12.19.2025 - Weekly Digest
12.15.2025
What beast stalks the shallows, I says to myself I says. A sandpiper zips across my path. Pearls of melted guano pockmark the beach, the churny hardish clay-type stuff between soft sand and wet tide lands. I don’t know the words for ocean things. I made a pact to stop looking everything up, to stop asking this computer to bail me out when I’m not sure what or how to say. Less scary than satisfyingly reckless. To make a mistake and charge ahead, disregardfullessly. Against insecurity for years I stacked reference books around me like castle walls. Cleaning out whole shelves at Myopic or Powell's in an afternoon. Encyclopedia Britannica, the entire set, last update circa 1993, classy burgundy-bound volumes displayed in rough handmade wood wall boxes screwed into studs through drywall, until the Great Collapse of 2011 when it all came down. I imagine the crash was loud as hell but thankfully the dog and I were at the park. Tape measures with historical events plotted out for easy reference. Road maps from everywhere with roads or without. Dungeon Master's guides and Oxford quotation dictionaries and catalogs of arcane theories and ridiculous inventions. In case I needed to make something right or win an argument or write a trivia question for that night's game, the one I told myself every week I was going to prep for on Sunday and emailed to myself to print out at Kinko's on the way to the bar.
12.16.2025
The pleasures of associative thinking. Some of us, especially me, like to argue that this is the essence of human cognition. You can't fly a plane on analogies but you can generally get pretty far comparing things to each other. When I took a break from college to follow a girlfriend to D.C. the great solace I found was in focusing my study skills on reading whatever I wanted. I did this instead of seriously looking for a job after my hours were cut at the coffee shop, a situation I later discovered was a result of the Iago-like machinations of a jealous Nepalese coworker. Try running that through your AI detector. She worked at a book store so there were plenty of samples lying around and there are piles of free literature all over that city anyway, what with all the concentrated overeducated brains consuming ideas and spitting them out like pits when they're done, as I rediscovered a few years ago when I followed a different girlfriend to D.C. and found the closest I got to inner peace was on long walks around Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights, weaving in and out of Rock Creek Park and often lost, coming across little free libraries full of esoteric biographies on playwrights I forgot about twenty years ago.
12.17.2025
Oh yeah the beast from earlier was a person, turns out, bent over on Ocean Beach. At sundown they resembled something else, an aquatic rhinoceros, perhaps, or a device for filtering seawater to make it drinkable at considerable scale. Without the internet or my reference materials to help we're going to have to assume that what I imagine this person to be is a machine of factual design and that my hallucination was a reasonable one. On the way here from Oakland the other day I kept seeing assemblages, if that's the word, loose pyramids of discarded fuel tanks and balloons, shimmering and multicolored in the manners of pinwheels or pennant bouquets, on the grassy outcroppings that jut out into the saltwater and they looked to me like structures someone might build in a junkyard out of boredom or desperation or an attempt to alert planes and ships to the plight of someone stranded there.
12.18.2025
I don't feel stranded here. I feel secure at the Safeway, where I go at least twice a day. I'm a regular there now. What's up guys, I say, and we do the pinky thing. At the cafes folks indulge my nonsense. Everything is so large out here, I say, so magnificent, like the Midwestern rube I am, the character who goes to California with a bag of beans, who's taken in by the scale of the ocean and the lights and the music and the disarming sexiness of the locals right before he learns the hard way that paradise is built on innocent blood, before he trades naivete for an unlit room with holes in the ceiling and learns the only way to get ahead is to murder someone he likes for people he doesn't. There's a word for this too, probably in Russian if nowhere else, and if I gave myself permission to look it up I'd use it for a title. As it is we leave him unfinished and unrefined.