About

This is a static site generated by Astro, using the theme AstroPaper, which the creator calls “a minimal, responsive and SEO-friendly Astro blog theme.”

Currently it is only a blog, but it may grow beyond that. If it does, I will move the blog to its own section.

The site takes its title from the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in 2005. Specifically, the idea that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” The parable Wallace begins with:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

I plan to remain anonymous, and will do what I can to scrub identifying details while still writing about daily minutiae as well as grander thoughts. But I should note here that I recently turned seventy, and a steadily increasing amount of my time during those years has been spent trying to just see the water we all find ourselves swimming in, much less understand it. And it turns out that things don’t work the way I was told they work, mostly. And learning something about how things actually work has made my life better.

I go back and forth on whether it’s worth writing down what I’ve learned. Much of it is only pertinent to me. Some may be true but misleading. Some may be wrong. If you choose to read what I’ve written, I encourage you to approach it merely as an account of how one person went about to see things as they are and then look for deeper truths about how things work. You could easily reject everything I’ve concluded and still get some value from knowing how I went about reaching those conclusions.