Jay's recent writing and drawings.
I was sitting out on our back porch watching the sunset tonight, when I felt something climbing up my leg. I looked down and there was a big bug or something on my left knee. It was dark enough I couldn’t tell what it was. I figured it was a cicada or june bug or something, so I wiggled my knee to make them fly away. But they didn’t.
On April 12, 2026, I gave a short talk to the All Souls Waccamaw Unitarian Universalist Congregation. One of the pastors there is Bob Clegg, an old friend of my wife's and mine, and he invited me to join one of their Sunday services, remotely, as a guest speaker. I was honored, but also intrigued by the prompt he gave me: how do you employ art to make meaning in your life?
The prelude to spring here has see-sawed between snowstorms and warm days. As the snow has melted away, we've been getting dense fog in the mornings.
Some photos I've been taking on walks around my neighborhood. Winter around here gets a bad rap. Gray, dark, bleak. But the longer I live here by the Patapsco River, though, the more I can’t help but fall in love with the way sunlight behaves this time of year.
We adopted a new dog last week, a 3 1/2-year old greyhound we named Penny Jane. Her name was my wife’s idea: she loves the Beatles. And ‘Jane’ is a tribute to Jane Goodall. We call her Penny for short.
We've got a bit of snow today - only a dusting so far, but it's the first of the year, which always feels exciting. I took a walk down the road with my camera just because. It felt like a shame to watch first snowfall through a window.
I visited Montreal a few weeks ago for a conference. This was the first time I've been there and I hope it won't be the last - it's such a beautiful city.
In my adult life I’ve become more and more inclined to make plans — increasingly detailed plans — but I also get more and more invested in them. I wish I didn’t feel so flustered when my plans don’t work out.
My wife’s birthday is September 1st, and I made a card for her: a series of quick drawings of a flower from our Rose of Sharon tree.
I took some time off this morning to walk around East Baltimore awhile. I haven't hung out in the city in too long, and, really, I just needed a break. I needed a minute to catch my breath, be somewhere that isn't my desk, and let my mind wander a little. So I picked up my camera, drove downtown, and took a long walk through my old neighborhoods.
A few photos I’ve taken with a few new lenses I’ve bought: photos of little details I’ve run across in our yard and the local forests. Flowers blooming in my wife’s garden, bugs in the creek, the trees and grass coming back to life.
These last couple chapters mull over what the night has meant to us humans over our history, and also what it means to me, personally. The dark scares us sometimes, but it’s also a place for us to step outside our senses, to lose ourselves, to rethink our priorities, to contemplate the source of things, to transform ourselves.
I love the way sunlight filters in through the windows in the morning this time of year. The sun gets brighter in April as the weather gets warmer, and it throws beautiful shadows and highlights across the house when it rises. I like to look out the window as the coffee brews, the house still quiet, and sometimes the light lures me outside.
Our cherry tree is usually the first thing in our yard to bloom. It kind of bursts into white in March or April, as the sun starts to burn off the winter gray. Then the rains and winds blow all the flower petals off the tree. There's a swirly, glittery, extremely local blizzard as the petals cover the deck, the tables, the cars, or anything that sits still too long.
The older I get, the more attached I feel to my daily routine. Over the years I’ve hammered my days into a certain shape and flow that works pretty well, all in all. But it also sometimes makes me feel … brittle.
The 5th chapter of my new essay is up! This chapter is about how we orient ourselves in the world in a very specific way: up and down, land and sky, figure and ground. What might it feel like to escape (or abandon) that? Is our sense of 'figure' and 'ground' essential to our human consciousness? Without it, would we become ...something else?
We got a pretty decent snowstorm this week - roughly 8 inches on the ground in my neighborhood.
I ran across a fascinating piece in The Economist this morning that does a nice job of summing up all the complexity of the problem of cattle farming and its environmental costs versus its economic and cultural importance.
I took a short walk the other morning. There'd been rain overnight and all the trees were covered in tiny water droplets. The air was awfully humid. As the sun rose everything dried out and it turned into a beautiful day.
I got a new camera and it got me thinking about what photography means to me, and how our expectations have changed, over the years, about what a camera is.
Here's some in-progress snapshots of the drawings I did for the 'Landing on the ceiling' illustration. The chapter is about bats' remarkable ability to land upside-down, and I thought I'd make a picture of some bats coming home to roost on the ceiling of their cave.
I’m afraid I was running late getting this chapter together. It’s been a busy fall. But it’s up! In this chapter I took a closer look at bats’ remarkable ability to land upside down, and what that might mean for how they see the world.
I took a short walk the other evening to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. I love how the light changes at dusk in winter. The cold air is super clear and in the dimming sunlight the landscape gets this low-contrast, subtle blue-purple-pink glow. I can’t do it justice with either my camera or my brushes, but I keep going out in the cold to admire it.
There’s a clip floating around YouTube that I’ve watched many times: Ayrton Senna drives a Honda NSX around Suzuka, a racetrack in Japan. That video encapsulates a lot of the complicated feelings I have about cars these days. Watching the greatest driver ever in a classic sports car is a moment of captivating grace and skill, but it’s also a reminder of a world that I struggle to see as anything…
I filled up the last page of my notebook last night, and it was time to start on the new one. I like to make my own notebooks; binding a new one has become a biannual ritual, my dorky way of marking the seasons. But this time I gave in and just bought one off the shelf. Why? I’ve got a lot going on this fall. Time is short and this is one of those compromises.
Chapter 3 of my new essay is up! ‘The upside-down people’ considers the world from a bat’s point of view, and the ways our own point of view — so different from theirs — makes it easy for us to misunderstand them.
An animated short from Salvador Dalì and Walt Disney
The other night I listened to M83’s classic double album, ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’, in my headphones. I hadn’t played it in a long time and I remembered, once again: it’s so, so good.
I’ve posted Chapter 2 of my new essay, in which I buy a bat house and find myself deeply confused.
Experience begets capability, but that isn’t always apparent or obvious. Year after year you do your thing, struggling with one dilemma or obstacle after another, and sometimes you look great and sometimes you look rough. I wonder: is this a thing that happens as you get older? You’ve put your 10,000 hours in, but young people who’ve read books keep dispensing advice, telling you you’re doing it…
I’ve been working on a new illustrated essay called Nightfall, which I’ve decided to post serially on my website, one chapter each month.
Here's some photos I shot from our trip to Ocean City, Maryland this year. Or, as my people say, from down the ocean.
I ran across a book at the library this week called ‘The Comfort of Crows’, by Margaret Renkl. Subtitled ‘A Backyard Year’, it sounded like something I could get into; I love local nature writing in that Annie Dillard-Roger Deakin kind of vein. This one is even better than I’d hoped.
I’m so sad to hear that Toumani Diabaté has passed away. A musician from Mali, Diabaté played a traditional stringed instrument called the kora.
Childish Gambino’s new album, 'Bando Stone and The New Word' is great and complicated and intense, like all his work. But one song, 'Can You Feel Me', is my favorite. It's a duet with his son, Legend, and it honestly gets me choked up every time. One of the most beautiful songs about fatherhood I think I’ve ever heard.
Overheard the other day…
I went on my first overnight-camping bike ride a few weeks ago. I picked a stretch of the C&O Canal Towpath between Brunswick, Maryland and Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I planned to park in Brunswick, ride the trail out to a campsite just past Shepherdstown, camp for the night, and then ride back to my car in the morning. I was feeling cautious because my ankle is still recovering from a fracture…
I’ve started going on (short, slow) runs again, about three months after fracturing my ankle.
There’s been some really great clouds over the past week or so — the kind that usually make me stop and take a picture. Here’s a few of those.
On a road trip the other weekend, I played a new favorite album: 'Being Waves' by a British band called Kinkajous. It's an instrumental album by five people who look an awful lot like a jazz quintet. But I don't think they're a jazz band... not exactly. I'm not sure I can really say what they are. They seem to occupy this wonderful, strange ground between jazz, electronic, experimental, and…
The other night, an owl flew right by us! …At least, I think an owl flew by us. We were sitting on the deck, watching the sunset, and I looked up just as a big bird swooped around the cherry tree, whisked over our heads, and landed somewhere in the big maple behind us.
I finished a new illustration for my upcoming essay, 'Nightfall'. Here's some in-process images and a timelapse video of the individual drawings and final composite.
This week, a month after I broke my ankle, I had a followup appointment with the orthopedist. I've healed up enough that I've 'graduated' from the giant medical boot to a much smaller, lighter ankle brace.
I’m trying out a slightly different approach to blogging: posting shorter notes more frequently. It’s a little more off-the-cuff and, also, a little more scary.
I read a piece Ed Yong wrote about his birdwatching hobby and was intrigued. I like how he describes birding as a meditative act, a way of connecting more directly with nature.
Reading ‘The Sentence’ this weekend, I remembered how much I love Louise Erdrich’s writing.
I really love what John Evelyn has done with his new game, ‘The Collage Atlas’, recently released on Steam. The entire game is hand-drawn with fine-liner pens and it has this incredibly beautiful, intricate style.