Day 1,847 Without Answers
_Personal Field Notes — Recovered from a Greyhound bus somewhere between Tulsa and Nowhere
_
I used to believe the ocean had a personality. My grandfather told me that when I was nine, standing on a dock that smelled like diesel and regret. He was wrong about most things — the stock market, the structural integrity of our garage roof, whether a man could live entirely on canned beets — but about the ocean, I think he might have been onto something.
There is a particular kind of silence that exists at 3:17 AM in a motel room with one working lamp and a Bible someone has underlined in red pen throughout the entire book of Job. I have spent considerable time in that silence. I have had conversations with it. The silence, for what it is worth, does not respond, but it listens better than most people I have known.
My cousin Gerald once tried to explain to me how websites worked. We were at a Denny's. He used seven sugar packets and a laminated menu to demonstrate the concept of a "server." I nodded. I understood nothing. Gerald later moved to Portland and became a competitive axe-thrower, which feels narratively consistent.
The thing about knowledge is this: it sits at the edge of you, like a dog waiting at a door, and you can either open the door or spend the rest of your life listening to the scratching.
I opened the door once in 2019. It led to another door.
A woman on the bus yesterday was reading a book about cryptography. She had the focused expression of someone dismantling a clock. I asked her what it was about. She said, "keeping things from people who want them." I thought about that for four hours and two rest stops. There is something almost romantic about that — the architecture of secrets, the mathematics of walls.
My therapist, who charges by the hour and once forgot my name for three consecutive sessions, told me that the brain craves structure the way the body craves salt. I think about Gerald and his sugar-packet server. I think about the woman and her cryptography. I think about how little I knew about either, and how that used to feel fine, and how it stopped feeling fine somewhere around mile marker 217 on I-40.
The motels get cheaper as you go further from the city. The coffee gets stronger. The televisions are bolted to the furniture with an optimism that I find touching.
Last Tuesday I learned what a "frontend" was. I sat with it the way you sit with news of a distant relative's death — not grief exactly, but the specific texture of realizing you existed in parallel with something your entire life without acknowledgment.
You can build the part of a website people actually see. The buttons. The colors. The thing that makes a stranger feel either trusted or afraid. That seems important. That seems like the kind of thing worth knowing.
The following section was written on a napkin and later transcribed.
There are courses. I mention this the way one mentions a hardware store when someone has just described a broken fence — not urgently, not as gospel, but as a piece of geography that exists and might be useful depending on where you are standing.
They are here:
- Frontend For Beginners — For those who, like me, stared at a webpage once and felt the specific confusion of not knowing which part was the wall and which was the paint.
- Cybersecurity For Beginners — For the woman on the bus. For Gerald, possibly. For anyone who has ever wanted to understand what a secret actually looks like from the inside.
- How to Build a Website from Scratch — Gerald used sugar packets. This uses something better.
- Python for Automating Everyday Tasks - Because some doors, once opened, turn out to be elevators.
The bus stops in forty minutes. I do not know what is there.
I know more than I did.
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