It bothers me that I can’t remember exactly when and where I met Jack. I’m usually pretty good about that. It was probably 2007-ish, probably at SXSW or An Event Apart. I was going to a lot of conferences back then, meeting all kinds of web people from all over the place, and Jack was a web person, though we didn’t talk about the web all that much once we found other things we had… See more →

We’ve been prepping my childhood home for an estate sale taking place in a few weeks, and my primary task has been getting my remaining unsalable old junk out of there. A lot of it has turned out to be assignments from college: a big stack of portfolios filled with charcoal nudes and various graphic design things mounted on black boards with tracing paper overlays for professors’ commentary. Sketches, marker comps, paste-ups, digital prints. Typesetting,… See more →

I was at a funeral today and felt all the appropriate funeral feelings but I also could not stop thinking about Coffin Flop

I got a speeding ticket the other day, my first in probably more than 25 years. After a decade and a half of not owning a car, L and I reluctantly accepted a hand-me-down Hyundai Tucson a couple years ago so we could be more nimble for the sake of our aging parents. Not coincidentally, I’ve been driving it a lot lately, making regular visits to the memory-care residence my mom now calls home, or… See more →

I don’t know if it’s because some new responsibilities are taking me out of the house more than usual, or because humanity’s current ugly streak makes everything else look more beautiful, or because the chlorophyll decided now was the time to leave it all on the stage, but I’m really noticing the fall colors this year. Waking up to this radiant pear tree outside our window has been a quiet blessing.

It seems like a cliché for a drug dealer to be working his stash out of a Burger King bathroom, but I hadn’t personally encountered it before. Or if I had, the operation was more subtle than this guy’s.

Not that he needed to be subtle. The place was mostly deserted, as often seems to be the case for legacy fast-food joints in the 21st century, at least in the suburbs. When did people stop… See more →

When I changed high schools after the ninth grade, there was some confusion about how each school handled its history curriculum, and in the shuffle, I lamentably never got a formal education in 20th century world history. I assume this is why I was never required to read this book. Reading it now, decades late to the, uh, party, it’s hard not to wonder how it would have affected me as a teen.

Would it… See more →

After a long day, as I made my dejected drift toward Suburban Station’s 18th Street exit, I saw a mural cheerfully proclaiming, “My art gives me a voice,” to which I was startled to find myself reflexively responding aloud, “Oh, that’s cool. Mine slowly fucking kills me.”

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →