On boredom

 Craig Mod, who writes one of my favorite blogs: 

I walk for weeks at a time. The longest walk I’ve done was about forty days. Do this day after day—the intense mileage, the intense wordage, the looking, the talking, the boredom-bathing, the wringing texture and life from a day—and you are changed. It’s impossible not to be. The whole thing, an ascetic practice. I even shave my head like some performative mendicant, one who lives off stories as alms. I’ve been doing walks like this for six years now, and they’ve made me more patient, kinder, more optimistic about the world, people, more amazed than ever at how many goofy-ass animals (monkeys jumping off bridges, tiny bears running like little pigs, mountain crabs that have no right to exist up on a lookout) are out there in the woods.

I placed an order for his new book, Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir.