It is 3:51 AM and I am in front of the computer eating a warm porridge. I went to yoga last night, and sometimes yoga gives me insomnia. This, and and room full of mosquitoes have prevented me from gainful sleep. But sometimes, when you put warm milk into the stomach it will put you to bed.

I feel much more comfortable writing these kind of things in this new home. Still, I know I need to pursue my “public persona” at exploration.work. I’ve been using it to post blank.page’s experiments, which is exactly the use case of why I bought this domain.

Yesterday I had a remote meeting with the guys from MeetUp in Madrid. It was great. I will miss these remote sessions when things become normal again, meetups are being held virtually for the time being and I take advantage of this.

Perhaps, post-COVID I ought to form my own meetup group here.

Work-wise, I’ve been cranking out blank page exercises on a daily basis. It is liberating doing experiments instead of the stressful work of working on live systems. Reliability is niether a talent nor an interest of mine, what makes me tick is exploration and prototyping. After the prototype is done, work becomes boring.

But I do admire people who are good at making systems reliable. The kind of work we are adept at doing seems to stem from our own personality, and the more flexible our own personality, the more skills we bring to the table. I am reminded of Sebas, that Colombian genius who seems to possess all kinds of contradictory qualities, he is the only person whom I’d trust to do exploration and reliability work.

The porridge seems to be doing its effect and I feel the need to go back to sleep. I wonder if I should write to the Yoga studio to cancel my appointment. Class is at 9am but I doubt that I will feel inclined to attend in the morning. If I were to fall asleep right now and wake up in four hours I’d be able to make it. It’s a close draw. I will keep on writing stream of thought and see if this is true sleepiness or simply tiredness.

As of late, I’ve had these random sensations of shame accompanied by “painful” memories. I put it in quotes, because the memories are objectively unimportant: it may be something awkward I said a long time ago, or a small uneducated detail that springs to mind—that I served myself too much wine and I did not share enough with my dad and his wife, for example. This is experienced as shame and it comes at the most random moments.

I am reminded of the conundrum presented by William James: does emotion elicit memory, or does memory elicit emotion? To the amateur observer of mind it would be obvious that the memory produces the emotion, but observing deeper, they seem to arise at the same time. It would be as if the emotion triggers a part of the brain where the memory is contained, and they both emerge at the same time.

This kind of shame only arises when I’ve been free of weed for a couple of days, but it never seems to stop. It seems to be a feature of my sober consciousness. Wait—I remember, this is true, but something else is also true, I used to experience this while walking the camino, and yerterday I distinctly remember feeling it while biking, as I became concerned that this emotional state would interfere with my driving.

Shame and fear seem to go hand in hand, for I also remember having the sensation that I would have an accident, a sort of intuition that something bad would happen to me. But I know this to be folly, I do not listen to intuition in the form of fear, because it has proved time and time again to be false. But one day I will have an accident with a preceding “intuition” and I will lament that I didn’t listen to my intuition, but if I listened to it I would do nothing in life.

In general, the state of being at this time is quite paradoxical: I wish to remain in my solitude, but I also wish to form a group of friends that are in accordance to my new state of being. I’ve seen a couple of friends from my younger days, but I have nothing in common with them anymore (I don’t think I ever did), I’m just not willing to waste away life drinking with buddies.

I yearn for so many things, and yet I tell myself that these are illusions, that—if I got what I wanted—I would find myself in this exact same state after a couple of weeks or months. Unsatisfied. The solution to this, it is said, is gratefulness. What am I grateful about? If I do not feel gratefulness, it feels artificial to go fishing into memory for something I should feel grateful about. I actually feel like an ungrateful prick.

The mood is overcast, but the time of the night and the circumstance in which this is being written is abnormal too. The fact that I can’t sleep influences thought, for sure. I must sit down to meditate so that I disidentify with these thoughts, and hopefully fall into peaceful sleep.