Aloha nui, readers... This looks like a wonderfully minimalist place wherein to write — just what I've been looking for! (Best part about it for me is the...
...is leavened and garnished by these elements, among others — a chicken-garlic blanco slice at Goodfellas on Powell at Bay, a sacrificial organic avocado from nearby Trader Joe's, a Modelo Especial, and Homer (Book 7, "A Magical Kingdom"): ...all presided over by a pixelated orange owl whose head-tilts, wing-flaps, and blinks are a node of attention in itself. The Architects had no idea what they…
{ a river in 13 paradigmatic axioms} Been dwelling on this: consciously, for the past couple of weeks or so now; and subconsciously, for the majority of my adult life. I suppose it began when I found writing or, more properly, writing found me. When I discovered I had a knack for constructing sentences, then putting them together in paragraphs, then essays. Even making up likely words now and…
Yesterday, I attempted to peer beyond the event horizon of a data export request I made of OpenAI — exactly a month ago — for my corpus of ChatGPT conversation threads from late 2022 to the present. Saw nothing but an immediate response from an "AI Assistant" that was marginally more than helpful. Said attempt was actually (and ironically) performed by ChatGPT itself, in its Codex guise (and "Dex"…
Come to think about it, it was around 2018 that I began chanting. Or, rather, learning then practicing Hawaiian chants as a way of deepening my engagement with its culture, which itself had began almost a couple of decades earlier when I would return to Maui to live part of the year there, and the other part in Berkeley. And where I would find the universe dropping a child on my lap saying, in…
It came back changed, yet it was the same... a new thing— but of the olden ways: a last homecoming. Sonam smiled gently as she looked up from behind the glass counter, recognizing me; turned around to retrieve the small sack that felt like filligreed air, the one in which she'd originally placed my unhinged mala for safekeeping when I'd brought it to her shop 76 days ago and she'd said her mom…
I got off the 22 at Fillmore and Union, thinking to walk down to the SFPL branch library in the Marina and do some work on IM there. On the ride up from Japantown, I'd sat in the front, where the seats are reserved for the elderly, pregnant women or those with infants, or simply the weary. To my left was an elder citizen with his iPhone open to the NY Times word game "Spelling Bee," which Abigail…
{ an odyssey in 13 short stanzas } sat to the side, the boy looked to the stage nearby, at his life. as if from a vast distance, and across the prelapsarian chasm of time. and what he saw both numbed and enchanted him. there were lights: shafts, cones, ziggurats, whimsies, dust devils of them dancing flittingly about on the floor, insouciant and knowing, glancing knowingly at the boy from time to…
For a while now, looking back at escarpment's index of titles , scrolling along its length, that's how it has felt like to me: a river's flow. And, of course, of days. As a side project, I asked the machine-mind to consider the list — just the titles not the posts' content itself — and come up with what it thought might be a good summative title for each month. While I know perfectly well that…
...on second thought (& after a first attempt): never effing mind. ;p Here, instead, is something from yesterday. A view of two iconic towers in North Beach, from Filbert Street near Taylor, as seen through a scrim of electric lines in air. I titled the JPEG thus: "towers.and.lines.a.passing.mind.jpeg" and uploaded it. ⌘
As I wryly commented on some Slack space somewhere, Matt's short story this week (#291) is such a perfect parable it should be in all children's books everywhere throughout all of remaining time. Then again... not exactly the sort of thing one would read to a little Callum or a wee Circe. ::chuckle:: But a parable for what, exactly? Well, for starters (though frankly this would be an excellent…