9.19.2025 - Weekly Digest
Busy week what with moving into the longer-term residence and all.
Reader poll, or general query: does anyone actually read the daily posts or do you wait for the weekly emails? Just thinking about my flow with this thing and what manner of adjustments I ought make.
Anyway, reach out. Say hello, say goodbye, let me know how your brain and other organs are doing. I'll do my best to reach back. Good to be in one place for a while.
Weird times require weird ideas and art.
9.16.2025
Last day in this kind house with kind people and friendly animals and sussurations of noise machines natural and artificial and I've been well fed and socialized and because I don't deserve those things I am once again heading to someone else's house where I will stumble around like a sleepwalker for a few days or weeks until I remember what day it is and to water the bamboo. Sleeping in a teenager's bedroom. For a while I could imagine that I, too, took first prize in an equestrian competition. Or that I wore a badge with my name on it that says ASK ME ANYTHING in my role as a helpful sales representative at a hip athletic wear retailer in a strip mall in a suburb where the cineplex has a remarkable number of Bollywood films on its roster. Or that I had enough clothes to fill several suitcases and some drawers and a wardrobe. Not that I'm complaining. Plenty of space even with all the memorabilia on the walls. The dog, the big horsey one, scratches at the door in the mornings and even if she's happy to see me it's not the same as if I'd been the one who actually lives here.
9.17.2025
It's been a major goal, to get to this house rich with fruit trees and colorful decorations and framed photographs of someone else's life. A lived-in clutter I recognize. Feels familial. Open sacks of grains and flour and unidentified sauces. A freezer full of rabbit meat, which is new to me. Plants of a hardy texture I am unsure are artificial or alive. How to administer the turing test to a succulent? It's my job, my only job, to keep these things respirating. Out back lemon trees and blood oranges and an acre's worth of sweet cherry tomatoes falling off the vines crammed into a modest rectangle at a tilt. One of the owners likes to tile things. He flew back from Portavilla with a backpack full of tiles and no real plan. As a person sometimes does. I built this wall with my dad, he says, one of the last things we did together. That's when I started with the tiles then they just kinda took over. We may have room in the garage for a bike if you get one, they say, and it's okay I say I know how these things go.
9.18.2025
Another teenager's bedroom. Lofty and well ventilated. Lego space vehicles are cool but they take up an awful lot of room. Found a space to stash unwanted clutter, an army of plush toys and a pillow with a pug's face on it next to which a stuffed pug, lifesize, and it's through details like this you start to think you know people. I mind least the Apollo lander with its moving hatch for blocky versions of Neil and Buzz to descend the ladder from. I was going to say stiffer than usual but in those suits they were pretty limited. If anything the footage from the later missions only proves that golf is bullshit. This one likes games as well and I would play some of them if I had someone to come over and play them with. No idea if there's a solitaire version of Settlers of Cataan but I figured it out often enough as a kid, whole four-person competitions of Monopoly and Parcheesi and Life and Solar Quest (Monopoly in space), each persona with a different strategy and it's fortunate I didn't develop more than two or three distinct personalities when you look back on it like that.
9.19.2025
Making a place my own. How many times I've done this. How many times just in the last few months. An ongoing theme, relentless, comes up all throughout that book I wrote, this whole deal where you can change location - countries, counties, continents - and wherever you wake up you face the disappointment of still having your same self with you. Not whining it's just it feels like to be somewhere as different as Oakland California is from Montreal Quebec you should feel a change in yourself, you know? If anything I do not feel as nervous as maybe I should but even in Detroit and Chicago I didn't feel threatened and these airborne toxic threats from The East as consequential as they are feel less pressing to me than getting this post written so I can think about something else the rest of the night, walk in a shadowy park where I've never been, eat an unnamed fruit from the branch of an exotic tree, settle in to play a game where I'm wandering an irradiated landscape looking for a partner to aid in my quest to feel like I have some purpose. A version of home anyway.