Not a stitch on except his ankle monitor
Resolutions
And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming. — Samuel Beckett
Yes, Samuel. As far as 2025 is concerned I have no qualms, we have a good time coming. And if that’s what a person says right before a global calamity, so be it — a bird must sing when the song is upon him.
I have no reason for optimism except an unusually good mood. Today I woke up in lush San Francisco, glistening from weeks of rain, and my backyard carpeted in woodsorrel, a clover-like plant which in more seasonal climes blooms at Easter and is known as alleluia. So how’s perpetual spring for signs and portents.
By all civilizational accounts, the new year is no arbitrary turn of the calendar, but an unknown country containing untold stores of pleasure and of pain. One is not only allowed but expected to rekit oneself for the journey ahead. Last year, I made resolutions for the first time since middle school, circa 2008, when I tore through my dad’s shelf of corporate leadership and self-help books. That year my resolutions were things like “firm handshakes” and “demonstrate values-based leadership in front of Gretta at the lunch table.”
My new resolutions are less about self-improvement and more a codification of whims, dreams, and signs. I have no system except they be short.
So. An accounting of 2024, and new resolutions for 2025
2024 resolutions
Read less
A friend mocked me. Lookit me. Lookit me. I’m Murdo, I read too much. I’m too well read. Yet it was true that in 2023, I read to the exclusion of almost everything and crucially writing. At a certain point, you have to put a book down and pick up the pen, or go outside. This I resolved.
But for no good reason I simultaneously developed the idea that the American public school system had never taught me anything, and since I hadn’t paid attention in any of my college classes either, I realized I had no intellectual foundation by which to understand the world — that I was a babe groping in the dark — and that this great embarrassment could only be remedied with serious and systematic scholarship: Greeks, classics, poetry, Proust, post-war fiction, the history of political thought, and so on. I bought four new bookcases, eight feet tall, and never got around to anchoring them to the wall, so if a big earthquake hits the Frantic Disco, they might well tip over and kill me.
And yet what do I know about Aristotle. Still nothing.
Verdict: FAILURE
Think less
I read a study that said not ruminating on your problems is a good way to stay sane and healthy and that study was 100% right.
Verdict: SUCCESS
Learn to play tennis
Certain lobes in my brain were turning flabby, so I resolved to learn a new sport. Tennis appealed because of the lifestyle (skirts), and because it’s a rare competitive outlet in the Frantic Disco that isn’t an endurance sport. I started lessons, and played with my friends. Many people want to play tennis, and everyone wants to play someone worse than them. I was only too happy to oblige.
One Sunday, I met my friend Nick at the courts in Buena Vista park. The Haight Ashbury Street Fair was in full swing a few blocks away, and halfway through our match, a citizen of that fair wandered onto the tennis courts. This man was naked, and without shoes, and not a stitch on except his ankle monitor. First he took to our neighbor’s court, saying appealing things about the drugs he’d taken and disagreeable things about his intentions. Those boys grumbled and packed up. I hoped he would leave us alone, but, as he had nothing else to do, he entered our court, and said he wasn’t going to leave until I gave him my shoes. I said that was out of the question. He responded by making a go at my duffel bag, and I had to make a defensive stand, fending him off with great sweeps of my racket, forehands and backhands, until he lost interest and wandered deeper into the park.
Verdict: MIXED SUCCESS
Learn to pray
Late in 2023, I read Professor of the Apocalypse, a biography of the scholar Jacob Taubes and a study of the possibilities and limitations of charisma. Several moments in the book made a great impression on me — including a letter that Taubes wrote to his wife, Susan, on her birthday, which I quoted from in a homily I gave at the wedding of two loyal Reality Farmers:
“You were blessed with great gifts of beauty and spirit and most all: you were granted that all your gifts are 'rooted' in the holy order and in the holy chaos and so you are a deeply essential creature. I wish you to grow into both dimensions, into the holy order and into the holy chaos deeper and deeper.”
I was also deeply impressed by the author’s description of Taubes’ fervent prayer — a physical, demanding prayer that left him teary and shaking. His friends saw it as a show: though he’d been ordained as a rabbi, he quickly left traditional religious instruction, and his faith in God, behind. But even if it was a show, what a show.
In my life I have encountered people who believe that their prayers are answered. Every prayer. Rare people. I do not mean in a garden-variety churchgoing fashion: some of these people aren’t particularly religious. But to them prayer is as efficacious as penicillin, and reality is so much putty. They are careful in what they pray for. Desire is a dangerous, weighty thing when you are assured of its fulfillment.
So all this informed my interest. But the real reason I wanted to learn to pray is that prayer is the speaking to and adoration of God. And what use is a man who can’t speak to God? In sum, I read one book about prayer and it wasn’t even the Bible.
Verdict: MIXED FAILURE
2025 resolutions
Understand iambs
Some parts of English class mystified me. I never understood how to diagram sentences, and found subjects and objects entirely subjective. I’ve had to learn most of that in a professional capacity, but related to my revelation (in 2024 resolution number 1) that I’m a simpleton, I recently became quite agitated about the fact I never figured out iambs.
I mean the base rhythmic unit of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare wrote in. An iamb is a short syllable followed by a long syllable: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. “Whose woods these are I think I know.” People say, it’s really simple it’s just where the accent falls, okay, but God gifted me with the capability to mentally bestow an accent on every syllable, so that doesn’t help, does it?
I’ll spend the year training my ear. I’ll dream in iambic by 2026. Also, I’ve dubbed these next twelve months the year of the play. I’m reading. I’m attending. All dialogue all the time. Join me.
Learn to run fast
When most people turn 30, they sign up for a marathon or a half-marathon. Well I have never liked long-distance running, and I’m not interested in doing a 5K. I have never been fast on land, but this year I will learn to sprint or explode something in my leg trying.
Make a plan
When I was 22 and looking for a job in Washington, a friend introduced me to a senior Democratic operative. I visited her office on the top floor of a mid-rise building downtown. Immediately she said there was nothing she could do for me, because I was a Republican, but since she had another 25 minutes scheduled for our meeting, she might as well give me some advice.
She said you can do anything before you turn 30, but the day you turn 30, you have to have a plan. I don’t believe in plans, but since I have been using her advice as justification to do whatever for the past ~8 years, I feel I owe it to her to make a plan.
Non-Euclidean moves and commitments
The first step in my plan is to become less legible. I understand that by announcing it here I’m not off to a great start, but I’m just putting everyone on notice that if you’ve got me pinned, well, not for long buddy.
Responsibilities. Projects. Collaborations. I’m making moves in a distinctly non-Euclidian manner. Do you get it. Do you fucking get it. If so please get in touch if not enjoy the Euclidean plane bozo.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
My Spiritual Evolution || Granta
These differences make me think that [near-death experiences] – the older, more natural exit from matter – are like flying home and going through customs and being welcomed by expectant friends and family, while [smoking] DMT is like teleporting desultorily into unforeseen locations in a foreign country. This would explain why breakthrough DMT trips are scarier and harder to comprehend and recall than NDEs.
note: when I worked as a legislative correspondent in Congress we often received emails from people who thought that they were being gang stalked and attached folders with pictures of, for example, hundreds and hundreds of white cars. The emails were painful to read, because these people lived in some alternate reality. But Tao Lin, author of such other pieces as “I cured my own autism” and “anti-gravity and the deep state” is like if these emailers had spiritual depth and knew how to write
The Pleasures of Reading || Harper’s
On first opening a book I listen for the sound of the human voice. Instead of looking for signs, I form an impression of a tone, and if I can hear in that tone the harmonies of the human improvisation extended through 5,000 years of space and time, then I read the book. By this device I am absolved from reading most of what is published in a given year.
note: I’ve been meaning to write a longer piece on how to read, but Lapham was right in that the first sentence is usually all you need to tell if you’ll like a book
The Secret History of the Red Book of Hamlet || Financial Times
Why? The question feels redundant. If you are someone who needs to perform, you are someone who needs to perform Hamlet. In Withnail and I, the 1987 cult comedy film about actors and their ambitions, the bloated, fey, lecherous character known as Uncle Monty has a short speech on the subject: “It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when, one morning, he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.’ When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.”
note: year of the play
THE BOOK BARN 📖
The Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt
(Fiction, 1926. $8)
And suddenly my whole body, my poor man’s body, calls out to the Lord of Heaven: ‘And I, I, my Lord, will never have a lover as beautiful as the ones from the dirty magazines!’
note: as you read, you pick up ancestors, and Arlt is one of mine
A lifetime ago, I read The Seven Madmen. For years, I waited for a proper translation of the sequel, The Flamethrowers. One day, I found a translation on Amazon and bought it. It is the only translation I’ve ever read that was so bad that — before throwing it in the trash — I tore the book in two and flung the pieces into my backyard to decompose, just to make sure that no innocent garbage collector might accidentally pick it up and be subjected to that mutilation of the Spanish language
I want to commission a proper translation of The Flamethrowers. If you know how to do this please email me.