Red fox
On my way out to Cat’s Cradle tonight, to catch the young band Happy Landing on the opening night of their tour, I saw a red fox dart across the gravel drive. It stopped in the woods just beyond the truck’s headlights, turned and watched me.
Recently, I prepared a two-page vivid vision (inspired by this) to guide my health, family and friends, finances, work, and writing over the next five years. In this plan, to answer “What is my state of mind” on my sixtieth birthday, I have this goal:
I find awe, beauty, and wonder from nature (hiking, camping, touring) and from people (music, arts, culture). I spend 5 full days outside and I attend 12 concerts, shows, plays, and other live entertainment each year.
I’ve already caught a couple of concerts in the last weeks (Cannons, The Heavy Heavy), with more tickets in hand for shows ahead. I join Uncle John later this month for the final year of the World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, then the one-day Carrboro Music Festival follows, and later my brother Nick will be here and we’ll be back at Cat’s Cradle for Melt and The Dear Hunter.. Culture is the easy goal.
The reach goal in my vivid vision is book related.
To focus on a topic of my one-day novel or memoir, I plan to mine my 25 years of blogging. For a long time and to have a hard copy archive of my writing, I’ve converted the blog posts from the Zuiker Chronicles and mistersugar.com into a single document, three columns of 9-point type to a page. It runs to more than 400 pages. Last month, I started to add posts that I have written on other, secondary blogs (Yumi Stap Storian, Wan Smol Blog, Coconut Wireless, and a blog I wrote with Dave Winer’s Fargo outliner). I have a bit of trepidation about feeding this archive into an AI engine, though I’m eager to learn what I can about all that I’ve chronicled and documented, so I’ll proceed cautiously and most likely use a local LLM. Someday.
At the moment, I’d just like a better way to search my archive. For example, with Malia now in Madrid for the semester, I’ve been thinking about the couple of years after I graduated college. I would purchase copies of El Pais and read that newspaper from Spain in my apartment in Honolulu, and later in Shaker Heights, as a way to practice my Spanish comprehension. But I’m not sure I mentioned that in two and a half decades of blogging. (The New Yorker happens to have a current article about El Pais in the U.S.)
I do know that I’ve blogged about a lot of wildlife—turtles and owls and ospreys and foxes and too many roaches and one dugong. All along, I have found awe, beauty, and wonder in nature. More to come.
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© Anton Zuiker