2.13.2026 - Weekly Digest
Coming up on a year of this here newsless newsletter. Howsabout that.
2.09.2026
You are a middle-aged human undercover sorceror looking for your kind. You come across a game store. The clerks are twins, or clones, race and class unknown.
I'd like to play some games, you say, voice low like you're speaking in code.
It's complicated, they tell you. Wednesdays are for board games, you can just show up and someone will want to play a board game with you.
That sounds nice, you say, I don't have any friends.
This does not concern them. They have each other, after all.
Sundays, well the last Sunday of the month, that's RPG night.
Can I just show up without having a character or anything? You can roll your characters here but there's no telling what game you'll be assigned to.
That's okay, I'm a utility guy, you say.
You wander around the shop for a few minutes. Unpainted miniatures hang on the wall ready to leap out of their boxes into battle. A halfling rogue catches your eye. Double daggers, dual wield.
Doesn't that hood compromise your field of vision in a fight? you ask.
You're not supposed to see me, he says.
2.10.2026
"It took ol' Jessup a full forty minutes to walk off his irritation."
This gig I've been working. Leaves me foggy. Someone else's words clanking around like loose pennies.
Need to clear my head after every session. Walking in circles is a palate cleanser. Crackers and cheese for the soul and I don't even feel pressure to buy a bottle of crap zinfandel when it's done.
News of the world out there trickles in with the rain. Away from screens the conversations are still about the shit everyone's thinking about. Mind control of the highest order. Ubiquitous. Collective cortisol spikes. Gods give us something we feel like we can control.
A large person in a trenchcoat writes or draws something on a redwood. My instinct is to get self righteous, to yell in iambic pentameter and rip the marker from their hammy paws and fling it into the stream running down the middle of the bicycle lane.
That would of course make the problem a bigger one. To be fair the tree looks dead. Wisdom check successful.
Hard being a monk in this world. Harder still to be pure. Impossible to be clean of thought but I never subscribed to that model anyway.
2.11.2026
JFK Promenade is a street that runs through Golden Gate Park. Most of it is closed to traffic. This means you can walk or ride or skate or hop or army crawl or zipline your way down the middle with the park on both sides and other folks doing the same kinds of things and be reasonably unafraid of getting plowed into by a car.
Not that it can't happen, it's just not supposed to.
You could also, if you have the means, use a humpback whale as a conveyance though it would be hard on the whale as the street is generally not flooded to a depth an aquatic mammal of that size requires to flex its flukes.
I had a girlfriend a long time ago, a poet who made reality television shows, who was obsessed with them. A cetaphile, I guess, but she loved me too, for a few months anyway. On the ocean once, she told me, a humpback surfaced and locked on her human-sized blue eyes with its big whale one. It saw me, she said. They shared a moment.
In another version of the universe that's us up there, me with my dog head and her hanging onto my fit torso with her bunny ears alert for threats or music. The whale is small enough for us to ride it comfortably or, I suppose, we're large enough that it all works out. Look I don't make the rules.
2.13.2026
Happy Birthday Mom!
I thought I was getting the jump on the flower delivery this year, as it's so close to VDay it's usually a chore to get anyone to accommodate the request without being extorted. As it is they got there a day early and I was at a grocery store with my phone muted as some poor guy called frantically from the Hoth-like conditions outside her house in Michigan. Thanks to Neighbor David for being home.
Also to Edward James Olmos (aka Commander Adama among other things) and to Stockard Channing (I know she's in Grease but as far as I'm concerned she's the GOAT FLOTUS) – and to Peter Gabriel, who was actually born on the same day in the same year as my mom. I don't muck around with astrology but mayhaps there's some credence to fantastically talented songwriters coming into the world in the depths of winter.
And I don't care how many times you've heard it, this song is ethereally awesome and got me through what so far was the worst time in my life. A revelation about a revelation. Apparently he's refused knighthood so I'll say thank you, sir with a small s.
Artists:
Gillie and Marc have all kinds of cool, weird public art you can check out here: