We were walking to dinner and trying to decide where to eat when we ran in to a woman my girlfriend knew and was becoming friends with. They had met while walking the dogs – or something like that. That’s not really where the memory begins. I was thinking that I should pick up sushi…
City Day, All the Things
Yesterday, Saturday, was one of those city days that had a little bit of everything: a touch of crazy, a lot of beauty, a little whimsy, and a mix of weather. The day started out gray and cool. I had my waffles, wrote a little, then caught a mid-morning bus to the Haight. Also getting…
A Year Ago Today
In the middle of a slow morning one year ago, I got a call from my best friend’s wife. My friend had had a massive heart attack. He didn’t make it. I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like that day. I couldn’t tell you if it was sunny or gray. I can remember…
What I’ve Known Influences What I Want
It was while reading a poem that begins with drinking white wine from jade cups in Szechuan China that I tried to imagine different lives, more exotic lives, lives I haven’t lived, lives I may never live. I started to write my own version of it – late-night dinner parties with interesting friends; stars and…
Stuck Somewhere on a Dance Floor
Another week has passed and I’m still waltzing around the edges of life’s ever-expanding dance floor. The dance partners change frequently: wonder for one turn, disappointment for another, curiosity, skepticism, worry, and reverie. All the while, the tune in the background is a series of questions – most of them variations on that eternal theme…
For the Love of Slow Mornings
When I can arrange it, I revel in the slowness of mornings. With sunshine and coffee, I try to stretch the moments for as long as I can. In the early hours, I love the way the mind loafs, when allowed to loaf. Meditations on people, or moments, or life’s many wandering paths, or the…
Social Butterfly, Lone Wolf, Hermit Crab
The sun is almost noon high. The sky is clear and pale blue. I’m having a tasty and simple lunch. I’ve already been to the farmer’s market, and gone for a run by the Bay, and written a few words that might become poems. The day feels good. Friday, after work, I took the train…
Terms of Endearment: A Meditation on Memory
“Hey babes, I got the wordle in two this morning…” At six-something in the morning with the sun already bright and streaming through the windows, I scrolled social media and the news. Someone shared a poem, someone shared their outrage, someone shared that they solved the morning Wordle and now they feel invincible, someone shared…
Too Much Chaos
Perhaps the best indicator of my current attitude/mood/ambivalence/confusion with and towards the world is that out of the last 15 posts listed on the back-end of this blog, 11 of them remain in draft form. Despite attempting to write nearly every day, nothing coalesces. The subjects range from bitching about AI, to the enshittification of…
A More Productive April than I Thought
Today I was going to go to an open studio event (local artists opening up their studios to the public), but I feel a sickness coming on. It’s that scratchy nasal feeling. I feel like I’ve gotten sick more often in my year-and-a-half out here in San Francisco than I have in other places and…
A Grateful Pause to Start the Day
From the corner of my charcoal gray sofa in the not yet nine am sunlight, I pause my reading and writing to answer a text. We’ll meet at the Polk thing at 1. The we being one of my friends and I and the Polk thing being a street fair with music and beer and…
The Phone as Part of My Morning Routine
If I don’t want to start the day with the heaviness of the world, or the anger over our present moment, I would do well to avoid the news and my handheld sadness machine. Yet, mixed among the daily frustrations and outrage are poems and painting and things that speak the soul’s deeper truths. My…