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I’ve been looking for a way to use outdoor time as a spur for creativity. Many of us do our best thinking when our brains and bodies are otherwise occupied — we even call them “shower thoughts” for a reason. Running and walking for me are incredibly productive for the generative part of my brain. I’ve come up with and connected more dots while running than ever when sitting at the keyboard.

Sometimes I’ll walk with phone in hand, usually reading in the Kindle app, but also burning time on social feeds. Depending on what I’m reading I’ll even bring a physical book on walks, as long as I can read one-handed. But then I started going with nothing, just a walk with my eyes, ears, and mind to keep me company. And, as is always the case when the mind has nothing to distract it, the brain is racing with thoughts and ideas and things I need to do and stuff I want to look up when I get back home. But there’s no way to write anything down — fleeting thoughts fleet right out of my head.

So a couple months back I bought a dictaphone. It seemed silly at the time, but I thought “what the hell, I’ll try it”.

Instead of the temptations of my iPhone and the internet in my pocket, I can “take notes”, but they have to be free-form, spoken word. There are voice recorders out there with wifi, AI, transcription. But all of this is irritating ornamentation to me. I wanted the lowest-tech, least-friction method I could find. Hit record, get mp3 file.

And yes, this means I have an audio file with messy, disorganized thoughts. But so what? I can easily speech-to-text it into the computer (more on that in a minute), and regardless, a driving factor here is to get out of my brain’s way. Half the benefit is the “unlocking” effect I get of the no-frills, no-barriers talking out loud. Who cares if I say something that makes no sense? Part of the objective here is to kickstart the mental pistons, get through the messy disorganized thoughts, and find the good stuff.

For me, thinking is modal. Sometimes I need a kick to switch my brain from “consuming” to “producing” mode.

Speaking your thoughts out loud doesn’t come naturally to me. Probably not to many people who aren’t daily podcasters or radio hosts. Having only done this for a little while, it takes practice to speak coherently off-the-cuff into a microphone.

But the improvisational aspect of dictating is one of the most interesting to me. I find myself 20 minutes into a spontaneous stream-of-consciousness, and along the way encountering 5 tangents of other ideas I didn’t even start out riffing on. It’s a fruitful method for getting these latent ideas in my head to crystallize into something tangible. I’ll fork off on some tangent, then the act of thinking, processing, and trying to articulate out lout helps organize the mess into cohesive thoughts.

These audio files aren’t publishable, but maybe one day they might be with practice.

All I’ve been doing after recording is copying the file off the device to my computer, and running a simple command line tool to convert to text locally.

I found this open source tool called hear, which acts as sort of the inverse of the native macOS command say. It uses the OS’s built-in speech recognition APIs to convert mp3 to a simple text file:

hear -d -i voice-note.mp3 > text-note.txt

It’s not as fancy as the online tools like Rev or Otter, but I like it this way. The bulk of the text is a mess of jumbled thoughts with fragments of useful interestingness I can clip out.

Offline, audible thinking is a helpful tool so far. I’ll keep going with it and see how it evolves.

I’m in the process of building some cabinets, and yesterday I was working on the drawers. I decided to use shellac as the finish for the drawer interiors. Never used it before, but heard that it applies easy, cures fast, and is generally more pleasant to work with than harsh chemical urethanes. It has the consistency and properties of other synthetic resins, but is totally organic — actually secreted naturally by the lac bug.

How it’s made is a marvel of human discovery, tinkering, and problem-solving, and also nature’s incredibly weird ability to produce naturally things we couldn’t reliably make synthetically:

Shellac, like silk, honey, and beeswax, is made by bugs, not of bugs. Laccifer lacca, a small insect about the size and color of an apple seed, swarms on certain trees in India and Thailand. Like most bugs, it eats during its larval stage, then settles down and creates a sort of cocoon in which to mature. In this case, the bugs create a huge, hard, waterproof, communal protective shell on the branches of the trees they live on. Soon, the adult males emerge from the shell and fly away. The females do not fly; they attach permanently to the tree and stay there.

Once the males have gone, natives collect the branches and scrape off the hard crust. This gets crumbled into what we call “seedlac.” Seedlac is filtered to remove any random bits of bark and bug legs to make shellac.

Here’s a great video that follows the entire production chain from a lac farm in India all the way to its final uses:

It’s interesting to imagine watching this procedure from start to finish as an alien observer, with no idea what’s being done — totally weird-looking and unexplainable steps like drying insect goop in the sun into crystals, putting it in a 30 foot-long sock to melt it and filter impurities, making huge sheets with a palm leaf. The whole process is an awesome example of human ingenuity to experiment with any methods that work to ultimately solve our problems.

And shellac solves many of them. The same insect resin gets used for making beads, coatings on medicines, hard candy, fruit preservatives, and, of course, wood finishes.

I ran back across this quote today, from one of Jonah Goldberg’s G-Files from a few years ago:

In Suicide of the West, I argued that our biggest cultural problem is that entitlement has eclipsed gratitude. This seems to be a variation of that. We all want to know stuff, but we increasingly resent the idea of having to learn it. It’s like wanting to be in great shape but not wanting to exercise. And when we discover something—like, say, the colonial divisions of Africa—that is actually important and useful to us, our sense of entitlement leads us to think it must have been hidden from us on purpose. Even our own ignorance is someone else’s fault. The proper (and healthier) response to learning something interesting that you didn’t know is gratitude. “Hey, thanks! I didn’t know that.”

In the piece ($) he’s making the argument that just because you didn’t know something doesn’t mean you were slighted, or that someone that does know the thing was advantaged against you. They may have had an advantage of some sort. But most often that person went out of their way to earn said knowledge.

It reminds me of something I used to hear earlier in my career from colleagues. When I’d advocate learning or reading up on a particular skill (one I enjoyed having invested in), I’d hear variants of “well that’s easy for you to say, you already know X”, or “yeah of course you’d be in favor of that, you got to learn Y already”. It used to piss me off royally, the entitled lack of respect.

That I knew how to use Linux or the command line or how to write coherently — these weren’t gifts from above. And at the time I had no explicit understanding that these things would become valuable skills to me later in life. I spent countless hours in college building and rebuilding computers, reading books, and writing on the internet because I enjoyed them and saw some value in them for myself — all while the critics were partying or watching TV instead.