Mikes Thoughts

owning my words

One of the things I thought about with my post on Sunday coffee and things is how I want my words. Thought a great deal on using some app for my words. Some nice journaling experience to bring things to me. Let me use the services and tools they bundle.

Perhaps I am wrong but I do not see using an app for journaling as really owning my words even using iCloud to share this is farther sometimes than I want. It would be easy to use syncthing instead. Let my words live on the Mac locally and the iPhone. Use a peer to peer service to let them see each other. I may go to this since there is an iOS syncthing app now. What it gives me I feel is ownership. The words only live on my devices. Syncthing just shares them securely across the local or even internet.

Then there’s blogging

I think on blogging a bit these days. I wrote before on 11ty to Blot as this possibility. Here’s the rub for me. The words end up on a service I don’t own. They must be put in some cloud. It’s not really much different now though. Now my words on 11ty get sent to GitHub. Then GitHub takes them and tells vercel I updated. Then my blog lives. What I realized is we really do not own any of this. It’s a matter of where things go. What is used to get them there and how things are published. I could self host somehow but I still would need someone else’s internet. Some network I don’t own. So I guess ownership kinda stops and someone else starts no matter what. Use a VPS? Sure. I don’t own that virtual metal. Or the network that propels it.

I think what I must do is be at the reasonable point of ownership. I can never own it all. Paying another platform sometimes seems like selling my rights to my words. I don’t have answers. I only have what works for me. Now 11ty does and writing my journal even with iCloud syncing things works. Who knows though. I know how easy syncthing is. Did that before.

Answers? No

Questions yes. But I like where I am now. My words are mine and Apple has a share. Google probably does somewhere. Some network in Vietnam makes things go here. Way out of my control. I don’t want it all. I just want to complain when I don’t 😀.

Meanwhile let’s just enjoy the act of it all. The doing of it. Like sitting with this beer. This day. Feeling I have nothing left to find. Or lose. Well I do want another beer. Then perhaps another. The Khmer waitress counts for me. She’s accurate and tells me when I reach six. That’s when I turn to wander home. To another thing I don’t understand and I will never pretend to. The best thing with all of it is to let it all be. Or let it go.

That’s the plan with beer in tow for today. Maybe tomorrow is different. Who has the desire to meddle and muddle with that. I’ll just take now.

Today I think

red soil coffee

Easy after a nice walk on a cool morning to this little coffee shop where the ac runs and WiFi is good. The writing like this makes all things run together. The journal is the blog. I find some basic idea when I write in one and it propels to the other. I can’t do notes. Tried that. It’s just not in me to record or track or manage. It’s why Apple health does not exist on this iPhone. Or any pedometer or app to track yoga or meditation. It’s just not needed. What is needed is the doing of it. The practice of it. Maybe I walk this far. Or that far. Sometimes I feel like I should stop early when I first start and then coffee and time gives me this ebullient feeling. To just go.

Maybe writing is the same for me. Obsessing over who owns a thing or what it means for me ends with some reasonable and enjoyable place. 11ty just works because it does. Now. How I feel deciding how it all works. Or not. It’s easy really to just stop. That doesn’t make what I want to write any better. Maybe the ownership truly is my words. My little place of them. That’s what I own. How they go out and become available in some rss feed is up to others. And I think that works. I own it. And it owns me. Whether I write in an app for the journal or find a nice platform like bearblog, truly the words are mine. Without them there is no blog. No journal. No meandering bullshit you read every so often.

Is that good enough? Yeah. It is. I own my words. And the writing of them. How you read them is up to other powers out there.