rocky41_7

The first week of 2026 has been a mixed bag.  My momentum was absolutely crushed by a guest staying over for the first few days of the year—meaning I had to perform the host role rather than blasting out of the gate with my resolutions. I didn't get to the gym until yesterday—I'd hoped to start on the first—but at least I am going now. I'm in gym clothes as we speak, in fact, and ready to go to the gym for Day 2 as soon as I finish this post.

So how have my other resolutions been?

No More Doomscrolling. 
Basically a catastrophic failure. I have been doomscrolling less, I guess, but I'm still attached to my phone. I've defaulted to a lot of YouTube and Tumblr scrolling in my downtime. My laptop is also just always 'there' waiting to be used. I'm nipping this in the bud today by switching to my dumbphone, and putting my laptop in a specific place and keeping it there, rather than just having it next to me wherever i am in the house. I've blocked my laptop from accessing scrolling sites I don't need for work—while I can obviously bypass or remove the blocks pretty easily, it does give me a moment to reflect when trying to access these sites, which interrupts the almost automatic process of opening a page and scrolling.

Write.
I started keeping a journal in order to cultivate a more consistent writing habit, but I'm struggling to find worthwhile things to write. I can't help feeling like a journal has to have more of a purpose—chronicling a time and place, or a series of events, rather than just someone's relatively uneventful life in totality. People point to Plath and Anais Nin as examples of diarists who kept account of their more 'normal' days, but their lives were abnormal enough to warrant diaries, and their status as notable writers gives their diaries a voyeuristic appeal.

If I was in prison (Ken Kesey), or shanghaid into working against my will as an officer in occupied Paris (Junger) I might feel like this was a more worthwhile endeavour. As is, my entries are just grotesquely mundane. Nice days out with friends and family are certainly nice, and certainly worth remembering, but there's only so much you can say about a gig or a hike before it starts to feel forced. I just can't bring myself to insincerely compare concerts to pagan cave rituals or pretend that walking around the woods was a spiritual experience—though maybe this is just my journal entries highlighting a more general anhedonia I'm currently suffering from.

I think I may just abandon the 'narrative diary entries with dates' format and use the diary as a notebook. I can fill up a notebook no-problem, actually writing clearly isn't the issue, but dates imply that the date an entry was written on matters—and, unless you're chronicling your life for some specific reason, it generally doesn't.

I never really got much out of psychotherapy, and I wonder if journalling appeals to the same kind of people who find that kind of thing helpful. That said, I'm aware that blog posts like this are essentially diary entries, and I do enjoy writing them, so maybe what I really dislike is just the pen and paper format. 

Quite the oppoite. I have been noticeably wired.

Mindful Consumption.

I haven't really had the chance to think about this one. I haven't bought anything, but that's mostly because I spent the week reading, going to shows, and hiking. I didn't do anything counter to this resolution though, so we'll call this one a win. 

Read 100 Books

Technically I'm a day behind on this one. Not because I haven't been reading—I have, quite a lot—but because I decided to start the year off with two dense 600 page behemoths—The Descent by Jeff Long, and its sequel Deeper—rather than a handful of breezy 200 page novels. I can't say I regret it, though. While reading a messy high-concept epic probably (definitely) helped to kill my start of the year momentum, these books are also the most fun I've had with fiction in a very long time. 

As for the books themselves: I find that a lot of science-fiction—even a lot of Golden Age science-fiction—really lacks a genuine sense of exploration, and the awe that comes with it, and The Descent and Deeper have both in spades. The Descent, in particular, despite being a little more action-focused than other exploratory sci-fi novels, scratched an itch for discovery that has only previously been scratched by Blindsight and Rendezvous With Rama. It's an odyssey through the bowels of the Earth that feels, at times, like a Michael Crichton horror novel.

Deeper is a little more cartoonish and more explicitly plot driven, and loses a bit of its magic (and a bit of its edge) as a result. That said, it makes up for it with some neat formal choices—fake documents, Hadal mythology, etc...—and cool conceptual content. The plot progresses in a way that feels organic, and there are some genuinely haunting scenes of horror—though there are also a handful of disappointingly B-movie ones, especially early on. It's a shame we never got Long's third book; Deeper very much feels like the second act of a three act play and I would love to have seen where the world went from here. 

I love stories set in cave systems. In all of my research into this sub-subgenre, Jeff Long's underground duology may be the very best at fulfilling that very specific brief. Characters trek weeks or months into increasingly bizarre caverns, encountering underground oceans and lost civilisations; the sense of isolation is palpable, and yet it feels like life is teeming all around them—the wonder of encountering a truly alien world hidden just beneath our own is perfectly blended with the absolute terror of being tapped deep, deep, deep, inescapably deep underground.