1.23.2026 - Weekly Digest
Hello youse from San Francisco! Still working on design ideas for the site but didn't want to procrastinate on posting any longer. Most of these were sketched out a few weeks ago before I took that break; I stand by their questionable relevance. Hope you're safe and well wherever you are.
-JA
1.19.2026
Steinbeck book on a pile of pillows by a street sign. Old hippies smelling of patchouli and cigarettes. Wolf on a leash. NARCAN spraypainted on a construction dumpster. Blanket laid out on the sidewalk displaying handmade bras - no customers. Peanut butter, expired 2019. Ancient heating contraption, you can see the flames, like an old boiler. I should order some coal on DoorDash. Is and isn’t the place Joan Didion wrote about. Certainly not the scene. Searched online for what happened to the five year old girl on LSD she wrote about. She could still be around. She could be on the Moon by now. Or sleeping at a bus stop or running an apothecary or dispensing interdimensional advice.
1.20.2026
Sciatica for weeks, a nerve jammed up somewhere since the blackout. Woke up at 4am when the lights came on and couldn’t go back to sleep. No idea when I went to bed. Somewhere between 5pm and midnight. I was holding the tablet up over my head to watch Bowen Yang say goodbye on SNL and the bed sagged in that place and when I stood up everything was off by a few degrees like my spine was listing. Limped my way down to the beach and it straightened up but it went all the way up the neck and made me feel twice my age. Sure I know about radial nerve damage and how a compressed or slipped cervical vertebra can make you think you’re having a heart attack or go even further down and cramp your hand or make you think you’re about to be paralyzed. Sometimes you roll up a towel and snag the bottom of the back of your skull and pull up toward the sky to put things right. Sometimes you have a semi-professional put you on the rack. Sometimes none of it works and you have to lie straight as a board like you're the subject of a seance for days or for weeks until your ligaments decide they're better together than apart. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. Let's say entropy.
1.21.2026
Few days in a house I’ve come to know and think of as a second home, which would be accurate if I had a first home but who’s keeping track. Made a point to sit upright, to not hold screens in front of my face. Fed the rabbit who lives in the closet, twice a day. In the evenings he emerges, tentative, every time it’s his first time, he’ll only stay on the rugs and the padding, the hardwood floor represents some evolutionary challenge, repulses him. Sniffs around my ankles and chews on my sleeves. His teeth are sharp but he is soft and presents no immediate danger. It’s hanging out with a rabbit that makes me realize I really don’t have PTSD reactions anymore. I don’t love crowds or loud noises but that’s not atypical and I’ve been doing these deep dives into neurology, trying to understand why I am the way I am and not the way you are, or why you are the way you are and whether that makes us compatible as friends or doomed to intolerate one another. I don’t want to intolerate you.
1.22.2026
No interest in calendars. My mom usually sends me one with bucolic photos of Ireland. Nostalgia for a place I’ve only been once and a long time ago and generally thought was fine. Analogies interest me though. This glen on the April page reminds me of a place I think of as a glen, or my friend Glen from middle school who always played a barbarian in D&D and was a barbarian in real life, streaking through pine groves with his muscles all over the place, peeing into sleet storms out of sheer enjoyment. The stretch along the Panhandle on Fell Street reminds me of a similar stretch along insert French Name for Catholic Saint Here Park in Montreal, the park I walked through every day for months and came to think of as home, where I saw the place lit up in arctic temperatures when I first got there and went on space walks with my mask frozen to my face and the mucous within solid like iron shavings, where I couldn’t make out the purpose or scope of the buildings, glowing officially in the frozen air, blurry and inchoate. Months later I walked through there every day. I’ve written about that place, that park, more than once, but as I refuse to look things up when I compose these posts anymore you’ll have to take my word for it. That's not true I just looked up inchoate to be sure I used it correctly. Not sure I did but it stays. Regardez-vous les warts.