R-253 Obsidian

Been awhile, innit? Started off the year with a bang, 7 or 8 posts per month which, although a drop in the bucket for those of you posting a couple of times per day in a variety of places, it nothing short of a firehose torrent of writing for me. But then last month I dropped to two, and one of them was discussing “Usenet”.

Way to stay current, dude.

So, making some marginal attempt at moving up into the 21st Century I’ve been dicking around with new software that I kinda backed into incidentally as a result of bringing myself up to speed on “markup/markdown” languages.

Now, I could easily say that my lack of production has been the result of this little project, which would be partially true, but the fact of the matter is that when I do write, it’s because I’ve been dragged into it:

“Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn’t return my phone calls; the itch I’m unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn’t something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It’s just something I do because not writing, as I’ve found, is so much worse.”

Quentin R. Bufogle

Or, as Dorothy Parker would have it: “I hate writing, I love having written.”

This is combined with the fact that I have been following Annie Dillard’s advice, and throwing away masses of shit I’ve actually started:

“Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now.”

Annie Dillard, “The Writer’s Life”

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve got great piles of half-started, half-assed, half-coherent crapola laying around waiting for something useful to happen to it, and the corpses are starting to moulder even as I’m cleaning them up. Mass graves take time to fill. Ask any Russian.

Then I discovered “Obsidian”. Before you bother with it, you should be clear that this is not a recommendation. It’s free (unless you want to suck up some of their server space syncing between devices) but has a short but steep learning curve, and knowing some markdown language comes in handy. It bills itself as a way to build a “second brain”. That would be a brain that works the same way your primary brain works. Or doesn’t work. Whichever.

I’ve loaded a pretty good batch of my journals, notes, and research into it (using plugins it takes input from Zotero, Readwise, keyboard, and about anything else that can be turned into a vaguely text-based format, as well as attachments to those files as pictures or pdfs or whatever). Then I started putting in hashtags and links as I ran across them. They don’t recommend you “overdo” it by going through and hashtagging everything or some such goofiness, as the point of the thing is to be able to search for anything nearly instantly, as well as to link each “thing” to other things as it occurs to you to do so, NOT spending your life organizing links and folders.

After all if I was any good at organizing this shit in the first place, I wouldn’t need Obsidian.

In fact, most authorities recommend using as few folders and subclassifications as you can. You can literally stop, drop, and create a note on the fly (it has a mobile version that will link with your desktop version) with no fuss, no muss, no issue.

Then using either hashtags or just a basic search function, it will show you everything you have and how it relates to everything else, commonly coughing up links that I would never have sorted out on my own.

Here’s a picture of a small fragment of stuff I have in there and how they’re related to each other:

 

 

And this is the 30,000 foot view of all of it (expanding by the day):

For example I’m writing a piece on Sean Carroll’s “Poetic Naturalism” (see the red dots above) and I vaguely remembered a thing I’d read online and Zotero-grabbed last year about church tax breaks (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/sep/28/viral-image/taxing-churches-would-not-add-enough-revenue-lower/ for anyone interested). I typed in the word “tax” and everywhere the word “tax” showed up anywhere in my pile of Readwise, Zotero, book quotes, personal notes, or wherever was displayed. Then I searched that pile with the word “church”, and there it was.

I opened it, and it was exactly what I needed, along with all the cites. I linked it to my “Poetic Naturalism” piece and from now till forever, I can immediately extract the bit I was interested in or go back and get it on the fly and immediately drop back into writing. Further, that article linked to a bunch of other stuff that I DIDN’T know I needed, and using Zotero I grabbed all them, too and linked them to both the article and the page I was writing.

A year from now when I’ve long since forgotten writing about anything related to any of it, as soon as I start up with something and hit ANY link that’s associated with that pile of data, it all turns up, ready to use, including the forgotten piece I was writing in the first place and all the associated junk that belongs to it — including, incidentally, this blog post.

Another example? I was looking to describe a dweeb in a piece I was doing the other day, and was well in progress but got a tad stuck. I hit up Obsidian with a quick query and it instantly popped up a note I wrote about a perfect-fit millennial clown. I’d taken the note on the fly (he was a volleyball dad watching his sprog compete) while I was in mandatory attendance at the granddaughter’s league volleyball game.

I had completely forgotten the two partial and misspelled sentences I’d half-assed and raggled into my Obsidian mobile app when I saw him (which syncs with my desktop Obsidian). The note was tagged “#description/people”, which I don’t remember putting in there at all. It was exactly perfect right down to the Shaggy From Scooby-Do haircut beard-wax-commercial beard, and skinny jeans competing with the fire-engine-red old-school tennis shoes (with broad white laces).

I literally didn’t remember writing it at all, never mind the full-detail memory it brought on, until the link popped up and I re-read it.

Now, I’m still using Scrivener because that’s the software that lets me ORGANIZE these disparate connections into an actual piece or story or article. But after importing a lot of journal stuff into Obsidian, I can hit a keyword like “redhead” and come up with wads of connected and relevant stuff that I kept or noted or wrote and that then fell away into obscurity. When I did exactly that, in fact, I came up with the following observation I’d written in the middle of a large journal entry while on vacation and visiting a sapphire mine in Montana nearly a decade ago. I literally doubt I’ve seen since the day I wrote it:

"We were just remaking how quiet it was - probably the result of our early arrival - when a car with Idaho plates showed up. Him/Her/His Father (judging by looks)/two kids, about 6 and 10. She’s a redhead, no kidding hot in a housewife-next-door kinda way. Pony-tail stuck through the back of a blue baseball cap, tight but comfortable looking levis, flip-flops (blue toenails - a bit of adventure), a deep-scoop tshirt, a tan bra with some sort of dark lining, and every time she bent over her table or came to wash out some gravel, I could see down her shirt all the way to her beltline. Near perfect tits. She caught me glancing over a couple of times and smiled at me. Friendly - talked to me about an upcoming vacation in Texas. Sounds like Austin somewhere.

“She/he named one of their kids “Judah,” and grampa kept calling him “Judy.” That should work out well. As I told (The Beneficiary), that little turd running around being a major PITA pointed out the main downside to latching hold of even hot redheads: They tend to produce PITA redhead kids.”

…and just like that, I’m there. I’ve not given her another thought since that day (or any of the rest of them, for that matter) but I’d bet some safe money after reading this snippet that I could pick her out of a crowd right now.

In fact, the only downside I see to this software is the same as dicking around with “Ancestry.com” or some such thing. There are so many connections and so many rabbit holes to chase down that without a bit of discipline (always an ongoing problem for me) it’s easy to amuse yourself for an afternoon without doing an actual damned thing.

So, there you have it. A quick 1600 words on why I haven’t actually gotten around to writing any words this month, or, more accurately, why I haven’t gotten around to putting any of them out here.

I’ll try to do better. Really.