Introduction this post is very drafty, but has been sitting around getting longer for a few weeks now, so I’m simply posting now and will do some more rounds of cleanup, probably. I’d started writing some of this in a letter to a friend, then noticed that, with a little modification, i’d want to share it with a different friend. Then it kept iterating, once I started down this line of reasoning, I kept finding more and more things. It’s nice to have things named. It’s long for a blog post, short compared to watching a movie. Usually my process is ‘get it out’ and then organize it later. Sorry in advance for the length, organization, (lack of) flow. Many other people than just me claim that to fully feel joy, one also is able to fully feel grief. I’m dramatically less into the idea of ‘suffering’ than I once does, and yet, I agree with the sentiment. Wanna access joy, without resisting when it passes? Get güd with grief. So, there’s many nods to sadness in the coming words, please also know I evaluate myself as very able to feel joy, peacefulness, connection, etc. Indeed, it’s my capacity for and appreciation of joy and connection that gives me some of my energy around railing against suffering, sadness, grief. I also affirm that to repress sadness or grief is to eventually lose the ability to experience joy and presence. We cannot ‘choose’ the emotions we feel, and it’s not helpful to try to hustle ourselves out of sadness, just as it’s not helpful to try to cling to a sense of joy or happiness, after the time for it is passed. So, in this piece, I’m attempting to move out of myself some of the sadness, perhaps externalizing it into this artifact, and in doing so, feel Witnessed, validated, by myself, and i’ll reclaim some emotional energy that feels stuck, pent up. On this being read by evangelicals, or my parents Obviously, I imagine people like my parents (or other religious authoritarian supremacists) might read this. Part of the composition process indeed demanded that I expect that they would, or people like them. But when I’m channeling anger at someone like one of my parents, I’m condemning the standard american colonial supremacist, with or without religious components to their being. The real theorized audience besides myself is others who were raised within any sort of structure like evangelicalism, or a structure shaped by evangelicalism. (operant conditioning footnote? BF Skinner was QUITE traumatized by vivid depictions of hell, told to him by his mother, and says everything downstream of that in his ideas was affected by his desire to not go to hell) Lots of traditional education is based in shame. To exist in an environment where someone is considered ‘educated’ means someone else is considered ‘uneducated’, or all of us are considered uneducated in some ways. Ivan Illych’s excellent Deschooling Society is a useful antidote. I’ve had horrific experiences around ‘education’, and I know others that internalized the shaming messages as a result of interacting within educational institutions. And the same is fully felt by anyone who is succeeding within those institutions, too, by the way. Or it can be. Some surely get through it with only a little shame, surely, but enough don’t. Plenty of people who perform exceptionally well in an endeavour are at least sometimes quite bound up by shame. I once saw someone send his second v13 on a tension board in a session and he said diminishing, self-shaming things about himself, based on how hard they felt for him!!!! Many of my friends have experienced me saying something like Hey, if you said that thing about yourself, about me, or {someone else present}, we’d all be aghast that you were being so mean, even you’d be shook at how mean that was. When I hear someone saying mean things about themselves, I assume this was the kinds of things a caretaker told them when they were younger, and damn, what a bummer. Also I’ll keep slightly judo-ing this toxic inner critic, sorry, I cannot not. The combination of a toxic shaming evangelical family system, using a shaming religious and academic system, to try to squeeze, contort, hack into a prim and proper shape the humanity of a child who is waging an actual emotional insurgency… it’s tragic. much of this list will reference evangelicalism and/or supremacy I believe it’s our responsibility or our opportunity or our ease-of-insight to discuss ‘our own people’. I have substantial lived experience inside the homes and minds of supremacists, colonizers. The kinds of people who have perpetuated genocide, ethnic cleansing, stripping children from their parents to apply a regime of social control to the children. Whatever practices were common in Australia, against the native peoples, and the i-still-cannot-appreciate-hardly-the-shape-of-it supremacy that defines the history of south africa. Israel’s genocide of palestinians, these are tactics of european american supremacists wanting a regime of social control and willing to, well, murder everyone and themselves. So, I can channel an insiders perspective to help others defend themselves. Ideally no one would have to defend themselves from people like this. Alas. Since I was raised by evangelicals, and a primary tool of evangelicals is “shame the children”, I had shame poured on me constantly, as the first line of defense against indications of my humanity. The people who were my parents used shame differently on me from each other, because of their respective damaged ideas about sex and gender. So I’ve got beef with some constructs around sex and gender, and I’ll talk about that later. (my stance is “don’t push your patriarchy kink1 on me unless I consent to it, and I do not consent to it”) The-person-who-was-my-father’s full-throated embrace of patriarchy causes him to erupt with a constant verbal stream of criticism at the idea of feeling feelings, and the-person-who-was-my-mother’s studious refusal to ever see me as a person of dignity, and her instead constant objectification of everything about me caused her to also evaluate the emotional side of me as ‘nonexistent’, in a different way. Abuse is the active, inverse of neglect. Even as I can construct exculpatory excuses for culty people who abuse and torture their kids in general, I note a growing sense of specific, focused anger over some specifics of these instances of people, and these situations. stamps foot. (keep reading for entries from her diary that she published of physical and sexual assaults upon me as a child, “for jesus”, as early as my third birthday!) Technically, my parents couldn’t meet me at a better place than they could meet themselves, their unaddressed childhood wounds, etc etc. The reason I can apply that treatment to them and still evaluate them (technically, their actions. don’t they say things like ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’?) as contemptible is because they are unable to receive input from the people they are interacting with, how they are being experienced, and they’ll do damage to someone else in the clinging to their own self-image. They would beat me, physically, and interpret the tears of kid josh as evidence that I needed more of a beating, instead of evidence of the relational harm they were inducing and that they could, should, move differently. Anyone who sees someone else as a person would not be able to throw away the person’s humanity and apply hurt and coercion to that person. doing nothing would be far, far better than making up rules for someone else to follow and then beating them, torturing them, for not following the rules. This would also have obviously been an applicable sentiment in that era of American Chattel Slavery, and yet slavery persisted for hundreds of years, warping the soul of everyone who even only perceived it, let alone the victims of the oppressor/complicit classes, and the people comprising those groups. the currency of shame inside of supremacy culture So, here’s a ‘grand unifying theory’ of why josh is so damn sensitive. It is endemic to the supremacy culture of the people here to categorize and group and rank and order things, so there’s a part of me that resists even recounting all of this. often-enough, I’ve been shamed, sometimes severely, for disinhibited self-expression. grief, joy, wonder, curiosity, grief, enthusiasm. Evangelicalism is obviously a shaming institution, and so to is everything reliant upon operant conditioning structures. That last piece might seem a hot take, it really is not. Pete Walker was the first person I encountered who articulated something like “people, who hurt others, and then refuse to feel shame about it cause the shame to be felt by the others. Even if it’s only dim echos of that shame being felt by others, they are still being forced to experience someone else’s shame and that stinks.” thus virtually every supremacist walking around clinging to supremacy is a tiny little factory of shame, emitting noxiousness like a car emits brake dust and tire rubber microplastics and noise and danger. Photos of my mom’s journal entries describing her repeated assaults of me Obviously this is some delicate terrain. I don’t remember any of the events described below, that happened to three-year-old-me, of course, but adult me certainly knows what he’d feel about witnessing this happening to child me, or happening to some other three year old. I happen to have my own child, so I can easily access a rather alivened sense of disgust over this behavior, especially when I appreciate that my parents think this behavior is so right, I should be applying it to my own child. I can appreciate why something in my nervous system goes big when I face icy, stern, cold behavior from others, after reading these entries and remembering the ways this disposition kept showing up my entire life, despite me clinging to hope that my mother had love or affection for me. In my mother’s words, from a diary she maintained and then printed/distributed to her offspring, here’s an early formative experience of shame. I appreciate the irony that this particular incident happened on my birthday. My 3rd birthday: On Joshua’s birthday Joshua asked me for his train set. Now, a few days ago he didn’t want to put it away. I told him if he didn’t want to put it away I would do it for him but I’d put it away out of his reach so he couldn’t play with it anymore. He wanted me to put it away anyway, and I did. Each time he asked for it after that I reminded him that he couldn’t play with it because he didn’t know how to put it away. When I told him that on this day, he assured me that this time he would put it away himself. I got his train set down for him. He played with it. When he was done, I asked him to put it back and he said “Mom put back train set.” He expected me to do it like I had before, and I reminded him that he had to put it away. He repeated, “No, Mom put back train set.” I repeated that it was his responsibility. He refused again and received a spanking. This time when I told him to please put away the train set he cried but he did it and then proudly said “Look, Mom!” I thanked him and then he told methe secret of his obedience. “Yord help Josh put back train set.” Oh how God answers prayer. Wow wow wow. The constructed ‘power struggle’. In religeous authoritarian families, male-passing children are assumed to be ‘strong willed’ or something like that, so the parents are attuned to all displays of preference or agency, and they take it as evidence of evil, ‘sin’, in their kid, and they fantasize situations that justify things like ‘sexual assault of a child, blamed on the child’. Miriam phrased this, “he refused again and received a spanking”. So, a 3 year old me opted out of a developmentally inappropriate ask (or maybe it was develpmentally appropriate, I’ve seen three year olds put things away, but usually not under threat of assault), then, the person who at the time represented, in theory, safety and nurturance to me, terrorized and hit me, to extract compliance from me, damn the concept of… emotional attunement? Putting the train set away herself? Letting it be out? my god. Parenting From The Inside Out is an adequate primer for an answer to the question “if not by assault, how am I supposed to interact with a child?” Key lines: he refused again and received a spanking I’ve spoken before about how I view ‘spanking’, and pulled into it’s own post long quotes from Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse but it’s de-dignifying to tease that part out as much worse than the rest. “spankings” are what less-propagandized people call “adults hitting children and blaming the kid for it” or “physical assault” or “child sexual assault”, as any kind of assault that targets or involves sexually intimate places is default-escalated to sexual assault. When I brought this up to my dad, he dismissed it. So I updated his status in my mind, appropriately. When I mentioned it to my mother, she never responded and eventually blocked me on whatsapp. Ditto, my father. Shunning and refusing to communicate is a classic move of power retention within supremacy culture. If I still lived in their house and made the same issue, they beat me and assaulted me, now that I don’t live in their house, they block me. It’s the classic appeal of white women’s tears, when encountering some forms of push back against their supremacy. My dad tried verbally fighting back with me, and when that didn’t work, applied the “shunning” treatment, or at least this is my experience of it. In their defense, I suggested both that they deserve whatever sort of peace they think child abusers deserve. Here’s another entry: Lately I’ve been trying to teach Joshua to put away his toys when he’s told. Lately, he’s been in the ‘why’ stage. When I ask him to put them away he asks “Why?” “Because it’s bath time.” “Why?” And so on. The questions go on and on when I ask him to pick up his toys. At bedtime timight I asked him to pick up his blocks and he again asked “Why?” I was too tired to think of any logical reasons so I just told him the end result: “Joshua, pick up your blocks because if you don’t you will get a spanking.” “Okay” he said, as he happily and immediately went to pick up his blocks! These were obviously the bedrock ideas of Miriam’s understanding of the world, and my childhood is full of other stories in line with this kind of thing. I note now, less happily, how often feedback has been about me, happily, in a work setting: “Josh is so [compliant] when given instruction, and works hard at doing whatever we tell him!” God, in light of how hard I was working to manage the emotional state of my mother, at the age of three, by repeating back to her versions of her broken view of reality rather than expressing something true to me, like I am so mad at you for hitting me, and I feel hurt by, and betrayed by and afraid of you now. As an adult, when I experience coercive, punishing behavior, I can more readily identify it and defend myself against it. Yet every time, the absolute crushing betrayal that it represents, feels like it breaks something in me that I didn’t know I had to break. I recognize a similarity, perhaps, between what I must have experienced, the sadness over the emotional loneliness, the hateful, icy, withdrawn, brutal emotional energy that seeped into every crack and pore and surface of those relationships I had with my parents. I realize now, when I thought I had a good relationship, it was because I was basically playing for myself both sides of the relationship. I knew how to relate to others without violence or hate, so I simply kept assuming my parents had that capacity within them and occasionally felt well about me. I could imagine someone like my parents reading the above, and ‘whataboutism’ing me with “well, James Dobson said…” or “it was just a few swats on the butt” (said in 2025 by my 6 foot 1 inch, 180 lb military officer/doctor/preacher father who’s pleased to tower over and terrorize and bully people). Frankly, the dual processes of 1) their inability to feel grief, sadness, over my/their/anyone else’s situation 2) the heavy cloak of defensiveness that gets drawn over the wound of ‘lack of sadness’, or something. Digging in, doubling down. (a proper response would be something like a full embrace over my anger, the sadness inherent in this. Evidencing doing work to reduce how quickly they dissociate from the experience of others, welcoming the depth of the human experience, showing that they’re beginning to appreciate how wrong it is to strip someone of their agency, will, bodily safety and lie to that person about why they were assaulted. I don’t think the damage is repairable. My dad’s last sentiment was something like “If you, josh, want to repair the relationship with me, you’re welcome to come grovelling to me over how you hurt my feelings by saying things that made me feel bad.” …sigh… I can appreciate now a bit more why there’s so much emotional deadness within me, towards them, and I find myself angering when it feels like that skillset I built, out of desperation, to defend myself against them, shows up in unhelpful ways today, as an adult. The hot/cold energy they pointed towards me, emotional devestation that went unaddressed and then ‘love’ was performed, later, and because I desperately wanted love, I accepted all of it. The fake love, and the real harm. What else could I have done? I don’t think repair is available until someone can speak extensively about why they used manipulation and bullying. And if there’s a power dynamic involved, it’s obviously abuse! And all of the exact same underlying ideas of entitlement and obligation hum along in the exact same way, in both of their ways of being today, that are obviously evident in how they perceived others then. Section FAQ I could imagine: well this seems pretty condeming, josh, I don’t see how repair could be done, while you… blah blah blah, focusing on my attitude marks one as the kind of person who’s complicit with bad things. I’d suggest The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize it and how to respond. An early chapter talks about people who live in reality one “power over” and reality two, “shared power”. Ppl in reality one feel anxious in some situations when they don’t feel like they’re dominating someone else, because that means they might be getting dominated. Or they might be soon to be dominated, because they dominate others, sometime, when they feel entitled to it. Since they’re willing to dominate and see it as useful when ‘push comes to shove’, so if someone else shows to this reality 1 person that they’re feeling as strongly as the abuser does about something, the abuser sorta… telegraphs/projects their own problem solving strategy onto the other, and then ‘moves defensively’ by attacking, in order to not get got. From the POV of someone in reality 2, who does not see violence or domination as anything but vastly hurtful to any situation wants to see the problem resolved. “shared power” appreciates the existance of power dynamics, and generally moves to flatten/reduce the power differential. The book also uses “co-creation” and “Mutuality” to describe reality 2. Co-creation and mutuality assume out of the gate certain things about positive intent, assumptions of dignity, etc. I notice in myself not even wanting to pollute my own brain, the part of me that loves others and loves co-creation and mutality, when I imagine that ecosystem overly affected by someone that moves through the world like Donald, Miriam, trampling delicate things beneat them, unable, unwilling to feel the sadness over what has been lost. and my god, the cost of all this is far, far beyond the individuals involved in this story. My own life, and two interpersonal relationships, compared to all the potential relationships I could have, or my actual relationships, OR compared against the billions of people alive today, or the billions lived and died, any of whom experienced good and bad things, fair and unfair things, from some of those lines of reasoning, none of this matters. So much of this document will talk about supremacy, and colonialism, and evangelicalism, as I view them as like three different lenses, three different frames, of the same underlying dissociation from grief and sadness, belief in the world as dominating, fear of power sharing, and thus entitlement to obedience, of them and others. I can certainly see how this has affected me, in some ways, I feel i’ve “resolved”, in others I’ve not, and I’m sure in a few more years I’ll be able to speak about things that I’ve not yet found awareness of yet. I feel a little like I wish a younger version of me had gotten some of the resources current me has. I could have more easily bolstered my own sense of self, clocked the misbehavior around me, etc etc. this is indicative of… again, unwellness. ‘spanking’ is a propagandist term for adults hitting children. I’m so angry that she today, in 2025 thinks it’s admirable, laudable, necessary, for adults, caretakers of kids, to threaten children with sexual assault to force them to comply. This is colonialism, genocidal energy, I welcome it exactly as anyone thinks I would. If you’ve not been raised within the cult of evangelicalism or a different institution of religious authoritarianism, this approach might be full of unfamiliar language. The first 18 years of my life was full of this motif, after which I was hauled off to college by my parents, and mostly never spoken to again. I’m recovering anger these days over the emotional abandonment of it all. It was bad when I was a child, and as I move through my life today, I anger again at the emotional abandonment I experience from my parents. It’s easier to learn to hold your own pain when you have a memory of sometimes been tenderly held, in pain, safely, by a caretaker. As I rolodex through experiences with miriam and donald, and other evangelicals I relied upon for attuned connection, but esp with miriam and donald, I remember brutal coldness, indifference, or the intentional infliction of deep emotional pain. Donald often enough was physically bullying, grabby, pushy, quick to grab and squeeze and move someone’s body simply because he felt entitled to it. How gross. So, having my own kid has been great, and healing in some ways for my own ‘parenting the inner child’ journey - I can see my kid developing normally, without our relationship being poisoned by violence and the dangerous superstitions of ‘authority’ and ‘obedience’, and I can appreciate that when I was policing myself, with an intense and devastatingly critical inner voice, I was not channeling ‘truth’ or ‘god’ or ‘me’, I was channeling the delusional, bullying influences of my parents, who hated themselves, me, and many, many others. So, I can turn down my inner critic, often-enough, and the simple naming of it’s prepense has a nice disarming effect on the worst of the harm it causes. And yet, this blog post. Why this blog post? Sadness. Shame. Other people not easily-enough attuning to me in an expression of pain. When I feel misattunement, the rest of my vulnerability is quick to exit the interaction, because the environment gets labeled as ‘obviously/possibly not safe enough’. Misattunement is endemic in supremacy cultures, so it’s part of the damage done to all of us, and part of the way we might unwittingly propagate that hurt outwards on others. This is manageable, but is made less so by a key prior intimate relationship partner said, often, plainly mean & aggressive things simply upon witnessing sadness in me. Tears, especially. This happened repeatedly. Eventually, I ‘managed’ my emotions, to alleviate that particular pain, at great cost. i currently feel “low” on the number of sensitive and non-shaming people in my life. Unfortunately, bc ✨supremacy culture in america✨ many, many people, with all sorts of genitalia, have incomplete or uneasy relationships with grief, their own grief and others. Yes, plenty of ‘men’/people with penises do not have easy access to wild amounts of emotional depth. AND! plenty of people who call themselves female/people who have vulvas also do not have easy access to emotional depth. Now, most people do not run around intending to openly shame others for expressing emotions, but when someone’s uncomfortable with their own grief, that discomfort gets telegraphed outwards to others. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s extremely not-subtle. Some of the stories, the contents of the original intent of this written work when I smell someone responding to an expression of my sadness or grief with something that feels like shame, a part of me operates in a powerful way to shape my future presentation within that relationship. I’m working on naming this thing a bit more directly, so I can give us all an opportunity to perhaps move differently next time. I am skilled, now, at either 1) hiding when I feel grief, or 2) avoiding within myself the sensation of grief, so I don’t have to hide it/hide it so effortfully. I don’t love the development of this skill for me. I don’t blame any particular person, I have simply come to resent supremacy culture, which causes grief to get mishandled in many ways, for everyone. It goes back generations. Grief, and the systems we live in, is complex and it takes a lot of humanity to hold it well, our own grief and the grief of others. In {friend’s name} I grew sensitized because, I remember {friend} saying something like: If I ever saw {partner of friend} cry, I’d think it was strange, odd, [vaguely unsettling]. sorta trivial, but it felt like an admission of: if I saw grief I didn’t understand in the visage of someone else who I don’t think deserves to feel grief, I would not be curious or enter into the experience with them, I’d label it as unexpected and deploy coping strategies. EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO DO THIS! This is simply not the kind of response that helps me move with more emotional safety instead of feeling withdrawn a bit. another time, in response to something I shared, there was a “well, at least…” or ‘oh, that seems better than {other bad thing}’. I note that this lands on me as dismissiveness, which unfortunately drafts onto other times I’ve experienced dismissive energy, and something in me withdraws, again, relationally. I could follow the thread of ‘sorta invalidating responses’ farther, maybe another time. I have an actual fear of dragging someone into an emotionally uncomfortable place, without their permission, so if I detect discomfort around grief, I bottle up my own tears, my own grief, pretty firmly, pretty quickly. There’s been a few other things that round to me having an assessment as “I don’t know how to handle my own sadness in the context of us. My current strategy is ‘mostly avoid my own’, while still modeling fully welcoming anyone else’s grief, and, in fact, continuing to honor my own grief. I’ll name it, and I know people mean well for me, so I can kinda do both sides of ‘handling my grief’, as needed.” It’s nice to not have to hold both sides of it. This leaves me feeling like I need to, or I want to, minimize something about myself, to preserve something that is otherwise very alivening and appreciated. I have often-enough been overwhelmingly, vastly crushed by sadness because of little things & big, and I feel stuck with it, stuck by it. <please read onward for a now-long-and-detailed list of some of the sadnesses I have found at times hard to articulate, or hard to articulate without perhaps finding myself feeling very sad, and sitting around crying in your company is not something I am comfortable with> There’s stuff that arose around {another person} and I continued a strategy of avoidance. a little turns into a lot. I feel like throughout {friend} experienced bits of this, from me, with your own sense of disappointments or questions or hurts. Josh’s long list of miscellanea that engenders sadness One of my first sadnesses is a meta-sadness. I’m sad about how unskillfully sadness is handled within supremacy culture. In some ways the lack of skills is accidental, a feature of the damage and violence of supremacy culture. yet in other ways it’s necessary. to maintain supremacy culture, one needs dissociation from other’s pain. is a function and coping mechanism of supremacy, war, capitalism, slavery, violence, obv. And it’s rooted in dissociation from one’s own addressed pain or relational betrayals! Lots of my childhood experiences were fully informed by growing up with supremacists. These supremacists fabricate the concept of ‘whiteness’ and then use that to justify the supremacy, but I won’t call them ‘white supremacists’, even though it would be an accurate label. It’s simply ceding too much intellectual ground to the delusion of race-as-a-real-thing. So, I am sad about living inside of a supremacy culture. Supremacy culture vs…? I’ll be referencing supremacy and some other stuff a lot, but I won’t be talking much about ‘white supremacy’, for the same reasons as I refuse to not airquote “spanking”, I find my wording simpler for me, here is why: the very concept of race was created to support the ideals of a certain group of supremacists. I might use ‘european american supremacy’, or ‘european colonial powers’, or something like that, but ‘white’ supremacy for me cedes a bit too much power to european american supremacists. Supremacists also invented a lot of patriarchy what do you mean by ‘supremacy culture’, Josh? Take a look at this list of characteristics of the supremacy culture of the greater united states: the 15 characteristics of supremacy culture Some of the 15 tenants of supremacy culture seem germane here. Reading the list helped me turn down my inner critic, a bit. When you’re getting after yourself for something that’s also on this list, consider blaming someone for playing on you their own internalized colonizer. I suggest reading the whole piece. These are all subtle and not-subtle messages poured upon me and maybe you. I find an increasing peacefulness from the ‘toxic inner critic’ that once operated constantly in my life. Especially as it relates to “firing the inner cop”, or “expelling the inner colonizer”. I found many parallels between how the US military does it’s “counter insurgency” tactics, and how I ended up defending my emotional safety from my parents. It’s not just evangelicals or the military that believe it’s necessary to “stamp out willfulness” wherever it lives - it’s a colonial religious thing, one that white-passing women fully participated in. Patriarchal white women (or, as I call them, people with vulvas who are supremacists) uphold patriarchy as much as a classic patriarchal white man. These tenants are non-gendered, non-ethnicity-based characteristics of supremacy culture. Wherever these tenants thrive, so too does supremacy culture. Lets not let these things thrive inside of our own minds, crushing our own sense of self. Here’s a great, detailed expansion of the list by the original author. Fear Phew. “Either/Or thinking”. I hear a response, when I say “not this, because…”. The supremacist will say “Well, if that thing cannot be had, WE HAVE TO HAVE THIS OTHER THING!!!!”. That’s thought-stopping. Not helpful. Worship of the written word Individualism Quantity over Quality Sense of Urgency Paternalism, Perfectionism, One Right Way, Objectivity Progress, or Bigger is Better Fear of (Open) Conflict, Power Hoarding, Right to Comfort Or “right to emotional comfort”. This sometimes looks like “you know what my preference is, how can you not have given it to me” or “this conversation causes me to think of myself in unflattering ways that are inharmonious with my self-image, I need it to stop and I’d like to distract myself.” Discussing conflict (rather than accepting the presumed hierarchy/correctness of the way of things) Power Hoarding Urgency Defensiveness & Denial Seems self-evident. It’s an intimacy-destroying response, and i appreciate how childhood me, and often enough adult me, survived in a desert of emotional intimacy, getting occasional sips of fake intimacy that I convinced myself was real, and good-enough. The last time I spoke to my dad on the phone, I felt many things. I have detailed notes, I noted how scared I was, going into the conversation, and I relived the many, many times I felt a terror having to go speak to him. It arose within me, a disgust for the kind of person who would want children to be afraid of them, out of a need to control others. I interrupted him as he was monologing, and he got very affronted, and said “if you cannot speak to me with respect I don’t want to be in this conversation.” Like many of his generation, he confuses respect with control. He’s never experienced me outside of the context of ‘is josh being obedient to me?’ because he and I have not spoken or interacted since I was 16, more or less, and he felt fully entitled to control every aspect of my being, then. Ooooh, I have anger for behavior like this. More on this later, perhaps. These concepts have been top of mind for me during my few recent interactions with both of my parents. The interactions were extremely illuminating to me, and saddening. I feel so sad for the me that spent so many years living with these people! Their fear of open conflict, for instance, or desperate entitlement to emotional comfort, would be radiating from them in every word. an alternative, better response than supremacy culture I can hop around with different frames, as does the supremacy.2 Curiosity is helpful. An ability to sometimes confidently generate a sense of peace within oneself. Mutuality and Co-creation. Opening questions. Silence. ‘tell me more about that’. There’s many, many options besides ‘characteristics of supremacy’, and it’s tricky when people reach for available power dynamics to exploit. SIIIIIIIIGH. Anyway, here’s my big ol’ list of things that relate to sadness and grief. 3 The one, single time I spent 1:1 time with my mom over the last few years she kept defending her abuse, saying things like: Your father and I tried everything to make you do what we wanted, and nothing else worked! [Nothing but threatening you with sufficient emotional and bodily harm made you give us what we wanted]. I almost threw her out of my house at her unselfconscious utterance of those words. She wasn’t even angry, just matter-of-fact about it. (That changed, quickly, of course. To quickly name certain dynamics in someone else’s passive observation of something can be a pretty strongly-felt statement) Her dissociation from others is ironclad. Earlier in the day, I was questing for the possibility of establishing any authentic attuned connection, and like an expert practitioner of judo, she kept blocking and blocking and blocking, reflexively, the possibility of connection. As the conversation continued, and I kept discussing her parenting decisions, sometimes in light of observations made as I’ve been a parent myself, it became clearer and clearer she hated me then, and hates me now. “hate” is a bit strong for the emotional deadness that usually exists in the space. She’d say “i don’t hate, I feel nothing” or a vague sense of dis-ease. I don’t dignify that with a serious response, because it continues to center as of primary import her non-experience of a very-bad-for-me experience. An attentive reader (or any reader?) might notice the relatedness of what I said above, and how someone might experience someone else in a sexually coercive situation, or sexual assault. There’s a needful emotional deadness + a plausible excuse for why the deadness existed. Maybe that’s why patriarchal women cannot attune to the sadness of their children. To do so might cast light on other things in their life of issue. Like, if I take {specific_issue} seriously for {relationship_z}, I will also take it seriously for {relationship_h}, and {relationship_a}, and that could become Problematic, thus I’ll try to avoid it all. Both of my parents either hated me, or tolerated me, but the ‘tolerance’ was dispensed when I was not being problematic, which i often enough was just that. I feel a need to mention that there’s available third-party evidence that I’m not at all times a disastrous piece of shit, which is certainly the dominant vibe I get from my parents in every conceivable way. Yet in conversation with both of them, I kept noticing the constant emission of energy that rounds to either “someone who does X is fundamentally flawed” or “you do X, and are thus fundamentally flawed”. There’s a HEAVY, overwhelming lean into role compliance. Non-compliance is met with deadness, non-responsiveness, silence, skipping over, if it can be. If it cannot be, they emotionally ‘slap back’. they’ve experienced me as vastly less compliant today than I was when I lived in their house, and are both obviously shook. Also, some of you might do this kind of stuff to yourself. There’s a cost to this treatment, but that cost can be lowered a heck of a lot if you can quickly name-and-witness-at-least-to-yourself the phenomena. She said over and over, her only goal for me was “to grow up successful”4, which to her meant becoming a faithful evangelical/republican supremacist. Every aspect of my personhood that stood beyond my compliance with her narrow view of the world was simply flushed down the toilet. I’ve been climbing, intensively, for most of the last 20 years. She and I have never discussed my rock climbing. It’s not listed as a thing in the bible, so how could it be discussed? I have memories of her unleashing icy, cold, contemptuous judgement against me, and not a single memory of tenderness or attuned time in the same space. When I read They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, lots clicked for me. I now strongly endorse this book to others as a form of bibliotherapy. I’ve got lots of kindle notes here. Several years ago, the last time I saw my father in person, I hadn’t the presence of mind to realize I had no desire to sit next to him for a family photo. He was pretending things were nice between us, even though obviously, obviously, they were not. He decided I should be sitting closer to him than I was, for a family photo, so he did what he always does to people he views as less than/other. Instead of moving himself, or asking me to move closer to him, with his hand, he grabbed my knee hard and tried to drag me closer to him. This piece of shit probably does this thing to kids all the time. If I could tell you the speed with which my hand moved to his arm, grabbed his upper arm firmly, not bruisingly, and said with harshness befitting his violation of my body: “stop.”, or maybe “don’t do that”. He let go like he’d touched a hot pan. If he’d yanked again, i would have simply shoved him down the bench, out of reach of me. he felt it. i had my own kid sitting on my hip. Things were obviously not unfolding the way he’d expected. I don’t think Donald often encounters resistance to his emotional/physical bulliness, and what he experienced surprised him. Back when he used to beat me, and long after he stopped physically assaulting me (understanding that physical assault on kids is uncouth after a certain age, he went for emotional/verbal/psychological bullying), I was in a skinny, small, thin, body, and even my (no longer skinny) adult height is dozens of pounds lighter and 15 cm/6 inches shorter. I was small, bony, unmuscled, shorter person, relative plenty of my peers, growing up. I didn’t really care with my peers, I wasn’t physically bullied by them, and got along with my friends fine, but my dad, he’s over six feet tall, I remember him with big hands and a pushy physicality about him, especially along side his verbal and emotional bullying. I still sometimes fantasize about beating him, I think something in my body remembering the terror and helplessness he would induce, and wishing that I then had access to the same safety I have access to now. (Krav Maga, living inside my body which is also strong, an embodied physical confidence of deserving access to physical autonomy, verbal peacefulness). I could write a whole article about the last phone conversation he and I had. it was the first time we’d spoken together 1:1 on the phone in several years. I have notes from before/during/after, going into it I saw it as likely a standard template for what it’s like to talk about supremacy with supremacists, and that’s exactly what it was. He instantly moved aggressively for the control of the ‘frame’ of the conversation. He maintains the fantasy that I call alternatively ‘pro-slavery christianity’, or ‘sky daddy-ism’. He loves the ‘frame’ of ‘we are all under authority. you, me, we’re all under authority. it’s just that that authority ALSO made me authority over you. convenient, eh? so, with that established, lets proceed…’ He said I should thank him, for his child sexual assaults, and it’s irrelevant that I have a single opinion of how he treated me then, because it’s in the past, and he did what he did, and he found a book by a eugenicist advocating child abuse, so he “was doing what experts recommended”.5 My only purpose to contacting him was to make sure he know that he had no permission to ever physically assault eden, or make jokes about adults assaulting children in her presence. I don’t get my druthers of fully excising him from the life of my kid, and it’s not worth the effort of actually trying. Most of the danger he represents to children comes from no adults in the space ever naming his behavior as abusive. So, his response, when I told him to not assault eden? Josh, you misunderstand [sky daddy’s wishes]. He doesn’t wish for grandparents to assault their grandkids, he only wishes for parents to assault their kids, so i don’t have to hit your kid. that is your job. I told him he’s a weak, fearful person for avoiding the book “The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black and White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia”, because so many of his load-bearing cognitive structures are perfectly described in that book, and I resent being raised in the house of a person espousing to a T the views of slavers. I view Donald Thompson, Miriam Thompson, as supremacists, prototypical of any other run-of-the-mill emotionally damaged person common in the greater united states today. Their own humanity has been disregarded, by people and systems, starting as children, and they internalized the dehumanization as they aged, eventually projecting it outwards, in some ways, and inwards in other ways. Since the capacity to be a feeling, grieving human is lost to them, every part of his personality exists to paper over the holes and project a sense of togetherness, cohesiveness. The banished bad parts get put on any other definable group, and the psyche finds piece. I wish I’d never had to meet them, and instead had a real source of healthy-enough maternal and paternal energy in my life. Anyway, this is but one of the stories i have flowing around my brain when I think of things of parenting, my kid, my parents, and more. Shaming (non)responses Part of why I’m even writing this section is because I’m much less affected by this sort of response than I once was. I’m less affected because I can more clearly label diminishing or minimizing or dismissing responses, and be more comfortable in whatever my response is. When I’m shamed for something, it’s less likely that the other person is trying to shame me out of feeling a particular way about something, though that has certainly happened (thanks, evangelicals), but it also is the other person deploying a reflexive strategy to deal with their own grief. They shame themselves out of feelings of grief, as an adaptive strategy to their own formative relationships, and then deploy the same strategies on others. They don’t intend to project shame, but all forms of distraction, avoidance, dismissiveness, vs. connecting and letting the feeling breath, projects shame. :( Like I said, trying to explain a list of things that’ll traverse a lot of territory. Often enough, in American society, especially white-passing society, when someone encounters a whiff of sadness, there’s a collective disgust reflect, or shame or fear. Countermeasures are deployed, like: “oh, bummer. At least it’s better now.” or: “oh. At least it’s not worse.” I don’t think anyone’s experience is extremely unique, generally. Even my most distinctive trait (heavy scooter usage) is common-enough in the USA, and the default for people of the global majority. It’s rare to ride a scooter as a white-passing person in denver/the greater united states, especially as a primary vehicle, etc etc) Possibly by writing it all down, once, or so comprehensively, I can also symbolically reclaim some of the emotional energy tied up in it all. Sometimes it feels so heavy, or one piece of it feels heavy, which is ‘fine’, and then that clears up (as it always does), and then another piece of it leans heavily upon me. There’s plenty more responses that telegraph some shame. Avoidance telegraphs shame, so even as I know intellectually most of these responses are driven by the persons own relationship to their own grief, some of me is an animal with a nervous system and a good-enough response from another person goes a long ways. A good cry does nice thing. Josh’s list of sadnesses not ordered in any particular way. There’s about 50 items? I expect I could do 150 without breaking a sweat, I’ve got other hand-written lists floating around, I need to update this written document with those… lots of family stuff I’m ‘sad’ over. Related to Eden, her mom, my parents, siblings, the dense fabric of relations represented by those words, contrasted with the reality of my particular situation which is that most of those relationships are slightly/severely impoverished, obviously. Eden! Sadness over the sparseness of our relationship, certain dynamics in her life. (I’ve heard from some, a sentiment like “oh, well, she’s young and won’t remember much.”, as if that either 1) addresses my own sadness. I’m not so young as to not` remember this. the fuq? also, it presumes that i don’t have a meaningful-to-me relationship with my kid, because dads don’t actually love or have real relationships with their kids. Also, this overall fits into the category of a ‘closing response’, so when I get it, the entire conversational space of ‘eden’ feels like it gets closed. Bummer) Increased sense of fragility of everything. I drive through 100x more dangerous intersections in a normal week in 2025 than I did in 2020, and it feels like a respective increase in risk. I think so intensely about riding around safely, and I resent how effortful it is, how dangerous the roads are, by foot, on a bicycle, a scooter, and yes, of course, the roads are outrageously dangerous in a car. I cannot help but notice when a car is pointed at me, when I’m relying on someone else’s decision making to not die. (walking a crosswalk in front of waiting cars sometimes feels like walking in front of loaded gun. “If any of these people move a limb an inch in the wrong way, I could die”. It feels like most people feel the same anxiety that I do, but dissociate from the experience a bit more than I do.) loss of so much that represented interestingness and joy to me. Cool projects, golden, a meaningful relationship, interesting outdoor places, easy access to outdoor climbing, better but still not ideal bicycle infrastructure. cars & car supremacy, the danger I clock. holding how ‘big’ the groups affected are, across time and space, today, and over the last 100 years. About 1 million people in America have died “accidentally/inevitably” in car-related deaths since the November 11, 2001 blowback event that killed 3,000 people and sparked yet a new round of total, global military domination by the USA. 40,000 people a year die on american roads. pedestrian deaths ‘going up’, the spaces where there is refuge from cars are always getting smaller. I look out my window and can witness close-enough-to-injurious interactions between cars and people all the time. the NOISE of car engines. Even on a third floor apartment, thankfully safe from a car being able to drive through my front wall or whatever, I still am not free from hearing every passing vehicle. Tire noise, engine noise, brake noise, wind noise, they are loud. During the day, and at night. Cars and motorcycles. Loud loud loud. Racing to catch a light. Honking to announce someone’s right of way. I despise it. I wear ear plugs most nights except hot winter nights where I close the windows and run air conditioning. I almost always have a window cracked, for fresh air, even when it’s very cold outside. I love apartment life! I almost never run my heat or my AC, too. Anyway, an open window and quiet indoor space means I hear everything. and I notice the cars. All of them. feels intrusive, disruptive, but it seems like many others I see IRL just… accept, cannot perceive it. I wear ear plugs a lot, and I seem to usually be distinctive in this way. I don’t know how others are not also wearing ear plugs a lot. parking lots. omg. walking through them. the ethnic cleansing they represent. The standard pattern of downtowns with parking lots where there were once buildings is… ethnic cleansing. There was an ethnic neighborhood, the supremacists didn’t want it there, they used zoning and highways to attack the neighborhood, eventually displacing and murdering and harassing and suppressing the area. Disrepair, fabricated, at first, then real. Then the justification of parking minimums to keep non-wealthy people from being prioritized. And now there’s parking everywhere. New development, of the last few decades, is different, the buildings and lots are laid out from the beginning for parking and parking lots, and… the evil spins onwards. past partners handling of driving, the dangers inherent within it. Multiple partners, not just one. Truly shocking levels of conflict emerge sometimes from me expressing a desire for more safety while driving. Years ago, a then-partner almost hit me in the car they were driving while I was on my bicycle and got mad at me for wanting to talk about it. 💔 friends treatment of driving. Multiple friends, not just one. Not only have partners driven dangerously and fought me about it, friends have to. My orientation towards my entitlement to my own safety with a partner is different than that of a friend. My friends who drive dangerously, I simply find myself spending less and less time with them. It’s sad, and I cannot prevent my own nervous system from registering the issue, eventually it becomes easier for me to simply not experience the issue. urban renewal and thus ethnic cleansing in america, plainly visible in every way in every city. Every vista of mine during the day, of Denver, marred by the history of ethnic cleansing, the tragedy of the lives lost and lives being spent, in it. genocide is ethnic cleansing. I’m so sad, watching the evidence of this all around me. Then my (usually white-passing) friends would imply that I am deficient for not being able to dissociate from the grevousness. supremacy and ‘whiteness’. it’s effects on others, on eden, on me. grief-phobic people, people groups, among family, ‘community’, friends. repeated exposure to malevolence and in-the-moment dissociation from the other party. (car drivers, at the same time aggressive and depersonalizing in their treatment of others) betrayal and betrayal-adjacent behaviors in specific ways w/groups. parents, paternal/maternal, siblings, legally-established family, communities. how shame spews out of some people/memes in culture pregnancy & 4th trimester for K, Eden. I obv wasn’t pregnant, and i felt unfairly eliminated from the emotional landscape of the whole thing. ‘death’ of many friendships as an adult, I want to wander my environment the same way I did as a kid, and I am so outside-constrained. Every city, esp Denver. America, also beyond, so many places are so constraining in the urban environment. Bad roads function as emotional walls to cross. I am so sad over the painful loss of relationship and friendship over the last few years, leaving family systems and religeous structures. Through little or no fault of them, many people remaining in those systems feel unavailable to me. “I’ve not changed” they might say, and correctly. I have. My heart breaks for it. My heart breaks over varieties of loss of relationship, even as it seemed to pre-break even in some of those same relationships. I miss feeling safe and vulnerable at the same time. Safe enough for disinhibited self-expression. this written document stands as a version of my exercising disinhibited self-expression. death of a friend to cancer death of a another friend to cancer another friend killed in a preventable avalanche incident another friend killed in a car over-run of a road. Friend was walking, passing car drove onto sidewalk, killed her. Her partner was with her, severely injured. If there were a bollard like the ones discussed here, instead of plastic flex posts, Lovisa would still be alive. Bollards can be installed for free. the grief and burden of Witnessing mistreatment (to see something bad and fulfil the obligation of naming it as such to the parties, either the victim, or the oppressor, or both). It’s tiring. an ocean of sadness and pain over the loss of time and experiences with Eden. the psychological distance caused by Colefax, Park Ave, Speer, Broadway. Not even saying anything about the I-25 and I-70 highways, running of course through ethnic neighborhoods. Not every highway mile goes through an ethnic neighborhood, of course, but enough of them do. The danger and violence of the vehicles and noise and physics of existing in these space. To drive on these highways with eyes to see it is enormously emotionally painful. people that reflexively attack their own sadness, as a [at one time reasonable] coping strategy with dehumanizing grief-phobic caretakers, and thus attack yours when it arises in the environment, even years later. i do not personally care too much for most gender construct conversation, and am annoyed when it seems like others do, or do too much. I’m usually annoyed when I get read strongly into the ‘MAN’ gender construct, usually by other people who have penises. ‘MEN’ are expected to not feel things, to not be sad, certainly to not love their children (fuck you, donald thompson) or to feel really anything at all, except dehumanization and objectification of the self and others. It’s a breath of fresh air to encounter male-passing people not traumatically socialized into the reflexive suppression of their emotional nature, but it’s certainly not an affliction exclusively born by english-speaking white-passing people with penises in the greater united states. I’m always pleased to hang with anyone who has easy-enough access to their own humanity. The book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again does a good job of painting how strongly the emotional damage of people passing as men can be experienced by everyone. The people who consider themselves men, perhaps seemingly willingly clinging to patriarchy (I say propagandized), and everyone they effect with their lives. The tl;dr of the book is thanks to skillful use of skills common in acting and theater, the author became convincingly male-passing, and could thus ‘go undercover’ in a long-term way, building relationships across time with different individual men, or groups of men. The author was harmed, in the same way that you or I would be harmed doing a long investigation into an area where pollution was being spewed into the environment. I have, in my family, multiple doctors, a therapist, a psychiatrist, many different versions and flavors of these types of people. My dad is a doctor, and we heard about it constantly. Most of these people I have no special respect for. I have very low regard for american psychiatry. That low regard is partially informed by most modern psychiatrists seeming to not know the supremacist origin of american psychiatry, which gave us things like the concept of ‘mental illness’, for not being sufficiently conformed to supremacists ideals. Go read the description for drapetomania, and meditate on how these sorts of people would go on to create the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM 1). The DSM 1 is such an abhorrent document, it feels self-abandoning to fantasize that anything downstream of it could be credible. i keep appreciating the new, visible, sad ways it manifests that my parents have hated me. (They would feign love towards me if I’d adhered to the pro-slavery christianity cult I was raised in, the patriarchy, nationalism, support of the state of the greater united states. Even when I participated in those systems, fully, I recount confidently the vibe that they hated me. It was simply slightly hidden behind the lie of ‘we all love each other and you’re doing what we think you ought so we give you fake affection!’) a regrettable number of times, key people in my life have attacked me for looking sad. (this happened in distant memory, from my parents, and much more poignantly, this happened during the end of my marriage, and indeed is part of why the marriage ended. I was tolerated when I performed mood-lifting for others, and utterly rejected when my mood was not deemed sufficiently ‘good enough’). As a in-the-moment useful coping mechanism, I can now ‘manage’ and hide my sadness, so, so well. It feels like this now gets unintentionally activated or used, by others, because it arises in me easily, now. I tried all the steps of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States with them. First loyalty, and I got abuse and torture. Then voice, and I got more punishment, abuse. Then exit, got me pretend peace, because “strong-willed Josh was finally out of the house”. Now I’m back to voice, and get more shunning and avoidance. I’ve always been quick to defect and undermine the control being dropped on me, heavily. the first time I read about anarchist calisthenics I thought “oh, easy, I’m already well-practiced at routine, small acts of non-compliance with abusive totalitarian systems! 1. Many people, even sometimes myself, are grief phobic, and thus reflexively, instinctively, push away all evidences of grief. So, I’ve had experiences of crying, hard, alone, and crying gently, to my self, in the company of others, and overall hiding it from them, AND I HATE THIS! Sometimes the best thing for a nervous system is a good cry, and a good accepting hug. I’ve received “what is wrong with you?” or “have you considered medication?” as a normal response to sadness. It hurts to feel disgust pointed at me, for being affected by something, to the point of tears. I’ve felt the loss of connection to my own grieving and angering, as I so often avoid perturbing others with the upset that would be experienced by me or them, witnessing my sadness. In about a year, i went from thinking I had four good-enough parent figures (two parents, by blood, two parents by marriage). Then, some death via heart attack, and the remaining three quickly evidenced their incompetence and abandonment, and I sadly appreciated that I actually had zero good-enough parent figures. As I became a parent myself, hope after hope dashed itself against the rocks of the supremacy and emotional immaturity of those people. I got shunned, pushed aside. My parents often made jokes about how discardable I was: “I could kill you and make another one like you.”, and more Part of my anger today, is fully rooted in things of the past, and in the context of the relationship with my parents could be fully addressed and resolved, except they’re continuing today exactly the same bad things they did in the past, thus there’s a second layer of anger piled on top. I wouldn’t imagine entertaining the idea of something like ‘forgiveness’ or ‘a repaired relationship’ without I can only guess how my parents feel about my divorce - neither of them have ever mentioned it, and both seem to studiously avoid me, so I suspect I’ve committed the Greatest Sin in their mind (a divorce), and nothing else matters to them. They’ve never spoken to me about my own child. I have never spoken about parenting, with my parents, in an emotionally regulated way. Perhaps they know that their own parenting was such an abomination there is no point in discussing it with me. All they did was emotionally and physically abuse and neglect me, while my dad was completely absent from the house, giving his entire life over to work, or the church. When he was at home, he was in his office working, continuously. Never once carved a shred of affection and tossed it my way. I experienced my own father as exclusively consumed by himself, or exclusively disappointed in me, disgusted by me. automobile supremacy & grief I feel sad that nearly every one of my friendships is mediated by the car dependency common to the greater united states. I don’t have a car, and nearly every single one of my friends has a car and is fully dependent upon it. I want to meet someone in a park? I have few friends that live within walking distance of the park I want to meet at, and so they spend forever driving their car around, finding parking, walking from the parking to the destination, and then however the day unfolds, they have to return to where they parked their car, to move it again. I’ve had relationships end, in part, because my partner refused to drive gently in the car. I despise being stuck in a car being driven dangerously, and even now when I go places with friends I weigh asking them to sometimes modify their behavior (hey, there’s .75 seconds of stopping distance between you and the car in front of you, and we’re going 60 mph, could we get a little more stopping distance?) highways, literal highways, now separate me from eden. Not just miles, and distance, but the spiritual/psychological distance of the highway. Tragedy, for all of us. I feel the weight of slavery, family destruction, I’m re-saddened over the violence, the experience. If one models police as deputized slave patrollers, one models “no-knock drug raids” as state-sponsored night-riding. It’s simply terrorism and supremacy. Unlike reconstruction-era night riding, when it’s modern policing, all the night riders are getting paid! What a nice arrangement one would set up for themselves, if they wanted to maintain the racial caste system that is white america. Police riding around with sirens? Casual emotional neglect in friendships, partnerships, familial relationships. I don’t miss emotional bids for connection, usually, and it’s hard being around people who discard emotional bids for connection. I’ve found voicelessness, within me, disempowerment. A sense of ‘asking for change might cause the relationship to end’. I deserve to ask for things, so I’ll ask for change, but the number of times this has led to the end of relationships for me has me feeling weight of grief and loss, and increases my sense of fear around asking for change. :( and I have to fawn my way through the interaction, because if I ask directly and they say no, that’s awkward as fuck, and can rapidly become quite uncomfortable to me. I asked one friend to slow down, and he started arguing with me that my risk perception was bunk, and because he has great reflexes we’re actually completely safe. Another friend said he had great car insurance so if he got in a car accident he’d just get a new car. I never drove with the latter friend again. I’ve only infrequently driven with the former friend since, and eventually heard me asking him to drive slower, and once he heard it in that way, he changed his behavior. When I say I feel uncomfortable or I feel that the risk of a bad outcome is unnecessarily elevated because of X, Y, and Z, could we discuss ameliorating it? I’d rather not be told “your feelings are wrong”. That’s dismissiveness, defensiveness, and damages the relationship. Certainly is not in line with relational flourishing. I have so often found myself drawn into what ends up feeling like an argument because the other person acts more threatened by my POV of something than the risk I’m trying to collaborate on, and so much relational damage ensues. A small instance of someone saying ‘i do not like that treatment’… … and how I responded When Eden says “i don’t like X”, I say “oh, thanks for telling me” and then I check in a few times subsequently to make sure it’s all good. There was a time she felt I was laughing at her in some situations. I was indeed laughing sometimes when she did something, and she was experiencing it as me laughing at her. I saw it in her face and disposition, and the emotional energy when she said “dont laugh at me!” I’ve been laughed at, mocked, criticized by people who think it’s fun to say hurtful things to others, and don’t care that it hurts me. Many family stories I grew up with rounded to “our family (mostly the patriarch donald) mocks Josh because he is sensitive, and ‘men’ are not sensitive, so we’ll bully him into manliness.”, and lots of other mocking behaviors. I hated this experience. So, when eden says “don’t laugh at me!” I didn’t fight her on if I was laughing at her. I said “my gosh, I don’t want you to feel laughed at by me. I have memories of some versions of something similar, I can easily sort this, thanks for telling me.” I told her what my plan was: I wrote a sign to myself and taped it up in the kitchen: josh, do not laugh at Eden josh And I told her “going forward, please tell me again if/when you feel laughed at, thank you for telling me already, i’ll check in on this a few times over the next few days”. I stopped laughing at her, including sometimes refraining from laughing in a situation that I knew I wasn’t teasing her, but I didn’t want her to think she was being teased. I don’t know how other people do/don’t handle her desire to not be laughed at. I’m not going to accidentally be like them. of course, humor is not gone, in any way shape or form. sometimes when I would laugh with her (in response to her sometimes doing funny things, saying clever things, being funny) I’d make sure we were both seeing it the same. Eden, a moment ago when I laughed, I was laughing because {x}, and I think you found it funny too. Was that all okay with you?” she’s since validated several different times that the issue she clocked is resolved, to her satisfaction. I did not tell her: “I didn’t INTEND to hurt you, I was simply laughing because it was funny, don’t worry about it, don’t be upset by it. It’s how I show love.” Further emotional abandonment from siblings, which I also assess as the partial responsibility of my parents. They set us all up for gross failure. Once when I said: Gosh, I’m sad over the current absence in my life represented by my supremacist, propagandized/propagandizing father A family member (who I think blames me for my relational ‘difficulties’ with my parents, rather than saying ‘the current relationship is a good reflection of the relationship they built with you’) responded: Well, what would he do that’s nice for you anyway? Implying, perhaps: what possible difference could you be experiencing in your current life if instead of an abusive, assaulting, bullying father, you had an emotionally attuned father who occasionally embodied healthy paternal and maternal energies? what a thing to think and say. supremacy needs gender essentialism (patriarchy) and patriarchy proclaims the message that people with penises have no emotional nature, and I am sometimes angered, or saddened, or both, to encounter people who think they’re not ruined by patriarchy, playing the same tired message upon me. I no longer am surprised to run into overwhelming patriarchal energy from people with vulvas. I’ve been (ineffectively) critizied by supremacists with penises who have sometimes told me, as if revealing a shameful truth about me, that I have a feminine communication style. This is why I get a blank face in response to grief and sadness so often by these people. I cut outside of the proscribed “rule” of emotional suppression, and someone else’s brain sorta fuzzes out when they witness it, until the moment has passed. If I am experiencing sadness, and I see the other person with a blank face, I reflexively move away from my own sadness, because if they started assaulting me for my sadness I’d be even more unhappy. I am simply pissed that these people then proclaim that because they experience nice things in the relationship with me, it must be healthy for both of us. When everyone is committed to the cult, it’s hard to access a sense of aliveness in anyone’s soul. Platitudes abound. Relational interdependence is impossible with supremacists My view of relationships has always been that we are influenced by the people around us, their positive or negative regard towards us. Because of that interdependence, it’s reasonable for us to all be mindful of how we hold our loved ones, in our own minds, or in the shared words/ideas that fill the space of relationship. Like, if you’re dear to me, I’ll try to tell you as such and reflect to you the things that I find distinctive, interesting, laudable, appreciable, about you. When dealing with evangelicals, in particular, I began to note that even as I pointed the above energy towards my loved ones, they reflected back to me not anything distinctive about me, but only things that they thought were laudable that emitted from me playing the role they wanted me to play. (example: my mom’s favorite thing to talk to me about was what I was reading in the bible, not anything real about my life) next, lets talk about parental coercion towards kids, and the way parents like this used alternatively emotional/verbal/physical assault and emotional warmth as a stick, and carrot, to farm from kids desired behaviors. this is called operant conditioning, and it sorta stinks, yet it’s everywhere. It’s dehumanizing. I will hurt you unless you do what I want is not so different from: I will dispense rewards for you giving me what I want So we ought to be as sensitive to the latter energy as the former. josh, have you considered that you’re choosing sadness? Based on other books, like ‘the courage to be disliked’ a line of reasoning, could be followed: I think josh is choosing sadness. The sadness and resulting frozenness (‘depression’) is helpful to josh, it gives him something he wants and needs OOOOH I am 100% ‘choosing’ depression and unhappiness and sadness. I’ll explain why: First, I’ve had some horrible experiences of disinhibited self-expression, along many dimensions. Intimate partnerships, marriage, family. Expressing hopes, joys, sadness, all has often enough led to emotional devestation. “depression” is a good way to avoid some of those bad things happening again. when I make the kinds of moves I made when i was happy, I kept triggering the disgust response from people close to me. My then-partner, friends, church friends, others. Or a profoundly blank face. The disgust was when I brought up issues with zoning and land use norms in the USA, that are crippling all of us. I kept unintentionally maligning something core to how they were (evangelicalism, patriarchy, car-normalized culture, militarism, violence, dismissiveness of the other) and often-enough they would want to control me/the conversation to achieve emotional comfort. To achieve relational comfort, I chose strategies that accomplished safety, which could look like sadness, depression, stuckness. The happy, ageiatic version of me kept running afoul of people near to me. Bummer. or “sadness is instrumental” in the same way that any form of hiding is instrumental. bibliotherapy Here’s some of the books that have helped me, over the last few years. Some themese weave together in interesting ways. For instance, what’s it like to be colonized by american supremacists? I strongly suggest reading Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, with special attention given to the experience with american missionaries. Both of my parents spent their entire lives fully participating in colonial missions around the world. recovering a capacity to grieve. I don’t agree with everything in this book, and found it enormously helpful The Tao of Fully Feeling. I learned only recently that Spotify has quite a lot of books on it - turns out this book is available on Spotify, so I gave it a re-read/listen recently. It’s helpful, logical, friendly. The author (and anyone else) loses a little of my appreciation whenever speaking positively of Alcoholics Anonymous or any sort of 12-step program. I strongly dislike those sorts of groups. Most other parts of the book were helpful to me. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, also by pete walker, is v helpful. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Dang. So good. Talks about the deep, aching emotional loneliness that comes from being ‘stuck’ on emotionally vaccuous subjects and people. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States The delusion of the people of the greater united states of ‘political authority’ and the way those entitlements play out on the world is very similar to ‘emotional immaturity’ and ‘verbal abuse’. The cost is infiniately high. I weep when I read books like this. This book is also why I will never vote again. Native people cannot vote. Imprisoned people cannot vote. Colonized people cannot vote. You know who can vote? The tiny group already almost certainly in favor of more colonialism, so the sytem gets what it wants. More colonialism. The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How To Respond what a bummer of a book to read, and so damn useful. I’d say it’s worth the read even if you’re not remotely questioning your own key relationships. Reading this book gave new color to my relationship with my own parents, and sparked lots of interesting conversations with peers about their relationships with their parents. Turns out lots of parents, because they feel entitled to control their children, make casual, routine use of verbally and emotionally abusive behaviors, to accomplish that control. Bummer, eh? White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color I just finished this book, exceptional. I’d note that “white tears” is how miriam usually responds to my occasional questing along the lines of this post, the thing I wrote about evangelicalism (her… mental dis-ease-dampener of choice?). What I observe is first a loss of attunement, or maybe a never-achieved-sense-of-attunement, and then I’d be clocking many signs of dissociation, in her mannerisms. The physicality of someone trying desperately to look like they’re relaxed when they’re really not relaxed. Totally fine, by the way, these are not easy conversations, I too sometimes do a little box breathing or grounding exercise, or try to shift the topic and attention to something else, so the system can settle back down to peacefulness. (Frisbee! Look at that thing we can both see since we’re out on a walk together!) With someone like miriam, there is no settling or peacefulness. no progress. no connection. When I watched Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke trailer I felt so much familiarity with my experiences with my own mother. Do you see how she operates fully emotionally alone, continuousy, coercing her kids, keeping up a front. Often, my mom (and not just my mom) would Anyway, I now have to think that when the supremacist is feeling overwhelmed, they’re not mindfully staying in a difficult state for the sake of an improved outcome, they’re dissociating from the experience and thus not able to hear you. Then, when you do something so provocative like “So, what do you think about this? What are you hearing me say? Whats coming up for you as you hear it?” it feels like being put on a stage, or being given a test. (I’ve heard “i just cannot say the right thing to you and that’s why I don’t want to talk about this” so many times). It’s that i am no longer accepting appeals to authority to dismissiveness towards me so, if all someone has is dismissiveness or appleas to authority, for instance, their experience of me is indeed “i just cannot say the right thing to josh”. I simply disagree with their frame. link to frame control piece? it’s still a draft. The collapse from that is to just start sobbing, playing the ‘damsel in distress’ trope. Tears are fine, natural, healthy, please note where in this piece about my own tears I’m putting commentary on someone else’s. When this pattern plays out repeatedly, every time I press her directly on supremacy, I cannot help but clock it. Especially having just read White Tears/Brown Scars. Here’s my notes/highlights from the book. I view my parents as colonizing powers, where “the mind and body of male child #1” was just one part of the colonized territory. Part of what caused me to realize they treated me as colonizers treated the lands and people they violenced against, was as I heard stories of resistence to colonizers, and found so much I resonated with, in my own emotional disposition towards them. Like Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism So, my parents responses to me all perfectly fit the script for ‘colonial powers responses of their victims’, which is also the abuser’s syllogism: I didn’t hurt you. And if I did, I didn’t intend to. If I did intend it, you deserved it. If you didn’t deserve it, it wasn’t that bad. So, I keep naming dynamics in the conversation, sometimes, and that feels quite uncomfortable for people like my parents. They make appeals to authority, I say “That’s an appeal to authority; I continue to evaluate you as the ultimate responsible person for your decisions.” Here’s a particularly interesting quote: The concept of whiteness and racism as a form of pathological narcissism that manifests in some individual white people has a long research history. In 1980, Carl Bell, a clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, outlined how the hallmark symptoms associated with narcissistic personality disorder, such as grandiosity, entitlement, and lack of empathy, apply to individual racists. More recently, in 2016, assistant professor of education Cheryl Matias described whiteness as narcissistic because its emotional nature insists on positioning itself as the center of the discourse, “especially when one is trying to push it to the margins.” Another quote: Strategic White Womanhood is a spectacle that permits the actual issue at hand to take a back seat to the emotions of the white woman, with the convenient effect that the status quo continues unabated. White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system. In this case, the person trying to assert himself against her is someone who was once a kid, not a person of color, but the diminishment that supremacism applies to the non-supremacist groups it creates is constant, across class (“child”) and ethnicity. Even more books In the last few years, I’ve read books like: I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction. Brutal. The terror and misery surrounding reconstruction, slavery. I cried so often reading this. I highlighted many sections via my kindle. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism this was an audiobook I got via the library/libby app, so no kindle highlights. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South Got lots of kindle notes here The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness here’s some of my kindle highlights The Most Dangerous Superstition Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia the male/female coded ‘beauty standards’ are directly eugenicist! Huzzah, read this book, decolonize a bit more of your sense of self.6 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI “what kind of things are settler colonialists willing to do, to get what they think they’re entitled to, Josh?” Great question. For an example of how even a single group believing in the fantasy of (political) authority ruins generations and continents regions and peoples, look no farther than this book. here’s my kindle notes Remember, some of us have these kinds of people as parents. 🤮 What should we do about it? “Sorry, world, for my supremacist parent” is a bit of parentification (of the kid) even as it’s a truthfully expressed sentiment. The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia I reference this everywhere, it’s the most useful conceptual compression of evangelicalism. Everyone is a propagandized participant, wittingly or unwittingly complicit with the strongest themes of supremacy in America. My notes here The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World I was raised by a certified colonizer - he worked in the pentagon and willingly participated in the war efforts of the greater usa, I was raised hearing some of these stories, told in a reverential, proud way. here’s my notes. The damage to one’s emotional sense of self, ones sense of inherent dignity or worth, in being exposed to this kind of energy, is not trivial. of course colonialists are willing to murder their own kids, or soul-murder them, they are willing to stampede around the world murdering any number of others. What’s one more? willingly soul-murdering your own kid shows your commitment to the cause. Sorta the cost of entry to the club. Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair this is one of the best, and I read this book early in the process of ending my marriage and exiting evangelicalism. I began to appreciate how others were responding to conflict that was arising as if I were abusing them. My mother, when I asked why she refused to read something I wrote, said “it is hard to see your children walk away from how they were raised”, as if I was harming her by writing, rather than writing about her harming me and that being my attempt to resolve the issue today. So, read that book, and then go create conflict with supremacists, and expect them to claim that you’re abusing them, when you’re not treating them according to the role they fancy themselves to have, and the role they fancy you to have. Footnotes not-yet-integrated loose notes, categorize the above list before randomly adding these entries: ongoing devestating harm of ‘car-dependent culture’, which even that frame is dismissive of the reality. a supremacist ideal, a regime of social control, is represented by ‘single family housing’ on one side, and the requisite zoning regime, and the highwaymen (rubber, asphalt, petroleum. you know, gdp stuff). urban renewal as ethnic cleansing the greatest threat to my and eden’s ongoing wellness is the possibility of getting crushed by a car for whatever reason, on our day-to-day. The other main risks are related to car-dependent, car-propagandized american culture. taps sign 40,000 people killed on american roads, not evenly distributed in anyway, by appreciating this it can be fixed all the sadness of less social time w/friends, bc of how much spiritual/psychological/time/risk/hassle exists for anyone to get in the same physical location, if it’s in america, regardless of the distribution of car users. I don’t have a car, often-enough wish at times that I did. My scooter works so well and is such an improvement on a car, and I still wish I had a Toyota Sienna, which I’ll purchase whenever I next find myself obtaining a vehicle. even when I’m just walking to cheesman, I have to cheat death repeatedly crossing Franklin, Colefax, 14th, 13th. I have plenty of valid beef w/supremacy culture materialized in cars proliferating like cancer or girrardia. sadness that fire department is not part of the solution to improving their domain. (I visited local fire department today, chatted w/Tom Ford, the person in charge and a few others. It was an odd vibe.) my parent’s routine use of silent treatment as punishment. Kid josh was so damn relational (adult josh is too) that depriving me of interaction, affection, warmth, while still in the same physical place, was such a shocking betrayal. I’d get upset and sent to my room or grounded, abandoned, said “you are not welcome here unless you’re putting on a fake face” and we’ll hurt you until you do. I experienced few opportunities of ‘disinhibeted self-expression’ until I’d fully left the toxic family/religeous situation A kid’s addendum My kid has a few things that bum her out. I live within walking distance of several parks, several libraries, a botanic gardens, three climbing gyms, grocery stores, and more. Some of these are long walks. My favorite climbing gym for ropes is a 7 mile round-trip walk. 3.5 miles each way. Totally doable, but not something I relsh doing often. I usually ride my scooter, of course, but with Eden have done much more walking than I’d do without. It’s tons of fun to load up her jogger, and chain trips together. The park, a friend’s house, the gym, another friend’s house on the way back, etc. We can have a super fun trip. Walking at night is particularly challenging, as cars have wildly bright headlights, especially the LED lights. Eden says “I don’t like it when the cars eyes look into my eyes” She’s three feet tall - the car headlights are blinding, a stunning amount of pollution, sometimes travelling hundreds and hundreds of meters. She also sometimes says about some trips “The walk is too big”. If we could subtract from the walk, all the distance that exists explicitly for cars, these walks would all be dramatically shorter. I estimate 1/2 the distance, conservatively. Land utilization is terrible when it’s allocated to vehicles. Of course, that was the point in america - urban renewal as ethnic cleansing. Supremcists WANTED to have parking lots and wide, dangerous streets instead of lively neighborhoods. They went hard in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and less hard since then, but we are all living amongs the rubble of their slow dismantelling of society. American cities destroying neighborhoods via ‘urban renewal’ is very, very similar to what people in Israel (with the support of people in America) are doing to the people in Palestine. The bulldozers rumbling around, tearing things down. Look at the photos of where Robert Moses destroyed neighborhoods for the ‘cross bronx expressway’ Devestation reigns. Is not “patriarchy kink” not a brilliant phrase? I did not come up with it. Nor did I originate ‘sky daddyism’, and found it to also be worth a few giggles. ↩ TODO finish draft, publish “frame control”, it’s inherently coercive to ‘force’ someone else into “your frame”, it’s inherently mutual to follow someone else into “their frame”, for their best understanding of the dynamic. https://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/. For an explanation and origin of the willingness to enslave and colonize: The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. I view a belief in authority now as an dangerous superstition, if it mattered to you to keep an appreciation for the figure of Jesus Christ, as one drop-kicks the rest of the structures to the curb, the politics of jesus post, but its not necessary. to treat others gently, one needs, needs to re-access treating oneself gently. I suggested to one friend that they “fire their inner cop”, someone else I pointed out that if they called someone else a fraction of what “they” called themselves, we’d all be horrified. Pete walker calls it ‘the toxic inner critic’, or the internalized voice of a parent, usually or some other caretaking figure who used shame and punishment and coercion to bully others. ↩ Years ago, I encountered this list of 300 ways it can hurt to be a man, and certainly appreciated some of them, and appreciated the impressive number. perhaps it could also be called ‘300 ways it can hurt to be a man inside of american/western/supremacist culture’ ↩ What is her definition of successful? Of course talking directly with her about it involves lots of thought-stopping cliches, but it rounds to the standard toolkit of ‘evangelical religious authoritarianism’ which is a regime of apocalyptic social control? is that too strong? Read some of my notes/quotes from on hitting small(er) people ↩ this is, of course, the classic ‘appeal to authority’, or ‘nuremburg defense/just following orders’. This is why belief in authority is such a dangerous superstition. As a reminder, this is my father, who claims he loves me, enlisting the full weight of his cognitive powers and story making potential to double down on defending child abuse ↩ When passing old white people deign to make remarks now that openly affirm a racialized, supremacist view of the world, out loud, with their full chest, I clap back. the last old white-passing woman that spoke in such a way of eden, to me said in passing to or about my kid “oh, you are such a beautiful little girl” (reinforcing a message of ‘there is a standard, you happen to meet it, therefore you are fundamentally different than someone else, I approve of your seeming conformity to my version of a eugenic ideal.’ Also a bunch of presumed crap around gender roles, femininity, conformity, etc) I stopped, turned, looked at her face, and said “what a strange thing to say to someone.” female-passing people get stripped by ‘society’ of permissible access to rage, by anyone embodying patriarchal, supremacist, emotionally immature ideals. Remember, Rage Becomes Her I wish I’d said something a bit more specific, but it is enough. I was not neglecting the role of the Witness. Eden heard me. The supremacist heard me. Its enough. ↩

alternative titles: yielding isometric mid-thigh pin pulls, isometric deadlift 'holds' for fun and climbing Introduction A few months ago, I began some barefoot sprints up a hill at a local park, and discussed also adding heavy kettlebell swings. My back started feeling great, along with my feet, my legs, the bones and connective tissues and muscles. Truly, i’m now four months in and this is all still part of my toolkit. It also feels great to walk my bare feet across grassy surfaces. The kettle bell swings transferred strongly to climbing. After building skills and strengths around one-handed heavy kettlebell swings (and giggling to myself over how fun it was to feel so much stronger while climbing). I found myself wondering ‘what will I do when I max out the kettlebells’, also, ‘I do not currently have any interest in maxing out the kettlebells, but I am curious to perhaps incrementally practice some of the same general pattern’ I remembered how I’ve always appreciated things about the deadlift that I’ve never quite managed to embody, or make part of my training, and some of the core parts of the deadlift are pretty unappealing to me, too. I appreciate the whole ‘strengthen the posterior chain’ thing, but I really, really, really do not care about having any particular deadlift “number”. And the few times I’ve spent a few sessions in a row deadlifting, I’d get to something around 200 lbs and then start getting anxious about how my back would be feeling, because of a prior injury/weakness. AND because of that weakness, I’ve long wanted to get a ‘strong(er) back’, to reduce the chances of an injury, but kept running into that weakness along the way. hm. so anyway, my back has been feeling great, and I was sorta thinking about deadlifty type stuff again. I was noticing how little portions of my back would move with the kettlebell swings, thinking about that hip hinge motion. I decided that I could replicate some of the motion simply by ‘pinning’ a bar with a bunch of weight on it close to the top of the deadlift position, and I could then pick it up and hold it. My first experience of this particular exercise I had been thinking about the motion/exercise for a while, but not quite set it up, I’d never used the pins like this before, and a friend gave a helpful nudge while we were exercising together, and I got it set up right, fiddled with it, started adding weight, slowly, seeing how everything felt as I went. AND I WAS SHOOK! The way the exercises felt while I was doing them and the ways my body felt fatigued, sore, later that day and the next day, the day after, and even three days later, was extremely thought provoking. I’m attuned to interestingness. these were interesting. From a proprioception point of view, there was lots of input and awareness throughout the lifts, AND for hours and days in the soreness and sensation generated by the strain and repair. Photos and videos and timelapses of the exercise, for context Here’s a still from a video, showing the entire thing. It’s a mostly no-range-of-motion exercise, so I pick it up from close to this ‘finished’ position: I will tell you about them, but first, it might be best to simply look at the video of the workout: 🎥 google photo album of the lifts It’s a few short videos, one showing a single heavy-for-me lift. You might notice I hold the bar up for only maybe three seconds. The timelapses show how fast the whole workout can be, and how little time is spent doing anything, and how small the range of motion is. I spent more than one session googling around, trying to find a useful name that described what I was doing, and finally, iteratively, with the help of two friends, walked into a title for it. I was describing it: Okay, so, you know the ‘top’ of the deadlift position? [shifts hands into this sorta stance] I’ll put the squat rack safety bars to this level [lowers two inches] and load a bar there, start with a single 45 plate on both sides… [more gesturing, miming] … I kept adding 45s until I was quite a bit past my regular deadlift weight. It was so interesting to hold a heavy, heavy bar for 5-10 seconds, with almost zero movement. Based off the soreness and fatigue I felt immediately and the following day(s), I could tell the ‘transfer’ to climbing-specific strength was very high. Not 100%, but close. This would be considered an isometric lift/hold. Google told me that “traditional” barbell isometrics would be pinning the bar in place and then pulling up on on it, rather than lifing it and holding it in an raised position. So, this is a ‘yielding isometric’ hold, in that we are activating muscles to avoid yielding to the weight. This is opposed to an ‘overcoming isometric’, like pushing on a wall (or lifting a bar against a pin), where the entire load is delivered by the body trying to overcome the immovable force. I’m so bad at counting weight plates, it takes a long time to figure out how much weight is on the bar, but I absolutely thought “well, I can easily hold my body weight with one arm hanging from a pull-up bar, so I wonder if I can do my body weight from each hand at the same time on this lift?” and started adding weight towards 140 * 2, or 280 lbs. Turns out it’s pretty easy for me to hold 280 lbs up there. I was going slowly up in weight, but even on my very first day, I think I went to 320 lbs. (!!!). I always, always evaluate how a back thing feels the day after the exercise, so I eased into these gently. But each time, the day after, things felt good. So I kept the lifting going, and very quickly saw wild numbers, all the way up into the very low 400s eventually. Mostly I stay at a lower weight, maybe 80% of a max, and aim for longer holds, and other forms of improved holding. For example, I can find ease with my breathing (slow exhale vs fast exhale and hold) and many versions of trying to keep my shoulders “packed”, and “holding them up” instead of letting them get pulled down (in most of the footage in the album, I’m letting them sag more than I do now). I’m not trying to get injured. For instance, breathing is difficult when holding this much weight, but if I’m holding it for a ‘longer time’ (>5 seconds) I can exhale and take a half-inhale. When I’m closer to my limit, there’s no way I can inhale under the tension. Anyway, there is tons of good stuff out there about isometric exercises. As a climber, nearly 100% of my finger flexor training is isometric, and I’ve noticed over the years more and more of my exercises tending towards isometrics. For example, I virtually never train pullups, but will do lots of holding a 135 degree arm position isometrically in various ways. It’s easy(ier) on the elbow tendons, etc. I expect this exercise counts as elbow tendon pre-hab, as I appreciate the soreness I sometimes detect, in the elbow joints. Ditto re knee and ankle and foot tendons. I get tons of proprioceptive input from those places, after holding sufficiently heavy weights. Contrasting this strange lift/hold to a look-alike exercise, the deadlift (lifting a much lighter amount of weight from the ground) Tons of obviously coherent, rooted-in-reasonableness ideas float around out there about why deadlifts are a nice thing to give to the human body, but again, I don’t deadlift, I’m not a gym person. I don’t view this lift as even remotely related to a deadlift. There’s no ‘reps’, there’s no movement, it’s just holding it at the top of the position, stressing out the upper body more than a full range-of-motion deadlift ever would be able to do, noticing what I’m feeling as I hold the weight. Even rock climbers sometimes talk about deadlifts, and some of the other ‘core’ barbell exercises. I’ve never cared for benching or squats, either. I’m not a gym person, though I love as much as anyone else the concept of ‘being strong’. Years ago, I injured my back in a severe-to-me way. Ultimately found it was ‘just’ a pulled psoaz muscle and not a herneated disk! how nice. the effect on my life and mobility for a long time was that of a severe back injury. Possibly I’ve got a slight congenital back issue (someone thinks the bottom vertebra is maybe partially fused to my pelvis or something, but the x-ray was unclear). I’ve simply always had tightness in my lower back. It’s part of why sometimes I look like I stand up very strait, I think. Anyway, old back injury + legit sensitivity + proclivity to back pain. I still don’t ‘run’ (besides those barefoot hill sprints I mentioned, and that’s been only a very recent addition), but things about that portion of my back is still a point of physical sensitivity, and emotional sensitivity, for me. Every time I’ve tried deadlifting from the ground, I can see, feel, witness in video recordings, errors in form and technique, and could not generate for myself the collection of body queues I seem to need to get the form right. I’ll maybe hire a coach for IRL training someday. Imagine how thrilled I was, then, to have stumbled across this thing that gets me more of the best parts of what I always wanted from the deadlift, and less of the parts I didn’t want, from the deadlift. I’m thrilled to have discovered this vastly-more-relatable-to-rock-climbing, lower-risk-to-the-back, no-range-of-motion exercise. Where did the name come from? I watched portions of a painful amount of youtube videos, trying to find a video of someone doing this exercise like this, and couldn’t find any. It’s not often I discover particularly novel things, and I’m pleased when I do. This feels like one of ‘em. 1 It’s a no-range-of-motion isometric deadlift pin-pull. Or yielding isometric mid-thigh pin-pull-and-hold I don’t know how to signal in the name that the point of the motion is the holding, and not reps, per se. I can find zero footage on youtube of anyone doing anything quite like this. I’d like to emphasize, again, the point is not reps, the point is time under tension. Here’s the videos I collected, again: google photo album of the lifts. Maybe I’ll make Why does this feel so transferrable to climbing We’ve perhaps seen people doing the ‘no-hang’ tension block weighted pulls. I think of this exercise as a version of that. I’ve tried those exersises, I like them well enough. I don’t mind that the tension block is a one-handed thing. these yeilding isometric barbell pin pulls feel conveniently two-handed. I can feel all the columns and structures and musculature and connective tissue of my upper body (and lower body) working, hard, to maintain the position throughout the hold. When I climb right after these exercises, I can feel lots of overlapping use. Or, I do these exercises after the climbing, and can feel it then, or in the soreness. The commonality of energy pathways is distinctive. It becomes very apparent why this is an interesting exercise as one approaches ‘heavy’, whatever that is for you. Here’s a list of some of the priprioceptive interestingness: The ‘meaty’ parts of my hands are sore, again, in a delightful way, with the effort of holding the bar. the pad at the base of the thumb is sore, in a nice way the weight is very heavy, so I absolutely MUST have my hands on opposite sides of the bar. Either direction feels like a direct mimic of the ‘base’ climbing movement. An undercling or ‘regular’ palm-facing-away position I feel soreness in the intercostal muscles across the tops of my ribs, in a way that makes sense when you appreciate how much force is being carried with the the lungs acting like a balloon, rigidly working with the ribs, shoulder structures, to carry the load. delightful soreness all across the forearms, and the rest of the arm and shoulder i was having issues with callouses building (and tearing. ick. happened once. did not like it.) and found that if I set an intention of gripping the bar really really tightly, my skin sloshes around under the bar less, and skin that gets pulled at less tears less. Also, my hands get even more sore! the ways the specific shape of the bar transfers directly, directly to certain hand positions on the wall is wild. I never had considered this before. It feels like I can hold a ‘c’ shape in my hand more, and thus feel improved on crimps in different/better ways, especially roofy crimps. I can kinda curl my wrist and hooked hand + crimped finger more into a hold, and achieve an improved body position on it, as a result. To appreciate the above, perhaps hold your hand in front of you, rigidely, as if your hand and thumb were wrapped all the way around a bar bell. Flex the hand. flip the thumb over into a half-crimp position. I can now imagine stronger intercostals at the base of the knuckles, and stronger wrist flexors. Before a few months ago, it would have been hard for me to imagine how this little chain of pulling could be made independently stronger by pulling hard on a bar, and now that I’ve experienced it, it seems of obvious why these exact pulls make this complex of muscles and structures so much stronger. 2 I can feel soreness in the bones and connective tissues in the a2 pulley region and pip joints, which obviously are frequently injured structures in the hands of climbers, and being able to systemically apply load in such controlled fashion feels great for prompting the whole tissue injury/repair cascade. tendon injuries are most likely during highly dynamic moves, or after a lot of wiggly back-and-forth sawing motion has already been applied to the tendons, these lifts are none of that. Theoretically, big early strength gains of some exercises are not the muscles getting any definition of stronger, it’s that the muscle fibers are becoming coordinated; it’s that the load is so high, they’re learning to all apply force at the same time. getting from 88% muscle fiber recruitment to, say, 95% muscle fiber recruitment, seems worthwhile, right? Lots of climbing-specific exercises talk about this principal. It’s sorta like ‘free strength’. “I don’t need more muscle to pull harder, nor do I need more force to be generated by any particular muscle fiber, I simply have some muscle fibers that are not trying at all when I am pulling really hard? And I can simply ask them to try alongside the other muscle fibers already trying? heck yeah.” I have no idea what sort of numbers anyone actually has, just that there are known ways of improving the coordinated activation of muscle fibers, and as I reflect on the way these exercises work, I note the same principle being applied. Similar to the kettlebell swings, holding a round bar feels like an ‘active’ position for the palm and structures of the hand. I could easily feel an interesting and useful transfer to crimping holds, and being able to more easily hold a rounded palm when crimping, vs it flattening out into more of a drag. Because the range of motion is tiny, this feels relatively easy on my metabolic system and muscles. Again, early gains are at least partially muscle fiber recruitment type things, perhaps, and I’m thrilled for it, and don’t mind at all when that is not an avenue of further improvement. Please don’t get me wrong, my nervous system felt absolutely emptied of something I didn’t know I had, the first few sessions. The entire body is working so hard - The first time I had the weight of one of me, hanging from each arm was very interesting. I then had one-of-me plus a 25 lb dumbbell, hanging from each arm. this is difficult to me. 3 Over the last two years, I’ve had several friends go through heavy-duty surgical interventions for damaged tendons in the ankle and knee. What they have experienced, I would love to avoid. I am THRILLED to be providing stress to the whole system right now, in such safe ways. I can feel things like my achillies tendons, and lots of things inside my knees, expressing a perception of having been used, the day or two after an exercise like this. For the next three days my entire body felt like I’d stretched in a way I didn’t know I could. It feels very useful from a climbing pov to be building capacity for this sort of energy output. It’s become perceivably less effortful to hold certain body positions on the wall, now, in ways I didn’t even know I was struggling with, or realizing I could have a certain competency with. In certain moves, I kept feeling like I was “clicking”, like a magnet tile, into ideal body positions during/between moves, with the improved ease with which I could move all of my body around, because of my stronger shoulders and back. Climbing is a skill sport, and I’m pleased to use my stronger body to develop my skill. Guess what one can do more of, with a stronger body? More practicing-by-trying difficult, skillful moves! TODO add video of my surprise casual send of first v9 on the tb2? I added the video to the photo album of the lifts. or click here to view it directly. It had been months since I’d tried that boulder problem, it was the first of the grade I’ve done on the tension board. I could tell my shoulders and back felt SO STRONG in ways that were not available to me from when I’d last tried it. In the video, especially compared to earlier attempts, it’s obvious to me that I am feeling so solid in each body position throughout the climb. Sometimes it’s obvious that I’m barely holding various body positions, and in this video, it’s that obvious that each of these body positions is secure. This sensation keeps getting born out on ropes and bouldering in many different ways. I keep telling people that I climb with that it feels like I’m playing a video game, and I cashed in accrued points for a character upgrade, and I just spent it on stronger shoulders and back. It’s like my joints and the holds I’m holding onto are more inclined to ‘snap into place’ once I grab them. Fantastic, and delightful. Even if I was not climbing, though, I think I would really like these exercises. If you’ve read this far, you’ve likely spent about 20 minutes on this piece and the videos, which means you’ve spent more time reading than I usually spend doing the entire isometric pin pull exercise. So, next time you’re around a squat rack, maybe you’ll think of me and this idea and try it yourself. If you do, I’d love to hear your experience of it. I subscribe to write it now philosophies, and this exercise is now pretty familiar to me, even as it’s still novel. I anticipate I’ll keep going with it, I’ll drop updates to this post now and again. Footnotes a few of the other novel things, which I think counts for something: I was the first one I’d heard of that rode a scooter as far as Denver>Canada>Seattle>Denver, photo album though turns out now people ride their scooters literally all around the world - findable on youtube. between when I encountered scooters as a useful vehicle in the usa (2022) and made that trip (2023) I had not. Even in the decades of experience among the people at the local scooter dealer, no one had heard of someone going so far on a scooter, and they were impressed. I’m counting this as ‘genuinely novel’. It wasn’t just a long scooter trip, but skillful managing of the logistics, the route, the pacing, the sleeping. I genuinely do not like to ‘work hard’ or to suffer, so a trip like this would be unappealing unless it was also deeply comfortable, most of the time. Secondly, I’ve never seen someone else collect, render anyone’s mobility data in such granular way as this: https://josh.works/mobility-data. Lots more could be said about that. Started as a very simple basic idea that grew into something quite interesting, rendering thousands of precise trips all at once on a single global map. Are computers not amazing??? Also I feel an odd awareness of my own lived experience, being able to zoom out and see evidences, breadcrumbs, sometimes whole meals of lines, evidences of trips, life lived. mm. the data is possibly self-explanatory? A third point of interestingness, novelty, that I am pleased to have encountered, that is close-enough-to-original: ‘coning’ an intersection, aka fixing the common american-style road junctions with traffic cones. I also do interesting/novel stuff with drone footage in cities, but don't yet anything super easy to link. jk, sorta: example 1: follow-along of a group on bikes thru a park/neighborhood in Denver, example 2: smooth timelapse footage of a stroad, example 3: trader joes paring lot timelapse ↩ In certainly one of my less sufferable traits, sometimes after I have what seems like an insight, to me, it becomes clear, obvious, and then I talk to others like it’s as obvious to them as it is obvious to me, even as I have clearly never arrived at this insight until {age_at_which_insight_was_gained}, and I can “be pushy” or at least experienced as “pushy” in some ways. I don’t deny it at all, also, possibly, I am sorry/i don’t disagree with you. 😬 ↩ I’ve often used unconventional units for calculating things. I sometimes still calculate the cost of items in burritos. “{such and such} is three burriots, with quacamole, is it worth that much?” from the job where I earned about one chipotle burrito per hour. ↩

“Traffic Cones and Junction Fixes: A DIY Guide” ? this is very drafty This post is probably best viewed on desktop, with some links opening new tabs, viewed, closed, and then this post returned to. There’s a lot of videos farther down, some of them are tiktoks (sorry) and some of them are youtube videos (that’s not my stuff) and then some of my stuff is also embedded via a service called “Wistia”. I hope you watch at least some of the videos below. maybe the piece still stands up well enough without the videos. maybe. Introduction Here’s a new word, I am introducing to the lexicon: Coning, verb to place traffic cones at specific points in a road or junction to shape how people travel through the intersection. Simplifies and smooths complexity, increases safety for everyone. Dramatically reduces the four types of vehicle emissions: engine exhaust, brake dust, tire rubber microplastics, and noise. Any vehicle that is accelerating from a stop to, say, 15 miles per hour, is generating all of those emissions except brake dust, and when that vehicle has to stop again, it’ll generate the brake dust as well. The noise of a vehicle is not just it’s engine - lots of noise comes from the rolling of tires over a surface, and the sound of displaced air is quite loud. Brakes also often-enough generate noise. 1 Another unique form of engine noise pollution is that based on how the driver uses the engine, the driver can signal to everyone something about the driver’s internal emotional state. I resent this. Compare accelerating and stopping behavior to travelling smoothly through a 50 meter section of road, without using the brake or gas pedal. The engine would be operating at an idle, instead of under accelleration. no brake dust, and the tire rubber microplastic generation would be at a much lower level than those same microplastics would be generated if the car was being stopped by the brakes or accellerated by the engine. This seems audacious/unreasonable, josh, because… Consider a junction in Poynton, UK. Here’s a link to the 8 minute mark of a youtube video about this ‘shared space’ road junction. I wrote a bit more about Poynton on substack: Interlude: A Pattern of Repair, and then again, applying the concept to an intersection that I (unfortunately) must interact with regularly: A Pattern of Repair: The ‘traffic bean’ ‘coning’ an intersection would be less intensive a treatment than a traffic bean, yet both obviously move with the same sorts of energies. A few times I’ve had the priviledge of stumbling into an idea, act, or articulation that, while firmly rooted in banal phenomena in one domain, feels quite novel when applied to a new domain. This thing I’m discussing in this post is one of those novel things. ‘coning’ a road, street, or junction is one of those banal-and-novel acts. I’ll explain below, and I hope you might try something similar some day for yourself. Examples of my own coning adventures Here’s one of the very first traffic cones I set out, in my whole life, with the goal of creating/providing safety in mind. 1. South Denver, a pedestrian crossing of a residential road One rainy day, I observed from my bedroom these traffic cones floating down the street. The video tells the rest of the story: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240202349451595054 I started with what most traffic planners in America would start with: Bulb-outs As you can see in the end of the video, nothing really seemed to change. I ended up with a small change in placement (instead of bulb-outs, I placed the cones where the lane divider would be), and a HUGE change in behavior: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240611295966268718 please notice in all these timelapses that people are walking down the street, the length of it. See how they scurry out of the road when a car is present, and how confidently they walk when there is no car. Anyway, ^^ that video above was my first foray into this coning thing. Here’s a reminder of what the street looks like without any cones: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7250134620694482218 As I say in that video, the mom who walked by was wise to warn her kid about the dangers of the road. Isn’t it a bummer? She’s using the road exactly like a car would, why does she have to be threatened with horrible violence continuously by passing cars? 2 The following https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7250134620694482218 another view of the same treatment: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240680684472274218 These cones remained in place for weeks. No one moved them for such a long time. Now, the above videos all highlighted the placement of the cones. Here’s a different view, I think the drone perspective is very interesting. From most points of view, the cones are almost invisible. what an elegant intervention: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240668293420322091 another view: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240665861508402478 another view: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240639996917632302 At this point, the satisfaction I derive from this kind of stuff is undoubtedly similar to what some people experience with public art, graffiti, etc. Here’s the lightest-weight intervention I’ve ever did, that worked shockingly well: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249134328502947118 2. South Denver, noise reduction on an arterial going past cafes, breweries, lots of outdoor seating This treatment was excellent, I’m pleased with the results, the noise level came down by so much, AND things were made way safer. The cones were taken away after a few hours That idea gave birth to the second iteration, sorta on the same walking path two blocks down: wistia-player[media-id='lqt60rz6m1']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/lqt60rz6m1/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } Another intersection, later in time: wistia-player[media-id='kuqbgipm8a']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/kuqbgipm8a/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } The way one might use this phrase/concept is like so: Ick, this street is loud and dangerous, I wish someone would put some cones down. or that person almost hit that other person with their car - if that intersection was properly coned it wouldn’t have happened. or The noise along this road is wild. if the area got well-coned, it would be way quieter. Here’s another denver-area coning, very close to a few different climbing gyms, schools, parks, apartment buildings. I was very pleased with this one. All of these intersections by the way are STILL INADEQUATE even with these cones: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249752983481732394 A fully complete intersection would have something like a built-in ‘traffic curve’, either a traffic bean, or if that is a bit too big, the ‘coning’ of the intersection could cause a small deviation in vehicle path. The big issue is: if the intersection accommodates vehicles passing through it fast, say, 35 mph, without any change in direction, even a slight wiggle/deviation, it’s not fully fixed. In all these intersections, I didn’t place any cones that wasn’t delimiting what is already theoretically delimited, It’s a good enough proof of concept, though, and shows that with a tiny bit of work, any unwanted speed can be filtered out, by these cones, and building little gates, defined curves, turn radii, etc. The experience of everyone NOT in a vehicle goes up enormously in these situations. It’s almost dedignifying to enumerate the ways. I am extremely aware of how dangerous roads and junctions are. 3 Cars feel to me as dangerous as guns, and I’m accutely aware of when a car is pointed at me, if it is in motion and when it’s stationary, if there is someone in the driver’s seat, same as I’d be aware of a gun being pointed at me. The driver of that car could kill me with the press of a foot with a car, just as the user of a gun could kill someone with the press of a finger. Check out my piece on bollards for more: Bollards: What and Why. I am unable to dissociate from shit roads and dangerous dynamics created by those road designers, and the people who use them. I’ve slightly unusual points of view, but I am aware of feeling something similar about roads my whole life. I am sensitive, sometimes extremely sensitive, and in ways that unavoidably inconvenience others. If you talk to some former partners, you could get long lists of ways my sensitivity and emotional delicacy has been experienced as extremely inconveniencing. Cars, even when the engines are idling or the vehicle is electric are so loud, and one can infer so much about a vehicle and its driver from things like: relative ratios of accelerating, coasting, braking. (In a 100 second segment of driving, what is the ratio between accelerating, coasting, braking? How quickly does the driver cycle between the three, and how smoothly or sharply?) speed in many different ways - speed through curves, speed through turns this list is simply some of the things one can infer about cars from the noise. Just the noise. 3. Centeral Denver, reducing noise, improving awareness https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249752983481732394 My friend and I did this, as we rode our scooters past, a few blocks from his house, a few blocks from two climbing gyms, grocery stores. There’s a school directly adjacent to the intersection. It is not tolerable, the speeds that can be accessed by people going straight through the intersection, and how crossing it requires one to deconflict with so much space, in both directions. The cones we put down obviously changes the turn radii for cars, and created little ‘protected pockets’ for passers-by, without causing a foot or bike barrier for anyone not in a car. 4. Loveland, pedestrian crossing of a four lane road with sometimes 50+mph traffic, I got to plan a project with the local city engineer I later spent some time living adjacent to this intersection, which had a whole fascinating saga. Here’s what happened. First, I lived next to this wildly unsafe junction that feels both rural and urban. Rural, in terms of how fast/straight the roads are, and the spacing of lights, lane widths, etc. Most people driving through this intersection are coming from ‘rural’ points of origin. Eventually, in talking to neighbors, I heard stories of many car accidents, deaths, vehicles bouncing into yards, fences, trees, etc. I found a bunch of traffic cones a short walk away, and the ideas started to emerge. wistia-player[media-id='iobo0kmb31']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/iobo0kmb31/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } I planned where I’d put cones, and then did so, and got the whole before/during/after on video via drone. The improvements were magnificent. Unfortunately for all of us, this was an event witnessed almost exclusively by me. No one else was there to agree with me on how much better it was, besides the people using the junction. Most drivers simply let off the gas and coasted straight through the intersection. Those that turned reduced their speeds appropriately to turn. It was glorious. Eventually, I went back out with more cones, and city employees followed me, and tried to get me to take the cones down. (using implication, never threats or demands). I simply did my normal word-vomit when talking to authority figures: I flood them with polite, relentless, technically-laced monologue. References to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, street typologies and the implication on sightlines, speed calculations, grief (over all of our loved ones killed on/by american roads), ‘we are all out here, together, united by our desire for us and our loved ones to continue to survive’. Usually they glaze over, like a dog that licked a toad and now wants the taste out of its mouth. They left, and returned with a member of the local deputized slave patrol. She did the threatening and provocative “I need your name and ID, any prior arrests or anything I should be worried about?” routine. (Isn’t it funny how slave patrollers will weaponize their own discomfort, in a way that makes it obviously a threat?) Again, I did the verbal vomit thing, as only a wealthy-enough-to-have-access-to-lawyers-passing, white-passing american man can do. I have the privilege of treating the deputized slave patrol as a tool for people just like me. I can embody this energy, as I was raised by a person who was also a preacher and a doctor and a military pilot and a supremacist and a military officer and had a penis and was white-passing. He huffed hard on the ‘authority and patriarchy/supremacy’ pipe. Me: How often do you deal with car accidents? Lots, really? Isn’t that annoying? Here’s a way to make for less car accidents, obviously this shouldn’t be your problem, it’s an engineering thing, maybe you can help me find the person in the city responsible for the road right here? she gave me a hint (“talk to {so-and-so} in the city admin office”) which I kept ‘privilege escalating’ until I was wandering around the city of loveland department of works office building, and found my way to the city engineer’s office, Matt. The admin person gave me his email address, phone number, his physical address. It was a few blocks away in a different building so I popped over and the door I parked my scooter next to was unlocked, so I wandered inside. I’ve never been inside a municipal streets authority building before, and having read the power broker I was attending to every detail. Lots of interesting stuff inside (a sign making shop, feeds from traffic cameras) and implications for anyone who’s read seeing like a state, like… I see why big ugly rural intersections seem so important to municipal people. They have billboard-sized TV’s displaying dozens of feeds of intersections. It was one of the ugliest and most depressing things I could imagine looking at all day. traffic beans, remember? Breaks my heart to see an intersection empty, with cars sitting around waiting to go through. The rate at which people’s time is being wasted is stunning Anyway, Matt had time, and was thrilled to nerd out about road junctions. hardly sixty seconds of conversation elapsed, as I gave him a short version of how I ended up in his office, before he had google earth open and we were zipping around Loveland ‘looking’ at intersections. We spoke for a while, it was all interesting. He seemed to obviously want at least some of the same safety outcomes I wanted. What I soon ran into is the very american assumption that ‘fast vehicle movement’ correlates at all with ‘good enough trip time’, among other assumptions. He and I swapped emails, and eventually met up again at a few different intersections within loveland, him in his city pickup truck, me on my scooter, to walk around and look at different bits of ‘pedestrian infrastructure’. I kept gently pushing my goal along (a coned-and-traffic-bean’ed intersection) and eventually got permission from him to treat with hay bales a connected series of road segments/junctions, including the one directly next to the house I was living in, that I could see from my front window. The plan was: using hay bales, the smallish rectangular ones, I could build roundabout/traffic-bean-type junctions, defining the inner and outer edges of the junctions with hay bales, leaving the open space free to people walking/biking, and shaping the flow of traffic to that traffic-bean-vibe We were going to treat a series of connected intersections, including the ones closest to where I was living at the time, NOT including, in the first pass, the intersection I had first treated I was thrilled, even as it was the smallest definition of the experiment. My plan was, upon my return to that house, try to obtain a pile of hay bales and then, while he stood next to me, start arranging them on the various junctions. I obviously had a plan in mind for where bales might go on each junction. I’d ended up travelling out of contry while he and I was discussing it, was gone for a while, ended up moving, and i returned to loveland only for a few hours to collect my stuff. That hard-won project never moved forward. I am still proud of how far I got with my hay-bale traffic bean plan, though. 5. Humboldt & 16th I moved back to Denver. Soon ended up living where I currently live, as I write these words. Near this intersection at Humboldt and 16th ave. Colefax is the name for 15th ave, so this street is but a single block from Colefax. If you live in the Denver area, you know Colefax. This street-level video shows a family driving on bicycles, then a bunch of passing cars. Can you see the obvious danger? I sometimes fear I’m belaboring the point, yet I still encounter people that can look at obviously dangerous interactions and not see them. wistia-player[media-id='m8dkzdxell']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/m8dkzdxell/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } wistia-player[media-id='kuqbgipm8a']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/kuqbgipm8a/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } another view of the same intersection: wistia-player[media-id='dpgunuzdcy']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/dpgunuzdcy/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } Misc other intersections Long ago, around the time of my first ‘coning’: this drone video of this walk with someone using a wheelchair is interesting to me. Explains why I don’t always hew to sidewalks like some people would want me to, as if they expected me to act obedient to their entitlement. another video from the above walk. Again, I think the minimum reasonable starting point is close most roads to vehicle throughput, and can you see how an arterial functions as a wall? General complaints about inadequate and dangerous and inefficient American intersections Oh, I have beef with American intersections. I hate to use them, to even witness them, so I don’t travel much by car, and when I do, it feels emotionally expensive. Feels like I’m walking on the graveyard of evidence of ethnic cleansing, and I cannot help but feel affected by the weight over the years of the death, bloodshed, misery, destroyed places and humans, that this whole regime represents. Intersections in america are as consumptive as any other part of a colonial culture. They perform unimaginably inefficiently. I wish all junctions could be evaluated by the vehicles per square meter per second standard. Here’s a bit more about that, on my/this substack Common complaints/FAQs: But Josh this is non traditional and I don’t think it will work or should work. How interesting. Here’s another video for how land is modified in expensive places to accommodate cars I contend that any modification or change to the norm is, in principal, possibly worth entertaining. Related Reading the ‘shared space’ concept in Poynton, UK (youtube.com) my words on the above shared space concept (substack.com) “Jaywalking” is a propagandist term I’ve excised from my vocabulary Evaluating Junction Function sorta off-topic, I really like this drone video I obtained, sorta a ‘in praise and hate of intersections’ I went on a walk with someone else who was using a wheelchair. this video of the walk is interesting to me. Explains why I don’t always hew to sidewalks like some people would want me to, if they expected me to act obedient. another video from the above walk. Again, I think the minimum reasonable starting point is close most roads to vehicle throughput, and can you see how an arterial functions as a wall? one of my all-time fav drone videos I made, isn’t it breathtaking, the amount of space given to these little metal boxes? and the gravitational effect they have on the buildings/environment around them. The ‘building line’ and setbacks are based on the roads, so every house is built up to a spot determined by the road. Even non-road space is dictated by roads! Footnotes The noise cuts through walls, in sometimes wildly-distracting ways. It’s hard to write about the experience of noise, since the happen in such different mediums. Should I add a 🚗 emoji every time my brain notes a car driving past, while I write this? It’s happened three times in the last sentence. 🚗🚗🚗 catches the car counter up to here. It’s not rush hour, sometimes the vehicle frequency is much higher. 🚗 Not so long ago, I 🚗 got permission from the city engineer and mayor of Golden to try cone-based speed shaping experiments in Golden, and since then have replicated the treatment and results on many different intersections. There’s a clear chronological 🚗 unfolding. I’m pleased to have video footage of almost every treatment I’ve ever done. The ‘treatment’ always varies, by the way, based on the junction, how people already use it, how many cones are available, and more. The exact treatment also unfolds🚗 with some iteration, 🚗 as you’ll see in some of the videos. A lot of walking around and making small adjustments. 🚗 🚗 i’ll stop with the “🚗 every time a car 🚗 drives past” because it’s annoying enough to experience, let alone accommodate in my writing now. I imagine you can sympathize with me being at times resentful of how an engine or a vehicle passes by and I hear it so loudly. Cities are not loud, cars are loud. When cars are not driving around (like ‘a sunday morning with 2 inches of snow on the ground’) the entire area is so, so quiet. When it’s really quiet, you can hear car engines from blocks away, sometimes. Sigh. ↩ some people might say ‘well the danger from cars is a fact of life’ and I’d retort that just as cars have streets that connect them to places, a sane mobility network would have a similar level of ‘street ennervation’ via car free streets, as well. If even one out of five of every north/south and east/west streets was shut down to cars passing through via modal filters, and slight traffic bean type treatment at the junctions where cars pass, the network would be transformed. It’s not ‘complete streets’ it’s ‘connected car-free streets’. Linear park type vibes would be the obvious upgrade to car-free streets. ↩ Many, many people seem disconnected, emotionally, physically, with something about the experience of being in/around personal vehicles. I could rant/rave about americans, but it’s really american-ness, which is a certain form of supremacy thinking. How many of your friends need to have been killed by a person driving a car, for you to have some unenjoyable emotional experiences with aspects of being around anyone who is driving? How many people that you know need to have been hit by someone in a car (but not killed!) for you to sorta not be down with the whole thing? How about animals killed? ↩

Introduction A few months ago, maybe in November, certainly by December, I began this ‘barefoot sprinting up grassy hills’ thing I’m going about to talk about in detail below. Shortly after I started, I began making use of the kettlebells I’d usually ignored at the gym(s) I have access to. I’ve been dual-tracking in time the two topics in this piece, kettlebell swings and sprints, but because of how text works, I must discuss one of them first, and one of them second. I’ve been hustling the kettlebell swings hard lately. If you’re one of the folks I’ve hung out with in-person, you know what I’m talking about. You are reading the blog post I said I’d send you. Someone said, believably, credibly: tell me more about these kettlebell swings, because I will do literally anything to be a stronger climber. Gladly. As usual, I’ve got a page a few pages of paper notes that I’ve put together across time, and am now bringing it to here and organizing it. I first crossed paths with kettlebells, and the ‘heavy two-handed kettlebell swing’ many, many years ago. I wrote my first piece about kettlebell swings in 2013. Did not write about them again until now. In 2013, I was using 55 lb kettlebells, and didn’t have access to other sizes. Now that I have access to real kettlebells, and at a variety of weights, I am find a lot more interestingness for myself. I still stand by that piece, and regularly since then have made kettlebell swings a part of how I use my body. Maybe two months ago I brought kettlebell swings back into my life, first time in many years, and I’m thrilled. My back feels AMAZING, and a bunch of other things. In case this information makes it incrementally more likely that any reader harvests any of the same nice things, here’s all of my beta. I try to write things when it’s first coalecing in my mind, and this current piece is no exception. Kettlebell Swings TODO: Add video of 2-handed swings. Here’s an album showing one-handed and two-handed kettlebell swings. The two-handed swings are me & a 75 lb kettlebell, doing reps 81-100 for that day’s work. The one-handed swing is from a different day showing reps 1-5 on each arm with a 55 lb kettlebell. I believe I did ten total on each side that day. The blog post about kettlebell swings I wrote now 12 years ago is maybe worth referencing. I no longer have the home-made kettlebell. The piece is a good-enough starting point. I remember getting a TON out of kettlebell swings long ago, especially part of training for a high-elevation marathon, and I’m thrilled that I used them then. It helped my back stay healthy, for sure. Then, after I stopped running, I stopped the kb swings, and then WRECKED!!!! my back doing something completely unrelated, and have not run since then… Until now (More on sprinting below) I also didn’t really do kb swings the last few years. Then, for reasons that do not have anything to do with climbing, I found a way to bring back into my life running, and stumbled backwards back into kettlebell swings, and have noticed so many interesting things as a result. In a way that is no longer surprising to me, my climbing has also been nicely effected as well, even though that was never the original intent of the kettlebell swings. Originally, I didn’t expect the exercise to do anything for my climbing, and in fact felt bummed when the kettlebell swings would sometimes leave me tired enough that I felt I was having a lower-effort, ‘maintenence’ climbing session, rather than a fresh, ‘try-hard’ session. Then, because of a slight reframe, I’m now thrilled by the soreness I feel from the kettlebells, and don’t mind that i’ve been carrying fatigue into most of my climbing sessions since I’ve started ‘spamming kettlebell swings’. Here’s misc notes I collected across a few days/weeks: I really don’t like to work hard, or even breath that hard. When doing my swings, I always breath through my nose, per Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. I started with sets of 5-10 reps. Then rest until my breath returns all the way to normal, and my heart rate, then i do more. Keep going at a low rate of effort until ~100 reps, if feeling good. If I’m a little sick or whatever, I found myself dropping the weight a lot and still finding 60 reps difficult enough to stop there. (that was part of how I knew I was sick at the time. Came down with a slow-onset illness, and I noticed it first by a stunning loss of power. 60 reps of a 60 lb kb is vastly less work than 110 reps of a 75 lb kettlebell, but when I was sick the 60 reps at low weight were harder than the 110 reps of 75lb swings) It’s impossible to do kb swings well without chalk, I used to not use chalk, or I’d do swings even if I didn’t have chalk, and that is no longer the case. i found the weights I was using to be so heavy that simply holding on to the dang thing was often-enough a hard part of the exercise. I now recall, the last time I did kettlebell swings without chalk, legitimately, correctly fearing the bell breaking free of my hands during some part of the motion. I don’t climb without chalk, I do not swing kettlebells without chalk. As soon as any part of the form would ‘break’, if it ever did, I’d end the set. It almost never broke. both of the videos here have pretty good form. My form isn’t always the exact same, across sets, especially the one-arm swings. In both videos, my heels sometimes come off the ground. It’s reflective of me having to try very hard. Often-enough my heels do not rise off the ground, which feels more correct. Heels up or not, I’m pleased with it, because it shows that my form is and looks quite good, even though I know the exercises were quite effortful. Back and shoulders in particular look “packed”. It looks much more straight forward than it felt in my body. an unexpected crossover: Kettlebell Swings and Climbing I noticed lots of kb-swing-related soreness while climbing. Some climbing moves became for a time very sensory-rich because of how it was interacting with soreness recepters. The soreness in my hands after the KB swings is similar to the soreness in my hands I experienced after trying something from Tyler Nelson’s insta: Drop the load a little and increase the muscle activity. Your fingers will thank you for it (instagram) sometimes, usually, I’d begin the climbing session with kettlebell swings. Sometimes I’d do the swings at the end. Sometimes I’d do only kb swings, and would not climb, if I didn’t feel like climbing. the gym I use is close enough that I can walk to it, and will walk/scoot right by it often enough even if I don’t seek it out, so it’s trivial for me to pop in for a few minutes of using a single piece of equipment, and then continue on with my day. #scooterthings Often enough, when doing the kb swings before the climbing session, I’d notice how nice it felt to be really warmed up, and warmed up with speed, not just slow ‘warm up’ climbing. The kb is very demanding, and takes speed, the same way that jumping into the air takes certain speed. It’s really nice to soak the nervous system in this level of effort, and helps for the climbing. I’d do the kb swings, and feel really well warmed up for bouldering. I also sometimes would feel really sore from the kb swings in ways that would be EXTREMELY OBVIOUS when I was climbing. I was thrilled bc that meant I was getting a ton of useful crossover. right now, as you read these words, consider ‘shrugging’ your shoulders, up towards your ears, and then pushing them back ‘down’, with firmness, and rigidity - these were very often the muscles that I’d feel EXTREME fatigue in, across days and weeks, and plenty of other muscles, but that these muscles in my body were so sore was continuously surprising to me. I pretty quickly dialed down good-enough technique, and then started adding weight. I got to 75 lb two-arm swings, spent a few sessions there, that was the heaviest kettlebell at that gym, then I found an 88 lb kettlebell at a different gym and have now used that one a few times. The first time I did it, I’d still not tried any one-handed kettlebell swings. I’ve now done a bunch, and the second time I used that 88 lb kettlebell, it felt shockingly easy to hold on to and swing, compared to how it felt the first time. It’s still wildly hard. That 2nd set was yesterday, as I type these words, I can feel soreness in my thumb, if I stretch it, each of my fingers, and much more. update from a few weeks later than that paragraph was typed^^: that 88lb kettlebell, while not feeling light, now feels much, much, much easier to move around. I giggled to myself the last time I used it, because of how easy it was to hold on to, and to swing!!! this kettlebell swing thing is a high-value 5-10 minutes in every session. i almost always do 100 swings. even when moving slow, it’s only like 7 minutes. If you read half this blog post, you’ve spent far longer reading than I spend on most kettlebell swinging sessions, which, for the record, even the ‘active 7 minute workout’ is still mostly me standing next to a kettlebell, not swinging it. I weigh 140lbs and started with a 55lb kb, then 65, then 75, then 88. Spent a few sessions at each weight before going up one. I switched to one-arm work with a 45 lb suitcase/farmers carry a few times, then 55lb one-arm swings, then 60 lbs, and get use from 45lb one-arm swings too. I do between 60 and 130 reps of two-arm swings, and started with like ten reps of one-arm swings, then 20, 30, and have not done more than 40 in a session so far. an unexpected variation: One-handed kettlebell swings I’ve got a video of me doing one-handed kb swings here. I started one-handed swings the very first time on accident, because when I went to the gym, the 70 and 75 lb kettlebells were in use. So I grabbed a 55, and thought “i bet I can still get a version of the exercise I want”. Oh, wow, I was correct. It feels so stability-encouraging of my toros, back, spine, ‘the box’ of the upper body, because of it’s asymetric nature. I could feel my spine and the mucles along it, and the entire “box” of my upper body (sides, front, back, bottom of my core), straining to maintain their body position. Straining to resist movement, rather than straining to move. Wildly applicable to climbing movements. My forearms and hands were quite nicely stressed by the effort - I could feel the familiar sense of fatigue in the muscles/connective tissue inside of my hands, the fleshy part of my thumb, I could feel fatigue and stress in the middle bone of my fingers, too. not the bone in the tip, not the bone connecting to the palms. The one in between. How nice. I could feel sensation from the muscles along my spine all that night and the next day - nothing felt painful or damaged, simple soreness and the feeling of use. I could tell the entire system had been thoroughly stressed. It felt so good. I could feel my rib intercostals and so many stabilizing muscles that night, feeling so sore and happy as I crawled into bed and went to sleep. I’ve had that feeling in my body now every time I’ve done KB swings, and usually carry perceivable fatigue into the next day, but it’s partially because I’m often-enough increasing the ‘work’ that I do every session. Once I started one-arm swings, I’d do five reps at a time, per side. I started at 55lbs, then went to 60 a few times, tried 45 lb swings once, liked it, and will probably keep upping the reps and weight as it feels good. I’ll slowly ease the rep count up, and sets. I started with 5 reps per side, then did 8, then reduced the weight and went to ten reps per side, and maybe 40 swings total, across a few sessions. other variations to the two-handed kb swing Hold a kb that’s like 1/3rd your body weight while standing around, or stretching, or shifting weight and doing bodyweight squats and stretches and stuff. Bounce on the toes. Switch it back and forth between your hands often. I started with like a small number of minutes of holding it, while moving around. The one-arm weight/motion is very interesting, both while moving around or perhaps while remaining very still. after a 45 lb/33% bodyweight suitcase carry, a 55lb one-arm kb swing isn’t such a leap, even though at first I surprised myself with how much I could move with the single-armed swing. try to move slowly under/around the kb. Think doing light yoga while holding a kettlebell. mega challenging, interesting. One-leg balancing, golfball pickup type motions, if you want. Felt to me promotive of stability in ways that justified the effort. So much for kettlebells. These have been something I’ve been doing regularly now for a few months. The same length of time that I’ve been doing this sprinting thing… Barefoot Grassy Hill Sprints In The Park I started these sprints I am about to describe before I restarted the KB swings The sprints had been going great for maybe two weeks, and then one of the times I walked past the kettlebells at the gym, I was like ‘my back and legs are already feeling great/tired, maybe i’ll be able to do kettlebell swings without my back feeling terrible the next day.’ I was right. Anyway, here’s free-associating through sprints, as recorded in a paper notebook across a few days: The idea originally had nothing to do with “running”. it started with ‘grounding’. A few friends have spoken in some length about grounding, over the years, the idea always seemed plausible, and I never did any particular action in response to it. years later, another friend that I’d meet at Cheesman Park, throwing frisbee, talked about it as he was taking his shoes off on a warm day in the fall, a few months ago. I thought ‘what a reasonable idea’, as I took my own shoes/socks off and went barefoot for the rest of the frisbee throwing session. Eventually, I started going barefoot often-enough when the weather was nice and we were throwing a frisbee, but usually never took more than a few lazy steps at a time to catch a disk, while barefoot. relevant: years ago (2020) I took a gnarly back injury and basically have not run since then, and for a long time could barely walk. Then even short walks would wreck me. Shortly before the injury, I’d run the Leadville Trail Marathon, and was climbing, so I was pretty abled, and the difference was profound. Deserves it’s own blog post or two, some time. As I think on it, it really changed me, the time of that injury, the things I experienced immediately afterwards. also relevant, years before that injury, after reading the Born to Run book that made the rounds, maybe in 2009 or 2012 or whenever. That was the one and only other time in my 35 years I’d done a specific ‘barefoot run’, for like 12 minutes, on a patch of grass at a park. My calves were DESTROYED, even though it was a short run, and I was used to long runs in normal shoes. I never ran barefoot again, but the memory stuck with me. So, back to 2024… I don’t have running shoes, and didn’t want to have to obtain another pair. I also know that walking up a hill is lower-impact on the body than a level surface or down a hill. I also know that walking on grass is lower-impact than walking on asphalt, concrete, or dirt. It’s gentle on the skin. So, I figured if I ran, and even sprinted, with a strong body position, up a hill, on grass, while barefoot and on the balls of my feet, and went only short distances, while doing lots of walking or standing around, I might not injure my back, and might find it interesting enough. I was right. It was all sorts of interesting, enjoyable, peaceful. I’m calling this ‘sprinting’, but it also involved plenty of ‘meandering back from whence I sprinted at a very, very leisurely pace’. I started with a short distance and a gentle but fast run. More than ten paces, probably less than 20, usually only the distance I could run while holding a single breath, or maybe two, because breathholding and nasal breathing. It’s a hold-over, always-running script in my brain. Ensuring I’m breathing through my nose, and sometimes holding my breath, or breathing in a very controlled way. Sprint sprint sprint, then walk, lazily, back to where I began, then walk around a little more, then sprint sprint sprint, repeat. It is vanishingly rare that I begin a sprint while still breathing hard, at all, from the prior sprint, and I usually let plenty of time elapse after my breath has all the way slowed down again. That was the routine, and it’s been extremely rewarding. TODO: create photo album, link to convey the gist of the vibe of the sprint/walk things 👉 Here’s a photo album of the vibe of the barefoot park sprints These “sprints” vs. distance running I’m appreciating how uneasy I am naming things sometimes, and ‘sprints’ is making me uneasy. It’s emphasizing the wrong thing. Alas. So much about the experience compares/contrasts with running. I like easy things, and tend to do more of something if it’s easy than if it’s difficult. Here’s ways this sprinting thing is easy: It’s barefoot, and I’m always close to where I start, so I can show up wearing ‘regular’ shoes, normal clothing, with a backpack, coffee, and more. Drop the bag, take off the outer layer of cloathing (i’ll have shorts or leggings under my pants, pretty much all the time, in the winter), take off shoes and socks, fold it all neatly in the grass/under a tree and I’m ready to run. I started this in the winter in colorado. there’s plenty of sunny days, and as long as there’s not snow on the ground, I’ll run. I’ve run barefoot in as cold as like 21 degrees farenheight. Only because the sun was out, and there was no snow. Again, much of the niceness to me of the sprints isn’t even the sprinting, it’s the walking around on the ground barefoot. Sometimes it’s cold, or the ground is wet in different ways. wet ground still counts as ‘nice’. It’s like a tiny little ice bath, when it’s snow melt or recently frozen. Like I said, I prefer comfort, and I usually run in dry, warm grass, but there’s a blob of trees where I run, and I sometimes interact with the shadow, which keeps ice/swow longer than the spot in the sun. Or I run/walk/stand mostly in the shadows of the trees, in the warmth. The hill I run up is south-facing, and because it’s sloped, water flows off it, so it dries out really quickly after snow, and becomes very usable very quickly, even when lots of the rest of the ground is covered with snow. Having my backpack with water in it, coffee, my coat, extra layers, makes it convenient even in the winter. Since I ride my scooter even in the cold, I’m accustomed to having a pair of leggings (that I can run in) under whatever pants I’m wearing that day anyway. I warm up by sometimes moving at a walking speed, but doing ‘high knees’ or doing a slow, ‘in place’ jump on each leg. It can look sorta like skipping. It can ‘build’ towards you doing something that looks like running through thigh-deep water. My goal was always to simply stress enough that I’d feel it the next day, on the bottoms of my feet. It wasn’t an aerobic workout, it wasn’t a leg workout. I’ll never forget how much a 2-mile barefoot run did me in, when I let myself run barefoot with my normal distance running form, in high school. The first session I did a low number of trips up the hill and back, I stopped while I felt fine and fresh, and I reflected ‘this small amount of movement is still more than I’ve had for a while’. It felt great, and as importantly, felt great the next day. Since I was at the park again anyway, throwing frisbee with a friend, I did some more ‘sprints’ up the hill. I’m a curiosity-driven person, I don’t know if that comes across as why these sprint things are so interesting to me. Eventually, I started jogging slowly back to the start, sometimes, and immediately would sprint again. Or I’d walk back, walk some more, walk even more, stand stationary for a bit, and then sprint again. After my sprints, to continue with the theme of applying impulse to the balls of my feet, I would/will hop on the balls of my feet, bouncing with two feet a few times and then landing firmly on one foot, to try to catch as much force as I could on each side. I could feel the gentle soreness the next day, always. I’d always evaluate how I felt the next day, and never pushed anything ‘hard’ or ‘got worked’ or anything, still have not, in any particular session. It feels so good in the balls of my feet, the arches, calves, supporting structures. I have found tons of interestingness in the simple observation and sensation of the soreness. I don’t count things, either. I don’t count reps, steps, distance, time. I start when my breath is still and slow, and I usually stop before it’s much more than ‘slightly elevated’. I got the entire sprint workout from a recent warm day, here. The first video, it was a bit too sunny, so I moved into the shade of some trees, and finished the sprints, in the second timelapse video. The whole thing took less than ten minutes. It feels so nice getting sunshine on my skin (colorado, afterall) and grass, dirt, moisture on my feet. My body feels so good, months later, still doing these sprint things. SO GOOD! I’ve been doing kettlebell swings throughout, too. Sometimes on days I’d run I’d skip the swings. When there’s snow out and I don’t sprint, I’m vastly likely to do some kettlebell swings. Often I’ll do both, because both the park and the gym is ‘right on the way’ for me, to many places. The park is close enough I can walk there, or I’ll take my scooter and convert a 12 minute walk to a 4 minute scoot. My brain and mood enjoy the experience. I’ll often take a frisbee and text my normal frisbee throwing friend(s), and he’ll sometimes join me for some frisbee tossing. I might frisbee before, during, or after the sprints. I’ve done these sprints with Eden. We were walking through cheesman already, she was asleep in the jogger, so I parked her jogger where I usually sprint, in the shade of a tree, and did the running right next to it. Then tom met me for some frisbee, we tossed for a while, then Eden woke up and was ready to depart, so we did. the whole thing is quite peaceful, full of ease, effortlessness. It’s nice to not spend a single dollar on traditional running gear. I don’t like the impact of doing anything on asphalt, and I won’t run on a road that is cambered, because it feels devestating to one’s body, to run across a slope like that. I don’t have to deal with cars, in this sprinting thing, either, and I don’t hear any engines nearby, unlike running on a road. When traveling, out of town, without access to Cheesman Park, and still wanting to do these sprints, I modified it to run in the playing field of a school near where I’ve visited. It was all fine, by the way. I prefer to run up a hill, yet this format seems to work on a level surface, well enough. The whole workout can be done in 5 minutes, or, if I’m feeling a longer session, it will stretch across many more minutes. Grand conclusions I’m so aware of how some of my skeleton and muscles function together often-enough to maintain the shape of a box, other times these systems function to form something of a column. The column of my spine is very perceivable along side the ‘box’ of my torso. I’m aware of holding tension/stiffness/maintaining a position through my whole body, in various situations. my climbing feels better. way better. My shoulders feel strong, my fingers feel strong, my core feels strong. It’s been interesting to experience the transfer of power from holding the round kb handle, for instance, and the ‘c’ shape one’s hand makes when crimping on steep holds. This is the ‘active hand position’ tyler nelson talks about. Being able to hold that ‘c’ is easier to me now, dramatically so, having ‘trained’ it, unintentionally, with kettlebells. I feel light on my feet when walking around. I still do not like to train, io don’t think it’ll change. I am thrilled that with almost zero time I get so much. The sprinting is also ‘walk barefoot in the grass in a park in the sun’ which obviously we should all be so lucky as to get a little bit of that every day. It’s nice for my 🧠. usually I have earplugs in and can only hear my own breath, when I do the sprints. And kettlebells. I wear ear plugs most of the time I’m not at home, and even some of the time I am. 😬 Ear plug wearing while exercising seems to make it effortless for me to perceive my own breath. I feel light on the wall. the one-arm swings + sprints helped me feel the intense usage of arms/shoulder girdle/the sides/front/back/bottom of the ‘box’ of my core. (Do not neglect the bottom of the box of the core! Kegles & pelvic floor strength is for everyone with a pelvis!) Updates on sprints after two more weeks I’m still quite pleased. I did some unexpectedly long walks on concrete, amidst some of the prior exercise, and I felt much stronger, most of the time, than usual. I think it would have been too many miles if I hadn’t been getting stronger. I did like three seven-mile days in a row, all back to back. I got a slight over-use tendon sensitivity on one of my feet. There was, and to a much lesser degree still is, pain around the movement of lifting my right toe, entirely coherent with a regular walking motion. I modified my gait a little, when it was really bad, and didn’t use it until it felt mostly better, and I’ve been easing back into using it. It was hurting quite appreciably for a few days, and now five days later it’s still delicate and I retain some of my accommodations. Sooo I wish I hadn’t done that to myself. There was a day after the big huge days of walking where I thought “hmm, this feels like it is damaged” and I went on a bit more of a barefoot walk in Cheesman than I wish I had. That night is when I realized it was pretty sensitive. The toe looks/feels like a bruise along the top of it, close to what it would feel like if the nail had been beaten into the nail bed (like after a long run, something I experienced often enough marathon training). Truly, this is the only pain of substance I’ve experienced. All the rest of the pain has been pain of interest, where I note slight sensitivities and sorenesses as I move around, in certain ways, body positions, motions, and it’s all, still, interesting. I appreciate how I’ve felt pleasent stress inside of my knee, the tops of the shin bones. I like how my knees and ankles feel. The sprints still feel worthwhile, and the time walking/bounding barefoot continues to be time very well spent. Updates on kettlebells after two more weeks some gyms have kettlebells that have rough, textured handles. The high-to-me weights are therefore rough on the skin of my hands. some kettlebell handles are too rough for me to feel comfortable with the swings. I could feel myself trying to accommodate it somehow and it was hurting, so I did a lot less reps. The skin at the base the fourth finger always gets pulled by the kettlebell, picks up callouses that have never torn but have sometimes felt close. Ideal kettelbell handles look like brushed metal, polished smooth. Don’t forget the chalk. I’m still getting lots of climbing-specific benefits from the one-armed swings. I’ve now done both lower-weight higher rep one-arm swings, and higher-weight lower-rep schemes. It’s all been interesting to me, which is good enough. It continues to feel deeply supportive of strong climbing. I’m sorta annoyingly still telling lots of people about this strange magic that helps my back feel great, and everything else too. If you’ve done more than skim a few paragraphs of this article, you’ve probably spent more time reading than your first two kettlebell workouts would take. I was having issues where the heaviest swings were pulling at the callouses at the base of each hand’s 4th finger. Eventually I noticed that if I sqeeze the handle a bit more at the bottom of the swing, it seems to pull less hard on the skin. So, if the skin in the hands starts hurting, squeeze harder? My fingers and hands feel nice. I’m not surprised, as often-enough I’ve felt profoundly sore in the small muscles inside my hands themselves, and all over the upper body. Much of the fatigue and soreness moves in waves through the shoulders and ‘shrugging’ motions. I am really curious for someone else to replicate this, doing lots of heavy two handed kettle bell swings, and eventually trying one-handed (heavy) kettlebell swings. I did one arm swings recently with 65 lbs, which is like 48% of my bodyweight. Heaviest I’ve done yet, and felt ‘lighter’ than the first time I tried 55 lb one-armed swings. My form and posture keeps getting better, and have I mentioned I feel stronger? More notes from a few weeks later I’ve regularly been dealing with the skin on my hands suffering under the weight of the kettlebell. HUGE NEWS! When I squeeze the kettlebell handles more tightly, much of the discomfort related to the skin pulling goes away. It took years of swinging a kettlebell for me to make this connection, I’ve never heard it articulated before. 🧐 I was obviously squeezing enough to hold onto it, but the skin was ‘sloshing’ around under the kettlebell. this is now minimized when I squeeze the bell harder. Huzzah. Related Reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art Drop the load a little and increase the muscle activity. Your fingers will thank you for it (tyler nelson instagram) Driven by Compression Progress a photo album of the vibe of the barefoot park sprints a photo album containing two videos - two-handed swings, reps 80-100, with a 75 lb kettlebell, and one-handed at 55 lbs Footnotes

Introduction Yes, peeing. Also called ‘pissing’, or ‘urination/urinating’. I noticed a collection of thoughts emerging in my mind, tied together with a very specific theme. I was pretty grown before I had necessarily encountered any of these things, so if any of this is interesting or relevant to any of you, may it go well for you. Please see todays ten thousand for more context. Also, would you believe this is only the second most contentious thing I am writing today? The piece that is full of actual spicy takes: I think I believe in magic, & implications Elimination Communication (useful for infants and their caretakers) The first way I want to talk about peeing is to bring attention to something that is pretty darned cool, and I was routinely fascinated by my own observations of it. “Elimination Communication” is a strategy of learning to communicate with an infant around its own elimination. It’s a full drop-in strategy/replacement for what someone is talking about when they say “potty training” or “using diapers” today. (Eden never ‘got potty trained’ because she never ‘got diaper trained’.) Babies have routines around when they pee and poop, like you and me. If you leave a newborn naked on a puppy pee pad or a little helper waterproof mat while they’re doing their normal infant thing, you’ll be able to see when they eliminate. You might notice that there is facial expressions or movements or sounds that happen before the elimination, and you might start giving the kid ‘potty-tunities’, where you hold them seated in your lap over a little tupperware, when it seems like a good time. (upon transitions, after they’ve been sleeping, seated for a while, etc) You take a deep breath for relaxation, their back against your chest, and as you exhale you say “pss pss” or maybe ‘mm mm’. If they have a pee, they might pee, a poop, they might poop. Otherwise, they might squirm a bit and crawl right off and carry on with the day. We taught eden how to say ‘all done’ as one of her first hand signals, so she could simply wave a hand in the air when done. You’ll always give more ‘potty-tunities’ than the kid needs, and once you start giving enough well-timed potty-tunities that the kid happens to using the container regularly, you’ll be amazed at how much ease exists in your life. It’s peaceful, and how traditional socieities without industrialized diaper systems would did this. It’s how many people around the world today learn. no diaper changes, can be done literally anywhere, without interrupting anything, like a conversation. If outside, one can help the kid pee into the grass. No container required. Eden wore lots of long shirts, no diaper or pants, and then legwarmers that went all the way up her legs. We could give her a pottytunity with zero fuss, and she quickly learned the routine of it too. She was only a few months old when often enough she would wake up from a long nighttime sleep with a dry diaper, as soon as she stirred, we’d give her a pottytunity, and immediately she released a huge amount of urine, and then was ready to begin the day. It’s an experience. I’d suggest starting with the go diaper free podcast/resources, if you find yourself in this spot. Forms of ease that were experienced were: easy to use cloth diapers, because MOST eliminations would be effortlessly caught in a container zero “diaper rash”. (i didn’t know that the reason some diapers talk so much about how absorbant they are is bc it’s common to leave a soiled diaper on a kid in some situations! Couldn’t be me) eden never had to cry to announce an upcoming elimination, OR to announce that that she had a wet diaper. She usually didn’t wear diapers of any sort, and never when anything was wet. Obv she eventually was able to simply announce to us when she needed help with the bathroom. paired well with a bidet (more on that below) On the Squatty Potty I’ve long been very pleased with the squatty potty I’ve had. I suggest you watch this extremely classic commercial: Squatty Potty Unicorn Commercial One can sorta ‘fake’ a squatty potty by simply squatting on the floor while eliminating, instead of sitting on the toilet seat. It’s more comfortable, though, IMO to squat while using the squatty potty platform, or to prop your legs on the platform while sitting on the toilet seat like usual. I think ‘propping legs on squatty potty while sitting on the toilet like usual’ is how most people use the squatty potty. I put my feet on the squatty potty, and then squat over the toilet, to use it. Very comfortable. Would endorse. Anyone out there who is pooping is sitting or squatting when they’re doing so, regardless of if they have a penis or a vulva. That in mind… not only do I squat/sit to poop, I also squat/sit to pee. On why I sit when I pee For many years, I have almost exclusively sat down to urinate. I have a penis, and I know it’s common-enough for others who also have a penis to stand when they pee. I don’t like to stand when I pee. I don’t remember exactly why I started sitting. It may have been after I took a back injury that left me unable to stand normally or without pain, even for very short periods of time, or maybe was already the case before then. One quickly notices, when sitting to pee: it’s comfortable there’s zero splashing in any way, not on the toilet bowl, the seat, the area behind the seat, ones legs or pants. One notices, if peeing while standing: one feels little dropplets of pee or toilet bowl water sometimes bouncing out of the bowl if one is wearing pants and thus not feeling the droplets on one’s skin directly… one is still splashing urine on one’s pants. When one cleans a toilet regularly, it’s effortless to tell if someone is peeing in it while standing. There’s a yellow gunk buildup behind the toilet bowl from the constant splashing. nooooo thank you. once someone, upon seeing me in the bathroom peeing for the first time, said: that is the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen a man do. 🤷‍♂️. I say this person would be considered a credible evaluator of attractive attributes in people with penises.1 By the way, when I am using public restrooms, I’m more likely to use a urinal and then stand off to one side, aiming to make as oblique an angle between the stream and the urinal, to achieve some of what is achieved with the shape of splashless urinals If I use a regular seated toilet out in the while, I’ll almost exclusively squat over it (for peeing or pooping). I mostly squat over my toilet at home, too, but I combine it with the squatty potty for a very comfortable squat. (by that I mean my butt doesn’t come in contact with the seat often-enough) This isn’t super novel to me. I use my own bathroom many times a day. I know plenty of other people with penises who also sit when they pee. So, if you have a penis, and don’t often pee, consider trying it out more often and see what you think. If you have a penis and want to possibly reduce the cleaning burden of the toilet where one pees, certainly sit down. And if you’re sitting, try squatting, AND try squatting WHILE USING THE SQUATTY POTTY. mega comfy. Bidets and Wand Bidets Since at least 2019, I’ve used a bidet, exclusively, to clean after defecation. I long used a under-the-seat tushy bidet. One still needs to dry oneself after using a bidet, so most people who have bidets still use toilet paper. It is a lot less toilet paper and used in a different way, because it’s needed soley to dry the skin. When the pandemic happened and toilet paper shortages were a thing, it felt satisfying to not be affected. One can completely get off toilet paper by using a designated fabric wash cloth to dry, too. The under-the-seat bidets can be sorta a pain to install. The warm-water function ends up being pointless. I ended up switching to a wand-style, hose-style bidet a few years ago, and never went back. they come as a two-pack from Amazon for like $30, I’ve now installed them in quite a few different houses. A bidet and especially a wand bidet helps with cloth diapers and elimination communication. Effortless to rinse out the container when used, or rinse of the cloth diaper if it has a little poop on it, before running it through the washing machine. A wand bidet helps with cleaning the toilet itself, and if it’s near the tub, you can use it to rinse things off in the tub. A wand bidet doesn’t interfere with the toilet seat. The clip for holding it sits over the toilet bowl itself, so there’s no screws to be dealt with, it doesn’t even need to have a wall-mounted clip. One doesn’t need to really touch oneself when using it - I direct the stream of water into my other hand, which I use to splash around or scrub anything that needs it. Using the second hand is key wand-bidet usage beta. One needs no hands when using a seat mounted bidet, but then one is getting a jet of water STRAIGHT TO THE BUTT! (or the vulva). The wand bidet lets you easily direct the water to flow over, across, parallel to, anything that needs it. You don’t have to spray it straight at your skin. It’s extremely comfortable for anyone with pain or sensitivity in the region. Not having to use paper preserves the skin, if it’s sensitive. If one is pregnant and needing to use the bathroom a lot, a bidet of any sort is gold. Notes on a two-container toilet system Long ago, a friend nerd-sniped me with this amazing book: The Humanure Handbook: Shit in a Nutshell I read it all, found it exceptional. Cannot unread it. Was written by someone a few miles from where I went to college, he said instead of writing a PH.D dissertation about bacteriology that no one would read, I decided to write a book about humanure that no one would read… and now we’re on to the fourth edition. a surprising number of people have wanted to read this. I was so curious by it, I ended up setting up a full, working, two-container toilet system. This was possibly the most interesting thing I did that year, tons of learnings, and I kept being shocked at the convenience and ease that was being experienced as a result. Alas, I no longer live in that house, but I plan on setting this all up again when I next have the opportunity. I wrote in various ways/places a lot of words about what I experienced, and I’ll probably bring that here when I find them. Small people peeing For eden, at home we have a portable toilet that is available to eden at all times. She usually likes to use the regular toilet, which has a stool in front of it, and usually gets a little help, if she wants. She sometimes opts to use her toilet. In her stoller, I keep this portable kids toilet. She knows we always have it, or almost always have it, especially if we’re going out for a while, and we can use it under a tree or in a private-ish place, even when at a park, and it’s provided a lot of ease to all of us, when using a ‘regular’ bathroom isn’t an option. Modern american bathrooms, especially at commercial facilities, have bright lights, bad accoustics, smells, strange sight lines, etc etc etc. Not super kid friendly. A portable toilet is mega convenient, mega peaceful. She also can still simply pee in the grass when she wants, though doesn’t exercise that option as much as she did as when she was an infant. Conclusion I really like ease. I want ease, and usually I want it to be effortless. I know, I know. There’s a lot of ease baked into Eden’s elimination routines. That was a big piece of what I wanted to highlight. If you, or anyone you know, finds themselves on a path of helping a newly-born person sus out peeing and pooping, maybe you’ll think of some of these things. Then, of course, the other main part of this piece has nothing to do with kids and helping kids use the bathroom - it has everything to do with helping me use the bathroom, and I like to be comfortable, clean, and I don’t mind at all being a little unconventional. on that note, I’m gonna go use the bathroom/squatty potty/my ability to squat/a wand bidet/a washcloth, brb It feels strange to type so many words about urination (and, of course, technically, defecation), in some ways, and yet I also know I spend a lot of time/frequency peeing. It’s a pretty core human experience. I like things to be easy (squatty potty for me, elimination communication for infant), clean (wand bidet, sitting to pee), and I like where I’ve ended up. Footnotes I note my language feeling most natural when I use phrasing like “people with penises” and “people with vulvas” as generalized stand-ins for ‘male’ and ‘female’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’-coded language. I’d long disliked the latter language without finding a good-enough replacement until I read Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters–And How to Get It. ↩