Among the many pleasures for which I am grateful are my long, mindless walks. I’ll often have a destination in mind, but no purpose: a bench by the water, a bookstore, a bar, or just a loop around the neighborhood. I took such a walk this morning. I was up early. I read. I wrote….
A Bookmark
While reading a book of poems by Lucille Clifton, I notice that the bookmark I’m using, water-warped with small tears along the edges, is from Borders.com. I search my memory for the last time I was in a Borders store. I try to remember its physical location – strip mall across the street from the…
Meditation on the Morning Routine
Nearly every morning after breakfast, I sit on my sofa and read. The sun shines blindingly through a large window facing east. It creeps from the white tufted ottoman / storage bench where I prop my feet, inches up my legs, and eventually settles on my hands, arms, torso, and face. Here, I drink my…
My Personal Neo-Luddite Commitment to Shunning AI
In my lifetime, few things have pushed their way in to public consciousness and changed our social fabric the way tech has: smartphones, social media, and now AI. Publicly (in this space and in conversations at my neighborhood bar) I don’t hesitate to share my distrust and disdain for tech. Privately, that disdain is far…
Breakfast Conversations
Every once in a while, the fishhook of longing will catch me by surprise and yank me gasping towards the surface of some distant memory. The feeling is a little hard to describe. It’s a mix between envisioning some version of the future that I’d like to see come to pass and remembering some version…
Eat the Rich?
I love living in San Francisco. I love living in California. It’s sunny most of the time and seldom too hot or too cold. I love being near the water and the mountains. I love the quiet majesty of the redwoods. I love the chaos and unpredictability of the people on city busses. I love…
Anticipation and Resignation
I spent most of April interviewing for a new job. I made it to the final round and had good reason to believe I was the lead candidate. As of the beginning of this post, I have not heard anything (I sent a follow up and may know by the time I’m done writing). With…
Grumpiness, That’s What I Bring to the Table
Some days, I’m just grumpy, at odds with the world, and probably heading in the wrong direction. Wednesday was one of those days. I was fine earlier in the day, but then two things happened that sent my grump-ometer into the danger zone. First, I read an article in The Guardian about how single women…
On the Edge of Maybe
Oh, it’s been that type of a morning, that type of a day. Unshowered and wearing yesterday’s jeans for most of the day, I’ve been caught between reading and writing and going through old word documents. One document was a poem I wrote equating unrequited love and unwanted attention to the emails that still arrive…
Let It Be Known…
At the corner of Fillmore and Pixley, just a few blocks from my apartment and along the route of my evening walks, is a building that was recently painted bright red with white lettering advertising a new dating app call Known. In the traditional click-bait style of tech-based hype and obfuscation, the building converted to…
Art Fair Weekend
A brown-skinned artist dressed in dusty and muted colors and wearing a copper bracelet stood at the edge of the promenade near the beach facing west. His tripod easel sat atop a low cement wall that separates the walkway from the beach, and on his easel, a thin block of wood the size of a…
The Dumbest Timeline Ever
Maxxerism? Dumbmaxxing? Shallowmaxxing? Yesterday, for no reason other than seeing an article about him on a newsfeed, I read the Wikipedia page for the online influencer Clavicular. A few days earlier, I did a shallow dive (another Wikipedia page) into “looksmaxxing.” I feel a few IQ points lower for having subjected myself to this information….