, Mozilla sent me an email announcing that Pocket is going away.

Clearly, I need something on my own computer that could organize bookmarks as well or better than Pocket. It would have to sync with my phone and be able to import my 4,359 Pocket bookmarks.

After searching for ten or fifteen minutes, I settled on Anybox. I have not had it a week yet, but I already love Anybox. It imported my Pocket clutter in about three minutes and fetched fresh thumbnails for everything. I can sort and rename tags, edit outdated URLS, and do many other things I haven’t even tried yet.

Anybox is currently $14.99 for a year or $39.99 lifetime — well worth it, either way.

Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021)

Jonathan Larson wrote musicals. He wrote one called Superbia that never got produced. Then he wrote another one, called Tick, Tick… Boom!. It was semi-autobiographical, about writing the first one. Then he wrote one called Rent that ran on Broadway for 12 years.

But — on the morning of the first preview performance of Rent, he collapsed and died of an aortic dissection.

Saturday night via Netflix, my mom and I watched the movie adaptation of Larson’s middle work — Tick, Tick… Boom!

It’s Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s directorial debut, and he keeps things moving, partly through engaging transitions from apartment to workshop to New York’s streets. It’s a close-up, musical study of a prisoner to creativity, tortured by the temptation to sell out.

Andrew Garfield stars as Larson, and his Oscar-nominated performance is fantastic. He acts and sings with astonishing skill and commitment. Somehow, though, I got the impression that the real-life Larson might have exuded a slightly goofier sense of humor.

My mom is a big fan of movie musicals, but she’s less familiar with the stage. We had to pause so I could read from Wikipedia and underscore the significance of Stephen Sondheim.

We both enjoyed it.