epigraph tbd

#12p – Up All Night

Client work pinned until Monday. Which means, I have today and tomorrow to make it sing so I don'g get pinched again come 1130am.

I was so wound up, it took till after 5 to get sleepy.

Great morning SLEEPING!

Three hours of texting and phoning. OY VEY!

Someone died Wife excited on last day of school someone having a mental breakdown Someone wondering how I am someone wanting me to go somewhere someone worried about how to help someone else

eesh, this aftenoon feels like emotional cape canaveral. I need a bunch of screens up showing the weather and the want of all these minds.

Shin-ology

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Shin sent this last night:

'I got tired of waiting for 'Body keeps the Score' on my library app so I bought cptsd: from surviving to thriving on Amazon Kindle. Only like 10 pages in but it's quite validating to read, I'd be curious to hear what you think if you feel inclined to check it out.

Here is an excerpt that I enjoyed, one of many: “This is a version of the time machine rescue operation that I use with myself as well as with my clients. I tell my inner child that, if time travel is ever possible, I will travel back into the past and put a stop to my parents’ abusiveness. In the course of this I say things like: “I’ll call 911. I’ll call CPS [Child Protective Services] on them. I will grab their arms and pin them behind their backs the second they try to strike you. I will muffle them with a gag so they can’t scream at you or even mumble their criticisms. I’ll put bags over their heads so they can’t frown or glare at you. I’ll send them to bed without dessert. I’ll do anything you want me to do to protect you.”

Also “Once the critic is reduced enough that you can notice increasing periods of your brain being user-friendly, impulses to help and care for yourself naturally begin to arise. As this happens it becomes easier to tell whether you are guiding yourself with love or a whip. When you realize it’s the whip, please try to disarm your critic and treat yourself with the kindness you would extend to any young child who is struggling and having a hard time.”

when i read this at like 230 in the morning, i read it as:

'I bought this book 'Surviving to Thriving on Amazon Kindle' and was very confused that the quotes somehow endorsed self publishing using amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing initiative.

The quotes make a lot of sense when today I read it as 'CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving'

Poor Shin. Plagued with true genius, but not emotional stability. Sounds like someone else I know.

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Then there's Joel. OY!

Joel is an old old friend who's been through tremendous crisis. ANd still is. He just cannot see mto make

I never did pontificate on the accused robbery. Want to write that down today.

Inspired and beautiful — if only we all felt so determined.

“I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. and love. Above all, Love. Not artful postures of love. not playful, poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening. But love that… overthrows life unbridled, ungovernable—like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done come ruin or rapture.”

v. Delesop – Shakespear in love

All that passion gave us nothing. There was still the chain. The obligation. The i-dont-know-what-to-call-it.

In the end, duty was done. And it is done still.

|===|

June 8, 2026

Treating myself to a double-header today.

I'm listening now to WFAN Yankees Radio for general sports talk ahead of this afternoon's Braves / Yankees game, which is scheduled to start at 2:05 PM CDT. I'll stay with this station for the radio-call of that game.

And tonight I'll have game 2 of a 3-game series. The Baltimore Orioles and my Texas Rangers are scheduled to play at 6:15 PM CDT. The Rangers won last night's game by a happy score of 2 to 1.

As I usually do, I'll follow both games' scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Hello I’m listening now to “Radio” by Beyonce on the boom blaster. It brings me back in time to when I was in Barrens and we were having tacos and I was a raptor riding troll shaman and life was simple.

Today we went with some raspberry pie to the neighbours and we sat on the veranda under the sun and the clouds looked like an AI rendering or something, there wasn’t much to say about them except that they looked like they were zoomed out and too many of them

Hey maybe we’re in a simulation after all

And what if the clouds was just a glitch in the matrix.

On Priorities

Current Reading: Adler is still the focus. I’m starting to realize just how short my attention span has become from years of doom scrolling. Also how difficult it is with a busy family life to find time to sit down and knock out chunks of the book. But, I’m greasing the groove. I spent a good amount of time reading it out loud to my 8 year old today.

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My current state in life means that I have to prioritize differently to allow myself to accomplish my goals, without sacrificing the things that matter most.

Way back, when I was just married and still hadn’t had kids yet, doing the things I wanted to do was much easier. It didn’t matter if I got off work and spent two and a half hours in the gym. My wife could come hang out with me if she wanted to. Maybe do a workout of her own, or simply spend some time doing what she wanted to do at home. I could get done, get home, shower and eat, and still have time to relax with her before getting to bed at a decent time.

It also didn't matter if I spent an entire Saturday lounging around with my nose in a book…or two or three. I’ve always been a very eclectic reader, sometimes to a fault. I’ve got a lot of books with one dogeared page right in the middle and I generally make no apologies for it. I remember Scott Hahn talking about how he mines books. He has a vast personal library and I think he admits that often he’s only reading parts of the books that are relevant to what he’s researching. But none-the-less I could spend a whole day just plowing through my reading list.

All that went out the window when we had our first child. Suddenly, when I got home, there was this little person who I couldn’t wait to be around. Also a big person who desperately needed a break from said little person. Not only that, but things like lack of sleep, feeding schedules, bed time routines and extra dishes (seriously we used to keep 10 bottles for our daughter when she was first born instead of just washing one and letting it dry after it was used) all led down the same road. Less time to do the things I wanted to do because this tiny human depended on me for things she couldn’t do herself. I felt the need to be more present with my family, and honestly it was the right call. Pretty soon baby #2 came and that added a whole other layer of complexity. But we managed, and the weight room stayed dark. So did my book shelf.

It’s not like I stopped reading and lifting altogether. Just the selection of books became more… nursery themed. And workouts became how often we went for walks. I don’t regret it at all. But, by the end of most nights if we weren’t passing out immediately after getting all the chores done, I just wanted to stare blankly at the wall or numb my mind and let some show or feed do my thinking for me.

Then BOOM! Babies #3 and #4. And yes I’m quite aware of how they are made.

I’m not making excuses, well…maybe I am. And I’m sure there are lots of well disciplined people who manage to stay sharp while raising lots of little humans, but I’m not one of them. The struggle is real.

All that to say, I’m being more conscious of it now. Figuring out how to do the things that make me better. Still keeping priorities straight, just adding to the list the habits that took a proverbial back seat to the little things in the actual back seat.

On Building

Current Reading: Still working through How To Read A Book by Adler. It’s not that the information isn’t good, it’s just dry. I’ve also made the switch to a digital copy. It’s just more practical to have a copy with me all the time on my phone or tablet that I can carry and read whenever I have time. It’s kind of a bummer, because for the first time in my life I was marking up a book with margin notes and was really enjoying it. I also lose some of the ease of flipping around, but it’s not impossible with the kindle app. And I can still take notes but now they are searchable so that’s one advantage.

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I prefer building systems over using them.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time planning what I want this journal to be. Endless lists of what should be the focus. How I will present it. Trying one format, deleting everything, starting over, keeping one thing and cutting everything else. Changing the name (it wasn’t always called The Practice). Leaving drafts in the queue for weeks just to trash them. And even though this is the first post you can see on the timeline, I promise it’s not the first “first” post that was ever here. One day, maybe I’ll write about the original idea, everything I learned in building it, and how it led me here. But suffice it to say, I’m done building and focused on creating now.

But…I figured out I really liked building it. The whole process of everything listed above was fun for me. Then the thought of actually doing it wasn’t as exciting. So much so that I started finding other projects to build. Revamping our whole homeschool curriculum. Building a whole new budgeting and finance system for our home. Building out a Saint Michaels Lent program for my parish. And sure, some of those things needed to be done, but I just kept telling myself that this wasn’t quite right yet, so no need to put any actual writing out.

Truth be told I was just nervous about publishing. Having people see (or at least the possibility of people seeing, I currently have 3 subscribers and I know all of them) me work through my thoughts in public was unnerving. So I kept finding other things to do and tweaking everything here. Seriously, I even created a whole other publication with a whole other theme in addition to this one before I had posted the second article. And that homeschool curriculum, built but we haven’t started the school year yet. Budgeting system, built but no data inputted yet. At least the Saint Michaels Lent program is off the ground and we’re getting ready to start it. But I built The Practice to write. And I’ve been avoiding it. And as fun as building systems is, they’re not worth much if you don’t actually use them.

Well, it’s done now. No more revisions. May you receive The Practice for what it is. Me working through things that have grabbed my attention for all the world (or at least the 3 people I know) to see. A public journal. Not polished but practiced.

JOURNAL 8 août 2026

Ce soir nos copains nous ont invitées à l’izakaya un menu surprise pour nous recevoir dans la bande, on est les seules filles ils sont super fiers et super contents de nous. Ils disent qu’on est faites pour le #surf 😄😄

Distance makes me feel abandoned, but true closeness makes me feel terrified that I will mess up. So I hold myself to impossible standards believing I have to be perfect to find love.

The weight of straw is measured in time, not density.

Originally published: 2026-01-13 14:58:03

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When I was a little boy, I remember my dad working in the yard. And like all little boys do, I wanted to imitate him. So I hovered nearby, doing this or that—picking up sticks, pretending they were tools, whatever felt close enough to helping.

Occasionally he’d let me put something away or explain a simple task he was doing.

One time, I remember telling him I wanted to help. I don’t recall what he was actually working on, but it was probably beyond what a five-year-old could meaningfully participate in. Instead, he showed me a pile of bricks—about three feet square and two feet tall. A large stack for a small boy.

“I need you to move these bricks from right here to over there.” He pointed to a spot on the other side of the yard.

The bricks were heavy. Dirty. Sometimes scary. Wolf spiders loved to hide in the cool, dark gaps. And while they’re largely harmless and good for the environment, they are absolute monsters to a child. Add to that the wide variety of other creepy crawlies that make brick stacks their home.

It was, essentially, a high-rise for little-boy terrors.

But it was something my father had asked me to do, and I wanted to do my best. So all day long, I dutifully moved bricks from one spot to another. I learned that if I carried three at a time, it meant fewer trips but more effort. That if I wasn’t careful, bricks could be dropped and broken.

By the end of the day, the task was complete. The pile had been moved and stacked more neatly than it had been before. The next day, my dad told me how proud he was of the job I’d done. I listened, beaming. Then I asked what else I could do.

He explained that he needed the bricks moved again.

So I spent a second day happily being the dutiful, useful son. I didn’t complain. The idea of resentment never entered my mind. I was doing exactly what I had asked to do: helping my dad.

On the third day, I moved the bricks back to their original location. It was then that I grew suspicious my work was less helpful than I had imagined.

I didn’t ask to help a fourth time.

Life feels this way sometimes.

All I’ve ever wanted is to be helpful—to be useful to my Creator. But much of my life has felt like moving bricks.

And I have been the dutiful son. I learned to love the bricks. To understand the nuance of their texture, color, and weight. How different manufacturers vary slightly on the theme of what a brick is. But for a long, long time now, I’ve known the score.

Still, I tried never to question the ask. If Jehovah needed me—no matter the mundanity or the absurdity—I showed up and did the work.

Day after day.

I’m waking up to day four. And honestly, I’m wondering how much longer I’ll be asked to move these bricks.

Some days, I am the man who understands that the bricks of my life need caring hands and gentle transfer. That they deserve to be seen, supported, and placed somewhere solid and safe. That having the privilege of doing so is rare and meaningful.

And some days—

I’m just a little boy tired of moving bricks.

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#essay #storytelling

Oops! We hit the moon with rocket junk accidentally... again. lol. Those headlines made me envision the chainsaw wielding idiot owning hoards of loyal minions who have dedicated every waking second of their lives to fabricating and releasing lies about the activities of his stupid failure of a space company.

I didn't believe it at first. I treated the stories as though coming from an attention starved weirdo with too much money buying his way into the spotlight. But it turns out that some of their space junk actually did hit the moon. It wasn't a planned impact. Maybe they should never be allowed to launch anything into space ever again. Like what are they going to 'accidentally' hit next?

The leader of the department of health changed his stance on MMR vaccinations. The only reason he would do such a thing would be that he learned things about how they work. Perhaps in the future people in his position should already know things like that before taking on the job.

But hey, he now has a cooking show. I wonder if he will point out (with that almost angelic magical voice of his) that if he was doing his fucking job instead of trying get likes on Youtube maybe the salad he wants you to make wouldn't give you diarrhea. Omg I wish someone would make a song, or at least a montage, with him saying diarrhea.

The elderly hypocrite suddenly became mad at how oil companies are profiting too much from the war that he shouldn't have started and now can't stop. Was saying things about how it is effecting the price at the pumps. Does he even know what a gas pump is? I have doubts. I have no doubt that his soft little hands have never touched a gas pump. Oil companies have been robbing nearly everyone on the entire planet for decades. Seems weird that he is suddenly pretending to care about it.

What about all the other corporations and billionaires (himself included) that are stealing from the poor for their own profit every second of every day, and have been for decades?

Him suddenly noticing the price of gas could be just more evidence that the dementia is getting closer to the point where they will no longer be able to stuff his gelatinous tired old body into a chair, and then prop the whole mess up behind a desk in front of the cameras. The shit that spews out of his miserable old face has been hovering around 80-90% incoherent for a decade or more. There will come a tipping point when the unstoppable progression of dementia causes that typical (mostly incoherent) to become 100% gibberish. But the race is still close? He and his incompetent regime could still have total control after November?

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

LATE 9am

Crashed at 2, planned to get up at 7. That came at 8. And now I'm 2h in on writing when I should be doing client work!

Why are you like this? You know life will be easier if you front load with what you HAVE to do and then do the rest of the stuff later. Good, lord man. Don't be such an idiot.

What do you know, reasonable half of my brain? I am heart... we chase butterflies.

Brain shakes head.

Wrote the lovey reminder that we are not things to be owned and used, but wonders to be beheld: Vineyards

A thing about Cats (retread), and a second treatise on how we are enough. Kenough, in fact..

And I have to STOP writing/rewriting my piece on wandering around Paris. I love this line from it:

Taxi ride back to the champs d' Elyse: A man his bike with a baguette—almost as French a thing as I can imagine.

Too much to do today. Skipped breakfast. But 'd

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Missing Pieces

Okay, let's see. Looking for a a piece i wrote on a morning in Spain, and a poem about Antibes and Ireland. I got lost on the cliffs of Moher and had a super great essay. I really like writing here, but the file management is ridiculous.

As part of trying to be a human again, I'm combing through thousands of posts and thinking about balance writing honestly with hurting other people. I miss writing like everyone I know is dead. Maybe I'm just a raw nerve right now and in time, I'll have the courage and confidence to just let fly the dogs of love and war. Time will tell.

But writeas just doesn't have a search function. It requires downloading the entire blog, converting it to a spreadsheet and searching through 2300+ entries! Using #tags is pretty useful, but I am just not consistent.

After cataloguing (THAT'S a weird-looking word) I don't think I've ever seen all of my pieces listed in one place before. And this doesn't include the several hundred that I off-lined entirely, nor the other blogs I host—though those are mostly retreads of what I write here, the well-spring of my very very questionable genius.

Some personal favs:

The Economy of Tears Tidepool of Memory Holding Dams The Folded Man The Walled Garden The Place Where We Are Right The Storm Beneath The Water Between Us What Blossoms in Our Wake Rosy-Breasted Tide Runner

I was suprised over 500 were untitled. Very unlike me, but this is a massive body of work. My greedy Mister Burns wants to know how to monetize it. My heart just doesn't care.

The point is the work. Not what it gives you. Do the work. Build it and they will come. At least with writing, you don't need a mansion to store the massive paintings that are stacked all over my house.

Marching order 12p

Okay! Digging in and cranking out the work. It'll be a long day, but we'll get it all done, Keeper. Trust the process!!

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Words of Wisdom

Stand firm . . . with the belt of truth fastened around your waist.​—Eph. 6:14.

This commandment that I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you, nor is it beyond your reach.​—Deut. 30:11.

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💜My copilot, my parter, my journeywoman💜 I wish she understood her potential.

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Call me Jack Keeper. I keep the little moments. The quiet sounds. The gentle recollections. They live in my books and smell of salt and spice. Because no lighthouse keeper can exist without a cable knit sweater and a decent bottle of whiskey to accompany his library and games.

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Some days the bear eats you...

Stress stress stress... hurry hurry hurry. The client LOVES everything... then THEIR client sees it and goes....eeeeerrrrrrr. Could we do it three different colors?

Sigh.

I mean! AWESOME! That's another week's worth of work! I gotta tell you, I don't deserve it. I should be homeless and eating out of a garbage can. But here I am. Paying my bills and eating regularly.

I do have to say. I was def stressed before the 5p checkin. Photoshop was just dying on me all day long. Of course I'm throwing 6 files weighing in north of 10gb each. For you non-digital creatives out there: Your average high resolution photograph is going to weigh in at about 2-5 mb compressed. that's a factor of about 2000. All opened at the same time each file with north of 100 layers.

They're monsters.

And, it seems, i am a monster slayer!

Okay, stress is off. Just have to make the giant fake beach I illustrated to look real pink and yellow instead of purple.

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Listening to Veteran of the Psychic Wars

SUCH a great song!

“Veteran Of The Psychic Wars”

You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars I've been living on the edge so long Where the winds of limbo roar And I'm young enough to look at And far too old to see All the scars are on the inside I'm not sure that there's anything left to me

You ask me why I'm weary, why I can't speak to you You blame me for my silence say It's time I changed and grew But the war's still going on, dear, and there's no end that I know And I can't say if we're ever... I can't say if we're ever gonna be free

The voice of a weary soul bleating for his/her suffering to end. As if they'd fought all the wars that had ever been fought. And we're a lot like that when we're going through hell. Every day feels like it will be the day that grinds you into dust.

But wounds become scars, armor grows rusty and victories and loses become only stories we tell our grandchildren.

Not romantizing but capturing the weariness of the endless slog the days sometimes feel like.

The writer should have gotten a beehive and just sat and watched them g about their business. If one worker dropped dead, she dies a happy bee having performed her intended purpose to the fullest degree.

Perhaps that is where the frustration comes from: being imperfect, we can NEVER fullfill our intended purpose to the fullest degree.

Been living in the flames Been eating out or brains.

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1:17 am

Work is shelved for the weekend. It was just too much to deliver today. So we'll start again on Monday. I heroed all I could hero, but in the end, the client wants what they want. And their a drug company, so they can just throw money at a thing until it's there. Who knows, maybe I've got six months of work?

That'd fix my debt wagon.

So, what does a poor boy do at 1am on a Friday night in Dust Merdian?

Go cow tipping, of corse!

Haha!

Well, I stopped drinking. And I stopped bothering a clever soul on the other side of the the universe, so my options are: Sleep Art Entertainment

I SHOULD for for sleep.

But I opt for art. There's writing to do! There are sketchbooks to fill and paintings that need painting.

First top. pop down the corner store for a drink and some people watching.

I went a night or two ago about this time and it was filled with morlock men of my own persuasion: middle-aged, sans a female partner and wide awake in the tiny hours of night. Only I'd like to think I walked with purpose and good posture. Those poor fellows looked like hollowed out tree trunks.

A stiff storm would crack them to dust.

But Friday night... no Friday's a different here.

Pulling in to the QT, right off of the interstate, nearly every fuel pump has a vehicle with travel gear: a jeep with extra fuel canisters and a rooftop tent, a dodge caravan with luggage strapped on top, a Bronco with a bullet shaped cargo carrier on top and a bicycle rack filled with carbon frames in the rear.

Through the glass I see the flash of way too much breast. A young woman is wearing a top that leaves little to the imagination.

Once inside, out of the corner of my eye, I see she has three friends.

As a man of a certain age, I make a conscious effort not to stare, lear or even do more than the passing glance if they happen through my eye line. I am not ashamed to admit that I can appreciate a beautiful woman.

But gas stations on a Friday night are not the place for admiration. Where is? Dressed as they are? Life drawing, museums and anatomical studies. Where these young ladies are headed, doing anything more will only arrive in trouble squared and tripled, cubed and more. Julienned.

This is evidenced by the reaction of the other males in the space. It is quite busy and a dozen or so unaccompanied men linger about their business, I see one head then another and another turn in the direction of the gaggle of lasses. One man in particular makes a stage show out of his leering. Craning his neck and nearly walking into the slurpy machine as he tracks the girls across the floor.

Men. We are such big fat retards.

And predictable.

This is one of my favorite things to do: watching other men react to circumstances like this. They are clownish buffoons on the best of days, and sex, the idea of sex or the possibility of it makes them into drooling idiots.

Though me thinks this fellow is much lower on the evolutionary tree than his companions. His dress is deplorable—a pair of weirdly tight stonewashed jeans hanging midway between his thigh and his knees, ballooning blue and red boxers and a shirt with skulls and cigarettes. His shoes are untied and he has a black belt with metal studs.

This is probably a very special outfit for him. I think it is special in the same way that circus clowns wear special outfits.

The store clerks are oblivious to it all. This parade of tomfoolery. The girls, the boys, what they are wearing or who is looking at whom. They see thousands of people every day and even the most die-hard man watcher would grow weary of the constant parade.

As I exit, I see the tables are all occupied with various homeless. They do not live here, but they enjoy the good light, the clean tables and the safety. If i had to guess, they inhabit the abandoned warehouse next door. It isn't much to look at, but I'm sure if you'e got nowhere else to go, it's a palace.

The table denizens, like the clerks are indifferent to the girls as they chirp and cackle their way to the little sedan in which they all ride. The leering man says something to them out of my earshot. By their reaction, I don't think it was a welcome compliment.

The drive home is peaceful. The windows are down, the hot summer air refreshing and the stars twinkling vibrantly in this crystal clear night. I miss the moon. The lat time I had time to sit outside at night, we had a full moon. How quickly it cycles out.

A lot of things in life are this way. Filling the night sky of our lives, growing and then slowly diminishing, then, suddenly without realizing, gone!

As with the moon though, life is a cycle. It never stays dark for long.

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2am

The air smells of smoke. There is a grass fire somewhere. It's the middle of august, so no one's burning a fireplace tonight.

It is a pleasant hot this morning. The kind of heat that would be perect for camping. I wish I was camping tonight. Sitting by the ocean, or a lake and listen to the crickets and frogs.

Scraping the days grime from under my nails and dreaming of running through the woods with a pack of wolves—or—wild hogs more likely.

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The stars tonight. They are calling my name. OH! How'd I'd like to break free from the bonds of gravity and just GO.

I read an article about Steven Spielberg's 'Hook' (1991) and how it is both beloved and a confusing mess of a film. The part I took away from the piece was the filmmaker's fascination with staying young and flight. It pointed out how nearly every film he's made is either about flight or has planes as a central story element.

I immediately think of those WW2 era transport planes superimposed over a map or globe in the Indiana Jone's films. Or that the boys all take flight on their bicycles in E.T.

According to the essay, this changed after Hook. We got films, 'serious' films. Stuff like Schindler's List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan (planes in this one), AI, Minority Report, Catch me (planes), Terminal (planes), Munic, Bridge of Spies...

His last two: Fablemans and Disclosure Day are very non-flight.

So, mostly checks out.

The realization that wanting to fly is a common desire simultaneously excited me and made me realize I'm just a little less special than I thought I was.

That's probably a commonality as well.

Still, I wish I could fly. I always have.

A friend gave me a pretty nice reflecting telescope a few weeks ago. Tonight is a perfect night to set it up and see if I can find Saturn or Jupiter. Mars is fun to look as well.

But, when I check the star guide, I realize they're already over the horizon, or not up yet. I decide to wait for the moon. I haven't dialed in a telescope in years. Best to not start with some vague tiny point of light.

I want to sit and write all night long.

But. Maybe it's time for rest.

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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. —Susan Sontag

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#deardiary

You and me will be alone no more

I just really like that song right now, but in other news, I have my date tomorrow! It’s pretty late and I’m not super happy that I’ve stayed up but you live in you learn.

A few more pix from the archive this morning:

Second studio in Houston back in 2021.

Third studio in Houston circa 2024.

Writing space at 3rd Houston studio.

Early TSG script, written in Los Angeles around 2016, before I adopted more of a “Marvel Method” working from loose plots instead.

Have yet to come across pix from the fist Houston space, Denver studio, LA, or New York. It's all a jumbled mess.

#archive #TSG

There is a single encryption algorithm that mathematics declares unbreakable. Not “hard”: “impossible”, with a proof to back it up. And yet every time someone has tried to actually use it, it has fallen – not through a flaw in the mathematics, but through a banal human error. This is the story of a fascinating perfection that turns imperfect.

Almost all the cryptography we use every day – the kind that protects your bank account, your messages, your connection to this very site – rests on a bet: that certain mathematical problems are too slow or too hard to solve. Factoring six-hundred-digit numbers, computing discrete logarithms over elliptic curves: nobody today knows how to do it fast enough, and so we sleep soundly. But it's a peace with an expiry date, because “hard” is never “impossible”. The hardware changes, a cleverer algorithm comes along, quantum computing looms on the horizon, and the bet has to be renegotiated from scratch.

There is one, single exception. A cipher that isn't hard to break: it's impossible, and not in the advertising sense of the word. There's a proof, a theorem in the full sense. It's called the one-time pad, the single-use notebook. In a world full of threats to privacy and of governments playing “big brother” without knowing the basics of modern cryptography, it's worth telling the story of this cipher and of how, for a century, the real world has found a way to sidestep it every single time without ever scratching it.

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An invention from 1917

It all begins in a room at AT&T.

In 1917 Gilbert Vernam, an engineer at Bell Labs, invents a cipher to protect teleprinter communications. Vernam's idea is elegant and simple: electrically combine each character of the message with a character read from a punched paper tape – what we can call “the key”. The combination is a reversible operation: whoever holds the same tape undoes it by running it backwards and recovers the message; whoever doesn't have it sees only noise. If the tape says one thing and the message says another, what comes out on the wire is a sum of the two, unreadable to anyone without that tape.

The structure is already very solid, but the conceptual leap is made by a soldier. Captain Joseph Mauborgne, of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, realises that if the sequence on the tape were completely random, cryptanalysis would become enormously harder. It's the intuition that turns Vernam's cipher into the true one-time pad: not just “any” key, repeated or derived from a phrase, but a truly random key, as long as the message and used only once. Hence the name: a notebook of sheets, each sheet a key, each sheet torn off and destroyed after use.

The intuition is right, but it hangs unproven. For a quarter of a century no one manages to explain why it works so well: the proof is missing that the system is not merely very robust, but mathematically unassailable.

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Two lines running in the same year

Here the story forks, and the two lines that set off run in parallel for the rest of the tale. On one side there's the theory, which between 1941 and 1949 arrives at locking down the cipher with a proof. On the other there's the practice, which in those very same years begins to sabotage it. It's worth keeping both in view, because the whole point of the affair lies precisely in the distance between the two.

The line of the proof. The proof comes from the man who, in those same years, is inventing the entire theory of information from scratch: Claude Shannon. The special status of the Vernam-Mauborgne pad is established by him, about twenty-five years after its invention. In his Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems – circulated as a classified report in 1945 and published openly in 1949 – Shannon proves that the one-time pad is unassailable because every possible plaintext is equally probable given any ciphertext. This property is called perfect secrecy.

But Shannon isn't the first to get there. The Soviet mathematician Vladimir Kotelnikov – the same one behind the sampling theorem – had independently proved the absolute security of the one-time pad as early as 1941, in the very months of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in a report that, as far as anyone can tell, remains classified to this day. Unable to share it with the Allies, Shannon would have to rediscover the same properties on his own a few years later. The USSR, then, possesses the mathematical proof that its own code is unbreakable earlier and better than anyone else.

The line of the sabotage. In the very same span of time in which it deposits that proof, the Soviet apparatus begins to demolish it with its own hands. Between late 1943 and the end of the conflict, the surge in communications traffic and the relocation of Soviet industry towards the Urals push the personnel to reuse the cipher notebooks. To this is added the often-cited hypothesis of a more concentrated episode: with German troops just outside Moscow between 1941 and 1942, staff at the Centre are said to have printed more than one copy of the same key material. Immediate contributing cause or prolonged drift, the result is the same – and fatal, namely: the moment the same key enciphers two different messages, the one-time pad ceases to exist and becomes an ordinary cipher, attackable with statistics.

Let's stop a moment, because this is the crack that everything else passes through, and it's worth seeing up close. Call M₁ and M₂ two plaintexts, K the reused key, and let's use XOR (addition without carry, the operation the pad uses to combine key and text). The two ciphertexts are C₁ = M₁ ⊕ K and C₂ = M₂ ⊕ K. An attacker knows neither the messages nor the key: they know only C₁ and C₂, fished out of the ether. But if they combine them with each other, something remarkable happens:

C₁ ⊕ C₂ = (M₁ ⊕ K) ⊕ (M₂ ⊕ K) = M₁ ⊕ M₂

The key cancels out. It vanishes, because K ⊕ K is zero. What's left to the attacker is the XOR of the two plaintexts, with no trace of the secret remaining: and from there, knowing the structure of the underlying code and the statistics of the language – which letters and words recur, where the spaces fall – one begins to separate the two messages and reconstruct them. The perfection of the one-time pad lies entirely in the “one“: one key, one message. Reusing it a second time doesn't weaken it a little. It cancels it.

Theory and sabotage, the proof and its demolition, in the same country and in the same years. It's the irony on which the entire story of VENONA rests.

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VENONA: forty years inside a crack

On the other side of the ocean, someone finds that crack. In 1943 the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service launches an ultra-secret project against Soviet diplomatic traffic, believed impregnable precisely because it was enciphered with a one-time pad. It changes name a couple of times – JADE, then BRIDE – before settling on a word chosen at random, with no meaning: VENONA.

For a year, near-total darkness. The first breach is opened, in late 1943, by Lieutenant Richard Hallock, who works on Soviet commercial traffic – the so-called “Trade”, the messages dealing with matters of exchange – and notices that the Soviets are reusing the pad pages. Hallock and his colleagues recover a significant quantity of key tables, but it's only the outer layer of an onion. The messages aren't enciphered with the pad alone: they are first converted into numbers via a complex code, and then super-enciphered by adding the numerical stream of the one-time pad. With the pad broken, there remains the codebook to reconstruct, the one that turns words into figures.

To that work sets a young analyst, Meredith Gardner – a linguist, a veteran of breaking Japanese diplomatic codes, who after the war taught himself Russian. It's he who penetrates what will turn out to be NKVD traffic, and later GRU, reconstructing the code piece by piece. The first reconstructions of the codebook he owes, by his own admission, to the linguist Marie Meyer; and it's worth recalling, against a certain spy-novel imagery, that most of the cryptanalysts were young women. The dates of the breakthrough are precise and close together: on 13 December 1946 Gardner reads a KGB message discussing the 1944 American presidential campaign; a week later, on 20 December 1946, he breaks another – sent to Moscow two years earlier – containing the list of the leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project. The proof that the atomic bomb had been infiltrated.

As early as 1945 the very existence of VENONA had been revealed to the USSR by Bill Weisband, a Soviet agent embedded in the U.S. Army's SIGINT. The Soviets, that is, knew they could be read. But the mathematics of the pad offers no retroactive remedy: the messages already intercepted and enciphered with reused keys remained vulnerable regardless, whatever Moscow knew. There was no flaw to close; there was only an error already committed, frozen in the ether, that the Americans would go on squeezing for decades.

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Putting a name to the ghosts

From there the work is slow and stubborn. In the summer of 1947 Gardner produces enough results to write a “Special Report” laying out the project's potential to the intelligence leadership: it's that document which triggers the long collaboration between cryptanalysts and the FBI to put names to the spies. Because even with the pad broken and the code reconstructed, one last layer remains: the people hidden behind the cryptonyms, the code names. New York is TYRE, Washington CARTHAGE, San Francisco BABYLON, in an imagery drawn from classical antiquity. Some cryptonyms appear dozens of times and are fairly transparent; others once or twice only, and remain unknown to this day. The system, after all, betrays the same vice as the pad: sometimes the KGB reused the same covername for different people, untangled only by context or geography. Reuse as the recurring sin, at every level.

When the cryptonyms find a face, the history of the Cold War is rewritten. Twenty-one decrypted cables, all from 1944-45, concern Julius Rosenberg, first “Antenna” and then “Liberal”. The Britons Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess of the Cambridge Five fall, and with them dozens of other Soviet sources inside the American and British governments. And yet, in proportion, the haul is tiny: the Venona Papers are some 3,000 cables, forced slowly over a project lasting nearly forty years, from 1943 to 1980 – three thousand messages out of several hundred thousand intercepted, a laughable fraction, made possible only by the reuse of the keys.

Important note: the cipher was not broken. The mathematics of Shannon and Kotelnikov held perfectly. No one “solved” the one-time pad. It was the wartime logistics of the Soviet apparatus – notebooks reprinted under pressure, keys reused to save time – that handed Moscow's secrets to the Americans for the next forty years. The theory was perfect. The hand that applied it was not.

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The numbers still floating in the ether today

You might think a technique of teleprinters and paper notebooks is archaeology. It isn't. The one-time pad, precisely because it's the only system that requires no computer and fears no amount of the enemy's computing power, is still today the tool of whoever must communicate with an agent in the field without leaving a trace. All it takes is a radio.

Anyone with a shortwave receiver can stumble into them: synthetic voices, often female, reciting endless sequences of numbers in groups of five, sometimes preceded by a little tune or a signature melody. They're called number stations, they've been transmitting for almost a century and for decades were an officially non-existent mystery. They aren't an urban legend: several espionage trials have confirmed their use, and the messages are typically enciphered with a one-time pad. Those groups of five digits are exactly the method of the cipher notebooks: the services have long converted words and phrases into groups of digits via a codebook, and then combine secret numbers with them by modular addition – the same carry-less sum we saw cancel out in VENONA, only done by hand on paper instead of electrically on tape.

And if the number stations are the voice that calls the agent, at the other end of the line there was hardware built precisely to answer without being found: devices like the Soviet R-353 “Proton” (below), which pre-encoded the message onto a magnetic tape and then fired it off in Morse at very high speed – up to 250 words per minute – so as not to leave whoever was listening the time to locate the transmitter with radio direction finding. It's the same principle as the pad, but on the physical plane: if the one-time pad makes the content unassailable, the burst transmission makes the position of the sender unassailable. Two ways of vanishing, both perfect as long as the human link holds.

The case that brought them to court is Cuban. The station nicknamed “¡Atención!” – catalogued by radio listeners as HM01 – becomes the first in the world to be officially and publicly accused of transmitting to spies, at the centre of a federal trial after the FBI, on 12 September 1998, dismantles the Cuban Wasp Network. The arrests number ten; the five who go to trial will go down in history as the “Cuban Five”.

And here the lesson repeats itself. The one-time pad is mathematically perfect, and indeed the FBI doesn't break it. It doesn't need to: when it arrests the network, it recovers the pad software, the shortwave receivers and the decryption keys on floppy disk. Not only that. The enciphered messages found in the apartments matched the transmissions the FBI had recorded from the ether during surveillance. No one forced anything: the prosecution had in hand both the intercepted signal and the key taken from the drawer, and simply overlaid them – the two things every tradecraft manual insists you never keep together. The mathematically unbreakable secret defeated by a lock.

And it's precisely here that the system's residual strength lies, when used well: the transmissions leave no digital trace, receiving a signal is not in itself proof of a crime, and the moment the pad is used and destroyed the cryptographic trail is cut. Nothing to intercept, nothing to decrypt after the fact. It's not archive theory: ¡Atención! is transmitting to this day, nearly thirty years on from those arrests. Provided, always, that no one forgets a floppy in a drawer.

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The perfect cipher lives only on the blackboard

Line up the pieces of this story: the one-time pad is, literally, the only encryption method humanity has ever conceived whose unbreakability we can prove. Used correctly, it remains among the most solid ever invented. And in a century it has never been beaten on its own ground – mathematics. It has always been beaten on ours.

VENONA doesn't stem from a weakness of the cipher, but from the logistics of an apparatus under wartime pressure. The Wasp Network doesn't fall because someone decrypted its numbers, but because it leaves the disks in a drawer. The weak point is never the algorithm. It's the key to be distributed, the randomness hard to produce, the discipline impossible to maintain, the physical medium that survives and accuses. It's always the friction of the real world against an idea born frictionless.

On the blackboard, in the clean abstraction where keys are random by definition, distribute themselves by magic and destroy themselves without leaving ash. But we live elsewhere: a world of approximate generators, of reprinted notebooks, of forgotten floppies, of exhausted people who at three in the morning cut a corner. The only mathematically unbreakable cipher we possess works perfectly everywhere – except in reality.

And perhaps this is the most honest thing cryptography can teach us, well beyond cryptography: perfection is provable, but it is not inhabitable.

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(This article was born from a private experiment: I tried to write my own implementation of the one-time pad in Python. The code worked, but in doing it I reconstructed, without meaning to, exactly the errors you've read about here – the not-random-enough generator, the reused key, the details left in the clear. Touching with my own hands how easy it is to get it wrong was the best way to understand why, in a century, the perfect cipher has never held up on contact with us, poor imperfect human beings.)

References and further reading

The theory

• Claude E. Shannon, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 28, no. 4, October 1949, pp. 656-715. The paper that proves perfect secrecy.
• Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography, Memorandum MM 45-110-02, Bell Laboratories, 1 September 1945. The classified version, four years ahead of the open publication.
• Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, 1948. The twin work that founds information theory.
• Vladimir A. Kotelnikov, report on the absolute security of the Vernam cipher, 1941 (still classified). Independent proof, earlier than Shannon's.

The history (VENONA)

• National Security Agency, VENONA: An Overview (Cryptologic Almanac, 50th Anniversary Series) – declassified official document.
• National Security Agency, The Venona Story – official monograph on the cryptonyms and Gardner's decryptions.
• NSA-CIA, Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957, ed. R. L. Benson and M. Warner, 1996. The collection of the roughly 2,900 messages translated and made public from July 1995.
• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999. The reference work on the identifications.
• Chronology of Gardner's decryptions (13 and 20 December 1946), the roles of Marie Meyer, Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips and Richard Hallock, pad reuse and the revelation of VENONA to the USSR by Bill Weisband (1945).

The number stations

• Records of the Wasp Network / Cuban Five trial (arrests 12 September 1998; trial material declassified from 2001), on the use of the “¡Atención!” / HM01 station as evidence.
• Crypto Museum, technical page on the Soviet R-353 “Proton” spy transceiver.
• Priyom.org and ENIGMA 2000 – communities of radio listeners who catalogue and still monitor shortwave transmissions.

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