Henry Miller... There are great works of literature within you, if you’d only stop and listen

A clarifying attitude for starting your week “Energy is attention, attention is energy. If you want more energy, stop wasting attention. Only attend to good and true things.” —Jonathan Pageau

Borges: "We are given mistakes, we are given nightmares, almost nightly, and our task is to make them into poetry." Bradbury: "You must stay drunk on writing so reality doesn't destroy you." x.com/NeckarValue/st…

An astute warning for writers: "Once an idea peaks, it starts to degrade quickly. Eventually, if not acted upon, the thing moves on and finds another willing participant in this strange alchemy of writing...Don’t confuse incubation for procrastination." —Jeff Goins

The magical creative combination: Inspiration + Technical Skill "Without [inspiration] nothing of lasting value can be put on paper. A good composer must also be a killed craftsman...but no matter how clever the workmanship, no composition will live unless it is inspired."

The Zen of Calvin and Hobbes

A pointed irony: Those of us who are drawn to creativity and spirituality are more prone to a grossly countermanding ego obsession. You know that self you're so keen to develop, express, actualize, and fulfill? That's your prison. Real liberation isn't *for* you but *from* you.

A scourge in contemporary American culture: performative authenticity. Everybody trying to look so honest, so real. Celebrities., politicians, churches, corporations. Authenticity as their very brand. Sorry, but if you sell yourself as authentic, it's a clear sign you're not.

"His psychological state of nihilism, pessimism, and Lovecraftian cosmic horror led naturally to Ligotti, and when he was introduced to Ligotti in 1997 via the man’s short story collection GRIMSCRIBE, he found the incantatory writing almost too powerful to believe." Yes, was me.

I owe my early adolescent discovery of Lovecraft to three things: a book about RPG's titled Dicing with Dragons, Sandy Peterson's Call of Cthulhu game, and Marvel comics. These led me to the Ballantine paperbacks, then to de Camp's HPL bio, which I devoured at age 17.

When you act from your conditioning, you just perpetuate your own programming in the world. True freedom has to come first, from within—from beyond the ego—before we can do any real good. Otherwise, our efforts just reproduce our own inner tyranny.

Private journals often conceal as much as they reveal. My own journals, for instance, written across 30 years, often reflect the opposite of what others might have seen in my outer life. I frequently turned to my journal to explore things not possible in my external world.

This weekend I reached a decision: I'm leaving X and moving my online writing elsewhere. See the a pinned announcement on my account. I'm posting this separate note because the announcement has a link and might be suppressed. I value my readers and wanted to inform you directly.