michael-dean-k/

i’ve counted from beginning ’til end; juggled in the school circus; memorized the stats of a baseball league's baseball players; fallen hundreds of Christmas trees with a handsaw; dined in the Twin Towers the week before; shattered my arm snowboarding; constructed angles of imaginary rooms in floor plans; plotted the angle of sun at specific times and days; trip-sat for a philosopher-librarian with cancer; built a computer from scratch; made someone cry from a VR moon simulation; carved time with sticks and given a perfect score by NYS; diagrammed the secret forms of a nation’s songs; performed at venues that are now Italian restaurants; astral travelled out of my body; lucid dreamt; dined with a billionaire, once; wept at a total eclipse; made an infant laugh.

I did not expect to be able quote whole scenes of The Sandlot (1993) from memory, but there I was, the annoying co-watcher to my wife who barely remembers it. I must have watched it a dozen times. If not, the few viewings of it must have been a religious, formative experience. Somehow it came on, via streaming, already more than half way through, but early enough to be inside of the dream of Benny Rodriguez¹ where the ghost of Babe Ruth delivers his classic line: “Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

Did this quote shape my elementary consciousness? Many of my essays here are about “textual immortality” and legacy—doesn’t that word have a shared root with legend? Has my drive to devote my life to creating something memorable (something that outlasts me and shapes the future) a product of a 1990s cult film with a $7 million budget?

Obviously the answers to those questions are lost; all that is left are fuzzy caricatures to reason with. I can’t know exactly the evolution of my psyche, but it does seem that in almost every phase—from baseball, to music, to architecture, to technology—there was this boyish desire to be Ruth-like, to master and transcend a genre, to have a bunch of goofy nicknames, to have leagues of kids yell my name in unison, and to be remember beyond my life. To lean into and live by that line is to become a megalomaniac.

There is a second half to that quote (which is less memorable): “Follow your heart, kid, you’ll never go wrong.” This disarms the grandiosity of the prior line. The goal is not to become a legend for legend’s sake, but to be attuned toward your heart (towards “the way,” nature’s order, the virtuous thing, the hard thing) which puts you on a path, perhaps towards doing legendary things, but the path is the point.

The other day I was listening to a podcast and noted “the purpose of life is the transmission of legacy.” The context is that in the face of death, we strive for immortality in different ways. The immature and impossible version of this is physical immortality. Religions promise spiritual immortality. Pharaohs and estates focus on material immortality. They referred to another option, “secular immortality,” which I’d rather call “symbolic immortality.” This is about living into the future through art, language, and symbols. This can be more modest than the cultural immortality of Babe Ruth; this can exist solely within the family. I’m talking about the paintings we have hung up of my wife’s grandmother, and the sayings from my great grandmother that I’ll pass down (“be your own person, choose your friends wisely”).

There are two ways to think about death. The first is cosmic deflation, to realize that Babe Ruth, the entire culture he's within, and even the species itself, are all just a temporary evolutionary blip; if everything will be cosmically forgotten, then it’s futile to strive to be remembered for anything. Alternatively, you could see your immediate chain, the generations before and after you, as equal to yourself, to see the whole lot of you as a single entity, and to act in a way that could be exemplary for your kids.

My great grandmother was born in 1918; I was born in the 1990s; let's say I live until 2080. But forget about my death, when will my great grandchildren die? If my daughter was born in the 2020s, her grandkids might be born in the 2070s, meaning I could know my great grandkids in the first 10 years of their life. Assuming there is no raical life-extending technology (big assumption), they could live until 2172. That's a 254-year span!

Why am I calculating this? Well, I suppose I was reflecting on how my great grandmother would say the same aphorism to me every time I left her house: "be your own person, choose your friends wisely." It etched into my head, and I don't think I processed it at the time, and now wonder if that fundamentally wired me—or at least, it laid some seed that wouldn't germinate until after she passed (in fact, I'd say I become "independent" in the exact year she died.)

So there's a world where I can say that same saying to my kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. And so that changes the scope of my life; I am not merely limited to be a 100-year old mayflay ("Funny—to be a Century"), but I sit at the center of a 250-year transmission of knowledge, the crux of my own semiquincentennial.

Starring out into a baseball field in late November, puddled and unkept, it struck me how, at one point in life, baseball was the whole frame of my existence: watching it, talking about it, playing it, traveling for it, dreaming about it, collecting cards, making Excel spreadsheets for those cards, memorizing the statistics of every starting player on every team, etc. Obviously, I’m nostalgic about it. That was just what I was into. I do wonder though, was that whole phase of my life a natural part of childhood that I was meant to get stuck in and grow out of? Or, was it mostly a big waste of time, spirit, and attention? I guess what I’m questioning is, is there a version of my childhood where baseball only took up 20% of my psyche instead of 100%, and would I be better off for it today? Would I be similarly nostalgic? Would a lesser obsession have freed up more bandwidth to develop in other areas? Or am I who I am today because of that obsession?

Caught up in the logistics of preparing for a baby, as well as the biographic change in my own life (I am becoming a father), I am sometimes struck with simple but revelatory perspective shifts: I remember being in Kindergarden, and very soon I will have a kid (a version of me) in that very same position. These imaginal perspectives of the parent are very common. In some weird way, you live your whole life on repeat, except it’s not you, it’s through someone else who has their own sense of agency.

11:30 AM—I used Claude to recreate a video game that my dad, brother and I made in 1995. I changed the logic so that every time you get a diamond, a new monster appears. This makes it get progressively harder within the level.

Inside the Monster Human

Prompt:

“Below are rules for a game. Read them and ask me any questions to clarify implementation before you build it: I'd like to create a game called "Inside the Monster Human." * Each level is a 30x30 grid. Cells can either be white or black (if it's black, characters cannot move onto them). Let's make the level something like a star, with a white center with 5 wings you can go down.* There are 10 diamonds randomly placed around the level. * The character (a hand-drawn red smiley face with a white mouth and eyes) uses the arrow keys to move around the grid and collect diamonds. When the character enters the cell of a diamond, the diamond disappears and displays a sound. *Each level contains monsters that are randomly placed. Every time the character moves one cell, the monsters moves in one cell in random direction. If they hit the character, it plays an "Oh no!" sound, displays a game over screen, and restarts the game. The map starts with 3 monsters. But every time a character gets a diamond, it randomly spawns 1 new diamond and 1 new monster. Display the score.”

11:29 PM—I probably got this idea from Ready Player One, but there’s something interesting about baking my consciousness into a video game. There are two interesting mechanics:

1. The highest scorer unlocks a personal piece of writing. You effectively have to beat me at my own game, making it pretty hard. The allure of the essay is more important than the essay itself (but of course, it needs to be awesome / revelatory).
2. As you play the game, each “coin” could unlock one of thousands of memories. Currently have a list of 300+ memories, sorted by year. The idea is the player gets these shards and slowly pieces together a sense of my life.

If I had this game running, it would be incentive to (a) remember all my memories from the past, and (b) to keep uploading them each year. By doing this, I not only have a non-linear game-based memoir, but my cornerstone memories are now machine-legible and can guide some weird AI experiments.

Bought memorydungeon.com. This isn't really a priority, but I imagine if I slowly jot memories all year, I’ll be able to throw this together one weekend in December.

02:33 PM, ONE DAY LATER—I think I get why footnotes don’t make sense in memoir / personal writing. It can feel like dictionary-brain. I also wonder if something is only footnotes (w/o a main narrative) is it even a footnote? I sense there’s something liberating about recording memories as personal paragraphs that don’t have to fit into a story.

So imagine this game is like a turn-based Pacman (but the ghosts are stupid and replicate out of control) — and so the main character is collecting diamonds, and each one has a year on them, so it’s like “Hm, do I go for 1997, or 2009, or 2021?” And then when you get it, it shows a self-contained paragraph from that year.

I think there’s a word for this: “the fragmented essay.” Honestly, they’re my least favorite sub-genre, but I think they weirdly make sense when you put it inside of Pacman.

Earlier this morning, I was visualizing myself on my drum set 10+ years ago. I could visualize the kit, and had a real-time connection between hitting a drum and hearing the sound. It was real-time enough that I could compose a pretty sophisticated beat on it. I was surprised that I could do this, and it probably helped that I was barely awake. I could never do this on guitar; drums are much simpler, and I have much more experience with them.

Even before I learned drum set, I mastered Snare Drum, which almost seems pointless, but I guess it’s a hyper-isolated way to learn rhythm. I forgot that I did level-6 NYSMA as a kid (for snare drum) and got a perfect score. I often say that “I can’t read music,” but I forget that I was able to sight read advanced snare drum rhythms. Before I started learning drum set (in 10th grade), I had been practicing snare drum for 8 years.

Now I’m wondering what effects that had on me and the way I think/see. How is someone different if they’ve spent that much time on precise rhythms? This is resonating with me because it falls into the category of how slow, pointless, analog things can be formative.