Quotes
“I must learn to ignore the question whether the objects of my thinking really exist and, if they do, whether they exist as I experience them. I must also learn to ignore questions about the reality and nature of the psychological acts in which I experience those objects. Instead, I focus on the object just as it presents itself, the object as I mean it, or as Husserl also called it, the “object qua object.”
– Blattner on Heidegger in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: A Reader’s Guide
“Only through phenomenology is ontology possible”
-Heidegger, Being and Time
“The woodpile is so beautiful, about all the joy and beauty that I can stand. I am afraid to turn around and face the mountains, for fear they will overpower me. But I did look, and I am astounded. Everyone must get to experience a profound state like this.”
– Sasha Shulgin in PIHKAL on 120 mg of MDMA
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another” – William James
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground”
– Chögyam Trungpa
“I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me; But it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much — My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst.
And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it. And then it flows through me like rain.
And, I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.”
– from the closing scene of American Beauty (major spoilers if you click the link!) I get a lot of milage from art that sees beauty/vividness in the mundane — the scene from The Bubble I linked below and Shulgin’s quote above have a similar effect
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
– Alfred Whitehead
“But now the leaves on the trees hung down thick and fleshy and had not begun to curl yet. I could look down from my office window on the great bolls and tufts and swollen globes of green which were the trees of the Capitol grounds seen from the height of my window, and think of the deep inner maze of green in one of the big trees and of the hollow shadowy chambers near the trunk, where maybe a big cantankerous jay would be perched for a moment like a barbarous potentate staring with black, glittering, beady eyes into the green tangle. Then he would dive soundlessly off the bough and break through the green screen and be gone into the bright sunshine where suddenly he would be screaming his damned head off, I could look down and think of myself inside that hollow inner chamber, in the aqueous green light, inside the great globe of the tree, and not even a jay bird in there with me now, for he had gone, and no chance of seeing anything beyond the green leaves, they were so thick, and no sound except, way off, the faint mumble of traffic, like the ocean chewing its gums.”
– Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
I read this in junior year of highschool and think it was one of my formative moments like “getting” literature
“Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’.”
-Nietzsche
I feel self-conscious quoting Nietzsche? I first saw this quote at a theoretical physics workshop and it gave me a lot of energy.
There’s a few book titles I love that I haven’t even read, that maybe fit into this quotes section — Speak, Memory, Nabakov; The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy; The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
“Form is an act of compassion” – a meditation teacher I did a retreat with said this and it made me think about the nature of this comment probably way more than they intended
“The most powerful position one can be in is having nothing to hide”
“A teardrop on the cheek of eternity”, poet Rabindranath Tagore describing the Taj Mahal as Shah Jahan’s show of his love for Mumtaz Mahal. (a friend told me about this and this quote feels more her’s than mine, but I found it stunning)
Music and music videos
2025
April
1 Hour of Smooth 70s-80s Japanese Grooves
Everybody's Talking // Harry NilssonMarch:
Another Day // This Mortal Coil
I have a visceral childhood (maybe 4-6 yo) memory of drifting off to sleep in my parents’ bed while my mom played an album that sort of sounded like this and feeling pure angst. Part of me thinks a song can’t be made like this post-internet.
drive ME crazy! / Lil YachtyEarly 2025: Shine On You Crazy Diamond // Pink Floyd + music video
major aesthetic inspo
2024
Winter in Cambridge MA: Cannock Chase // Labi Siffre, It Ain’t Me Babe // Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Love Me Or Leave Me // Nina Simone (had a peak experience cooking an elaborate dinner for myself one cold Friday night in Cambridge recently, listening to this and similar music, and my tiny apartment got really warm from the oven and stove)
I love Cambridge so much and I’ve been in and out of this place a few times over the past years but among other positive things I think of it as a place to spend time alone during life transitions.Fall -> winter: Suzanne // Nina Simone’s version
Summer: half return // Adrian Lenker, Victory // Trampled by Turtles (I’ve known Victory for maybe a decade but recently experienced a strong revival. It carries a vibe that was a big part of my music taste growing up that I’ve felt further from/missed in adult California life but am trying to reintegrate in a Norcal sense)
April/May: Heavy Bend // Big Thief (I really want to choreograph a dance to this lol), Hard Dreams // Gesaffelstein (saw this one at Coachella and was trance-like, haven’t listened to it much since)
March: Sadness As A Gift from Adrianne Lenker (when her new album came out!) (one particular memory of sitting on a friend’s bed on the third floor journaling while a party commenced downstairs, the windows open during heavy rain, cool breeze blowing through the room, intense gratitude for my adult life
Everywhere // Fleetwood Mac — same house, laying on a green, velvet sofa staring at an orange and yellow light cast across the ceiling and a glittering stain glass window, listening to chatter in the other room where >10 people were assembling furniture.Fingerbib by Aphex Twin for SF Jan/Feb downpours, walking at night, and the subway — good for anything metropolitan feeling
Boyhood by Japanese House, angsty, glowy, doesn’t land like a sad song (but is). I listened to this + a couple other songs from this album constantly in Feb
2023
I am completely obsessed with Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief right now (Nov 2023) — especially ingydar and Simulation Swarm. I also can’t stop playing this cover of Vampire Empire that I randomly stumbled upon (the wind that starts around 1:50).
Welcome to My Island by Caroline Polacheck was on repeat during a series of consequential, unexpected, difficult choices that monopolized me for a bit. One listen while ditching my plans for the day and driving fast across Golden Gate Bridge to hike in Marin sticks out. I liked this profile of Caroline, and she’s one of my style icons. Desire, I want to turn into you is such a powerful album title/lyric… and then the album cover too + it’s contrast from the aesthetics of her previous work that felt more fantastical/ethereal/video game-like whereas this one is viscerally in the world.
I have an otherworldly memory of driving up the red mountains/sweeping vistas of New Mexico to Los Alamos near sunset listening to Enya’s Caribbean Blue
I listened to H Hunt’s album Playing Piano for Dad perhaps over 100 times this year. It was a go-to for evenings staring at the ceiling in my apartment and early morning work. It’s so textured and caring. The album was a Christmas gift to the artist’s father and wasn’t originally intended to be shared publicly.
2021
New York – Mad Rush, Philip Glass
Kate Bush Wuthering Heights Music Video , I love the story of how Kate Bush wrote it.
Before 2021
I spent a cloudy month in Cambridge, UK in spring of 2021 where I constantly listened to Quand Vas Tu Rentrer by Melody’s Echo Chamber on long walks.
Y La Bamba: One my favorite bands in college, and I think pretty underrated. I loved running fast to Libre in college, and I imagine a bunch of animals happily dancing when I listen to it . Other favs from them include Juniper, Ponce Pilato, My Death, Fasting in San Francisco, and Orca.
Mountain Man: summer 2020, spent in Chapel Hill, NC especially Soft Skin (my most listened to song of the year, ow), but I also love Stella, Moon, Animal Tracks, and Rang Tang Ring Toon. I’m reminded of a post rainstorm smell to the air, cool humid breeze and my open windows with the lights off still morning / dense greenery on the paths near my house there , the invasive kudzu climbing up trees and filling the gaps between them, forming a teeming wall of leaves
Kerina (Adrianne Lenker) and Cattails (Big Thief) were the soundtracks of a summer 2019 heart ache and watching shadows flicker on the wall. Living in Finland, homesick, sad in a never getting dark and staying up all night way
The Avett Brothers were probably the most influential band of my teenage years and listening to them now is one of the best ways to ground myself. I think maybe even if you weren’t me and didn’t grow up in NC, they may feel like home? I love too many of their songs to list but some of the most personally meaningful are November Blue, Beside the Yellow Line, Nothing Short of Thankful, Tales of Coming News. I also made a starter pack playlist with some of my favorites.
40 Day Dream (Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes), Strawberry Fields Forever (The Beatles), Oh! You Pretty Things (Bowie), everything Passion Pit were big for the highschool emotional rollercoaster existential spiral blah blah (where you ask those big questions with wide eyes for the first time totally earnestly)
Where Is My Mind by the Pixies: same as the above and I loved this song so fiercely as a teen. One of my high school best friends and I were infatuated with the scene 59 minutes into the movie Mr. Nobody where it plays.
Films
Burden of Dreams (about the making of Fitzcarraldo)
Last couple minutes of The Bubble, a documentary about America’s largest retirement community (the song really got me)
The King’s Speech
Whiplash
The Big Short
Legally Blonde (perfect?)
Captain Fantastic Sweet Child O’ Mine closing song — this moved me a lot as a teenager when I was terminally idealistic
The Day After Trinity (documentary)
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
Farewell My Concubine
Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond
Janet Plant
I don’t even trust myself to report whether this was that good because I was so intoxicated by the nostalgic lazy summer ambience, especially the dense greenery and natural sounds around the characters’ house and memories of how much better my subjective experience tended to be before smartphones & my healthy carefree child body. Maybe it was that good?The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Call Me by Your Name + soundtrack (unbearably pretty, and I vacantly roamed around my college campus with tears streaming down my face the following day. It remains a great mystery to me how Bones and All, made by the same person, may possibly be the worst movie I’ve ever seen?)
Dune 2
Eighth Grade
Paprika
Spaceship Earth
The Conformist
Mamma Mia
Shows
Avatar: The Last Airbender
The first half of Death Note
The End of the F***king World (watched it in one evening, but it’s super short so that doesn’t say too much) I think they did a good job with teen angst, existential dread, and the feelings that follow trauma, and I felt a lot of care for the main characters
The last episode of Midnight Gospel
It sort of shocked me to find something this..real(?) on Netflix. Afaik the episode is a conversation with the show host and his mother just a couple weeks before she died from cancer.(spoiler) The end of Fleabag when Fleabag says “I love you” to the priest and he says “It’ll pass”.
Poems
[i carry your heart with me(I carry it in] // E.E. Cummings
I first heard this poem at the end of podcast while biking through a suburb of Helsinki in summer during golden hour, and I think I started crying. I remember watching the sun light up poplar seed pods that were floating through the air like snow
Widening Circles // Ranier Marie Rilke
I thought of this poem often during summer 2020, maybe somewhat inauthentically honestly? Either way, it was a motif
I like Alice Oswald’s poems e.g. Fox. A friend was a big fan of hers and transmitted this admiration to me.
Not technically a poem but the lyrics to Adrianne Lenker’s ingydar are incredible
Websites
I love Aidan’s poetry map
Books
In no particular order
Just Kids, Patti Smith, good for summoning creative courage, trusting yourself, enjoying your twenties
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris, read in mostly one go laying in a cemetery in Helsinki basking in melancholy during the part of summer when the sun doesn’t set. I was so sad at the time and Sedaris is very funny.
Calypso, David Sedaris
(disclaimer that I have major David Sedaris Bias because he writes about growing up in Raleigh (where I’m from) and summers on NC beaches that I have warm child/teenhood memories of). I think this is fun to read after Me Talk Pretty as they were published ~20 years apart.Dependent Origination and Emptiness, Leigh Brasington
available online for free!Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog (I love him)
Permutation City, Greg Egan
Being and Time, Heidegger (+ Blattner’s commentary)
The Stranger, Camus (fever dream in high school)
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
Nexus, Ramez Naam
I raced through this less than two days pouring over descriptions of telepathy neurotech. I lost steam halfway through the second book and started flipping through scanning for interesting neurotech applications.Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
(on empathy) Did I enjoy reading this? I don’t know. I read it in a day and considered it a work assignment, but I make obligatory note of rigorous or culturally acknowledged inquiries into empathy and technology.American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bird and Sherwin
Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed
Dear Sugar was a significant part of my emotional life my freshman year of college, and Strayed feels like a friend.Simple, Ottolenghi (cook book) Produce-centric Middle Eastern/Mediterranean food has been my favorite style for a while and I’d like to get great at preparing it
Rhythms of the Brain, György Buzsáki
Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism, Radmila Moacanin
Trauma and the Unbound Body, Judith Blackstone
I haven’t read the entire book, but a friend lent it to me when I was visiting him, and the guided meditations were some of my favorite that I’ve come across. They aren’t specific to trauma, and the aspect I like is her skillfulness in creating awareness in the bodyEven Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
Omg so fantastically fun, I kept laughing aloud/dropping my jaw while reading, + much needed fuel for adventurous aspirations. I read this while on a retreat in rural New Mexico which felt fittingThese Precious Days, Ann Patchett (might be removed but I have to think about it. There’s a specific coziness that came from reading this that had decent gravity while traveling home for Christmas in 2023. I was tethered to the book while uber, airport, plane proceeded in the background, then finished it in my childhood bedroom)
Truth and Beauty, This book was beautiful, but brutal. Also by Patchett, better than These Precious Days. I’ll die a sucker for any memoir-style book about idealistic artists plunging themselves into their ambitions, and I love stories about intimate relationships (a friendship in this book).
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
This book wasn’t everything for me, but I remember loving the descriptions of antique furniture, the protagonist’s experience living in a bleak Vegas suburb, and how Tartt plays with these contrasts. I’ve also read The Secret History ,but I feel a superiority complex around saying it left an impression, but I also genuinely don’t think it did? For context I read it about 4 years after GoldfinchThe Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
I didn’t really care about the politics/most of the plot, but I was excited about descriptions of mindspeech and foretelling. I might take this off as it’s mostly a placeholder for my desire to read more psychological / neurotech ish sci fi (recs welcome!)Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
I love confessional, emotive, funny, non-fiction writing, especially essays, and would appreciate recommendations dionmackenzie7 [@] gmail.com
Shorter writing
Loving Awareness as Anti-Meme, Sasha Chapin
Communion, Vivid Void
This essay broke my heart around a time I was internalizing that old age can actually be pretty horrific. I don’t think it has to be, but I also don’t think that’s necessarily in your control.
Misc media
Andrew Garfield Modern Love
I didn’t set out to be an Andrew Garfield booster, but I loved both of these — I admire his earnestness/authenticity when doing press.
Personal writing
Stuff I want
I would love to buy the Presidio golf course and turn it into a massive public park. I would probably set aside a small portion of it to build housing and in my dream land (which this is) I’d build a monastery of some sort (maybe with a small farm? or large community garden), an artists residency, and some type of event space.
I bought the urls http://www.nontology.net/org and would like to start a philosophy club of some sort. A friend and I tried to project Nontology Club onto a recurring philosophy discussion we were having, but I don’t think it stuck. I like the play on study of nothing/rejection of ontology/+ for some reason Urban Dictionary’s definition of nontology, which I couldn’t find elsewhere (?): “Nontology is the negation of ontology or the possibility of our mind to understand by logic the ultimate nature of things“
I think it sorta gets at the feeling I was having around thinking there’s no “ground truth” worldview and having a strong interest in how to study the compared experiences of people/other living beingsI am fairly wary of hormonal birth control — I don’t think the long-term side-effects of hormonal birth control on humans are well understood. I want access to minimal effort birth control that’s as effective as say a hormonal IUD but doesn’t use hormones and has no significant side effects (would disqualify copper IUD due to side effects imo).
I want to design a line of tops with nicely embroidered small symbols and objects on the upper center of the chest. I love well-done embroidery and keep imagining flowers, hearts, leaves, the sun, stars, etc. I also have been trying to buy every shirt I can find with a heart cut-out in the chest and want to make some like this.1
I want a small cabin in the woods really badly. It should probably be at most a couple hours drive from the Bay Area, so I don’t have to fly there, but I also often dream of the Pacific Northwest.
At some point, I want to start a coffee shop somewhere in San Francisco with excellent light, art, plants, pottery, and coffees/teas. Maybe a passion project in my late 30s or early 40s?
I also care about
Attention: I get distressed over kids (and adults) becoming addicted to electronics, especially platforms like TikTok. I feel really lucky that I got to experience prolonged focus as a child and teen, and I worry that many (most?) young people today won’t develop a strong relationship with that state. I think that immersion in some intellectual or creative task is one of the best experiences in life.
Healthy food and food systems
Influences
Images of the sacred heart or heart art generally: I’m not Catholic, but I’ve been looking for sacred heart jewelry for like two years now, but haven’t found the right thing / am a bit hesitant given my non-Catholicism. I’m pretty obsessed with this mirror I bought from a folk art store in Santa Fe:
Dakinis
Notes
2024
12/28/24: I’ve been feeling sad lately thinking about people who may lose their jobs in the next decade bc of AI, especially when I interact with people whose work I assume will be automated and feel like this isn’t on their radar. The loss of meaning and structure that may come from people’s careers evaporating will probably cause a lot of social unrest and suffering. I’m optimistic that with time we’ll find new ways to make a living and fill our time, and I think many of the jobs that will be replaced may be those that require less creativity, agency, and emotional connection with others. I’m hopeful that people eventually can do more fulfilling work instead.
11/9/24: I’m so thankful to know people twice my age+, or even just a generation-ish older than me, who are just as in love with the world and hungry for understanding as I am now. I worry sometimes that this feeling will dim over time, and I am sure it will in certain ways, but it’s very encouraging to be reminded that I could spend my whole life passionately asking questions. I think this also helps me feel a kinship with my older self, that I can trust her to carry the torch or something. I also feel similarly when I hang out with my grandma and she seems very gripped with questions about meaning.
8/31/24: I don’t like the feeling of “machine goes into the brain” neurotech, but I really love “mind goes into the world” or “mind expands”, enabled by neurotech.
A strong theme I find beautiful, compelling, captivating is the mutual arising or the codependence of the phenomena of subject and object (big Buddhism thing). So I think that’s one of the reasons I like collecting objects or art and fashion that emphasizes isolated objects— it’s like, here I am encountering, fabricating, perceiving this object and this is a self-referential act. And the act is sort of a metaphysical trap, I can’t step outside “myself” in trying to understand “objects” — I felt like the “object qua object” quote at the very top of this page embodies the feelings I have around this really well. Surprisingly, I don’t really care that much about still life art which I feel like would be the prime example of this impulse? ↩︎