CxD: Same management, different everything else 👻 = The Rocky Horror Picture Show 💋
Esteemed long-time faithful Designers of Character, friends, enemies, and Bunk if your transition into a new realm has greatly improved your literacy:
I’m in the middle of my fourth Nietzsche biography — a near 600-page stunner by Julian Young — and it took me this many narrative flybys of Nietzsche’s beastly life to realize that my journey here at CxD —Character By Design— needs to change; I need to become more of who I am.
I started this writing project five+ years ago born of the conviction that character is our destiny, which seems like a big fucking deal— and so I wanted to document examples of how it might be landscaped, sculpted, gardened, and weed-whacked.
But this experiment has now shape-shifted into a more encompassing topic: How to Live, which I write and co-create with Buddhist and Zen scholar extraordinaire, Dale Wright — author of my own character bible The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character— over at Fire Philosophy🔥:
Because all my character-designing efforts are now refined through the filter of Fire Philosophy, I’m unsure what to write here.
This is my long-ass way of announcing that going forth, I will write about all kinds of things on this humble little rag without any predetermined constraints, topic-wise: I’ll be playing tennis without a net, as Robert Frost urged poets not to do when writing free-verse.
And so but so since I try to be an honest man — as the tattoo on my left shoulder proclaims — but to live outside the law you must be honest — I’m most likely going to write about the books I’m reading, movies I’m watching, and thoughts I’m having about life encounters that are creating some kind of spark. Maybe this substack will transmogrify into to a 2008-ish quaint blog of a fella on the interwebs, just minding his own business, but in public.
🚨 What should you do now?
If you don’t care about me, or know me, or feel like you’ve been bamboozled and hoodwinked with this switcheroo, please unsubscribe — I’m supremely grateful for your readership all these years.
If you’re curious about how CxD will evolve, then wait for my next posts and then unsubscribe in disappointment and resentment.
If you’re excited that I’ll now be free to roam wherever the hell-hounds take me, then don’t do anything besides enjoy whatever happens— and thank you.
A quick preview of what I mean by all of the above: last night I watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time, and no longer understand much about anything.
This was on the back of having watched Little Shop of Horrors which didn’t help much in my understanding of anything either. Perhaps horror isn’t my genre?
I did notice however that everybody in Rocky Horror seemed to end up wearing black nylon thigh-highs. Is this something I, too, should consider wearing?
All feedback is welcome and deeply sought after.
Hugs,
Krzysztof