Saw someone whose writing I follow wearing a Dr. Strangelove t-shirt.
“Purity of Essence.”

A pull.
Tools and practices that don’t fight each other.

A fault line.
Purity held inward clarifies.
Projected outward, it hardens.

Unmarked transitions.
Critique sliding into affirmation.
Roles blurring.

I slept deeply until my father died.
Since then, I sleep lightly.

I moved to an apartment above the muck.
Windows that keep sound out.
Better curtains.

I still don’t sleep eight hours consistently.
Once I wake up, it doesn’t take much.
I don’t fall back asleep.

The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.

— Barry H. Gillespie

The wind comes and goes.

Fennel, spinach, cucumber, celery, parsley.

Met someone briefly at lunch.
Put together. Easy smile. Comfortable to be around.

Later I looked up her work.
It moved between documenting harm and affirming institutions.
The transition wasn’t marked.

I couldn’t tell which role I was meant to be seeing.
The discomfort stayed.

Wife had been talking about a juice fast for a while. We started yesterday.

I stopped exercising months ago after hurting my shoulders.
Today is day 2 and I’m mildly annoyed.

She got the idea from a six-day water fast I did years ago.

I have a lunch appointment tomorrow.
The cook is making food for my daughter.
The smell is making me feel slightly more pissed off.

I am feeling lighter.
There is a bottle of beetroot, carrot, apple, ginger, lime.

Bought a little Canon photo printer the other day. Spent quite a lot of time going through old photos and printing a bunch.
Most of them are photos of dead people.
Posted a few on the fridge with magnets.
Feels like Día de los Muertos.

I miss them.

I cheated and made myself a protein smoothie.
I have a lunch appointment tomorrow anyway.

It reminded me of when I used to come up with excuses to smoke.

Last juice.
Cashew, date, himalayan salt, vanilla, chai spices.

Wife said starting tomorrow we’re moving onto "medicinal green glow."
No more cashew chai.

P ≠ NP?
Not winning by solving life.
Designing it so good enough compounds.

"What is there to confess that’s worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it’s no novelty, and if only to us, then it won’t be understood. If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant. I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations."

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Daily dose of social lipstick. Done.
Breakfast protein smoothie. Done.
Resist thinking. Doing.

On the way to the toilet I turned on my smart switch.
I push on the side that sticks out most. It switches.
The rest of the time it stays out of my way.

Light switches here turn on when you push down.

The terrace upstairs is so windy it destroyed our plants.
The banana trees looked like a typhoon had just passed.

This is not a building. It’s a boat.

In Mexico City there is a wide avenue named after a revolution.
Today I heard a dissident being quoted by mainstream long after danger passed.
As we travel through time, we find statues where persons used to be.
Street names where points of inflection used to exist.

Barely functional this afternoon.
Dinner appointment.

Nap?
Work. Then power nap?
Or wait and sleep early.

Volume way down.

pulsar.el

I no longer have to ask where I am.

Removed the email address to discourage scrapers.
Contact remains, but gated.
Noise is not access.

YOU ARE IN ROOM 16
YOU HAVE 5 ARROWS
BATS NEARBY…

Connections started firing.

Late last night I remembered the computer room technician from the mid-80s: Señor Minor. Stubby guy with a mustache, reserved, and the loudest sneeze I have ever known. It could be heard throughout the company, through closed doors.

Neurons fire.
Now I’m thinking of my long-lost uncle, Carlos.
He had the first laptop I ever saw.
Separated from my aunt some thirty-five years ago.
Poof! Disappeared.
Reappeared briefly in 1998. Systems engineer. SAP implementer.

Had a mustache too.

I spent most of this morning trying to track him down.

Common first and last name. No obvious matches. The 1998 Hotmail address doesn’t bounce.

I left my fountain pen in a drawer for a few months after the move.

I’ve picked it up a few times since. Ink on my fingers. On the cap. I can’t tell if it leaked or if I smeared it myself. The ink didn’t dry. That’s usually what happens.

I love fountain pens until they become finicky. After that I never quite get them back. I clean them. I try again. Eventually I replace them.

Using a Pigma Micron 03.

The nanny put her hand to her forehead and sighed.

I asked what was wrong.

Someone offered her money to start a business.

She likes being a nanny. She doesn’t want to quit.

Money waiting.
Time pushing.
Nothing decided.

Stayed up tweaking Emacs config.
Important meeting at 9am.

Ugh.

Matcha at home.

Microwaved water, superheated.
The powder hits.
Cup boils on contact.
I stir.
Milk from the fridge, quick.
I drink it hot.

Another way:
Spindle whisking.
Metal whisk.
Turbulence.
Foam.
Still hot.

I’ve watched it done properly.
Quiet room.
Tools laid out.
Powder weighed.
Sieved.
Water cooled.
73℃.
Fifteen minutes later,
the cup is warm at best.

Something gets lost when mastery becomes aspirational.
The ritual survives.
The heat doesn’t.

At what point does optimization expose theater?

I have observations on ginger beer too.

I installed NixOS on 3 computers for the accounting team thinking it would be easy to replicate and scale.

I’ve had no need to scale. Every change needs to be written in a config file and every time I have to relearn and fiddle with it.

I’ve had enough. Migrating the first one to Debian today.

The first computer programs I ever used were Hunt the Wumpus and Artillery, sometime in the mid-1980s. Hunt the Wumpus would confuse me, and I don’t think I won often. Artillery was more predictable but felt less magical.

My dad had a computer room at the office with a few monitors, some giant floppy drives, and a dot matrix printer. There was a Snoopy calendar program, and I used to love getting one of those as a long string of attached paper.

I thought he’d made the programs himself. That’s what I understood. I guess he copied the code from magazines.

He also taught me to write a program that printed my name over and over on the screen in BASIC. It was hypnotic and felt like magic. I remember asking him more than once how to make it stop. I still remember the combination and the ^C interrupting the dance on the screen.

I can still smell and hear that cold, air-conditioned room and see the green letters glowing on the screen, with the curved beige housing.

Years later that same room was full of PCs, and there was a computer guy who played Dungeons & Dragons in his free time and brought many games for me to play: Decathlon, Destroyer, Tapper, Digger, Alley Cat, Carmen Sandiego.

YOU ARE IN ROOM 8.
YOU FEEL A DRAFT
THE WUMPUS IS NEARBY

Am I slowly being modulated to mediocrity? Enter the full Deleuzian society of modulation. On steroids. I love it. It makes me legible. It reduces the friction. It allows me to exist in C major.

But that is not my nature. Some surfaces were meant to polish rock.

Let this surface be the abrasive then.

What does refusal look like in 2026?

Without withdrawal or heroics.

How do you refuse without losing legibility? Without jeopardizing work, residence, family?

Is that refusal structural or is it just selective silence?

And if selective is it hypocrisy? Or is it simply the cost of staying inside the system long enough to make a living?

Does it signal misalignment that could be corrected by changing the structure? To live the dream, so to speak, but not the Instagramed one.

We’re told to be ourselves.

But that assumes there is a single self to be.

The waitress goes home and becomes a mother. The children sleep. She becomes something else.

"Be yourself" often means: separate cleanly. perform appropriately. don’t let roles leak.

Honesty, then, isn’t disclosure. It’s knowing which parts must stay unspoken.

This could be a private log. Instead, it’s public.

What is gained by that exposure? What is quietly surrendered?

Linkedin that.

Unfinished. Raw. Unprocessed. Here. This. Now.

Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

— Pema Chodron

Here 2> is a heart.

Looks like its starting to warm up again. It was 32℃ before I turned on the AC earlier.

More log than blog. Might as well have some weather updates too: uncomfortably warm with a chance of overthinking.

I remembered a poem by Leon Felipe as I was making this site today:

Más sencilla… más sencilla.
Sin barroquismo,
sin añadidos ni ornamentos.
Que se vean desnudos
los maderos,
desnudos
y decididamente rectos.

«Los brazos en abrazo hacia la tierra,
el mástil disparándose a los cielos».

Que no haya un solo adorno
que distraiga este gesto…
este equilibrio humano
de los dos mandamientos.
Más sencilla… más sencilla…
hazme una cruz sencilla, carpintero.

A life long fascination with simplicity and yet trapped in an overthinking, baroque mind.