Mere Being - 030 - April - meditation, improv, and the NFL draft

Hello, from Minneapolis! It is proper spring today– sunny, warm enough to be outside, but with a cold breeze. Spring is spranging, May Day revelers have come and gone– Minneapolis is waking up, with all her flowers.

Speaking of Spring: Did you know that I send another newsletter, with photos? (I can never tell if people are making sense of my multi-newsletter setup on the Ghost setup.) I just finished the first 16-issue season about winter in Powderhorn Park, and just started the second season, which is all about flowers. I'll probably include a few new photos, but mostly I'm going back through the archives; publishing old photographs I took in LA, Oakland, and Berkeley. It's called Good Rectangles – switch it on here.

Travel Plans

I'm going to be attending o11ycon 2026 on May 21st. If you're in San Francisco, maybe I'll see you there?

John Garbanzo Spartan

We got a puppy! His name is John Garbanzo Spartan, but we mostly call him "Bonzo," "Jonbanzo," or "Bon Bon." He joins our seven year old Havanese, Edgar Friendly.

Here is his photograph

Meditation and Improv

When I moved to Minneapolis I made myself two promises: I was going to take an improv class, and I was going to go to the Minnesota Zen Center. Six months in and I'm doing pretty good on both. I'm about halfway through my second improv class, and I've been to the MNZC about half the Sundays since I've moved. (I've also attended one Saturday service, a handful of Tuesday services, and a half-day retreat. The Saturday service was my favorite– all the chanting.)

There must have been some kind of deep Zen concordance operating on me when I selected these two as my personal commitments, because whenever I sit zazen I think, "This is just like improv." And whenever I'm at improv I inevitably think, "This is just like sitting."

Down to the details they are the same. The other night at improv we learned about "actor's neutral." Stand with your back straight, shoulders relaxed, as if there's an invisible string pulling you to the ceiling. The zazen instruction is more likely to be "imagine a column of light" but it's the same posture. (I think zazen is particularly like improv, out of the types of meditation I've studied or practiced, because it's so focused on things like posture; the external conditions. Get those right and the meditation happens.)

Improv and meditation are both very concerned with selecting the correct actions, and they share a theory of how correct action happens: You listen very intensely and then you respond in the way that listening makes obvious. Something magical happens if you do this very sincerely.

Both are very concerned with attention, understanding the nature of attention and training it. In improv it's called "hard and soft focus." In meditation I've heard the same concept calls "attention and awareness." The mind has two ways of receiving information about the world. Attention, or hard focus, is hard, pointed, and largely under conscious control, but also ceaselessly wandering. It's useful for studying details carefully, but it only tells you what you ask it to tell you. Awareness, or soft focus, is diffuse, general, and receptive. It gives you a more general vibe of what's happening, but it's what can tell you about things that you weren't expecting. When they're unbalanced, you get all kinds of derangements: Constantly flitting from one thing to another, or hyper-focused and missing out on things happening around you.

Most people have relatively weak awareness and relatively strong attention. A lot of meditation is about strengthening awareness, and using it to guide attention. Improv isn't quite as explicitly focused on training awareness, but often in improv I feel myself deliberately exercising either awareness or attention, and the shift between the two.

I don't totally understand why more powerful awareness makes me calmer. When I'm meditating regularly (20 minutes per day for a few days seems to be the threshold here) I generally juts find myself reacting more... slowly? I'm more likely to respond with, "Oh, that's interesting," and then choose a response a few seconds later than a hyper twitch first response. The best I've been able to come up with is, when I'm more aware of my environment (including my internal environment) I don't have to be as keyed up in order for whatever system is responsible for my current panic level to decide that we're safe.

I think there's also something important here about the need for attention. I think that meditation tends to quiet the mind because it's giving attention to parts that are trying to get attention. When they get that "close" signal, they quiet down. Something similar happens between people: We need attention from each other. I think this is part of what creates that "magic" sensation in improv scenes when people are really listening to each other. Some of it is what's happening in my mind, when I listen, but some of it is what is happening in my scene partner's mind, in tiny ways they're responding to my presence.

All that flapping

I saw a brown-headed cowbird a few days ago and I'm still pleased with myself about it. Also new this spring: Wood ducks and a double-crested cormorant, both of which have taken up residence in the Powderhorn Park lake this season. Occasionally, I look up from my garden to see a mallard duck looking down at me; a pair nests every year on the roof of the apartment complex next to my house.

My partner thinks I really like birds. I resisted this for a long time. The fact that I had put "see a good bird" at the top of my to-do list for a trip to Hawaii didn't, in my mind, evidence any special interest in birds. Anyone in that situation would want to see a good bird. But birds consistently bring me delight, and after a few years of my partner pointing this out, I finally accepted that I like really birds. (The highlight of that trip ended up being the Victoria Pigeon at Honolulu Zoo; if you, too, appreciate a good bird, and find yourself on Oahu, I highly recommend their collection. Tropical birds can be kept outside in Honolulu, so it's much larger and more varied than what you get in places where that sort of bird is purely a creature of the indoors.)

A request for help

If you like this newsletter, would you forward it to a friend who you think would appreciate it?

If you hate it, forward it to your most irritating enemy.

A Sponsorship Program?

And if you really like this newsletter: I've finally set up a Premium Subscription. It's $10/month or $100/year. The main thing that you get is "scare Nat into writing more," but you'll also get discounts on physical stuff I'm making (more on that soon) and access to archives of the "pop-up newsletters," which otherwise I only ever made available via e-mail– they're a little too draft-y and a little too personal for me to want to risk them ending up, for instance, Hacker News.

For example: Right now you can read the archives of Point Lobos, a newsletter I wrote over four days at the titular state park. It's about photography and California and creative jealousy and hiker hunger and houses built by wood mice. I'll be adding more newsletters and figuring out how to organize them over the next month or so.

(If you've ever wanted to be able to sign up for "absolutely everything Nat writes online, without having to worry about signing up for something at the right time"— this is it.)

The NFL Draft, and the Impossibility of Tanking

The main thing I've been watching lately is– well, it's John, but a close second is NFL draft coverage. It's in some ways the most exciting weekend of the entire NFL season. We've just had to sit through three weeks of increasingly hysterical, content-free takes while football media begs for please anything to actually happen, and then every roster in the league blooms into near-final form, shimmering with possibility.

As usual, there's been a lot of coverage about next year's draft, where all the actually good players are, and about how certain teams are clearly planning to do poorly this season in order to maximize their position in that draft. This never works. The same teams are in this conversation every year. "Ah, this time, the Jets will use their 13 picks to make a football team." Meanwhile the teams that are trying to win just draft the guys they think are good this year, and then start thinking about, you know, the football part.

There are a lot of reasons that tanking doesn't work, but I think a big part of it is that football is an effort sport. Football hurts. Playing football well hurts more. It takes a lot of effort both on and off the field, not just to get good at it, but to perform at the level that you're capable of. It takes even more effort to get an entire team to perform at the level that they're capable of. Not giving a shit is contagious; if everyone isn't 110% present then no one is.

Guys who do well at it tend to be competitive. Teams who do well at it tend to be competitive. Pathologically, incoherently competitive. I listen to Mark Schlereth's podcast occasionally and he talks about how during TV timeouts the offensive linemen are always playing "idiot games" – like, trying to say the stupidest thing they can so that when another guy disagrees with them you can get right up in his face and shout, "Oh reeeeeally" at the absolute top of your 6'2," 300 pound lineman's voice.

That level of competition isn't something you can turn off and on like a switch. "Giving a shit" isn't something you can turn on and off like a switch. And if you're tanking, you don't have it. If you just spent the last 3 years tanking and now you finally have the super team of your dreams, you don't have it. And you're not going to win football games.

Fragrance

Latest special interest: smells. I ordered a bunch of what the community calls "decants" and have been trying them out. So far my favorite is Un Jardin sur le Nil. Also finding myself quite fond of Clinique's Aromatics Elixir, and entranced by Serge Lutens's Muscs Koublai Khan (though for various reasons I don't expect to actually wear that one much.)

Almost-Poached Eggs

I like my fried eggs with the yolks just barely set. "Jammy" I think is the term of art. This is difficult (impossible?) to achieve when flipping them, and I have never been able to bring myself to cook a sunny side up egg, not once in my entire life. (Unset whites? Ugh.)

However: A splash of water, a lid on the pan, and about 20-30 seconds, on fried eggs that are already mostly cooked through from the bottom, reliably produces just-set yolks without any unfortunate additional textures. I'm still tinkering with the exact combination of temperature, time before the steam bath, and time in the steam bath produces the exact correct eggs, but this has become the standard way I make them for breakfast.