September 11, twenty-five years on
I am also a we
I was eleven, sitting in Mrs. Landsaw’s sixth-grade classroom, when Mr. Gochenauer came to the door and told her to turn on the news. So we watched.
A board is in true when its edge runs straight along its whole length. Not perfect. True. And a life out of true isn’t a guilty verdict. It’s information.
Letter 1 · True is geometry, not perfection
The letters
Read them in order, or listen
Thirty letters, one Sunday at a time, through January. Every one is recorded in my own voice, so you can put one on while you cook. They circle the same few truths from different sides, the way a life does.
The bookshelf
The voices behind the letters
The letters wear their sources lightly. The shelf names them: Wendell Berry on the body as something given, not a machine to drive. The cook in the Zhuangzi whose blade never dulls because he follows the openings already in the ox. Buber’s I and Thou. Bowlby’s secure base, where the held child explores more, not less. One sentence each, where to start, and which letters lean on them. And the podcasts I’m still turning over.
The daily practice
What Thursday night looks like on a Tuesday morning
Small things, tended on purpose, every day: twenty minutes on the mat, a fork in the compost, a strip of sod, one line in the log, a few rows on the needles. Each one a single note on the staff. Some days it’s an atonal mess; some days a chord. Given time and patience, a symphony, or a garden that feeds more than me. The martial arts are one practice among them, and the source of three rules that reorganized the rest.
What I build
Tools made because the right one didn’t exist
Engineering is where the letters’ habits of mind were first learned: know the whole system, find the failure point before it fails, build the tool if it doesn’t exist.
The round caller
Calls the rounds in my workout sessions and writes the training log itself, so the record is never a chore.
The health dashboard
Rebuilds itself from plain CSV logs whenever they change. Measured, not judged.
A school’s classroom
A learning platform for a martial arts school: single sign-on, video classrooms, a level-by-level curriculum.
The ground under this page
A segmented home network, encrypted backups in two places, and the servers this site runs on.
Now · autumn 2026
What I’m tending this season
Body
A fall semester in two-week blocks, a pull-up progression, conditioning and confidence.
Writing
Letters 11 through 30 landing every Sunday. A book in scene harvest.
Hands
A sweater vest on the needles. The garden under its tarp until spring.
Keeping
This site, a homelab, and a martial arts school’s servers.
The scan is right, and the thinking is mine.
These letters are made with AI tools inside a process I direct. The tools draft, then argue with the draft; I read every line and decide what stays. A scan can see how the words were made. It can’t see who did the thinking.