Post and Beam Construction

The first thing I ever remember being obsessed with was building forts in the woods with my friends. Big ones. Elaborate ones. We'd spend entire weekends hauling sticks and branches and figuring out how to make things stand up that probably shouldn't have stood up. Nobody told us to do any of it. It was just what we wanted to be doing.

I forgot about that for a long time. Went to college, failed out, came back, got a political science degree, ended up in grad school, and spent a while trying to figure out what the point of my life was supposed to be.

One of the jobs I picked up during grad school was at a post and beam construction company — the kind of operation where, instead of framing a house out of dimensional lumber, you build it out of huge, exposed hand-cut timbers joined together with traditional mortise-and-tenon joinery. The structure is the design. The beams don't get covered up by drywall. They become the ceiling. It's an old style of building, and it requires real craft. I loved it. I spent my days outside, moving giant pieces of wood around, planing joints, fitting timbers together. At the end of every day there was a thing in front of me that hadn't been there in the morning. When the house was done, you could walk inside it and put your hand on what you'd built.

I didn't do it for long, and I wasn't doing it to build a career. But something about that work stuck with me, and I didn't fully understand why until a long time later. There's a version of me that would have been very happy just doing that for the rest of my life. I didn't take that path, but I've never forgotten it. The pull I have toward building things with AI now is the same pull that made me spend whole weekends in the woods when I was eight. The material keeps changing. The thing underneath doesn't.