Packed Thoughts

Two F’s

August 15, 2026

There is a version of Lance Armstrong who is still a hero. One Tour, cancer beaten, an early retirement, and he disappears into a quiet life before anyone tests anything. The story ends while it is still beautiful.

There is a version of Ellen DeGeneres who is still beloved. Three seasons, a warm show, a graceful exit, and she stays a fond memory instead of a debate.

Same people. Same character. The only difference is how long they stayed.

And that is the thing I keep thinking about. Because when you look at the people this has happened to, they fall into completely different categories, and it does not seem to matter which one you are in.

Some were adored and vilified without doing anything wrong. Nothing surfaced. No scandal. The mood simply changed, the audience got bored of liking them, and one day the comments were different. Negative.

Some did something wrong, but had they left earlier, nobody would ever have known. The wrong things they committed was real, and it was also only ever going to be found by people who kept looking. Staying is what kept them under the light long enough for someone to find it. Shane Dawson and Colleen Ballinger both had material that had been sitting in public for years before anyone went back for it.

Some made one small mistake and apologised for it properly. It made no difference. The apology became its own news cycle, then evidence, then a clip. James Charles is the clearest case of that.

And some were villains from the very beginning. People idolised them anyway, for years, and eventually arrived at the truth that was there the whole time. Bill Cosby is the obvious one. He was never a good man who later became bad. Leaving early would have meant fewer victims, not a better ending.

Four completely different situations. Four different levels of guilt, from none at all to monstrous.

Bat all have the same ending.

And this is not new. Julius Caesar was the most popular man in Rome and was killed by senators who believed they were saving it from him.

Fiction has known it for centuries too. Macbeth opens as the celebrated warrior who has just saved his king and closes as the tyrant everyone wants dead. Anakin was a heroic Jedi before he was Darth Vader.

That is what makes me think about it in the first place. If innocence and guilt both produce the same result, then the result was never really about the guilt.

It was all about the staying. Its best exemplified in a quote I heard but found out that it is from Batman which I also quoted once here before.

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

In Arabic we also have a similar one that captures the meaning I am thinking of which is what this whole post is about.

ما طار طيرٌ وارتفع، إلا كما طار وقع

Yesterday I wrote about help and hinder sharing an H, and how two words at opposite ends of meaning keep arriving at the same place.

Fly and fall share an F, and this pair is worse.

Help and hinder land in the same result by accident. Fly and fall are the same motion. The rise is not followed by the fall. The rise is the fall, still in progress. Every metre gained is a metre you will come down.

The fall is not a risk of rising. It is the second half of it.

Which is what I keep thinking about while reading the coverage of Mamdani. The ratings. The support. The tone of the writing about him right now.

And I can already see the shape of what comes next. Not because of anything he has done. Because of where he is standing.

So what is he supposed to do?

Leave now, at the top, and become a quitter. The man who walked away. Abandoned the people who put him there. Did not fight when it counted. The story writes itself and nobody writes it kindly.

Stay, and he gets the other story. Because staying means governing, and governing means disappointing people, and enough disappointment over enough time becomes a villain arc whether it is earned or not.

Leaving is a betrayal. Staying is a countdown for the public downfall.

There is no third choice.

And it is not only famous people.

The mechanism does not need millions of viewers. It works in a family. In an office. In a group of friends.

It might have occurred in my school’s social studies teacher’s room, when I visited to the small gathering because the conversation was better there, and kept visiting, until being there stopped being a visit and became a position. At a certain point I believe the arc for my fall started.

It might have happened when I was the one who always answered the phone. Any hour. Every time. Until answering was no longer generous, it was expected, and the first time I did not answer, maybe the arc for my fall started.

It might have worked every time people come to depend on me and enjoy having me there, which feels wonderful, right up until presence becomes obligation. And the arc for the fall starts.

Whether I am the hero at work, or the hero at home, or the hero to six people who have my number, the arc does not care how many are watching. It just happens.

So, at some point I am the one everybody appreciates, and I know from experience that in a few weeks or a few months I will be the problem. Same person. Same behaviour. Different position on the arc.

That is not pessimism. It is what my mother says, which she took from her father.

نستقرئ الماضي لمعرفة المستقبل

And the past on this particular subject is extremely consistent.

So can it be avoided?

I do not know. And I do not think anyone does. Every person named above had advisers, friends, and instincts, and not one of them saw it while it was happening.

Because nobody sees the fall while it is happening. It looks exactly like flying right up until you check the ground.

Which is why I believe I will be going through it.

Or I already have, and have not looked down yet.

Write in the logbook
Two H’s

August 14, 2026

Help and hinder sit at opposite ends of meaning, and yet they arrive at the same result often enough that I have started to wonder about the shared H.

Let me show you what I mean.

The first time.

For years I was my wife’s concierge.

Not in a noble way. In a Vertu way. Those luxury phones used to have a dedicated button on the side that connected you straight to a human being who would book your restaurant, find your flight, and handle whatever you did not want to handle yourself. That was me. The button.

The weekly shop, ordered online. Amazon. Her medications. Flights. Hotels. Train tickets. Anything that involved a form, a login, or a decision between three options. She would say the thing she needed and it would appear.

Then I got sick.

Not the twice-a-year sick where the weather turns and you have a sore throat for four days. Extreme. I never had COVID, but I have been around plenty of people who did, and this was worse than anything they described. It lasted a month.

And during that month, she was lost.

She did not know how to order my medication. She did not know where the train tickets were booked or which account the hotel was under. The button did not work anymore.

The first week was chaos. She had to step up with no warning and no handover. I helped where I could, propped up and half-conscious, which was not much help at all.

The second week she broke. Properly. Not dramatically. Quietly, at a kitchen table, the way people break when they have been carrying something they did not agree to carry and cannot put down.

By the third week she was an expert.

By the fourth she had overtaken me. She had found better ways to do things I had been doing badly for years. She started teaching me. She sat me down and explained a process I had personally been running since before we were married, and she was right and I was wrong.

She did not become as good as the concierge. She replaced it.

And that is when it landed.

For all those years I thought I was helping.

I was not. I was standing between her and the thing. Every task I took off her hands was a task she never had the chance to learn. Every time I said leave it, I’ll do it, I was removing a small piece of her independence and calling it love.

She could have done all of it. She did all of it in three weeks. The only thing that had ever stopped her was me being faster.

So I changed.

Now, when there is a government process, or a difficult conversation with her boss, or something heavy and unpleasant that needs handling, my instinct still fires. The chivalry reflex. The eastern man who steps in front. I have not removed it. I just hold it.

I stay in the room. I do not take the phone out of her hand.

That is the switch. From help to support.

Then I did it again.

I took on the caretaker role for my father, to take the weight off my mother.

The appointments. The prescriptions. The hospital runs. The moving of a man who cannot move himself. The paperwork nobody wants to look at. The phone call at an hour when nobody wants to be called.

I became the emergency number. Which is fitting, because I still do not know what the actual emergency number is in this country. I have lived here my whole life. If something happened right now I would call myself.

And I was there. Always. Which is what I wanted.

But here is what I did not see coming.

Because I was always there, nobody else needed to be.

Not the big things. The small ones. Paying a phone bill. Ordering food. Sending someone the Google location of the house. All of it comes to me. Not because anyone refused. Because I took the role, and I made it known that I had taken it, and the moment that is known, everybody else quietly stands down.

I said I am here. And the room heard, you are not needed.

Then a few weeks ago I could not be there. I was sick, and then my children were sick, one after the other.

And everything stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. There was no second person. No backup. No one who knew where anything was or which doctor to call or how any of it worked, because for years there had been no reason for anyone to learn.

My mother’s whole world stalled because one man had a fever.

That is not a support system. That is a single point of failure with good intentions.

So I am doing it again.

Backing off. Not disappearing. Backing off.

Letting things be asked for instead of pre-empted. Letting someone else be called first sometimes. Letting the small tasks find their way to other hands, even when I could do them faster, even when watching it take three days instead of ten minutes is physically uncomfortable.

Because help and hinder sit at opposite ends of meaning and arrive at the same place, and I have now walked into it twice with the same face on.

And I have noticed something about the words themselves.

Help starts with an H. Hinder starts with an H. Hold, hover, handle, hand it over. All of them.

The thing that actually works does not.

Support.

Different letter entirely. Which feels about right.

Write in the logbook
Wait, There Is Another

August 13, 2026

I have always been the tech guy.

Not just the one who takes things apart. The one people ask before they buy anything. Since middle school I have been reading Engadget, GSMArena, PhoneArena, Anandtech, forums with three active users and one moderator who took it very seriously.

But I did not have a phone.

I shared a line with my sister.

That was a thing, and if you were there you know it. You either had a pager or you shared a line with a sibling. Some people had to share with their mother, which was worse in every measurable way.

I got lucky. My sister was not what you would call socially demanding. She had three friends and a cousin. And by three friends I mean the three walls of her bedroom, because one of the four was mine, courtesy of my graffiti. PROPERTY OF ME. I Banksy’d my way across that wall for years purely to irritate her, and it worked every single time.

By late high school I was finally allowed my own phone.

Now. Everyone had a Nokia. Nokia was for people who did not think about it. Ericsson, before the Sony merger, was for people with I-am-unique syndrome. Alcatel was the Egyptian phone. Motorola was for rich kids.

I bought a Siemens.

German. Made by a company that also built the telecom infrastructure the whole country ran on. This was before Ooredoo and STC and Zain. It was MTC, and MTC used Siemens equipment for the signal. So my logic was simple and, I still maintain, correct: buy the phone from the company that built the network.

And it was the SL45. The first phone with an MP3 player and a memory card. Orange backlight. Proper headphones in the box. Thirty-two megabytes, which held about forty-five minutes of music, all of it downloaded from Napster. That is another post and I am not writing it.

Nobody else had one. Not one person.

Then I upgraded to another Siemens. And another. And another. All the way to the point where I finally gave up and switched to Nokia.

In between, I bought and sold. I had the first Kitkat in Kuwait, through the man who ran Nokia here, who I knew well. I had the first touchscreen phone in Kuwait and sold it to a spoiled millionaire for three times what I paid. I used the Ringo, which was a genuinely rude phone. Look it up.

All of this gave me credentials. I was the guy people came to.

It became my first job. I wrote the tech page for a local newspaper. Followed the company announcements, took the press releases, paraphrased them, and produced articles. My first published piece was about the release of the last phone Siemens ever made under its own name. The SXG75. First Siemens with GPS, first 3G phone they built themselves, and the final one before BenQ bought the division.

I bought it, obviously.

Then the free advice service collapsed.

It went like this.

I recommended a device. The person bought it. The person was happy with it. Then someone with an opinion and no information convinced them it was a bad choice. The person converted. Then came back to tell me I was wrong, with no evidence of any kind, and wanted to argue about it.

I hate debates.

I did not lose. I just did not want to keep going. So I closed the service.

I have carried that ever since. My recommendation service is now for one customer. Me.

Except the field stopped making sense.

It used to work like this. A device came out. It was the best thing available for a year, maybe two. Then something better replaced it, and the better thing was genuinely better. There were maybe six options and you could hold all of them in your head.

Now a device launches and arrives already accompanied by two leaks and a press release for the thing that replaces it. You are buying something outdated on the day it ships. There is no moment where you own the current thing.

Which brings me to what I actually wanted.

I had settled on the new Surface Laptop for Business. Intel Core Ultra Series 3, released on the nineteenth of May. It has everything I need. I read the reviews. I made the decision. This is rare for me now.

Twelve days later, Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra.

Nvidia RTX Spark. Twenty ARM cores. A Blackwell GPU. Up to 128GB of unified memory. A petaflop of AI performance. A fifteen-inch mini-LED screen at two thousand nits.

And here is the part that finished me. They did not announce a price. They did not announce a release date. They announced “later this year,” put up a page where you can register for updates, and let reviewers handle one.

So my device is now old, outdated, and expensive, because there is a new kid in town who does everything better and nobody will tell me how much he costs or when he arrives.

I am back to waiting.

Which means my recommendation service is no longer available even to me. Because there is only one recommendation left in it, and it is the same one every time.

Wait. There is another.

Write in the logbook

Icky the Sticky

A black, eyeless, ink-like creature sits on the fourth stone step of a lighthouse staircase at dusk, blocking the path to an open glowing door, with carrots scattered beside it and the lighthouse beam shining overhead.

August 12, 2026

I do not know why certain things refuse to stick. No matter how well you prepare, how much you read, how many times it is explained.

Let me show you exactly what I mean.

You start learning a topic. You read about it. You get through the first three ideas comfortably. Then you arrive at the fourth one and hit a wall.

You read it again. Nothing. You find a second source that explains it differently. Nothing. You ask ChatGPT. You ask it to simplify. You ask it to explain it as though you were nine. Nothing. You go on a YouTube rampage — three tutorials, a lecture, an Indian man with a whiteboard who is genuinely excellent at his job.

Nothing.

It is as if the information reaches the door of your head, looks inside, and decides not to come in.

So you get the sentence we all memorised from school. No need to understand it. Just memorise it.

That has never worked for me. I go to the etymology. I need the root. I need to know where a word came from and what it was doing before it got here, otherwise it does not settle.

Then comes the better teacher’s advice. Skip it and come back later.

Also not me.

I cannot move forward without standing on every step. I do not skip in a queue and I do not skip in a book. I read the preface. I read the introduction. I read the acknowledgements, which nobody reads, and which are usually about someone’s wife.

Which is why I could never handle Give Yourself Goosebumps.

For anyone who missed the nineties: Goosebumps were R.L. Stine’s horror books for children, and there were dozens of them. Then came the spin-off, where you were the main character and every few pages you had to make a choice. Open the door, turn to page 47. Run, turn to page 82. Around twenty different endings, most of them bad, and the only way to read the whole book was to jump around it like a lunatic.

I could not do it. I read them in page order, start to finish, which produces total nonsense and defeats the entire concept.

I was not a fun child.

Anyway. I am stuck.

And the feeling is so familiar by now that I have given it a name and a face.

His name is Icky and he is sticky. Black, with braids, and he eats those tiny fake baby carrots. Bag after bag. I do not know why. He will not explain it and I have stopped asking.

Anything he touches becomes stuck. Not difficult. Not confusing. Stuck. A thing I cannot get over, around, or through.

And this month he decided to touch aspect.

Aspect is the second half of the verb.

Every verb carries two pieces of information about time, and most people only know about the first one.

Tense is the one everybody knows. It answers when. Past, present, future. Yesterday, now, tomorrow. From Latin tempus, meaning time.

Aspect answers something else entirely. Not when the action happened, but how it sits in time. Is it finished or unfinished? A single point or a long stretch? A habit or a one-off? Are you looking at it from outside, as a closed package, or from inside, while it is still running?

And here is the part I love, because it is the part that finally made me half-understand it. The etymology.

Aspect comes from Latin aspectus — a look, a view, an appearance. From ad-, meaning towards, and specere, meaning to look. The same root that gives us spectacle, inspect, spectator.

So aspect is literally the angle you are looking from.

Tense tells you where the event is. Aspect tells you where you are standing while you look at it.

In English, you use it constantly without noticing.

I ate. Finished. One block. Seen from outside.
I was eating. Unfinished. In progress. You are inside it, watching it happen.
I have eaten. Finished, but still relevant now. It has consequences.
I used to eat. A habit that stopped.

All four can point to the same afternoon. Same time. Four different camera positions.

In French, aspect is unavoidable, because the past tense forces you to choose between two of them.

Il pleuvait — it was raining. Ongoing. No edges. You are inside it while it happens.
Il a plu — it rained. Finished. A single closed event with a beginning and an end.

Both are past. Same time. The difference is entirely aspect.

Which is why French learners suffer. English lets you say “it rained” and stay vague about whether it was a downpour or an afternoon. French makes you commit. Every time you talk about the past, you declare which angle you are looking from.

The textbook sentence is quand je suis arrivé, il pleuvait. When I arrived, it was raining. Arriving is a point. Raining is a stretch. The point lands inside the stretch, and you cannot build that sentence without knowing which is which.

In Arabic, aspect is not one feature among several. It is the foundation.

There are two basic verb forms. الماضي, which classical grammarians called تام — complete. And المضارع, which they called ناقص — incomplete.

Look at what those words are describing. Not past and present. Complete and incomplete. The grammarians were not classifying time. They were classifying whether the action is finished.

Arabic absolutely expresses time. Every language does. It just does not put time inside the verb form. Time gets added from outside. قد before a completed verb pulls it close to now. سوف or the prefix س pushes an incomplete verb forward into the future. كان placed before an incomplete verb — كان يكتب — takes an unfinished action and sets it in the past. He was writing.

Which means the same verb form can land in the past, the present, or the future depending on what stands beside it. Because the form was never marking time in the first place. It was marking completion.

So an English speaker walks in assuming when did it happen is the fundamental question, and discovers that in Arabic it is the secondary one, handled by a neighbouring word. Meanwhile the question they barely think about — is this finished or not — is carrying the entire structure.

Three languages. Three different opinions about what a verb is for.

	English	French	Arabic
What the verb form marks first	Tense	Tense	Aspect
Completed action	I ate	Il a plu	كتب
Ongoing action	I was eating	Il pleuvait	يكتب
Ongoing, set in the past	I was eating	Il pleuvait	كان يكتب
Future	I will eat	Il pleuvra	سيكتب
Finished but still relevant	I have eaten	J’ai mangé	قد كتب
How aspect is expressed	Auxiliaries and -ing	Separate tense forms	Built into the verb form itself
How time is expressed	Built into the verb form	Built into the verb form	Added by particles and context
Can you avoid choosing an aspect?	Often yes	In the past tense, no	Never

And I still do not have it.

I could write all of that. I just did. I could source it, footnote it, and hand it to a student.

But I do not have it. Not the way I have things I actually understand. It is a shape I can trace without being able to build.

Icky touched it.

So what I need is somebody who can get him off.

Her name is Kleany, with a K. She is the opposite of Icky in every way. Where he leaves things stuck, she leaves them in order. She wipes surfaces. She squares up the edges of paper. She puts things back where they belong and she is very calm about it.

She does not fight Icky. She just arrives, cleans the area, and whatever he was holding onto is simply no longer stuck.

The problem is she does not take appointments.

You cannot call her. You cannot book her. She never comes when you sit at the desk with the book open and the coffee ready and the whole afternoon cleared. That is the one time she is guaranteed not to appear.

She turns up in the shower. Or four days later on a Thursday while somebody is telling a long story about a car. Or at eleven at night when you have stopped caring, and suddenly the thing is just there, in three dimensions, obvious.

So I am doing something I have never done in my life.

I am taking the good teacher’s advice. Skipping it. Coming back later.

Later meaning: whenever Kleany decides.

And Icky can keep the carrots.

Write in the logbook

Focus Pocus

August 11, 2026

Everything is now pointing to success, inshallah.

I set out to reach this place. I hoped I would reach it. I lost hope that I would reach it. Then it crept back without my permission, and like magic, here it is.

So no whining. No feeling sorry for myself. No looking for the thing that is about to go wrong. My job now is simple. Maintain it.

But. And there is always a but.

There is one thing I am struggling with. Focus.

In both of its senses.

The first kind of focus.

This is the one you say to somebody who has bitten off more than they can chew. Slow down. Pick one thing. Focus.

That is me.

I am doing a course on research writing. I am refreshing my statistics. I am doing a course on data science. I am coding. I am researching and writing two papers. And all of that is running alongside being a father and being a son, which are not hobbies you get to pause. And swimming. Yep mu laayig.

So it is everywhere at once. Every one of those things is going well. None of them is going fast. And I cannot tell whether that is discipline or dilution.

The second kind of focus.

This is the harder one.

This is when you sit down to do something that requires your whole brain, and your brain leaves.

I have shut down everything that causes it. The phone is dumb. The laptop is dumb. No news. No notifications. No open tabs waiting to be checked. I closed every door.

There is one thing I cannot shut down.

My adventures.

The scenes in my head. I have written about them before. Full sequences with lighting and camera angles and music. My head is a cinema that never closes.

And it never used to be a problem, because I had a switch. They ran when I let them run. Before sleep. On long drives. On flights. I owned the schedule.

Now I do not.

They arrive mid-sentence. Mid-paragraph. Mid-statistical formula that I will have to start again. I look up and eleven minutes have gone somewhere, and I could tell you exactly what happened in them, in detail, with a soundtrack.

And here is the part that bothers me most. I know why it is happening.

I just do not know how to switch it off.

Which brings me to the nineties.

Magic Eye. The posters in every mall. A page of coloured noise that looks like nothing at all, and then somebody tells you there is a dolphin in it, and you spend four minutes going slightly cross-eyed in public.

I loved them. And I was good at them, which as achievements go is not one you can put on a CV.

Here is what nobody tells you about how they work.

You do not see the picture by concentrating harder. That is the trap. Stare at the surface, try to force it, screw up your eyes and really commit, and you will see noise for the rest of your life.

It appears when nothing else is in the way. Your eyes have to let go of the page, the room, the person standing next to you, everything they were holding onto. Empty. And then the image is there, because there was nothing left to block it.

Then it comes. All at once. The noise reorganises and there is a shape sitting in three dimensions, and you cannot understand how you ever missed it.

And then someone says your name.

Gone. Not blurred. Gone. Back to a page of dots. One thing entered your head and the picture could not survive it. And you cannot get it back by wanting it, because it was never a memory. It was an empty room. You have to clear the whole thing again from the beginning.

Which is exactly what happens at my desk.

The work is the hidden image. Everything else is the noise. Concentrating harder does not produce it, and I have spent years proving that. It arrives when there is nothing else in my head at all. No other project. No open loop. No scene running in the background. Empty. And then the work is there, in full depth, and I can see the whole shape of it.

Then an adventure starts. One thing enters the room.

Gone.

And it is not eleven minutes that I lose. It is eleven minutes plus the twenty it takes to empty the room again, and half the time I never get it back.

So I made a spell.

Snape wrote his in the margins of a textbook. Sectumsempra. Levicorpus. Muffliato. Langlock. All of them invented by a teenager nobody was paying attention to.

Harry never invented one. He just had a signature. Expelliarmus. Disarm the thing in front of you and take away what it is holding.

Hermione did not invent one either, but everyone knows hers. Protego. The shield you cast before anything gets through.

I am not any of them. So mine is not elegant, it is not Latin, and it does not appear in any book.

Focus Pocus.

Cast at a desk. Closes the cinema. Disarms the distraction. Holds the shield for about forty minutes at a time.

And like the posters, it only works when there is nothing else in the room.

So. Focus Pocus.

The image above is not a real Magic Eye. There is nothing hidden in it. I am telling you now because I know some of you were already leaning in, and I do not want to be responsible for your eyes.

Write in the logbook

Two F’s

Two H’s

Wait, There Is Another

Icky the Sticky

Focus Pocus