2026-02-20
I started a new project last night. I plan on releasing it later today.
My life has been a series of these vignettes since I started Cogito. I feel myself continuing to refine the process here. There's more consideration for coherence and structure, but there's still an unfortunate reality: not every day feels so inspired. These entries are not written equally. Every day, I come back to the page a different person. In a sense, my job is to tell the story of the moment itself, day by day. The tedium behind that is more than noticeable, but after more than 150 entries, I've shown the world that I have what it takes to build something great.
Most would look back on six months of almost daily writing and pat themselves on the back, say "good job," and try to ramp down into something less taxing. But for me, the only thing I crave is more. After writing, I feel a release that I can only compare to when I was younger, playing gigs on my saxophone. To let it all out and leave it there is something that feels important to me on a level that transcends just about anything else. But as a musician playing live gigs, there's a certain ephemerality to it.
Here, these entries are written in the moment but stay long past it.
I've reached a point now where I have an extensive catalog: easily over 100,000 words. Each day, I wrote vignettes, but looking back I now see that I have a novel’s worth of coherent work. The thing that baffles me further is that six months, when put into perspective, isn't even a long time—only two seasons, really. I'm 28 years old, so if I have the privilege of living a somewhat long life, there's still so much ahead. I know that as I keep writing, the catalog is only going to get larger. More than that, it'll be there long after I'm gone.
The musician Prince was about as prolific as a musician could get. He's one of the only famous musicians who could say he literally had a vault of music. Thousands of unreleased records line its shelves, and we've heard only a small fraction of it. I put that into perspective with Cogito and think that, out of the potentially thousands of entries I could write here, only a few would be widely read, if any at all. Yet despite that, I still come here and write every day. Prince’s collaborators who helped him make his music—his sound engineers and such—have shared profound anecdotes about his creative process. Prince, despite being a rock star, had a monastic dedication to making music. It’s more impressive than the approach of artists who spend two or more years working on a single album; Prince could have one done in an afternoon.
That's because his whole life was devoted to his creative process. Every routine he had was centered around the idea of facilitating composition. Every moment was precious: he'd squeeze time wherever he could while on tour to write lyrics, try out new song ideas during sound checks, and even had a bed put in his studio so he could be closer to the equipment. To Prince, music wasn't just a job or an outlet but a lifeline. For me, writing here is the same thing.
My whole life revolves around it. I know that every morning at around the same time, I'm going to be sitting here at my computer letting some kind of words come out of my fingertips. I go to the gym and stay healthy so that I can write better when I go out to a café that evening. Every day is built around pushing out an entry, pushing out as many words as I can, and poring over the revisions so that I can say what I have to say in the exact way I intend. Each sentence is special to me, and I do everything to make sure they’re the best I can make them.
I know that for me, nothing else really matters. I'm safe, comfortable, and work through a series of habits that conduce to a prolific and layered writing workflow. I remember when I was 22, still living in Austin. I was bartending, selling drugs, and delivering food on my bike. It was a good life because I was independent, making money, and living freely. But one day I was lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and thinking that one day I was going to blink and turn 30. If I were still doing what I was doing, I'd have failed. I knew there was something bigger calling to me, but I didn't know what.
Now I know.
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