“We first got together when he was a senior and I was a junior, and we got married back in 2011. We’re a couple of lovebirds, for sure.”

Reading the Odyssey, I keep feeling the phantom audience for its oral performance - can hear them cheering when Telemachus says Ithaca’s a simple island fit only for goats yet he loves it - can hear the storyteller giving a mid-story recap for stragglers. It’s haunted, haunting.

I’ve long felt the dichotomy between reading for status/progress/duty and reading for pleasure. Aiming mostly these days for the latter, I appreciated this recent Anne Trubek essay, “Why I’ve Been Reading”. (Her whole Notes From a Small Press newsletter is consistently great.)

We call meat in a tube a “hot dog” so why is tubal cheese called “string cheese”?

Let’s get it right, “cheese dog”

This morning’s realization: shortbread is bulletproof cookie.

No, wait. Now I’m hearing that I’ve got it backwards. Bulletproof coffee is actually shortjoe.

The eternal, rhythmic challenge of falling out of routine, recognizing that, and then falling back into it. Losing and regaining my routine IS my routine.

If these are the guardrails AI requires, we’re totally screwed.

Taking four months off from writing Lightplay was a necessity—newborns take up all your time!—but it also gave me a chance to re-think what I’m doing. For one, I’m breaking up with Sunday. The new thing: publishing on the full moon. It feels right.

“Email workflow.” You say those two words and you’ve already bored 99% of people. But for me, setting up gmail to auto-load the next message, using the “e” shortcut to archive, using send-and-archive, and switching it to auto-load the next-most-recent message… has markedly improved my life.

I finally put up my essay “Night/Light” up on my website. (It went out in Lightplay last October.) It’s about a night walk, the thin blue line movement, poverty, an old folk tale, reptiles. Mostly it’s about the mystery and fear of not knowing our neighbors. I think it holds up.

Taking four months off from writing Lightplay was a necessity—newborns take up all your time!—but it also gave me a chance to re-think what I’m doing. For one, I’m breaking up with Sunday. The new thing: publishing on the full moon. It feels right.

This disaster where a Koch daughter bought lit world power through founding+bankrolling Catapult, then got bored reminds me of my own early-twenties fantasy of some billionaire benefactor appearing, waving money wand, and unshackling me from capitalism. Nope. Socialism is the way

Slugging is the new goblin mode

Little-known fact: orange wine is just bad rosé

A Chinese balloon! Oh nooooaauuwwrr! They are spying on us with their evil-wrought balloon!

bought a dozen pencils at the bookstore - came home and sharpened them - now my engineering people are all jealous

Struggling to get hooked on the next book I want to read — then, in bath, suddenly engrossed — letting the mystery in.

My dad just told me the rent on his first place out in the country after leaving LA, at the end of Pigeon Point Road in Humboldt: fifty cents a month. 1969-70.

To have been a boomer!

I’m once again thinking of this haiku by Taneda Santōka:

141

busy pulling away

at paddy weeds—

those big balls*

Only enhanced by translator Burton Watson’s asterisk:

*In Santōka’s time, Japanese farmers working in the fields in hot weather often wore only a simple loincloth.

Sometimes the good feelings curdle. Then it’s time for solitude, and for straining emotion through the cheesecloth of contemplation.

To make, uhhh, “mozzarella art”?

Reading that no one knows who exploded sections of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 undersea pipelines, I can’t help but think of the acts of anti-fossil fuel sabotage in KSR’s The Ministry For the Future. Maybe it wasn’t Russia! Maybe the eco-terrorists are finally here!

www.washingtonpost.com/national-…

I’m sorry to report that over on the bird site the you-can-only-read-four-tweets-if-not-logged-in tool seems to have broken again, or been disabled. A pity for a social media junkie like me. Back to visiting individual people’s pages and gobbling up all their tweets.

I’m sorry but scientists have now found “space hurricanes” that are “Over 600 miles in diameter with multiple arms that rotate counterclockwise … contain a calm center, or eye, and ‘rain’ electrons into the upper atmosphere”? If Philip Pullman was crowing when it turned out “dark matter” was real, he ought to have a real field day with this one.

Another capsicin observation: there is a specific, peculiar sensation in your mouth when it is burning with chili and then you take a gulp of very hot coffee. This sensation is for me so distinctive that today when I felt it, my mind whisked me right to my favorite diner, Cafe One, in Noyo, where I always get the huevos rancheros and wash them down with some delicious, half-burnt diner coffee, black.