Found this in a stack of photos my grandma took. On the back it says, “We saw the fireboat.”

I like how the house my dad built kind of looks like a shogun’s keep.

As I listen to more Hermanos Gutiérrez, I have to say, their debut album has an almost platonically perfect cover:

My brother’s partner put on some music, and I was like, Cool, some “Wicked Games” vibes, love this. And then I was like, What are you doing, fool, ask what it is!

Hermanos Gutiérrez, it turns out. On repeat, on my ears.

England is a country that takes its hydrangeas extremely seriously, and, you gotta hand it to them, very good hydrangea.

Just realized that everything they say about Scorpios, it’s actually hella true of Libras, we’re just a lil sly about it.

I’ve decided to experiment with cross-posting image-only posts from Jasperland to Instagram. Definitely playing with fire: I’m a like-addled social media junkie, 7 years sober from the ‘Gram. Initial impression: woof, that timeline has become absolutely choked with ugly auto-playing videos and ads.

Platforms may cannibalize what came before, but eventually they generate their own formats:

• • Spotify started with CD culture, ended with bland “mood” playlists full of 90-second vibe-clones

• • Google started with the open web, ended full of bland, SEO-optimized pap

• • Amazon started with books, quickly added 100% of physical culture, and ended with endless fake-sounding SEO-optimized pseudo-products

• • Ebooks started with the vast catalog of all books ever written, ended with direct-to-ebook authors cranking out 6+ novels a year to keep their speedreading fans satisfied

Of course the cannibalized thing usually persists, impoverished but still alive albeit continuing to be cannibalized. How interesting, though, to look directly the formats generated specifically for and by these platforms. We should pray that the places we go for culture in the next twenty years call forth formats that feel less hollow, less joyless, and less “optimized” than these.

Mendocino, August 2023

One of my favorite things about public school classrooms is the way particularly cool print objects persist over the decades, passed from one teacher to the next, to the next. I was extra delighted to find that my dad’s late-70s map of Mendocino County persists in a 6th-grade classroom in Mendo:

A writer in this weekend’s workshop expressed a pet peeve against the word “that”. Said she searches her draft for the word and excises it. She called me out for being a big “that”-er.

Huh?!

“That” is one of the great pronouns, a key glue word, a ligament. It’s indespensable. And that’s that.

I love writing essays and poems, but maybe it’s just because I’ve figured out how. Or because they reward a try-hard like me. Writing in the literary forms of this century—“blog voice,” “Twitter voice,” “newsletter voice”—feels more challenging. Is it because they require a hard-to-fake breeziness?

Great explanatory power in Talia Lavin’s latest, “The Christian Right’s Deal With the Devil”:

Political attitudes and policies that can seem inexplicable and monstrous from the outset always have their reasons, their own internally coherent logic, even if those reasons seem outrageous to outsiders.

If we want to understand today’s religious right, Talia argues, their actions make a lot more sense when you realize that for millions, the Satanic Panic never actually ended.

I have a confession. I am the “J” who recommended this story about Florida’s free Wikipedia content hiring someone to move massive blocks.

The singularity, it is near.

Grateful for “Fatphobia is the literary world’s final frontier” by Emma Copley Eisenberg. Like anyone, I love a good literary typology. But also, man, becoming aware of fatphobia both internal and societal is such a gauze-lifting-from-eyes experience. (One I want to write more about myself.)

Stroud, July 2023

Noyo, July 2023

London, July 2023

Leave behind your ego,

Of superego be rid.

Only bring government-issued

You—unbridled, real id.

Did I just get fat shamed by a literal PAPER BAG???

Yesterday we drove from LA to Mendocino. Stopped in Petaluma for burritos, and noticed: more than 50% of the men in line were wearing shorts, and not athletic shorts or swim trunks but tailored shorts with belt loops and zippers.

NorCal I missed you!

I of course was wearing shorts myself.

Need an LA retelling of Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Give a Cop a Helicopter

Someone fashionable spends a lot of money on clothes. Someone stylish dresses in a way that accentuates and complements their beauty and personality.

West Hollywood, June 2023

“we did it Joe”