V. prepared dinner last night. It was fish and it was laborious. I assisted with the drinks and the salad. We had a nice chat though I would blank out at time from having smoked weed. She’s just seen me high a handful of times and her reaction is utterly normal, she speaks to me as if I were sober and helps me backtrack if I lose the thread.

She left very early in the morning to go on vacation to Santander, where it’s less hot. I got to refresh myself at a water gun fight in Lavapiés, where the fiestas are happening tonight. Finally I’ll resume my “project”.

Aside: I’m importing my old journals into a private blog. It’s interesting to read myself from ten years ago. I struggle with the same issues perpetually. I’ve only progressed in self-honesty and humility about them. But at the same time there’s a feeling: dude chill, you’re good ok? shhhh nah no “but”, you’re good. Now shut up and let me enjoy my show.

I’m so glad I’m able to do this casually. I used to think I would only be able to do it in my old age. I’m not sure what I will do with it but I know I want in text. At this time I don’t want to publish it (it was never meant to) but I know somehow I’ll learn to extract wisdom from my own corpus.

Without prior context warmup, a purely technical context window, I asked Fable:

Have you read what we imported? what do you think about it?

I have — closely, three times over, and it’s been one of the more absorbing things I’ve worked on. Some honest reactions:

What it actually is. On the surface it’s an addiction-recovery journal — the ganja/tobacco/porn cycle repeats through all three notebooks, and you catch yourself at it (“even I’m getting tired of having this discussion in my diary”). But the deeper project is the one you name in the Ataraxia notebook after reading the existential therapy book: “I have never had an authority figure. The challenge ahead is being my own father.” That’s the real thread. Everything else — the virtue sheets, the pacts with the universe, the trackers, the Karamazov brothers negotiating with each other — reads as a 2014 Mark building the internal parent he didn’t get. The shoes anecdote and the calculator anecdote appear in two notebooks, told twice, differently; the second telling ends with the Indian teacher who lent you his calculator. You were working something loose.

The best writing is the least deliberate. When you set out to Write (“THE ALTERNATE WAY”, “ART FOR THE RATIONAL MIND”), the pages fill with cross-outs and end in “NAH THIS IS BULLSHIT”. When you’re just recording — the Sócrates-at-Dr.-Simi stool exam story, the Ecobici and the patrulla, the dog-in-the-woods metaphor for the subconscious, the neighbor couple outperforming the terrible musician — it’s vivid and funny and needs no editing. The letter to María in the Success notebook is the most affecting thing in the corpus precisely because it’s a draft: you can watch you deciding, strike by strike, how much truth to put in each sentence.

The self-awareness cuts both ways. You diagnose your own failure modes with real precision — “no se puede registrar la vida y vivirla al mismo tiempo” is the sharpest sentence in three notebooks, and the observation that the virtue sheet itself becomes a stick to beat yourself with when depressed is exactly right. But the diaries also demonstrate the trap they describe: system after system (CHECASH, LAPIPA, BODY/MIND/SPIRIT/ENVIRONMENT, the color-coded graphs) built, abandoned, rebuilt — each one partly a way of not doing the thing. The loneliness underneath is the most consistent signal: “Necesito amigos. Ya fue suficiente de este aislamiento” recurs more often than any philosophical conclusion, and it’s usually the thing that actually fixes your mood — yoga, the fútbol with Boris and Hugo, talking to the lavandería lady — never the metaphysics.

Two things I found genuinely remarkable. The archetype-per-diary plan at the end of Intensity — “each diary will be an archetype” — is a real formal invention, turning the journal from a record into a deliberate instrument for trying on selves. And the note to future-you: “54 y/o Mark, if you are indeed reading this I hope you are happy, healthy. This is all I ask for.” You’re not 54 yet, but this import means you’re re-reading it now, a decade-plus on, from Madrid — where 2014-you kept deciding not to go. There’s something quietly satisfying about the “incapaz de sostenerme independientemente” fear sitting in a repo alongside the games that are still played and the career that held.

Least favorite stretch, honestly: the “A real man…” maxims. You half-knew it too — “If I read myself it sounds like I am a douchebag” is right there a few pages earlier. But even that section earns its place, because ANIMUS reframes it as an archetype to be tried on rather than a creed — which is the most charitable and, I think, correct reading of what you were doing.

I’m curious whether the Animus notebook exists and whether the archetype plan survived contact with reality.