Alliteration is Accidental I wrote the following a bit ago, and I’ll get to why, but I’m including it here mostly as I left it. At the end, I’ll go back to Now. The first bit, about death, is from the Before (a month ago, or slightly more). — I’ve been thinking about death a…
Finding All New Bottoms My original title for this was My Fraught Relationship With Pain, because I had a couple of jaunts to the emergency room and they were both pain-related. I’ll elaborate in a minute, but I ditched that title because I realized that nobody has a good relationship with pain. The title I…
My name is James Hazlett Foreman. That’s the name I was given by my parents, though I suspect my mother had more to do with it than my father. I say this not because of a lack of fatherly interest in child-rearing but because of a great deal of interest in names on the part…
I don’t know how else to describe how I feel, so I went with something nautical. The nautical thing is an affectation, not an endorsement. I like nautical things in the same way I like wars that never happened—nobody was actually hurt, and it’s all just imagination (the star wars, for example). I like the…
There’s a lot of “happening” happening and frankly I’m sick of it. Oh man. Oh jeez. Where do I even begin? There’s no central narrative to Jim’s 2020, though COVID will dominate. That’s just the A Plot. The B and C Plots for your 2020 were different depending on who you are—maybe you lost your…
This isn’t going to be gross, I promise. On this, the eve of the third anniversary of my second brain surgery, I am going to tell you about my shunt. I have a peritoneal shunt installed inside my brain. Here’s what it looks like: It’s a straw inside my brain ventricle with a long tube…
I only mentioned cancer once this time I am writing this from my latest Instagram impulse purchase: a surprisingly inexpensive (at least it was when I ordered it—I see they’ve substantially raised the price since then) and extremely responsive e-ink tablet with a pen. I can write long hand, with decent character and handwriting recognition,…
Eye Roll Emoji The title means nothing. I’ve recently found myself using those three words a lot and when you put them all in a line like that it looks like an extremely pretentious version of this newsletter (that can already get a little pretentious, if I’m honest). It’s incredibly goth of me to even…
Are we nurtured or is it nature? Stars are not important. There is nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important, because they’re so rare. As far as we know, there’s only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys. – Terry Pratchett I’ve always been a version…
Some people are also animals. Some people are just regular people. I would say that, in fact, most people are regular people. A person is smart, knows what they need, what they want, and what they need to do. But some of us are also animals, and it’s easier to understand us with the additional…