Love this album cover, the title, and how it looks on YouTube.

The music isn’t half-bad, either. Ambient-influenced, classical-inflected, full of deep-voiced strings and the droning energy and circularity of focus-core.

The fine art of bathmaxing.

Pacific Design Center, viewed from West Hollywood Park during the WeHo Pride music festival, 2023.

Like a cherry tree, I too need over a thousand chilling hours before I can produce my great gift.

West Hollywood, June 2023

easemax (v.), to arrange one’s life and actions in the way that ensures the easiest path and the greatest comfort at all moments. Jimmy hit another level of easemaxing when his boss started letting him work entirely from bed, where pajama-clad he ate snacks his mom brought in on special tray.

West Hollywood, May 2023

At some point we spoonerized oatmeal into moat eel. Now every time I eat the stuff I’m bothered by visions of a fishing rod poking through a crenel, a cauldron bubbling in a dingy castle kitchen, a fragrant bowl of fish gruel. What a time the chivalric era must have been.

It’s nice to wear a hat at the museum, to keep the light out of your eyes.

In order to actually practice (v.) we must develop a practice (n.). Otherwise we’re just dabbling (v.).

An introvert, I crave the company of friends but can wear myself out on voices, stories, conversation.

Nifty trick: in periods of heavy socializing, I stop listening to podcasts entirely.

“Mike DeWine,” screams the German villain, gesturing wildly at the grapes, the press, the fermentation vessels.

The siren call to write a scene where your protagonist makes spaghetti, listens to the end of a baseball game on the radio, eats solo, then listens to a jazz record and sips whiskey.

Many a sloop has wrecked on the perilous shoals of Murakami.

Feeling affection for the 18-year-old who wrote this, justifying a briefly-updated blog.

Affection—and continuity of self.

It’s a pity that the most noted war criminal of my lifetime took “own feet at other end of bathtub” as his preferred genre. I’d as soon not think about him during my special bathtime.

West Hollywood, May 2023.

The distance between exposing a photo and seeing it in full resolution has been narrowing for two centuries. Yet outside of elaborate studio setups, the most photographers today can do is preview on a small screen and zoom in.

A potential “new thing” AR/VR headsets might do. For better/worse.

Re: 2015 travels in Tibet: The further I get from that trip, the more impressed I am by the photos from it, all taken on a standard-issue iPhone 5. I had so much fun with that camera.

I re-did the Lightplay archives so each entry has a hyperlinked cover image. In doing so, I realized one of my 2015 travelogues from south-eastern Tibet never got posted. So I tracked it down, added it, and sure felt a pang of missing that corner of the world.

The scariest words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to decide what you can and cannot do with your body.

Santa Monica, May 2023

Schadenfreude, n., pleasure derived from another’s misfortune.

__________, n., relief derived from the decline of a social media platform where you never developed a following.

Sitedeklinenrelief?

Today in megalomania: Who is the American Bohumil Hrabal? Could I?

Just re-installed Webster’s 1913 onto the MacOS dictionary app—and it continues to absolutely rip. (Somehow my previous install had broken.) Thanks @craigmod@mastodon.social for the last-mile work of getting this out-of-copyright masterpiece into an app where one actually, constantly uses it.

West Hollywood, April 2023