Killing and Composting
A few weeks ago I decided to kill one of my projects. I’ve been running a little podcast called I Will Read To You since September of 2021, and in the past little-over-a-year I’ve recorded and published nearly 200 poems…
Sick and Tired
I’ve been in Seattle, visiting family and pet-sitting for a week. I’ve been sick for nearly the same duration. I had a few days of relative normalcy and then—immediately after driving back from the dock where I dropped my sister,…
Centaurs
One of my favorite myth-related conceptual labels is that of chess tournament centaurs: a human who plays with computer assistance. Centaur players tend to outperform both software and human players, though sometimes straight-up AI will have the advantage and some…
Slow Fast Near Far
I think (and write) about consumption a lot, because—as someone who loves to create things—what I consume informs what I produce, and the time and energy I spend consuming are resources I cannot use to make things. Consequently, I use…
Social Media
It hasn’t been a great year for social media companies. They’re still raking in money, dominating the ad-sector, and shaping personal, economic, and political discourse but they’re also at the center of many lawsuits and scandals. The increasingly dominant narrative…
Questions for Deciding
When I’m mulling over some kind of new opportunity, relationship dynamic, career change, or other deviation to my existing lifestyle structure I work through a series of questions, including: Will this increase or decrease the number of options and opportunities…
Small, Simple, Every Day
How do we become the people we need to be to live the lives we want to live, do the things we want to do, and face the challenges we want to (or must, because of forces beyond our control)…
Coiling and Uncoiling
For the past few years, I’ve been spring-coiling. That’s how I think of it, anyway: a focused process of assessing, experimenting, consolidating, retracting, refurbishing, replacing, upgrading, upskilling, scanning my personal, interpersonal, and professional horizons, and generally questioning every aspect of…
Cause-Orientation
When you’re cause-oriented—there’s something you care deeply about and you’ve committed part of yourself, your life to it—it’s normal and understandable that you might wring yourself out in support of that cause on a semi-regular basis. You believe in this…
The Work Itself
I’ve had a similar conversation with maybe a half-dozen people recently, about how “work”—in the sense of doing what one does to make a living, and especially creative work—has slowly grown in definitional scope to encompass things well beyond the…