A website built just for you, which expects nothing of your time. Breathe freely, old friend.
when i said let’s circle back to that i really more meant, perhaps, in a different era, a different city, another life. let's circle back to it when we're old, or maybe when we're young again...we'll circle back in vienna, or in cairo, or in those slender black cat streets of Paris, streetlamps and gossip and vibraphone. we'll share drags on cigarettes & dregs of bitter campari cocktails; orange…
woke with a start, another dream about working on the grime of the 'Net. it's near dawn, the sun waiting for me below the horizon, and the air is crisp on the ranch. i stretch; make my way to the photovoltaic array. i dont work on the web anymore, traded long ago pixels for panels on the solarfarm. the mist settling through the valley smells clean after last night's rain, and the lark buntings and…
computer, Show Me Less Like This. show me Parisian streets and their denizens, show me futurist art and central american architecture. show me black forests and crystal pools, steady wildlife and bad poetry and confused yellow cabs. computer, show me the agonies of Men in love! computer, show me the face of someone who just realized they forgot an important date. show me tears, show me stars. show…
larping once more as a creature of sensuality, of agony, of flesh. slovenly and begrimed by these human desires, i covet victor mug burnt black coffee & acrid blue oil smoke, i scratch my back like a bear on the fry of a woman's voice. i am made to feel the ache in my retinas from raw, hot sunlight glinting off bleached santa fe sidewalks, and that timid convulsing of lungs forced to inhale the…
standup update: i'm afraid i'm blocked for the day. the amber and umber and sienna leaves fall from the trees along 6th avenue in great exhales. they land on my book & cafe table & the sidewalk with a crisp lounge brush-snare tapping and snapping, and they then shuffle along the street, busy with gossip and errands unknown. well, i won't be able to make any further progress on this project: i need…
dropped my phone off to get the screen replaced, and as i walked out of the store with empty pocket, my city vanished. in its place great sighing fields of barley spread from the shop in every direction. to the east, mile-high storm clouds loomed; to the west a mighty jury of peaks looked on, somber and venerable. i felt the low echoes of thunder before i heard them, watched my skin respond to the…
i would love to further my education in The Institution, be made a wise man by such wise men. but to what school might i go to learn contemporaneously of Mayakovsky & Rimbaud, of Basquiat & Wojnarowicz (their work, their world!), of Frank O’Hara & Allen Ginsberg, wild trees & wild birds & wildflowers? which Ivy campus offers an undergraduate study of art & biology & heartbreak, horny french film &…
summer moves past you like you’re standing still, clouds seven miles tall pull the peaks of the front range into private conversations. these days you’re feeling less like a person and more like his unfinished house project, half-framed, clippings and cuttings and misplaced hardware. you talk on the phone with a Bay Area friend you’ve always looked up to, she shares your appreciation of insane…
anyway here’s to my father, a man who showed me the honor to be found in quiet humility, the great kindness of great patience, the nobility of purposeful labor a man who taught me what gold is to be enjoyed in joyful storytelling, and in dedicated eager listening; the passion for educating and the esurience to learn; the times for solemnity and observant respect, and the times for wide smiles and…
it’s a big lightning storm out here tonight — it’s raining heavy on the window and on the roof, and i can sit in my apartment and look out the window and watch the lightning travel west and light up neighborhoods all the way right up to the lap of the mountains. denver wants to be a big city so bad, but she’s still just a little cowtown with a couple tall buildings. she’s the gateway to the west,…
i got an email from an ex today — it's a bit of a telepathic moment, both of us i think were strategizing and hand-wringing about how to get in touch with each other after a long period of Never Talk To You Again. there’s a lot to be said, and it’s an incomprehensibly fragile undertaking: to hold each other’s hearts or even to bend each other’s ears after everything we’ve been through; to make all…
my eyes burn at the sight of roadkill; my cheeks gather up at either corner like old men throwing bread into Conservatory Water, talking in gentle resignation and understanding about their grandchildren's divorces. i can’t help it, i imagine the dark eyes of whole fox or rabbit families at home watching the clock, as their anxious confusion becomes awful silent knowing. if it is being made an…
i think i need to do it all over again. i’ve got so many better ideas for a second time around — i know how to stay focused in school, or be kinder to my mother, or which heartbreaks will be worth it. i’ll warn my brother from the cliffside that day, i'll hold my tongue better, i'll trust myself. i need to do it all over again: i’ve half-built too many dreams on these shoulders to carry with this…
i visited your website today. snow fell for hours, quieting the din of the city many stories below. tonight, my apartment was a haven, illuminated only by the keen blinking eyes of computer towers and thermal printers, and the glow from street lamps off the snowed sidewalks. an uncased hard drive hummed and sputtered by my feet, like that ancient hound dog you grew up with you used to tell me…
6:30 pm in october is transitory. everyone seems to be waiting for the conductor's raised hands; the city settles into its kodachrome tenor saxophone solo blue hour folded hands composure, and the low-kelvin incandescence of rented apartments blooms from the windows of every victorian in baker, dusty and soft and constant. the glass pouring down the sides of the TIAA-CREF tower downtown holds…
rain clouds sit heavy over your neighborhood and on the horizon, rumbling doldrum thunder and stubborn arms across the sky. through the windows the dimmed overcast light is filtered and diffused. sometimes your thoughts can feel like atmospheric tension, electrostatic and uncomfortable — sometimes you mollify your darting neurons with personal computers and emotionless scrolling in…
grey today; this time of year can press firm to your collarbones the cold iron of Nothing Ever Changes Around Here. it’s an exhaling and quiet morning in the city, but it’s even quieter up by the lake. i'll start up that old sports car that was cheaper than it ought to have been — i like it because it rolls its eyes and complains in creaks and low rumbles when i ask it for favors, because i have…
it’s a season of biding, of putting both hands on the mug, of feeling that frozen-air tightness under your heart lurch in its unfurling when you get back in from the street. it’s a season of genuine swelling gratitude for the guy sprinting through the blizzard from his accord to your door in a t-shirt to make sure you get your pad kra pow okay. i'm tripping over myself to do errands for neighbors…
fraternal Santa Fe line locomotive twins with a-thousand-and-one cars each call mournfully to each other with their C minor seventh horns, like the last two musicians on stage at that old piano bar El Chapultapec (closed permanently, I'm afraid) on a sunday night, languid and pensive as they humbly toe melodies and countermelodies back and forth to each other without eye contact, thoughtful nods…
well it’s late in the summer again, and the internet’s been less of a wonder. instead i’ve been slow-rolling the slow-rolled hills of my hometown, pushing bicycles through the late June heat and then late July heat and most of all in the late August heat. it’s that sort of fever that makes you look different at your own overworked eyes in the mirror; the kiln of late august that makes you start to…
a summer of friendship with you is outside of time, past moments and nows and about a thousand imagined futures; it’s piloting a 40-foot cutter — with its shining waxed red cedar deck and sun-white sails — through sparkling seas of the reflexive curiosity and clear-sighted discernment in your eyes when you take on the world. a summer with you is setting my watch to the slow, deep rise and fall of…
a group chat is a place of worship. it’s where i come to fall humble to my knees and marvel at the lore and impossibilities of closest friends, that secret and sacred cadre. it’s where we gather when a push notification chimes like a village bell for new stories and sermons, and i sit next to you on the pews and another of our friends stands at the pulpit, waving their arms in a whirlwind; the…
today we watched the sun set on the longest day of the year at the radio tower down from la sal peak. we stared down the immolation of the horizon and cracked dry kindling jokes, bright staccato laughs snapping in the atmosphere among the steady ignition of the clouds. we’re sitting in the resulting ashen dark of a full day, critiquing each other’s log placement on our sophomoric bonfire; we’re…
i’m afraid i can’t stay out too late ‘cause you and i have to get an early start — we’ll load up the car and head deep west over the passes to the maroon bells, or one of the via ferratas, or gore lake or emerald lake or the ice lake basin, and we’ll cook dinner tomorrow night over a real campfire. you and i will shake the doom of the big city’s latest end-of-the-world loose with deep breaths of…
so now i’m up on the rooftop, watching a storm pull the blue from the mountains and the grey from the clouds, and if you were here you could turn your head from the left and watch the front range vanish, swooning melodramatically to the fainting couch of the eastern Colorado plains. the storm clouds carve shocks of deep grey out of the sky and wrest sheaves of mute indigo from the faces of the…
rise to stand in the mornings in the deserts of the american west and look to the edge of sight — see the reds and browns of the earth bleach steadily into blue, and then into nothing. the brush in the hand of god that blends uncertainty and infinite possibility, that paints hope and adventure and big-R Romance into plain view; that shade that turns the horizon into the sky.
it’s silly and self-defeating to pretend my peace and well-being are entirely beholden to the location i’ve put down my bags in but i spent this last week eating dinner with dear old friends, breathing deeply, and watching the sun yawn and roll itself contentedly into those mule-kicked sheets on the unmade bed of the rocky mountains and what i do know is that right now, i don’t feel like a ghost…
i don't ever want to see your power-washing, slime-squishing, pimple-popping, domino-dropping, paint-mixing, hydraulic-pressing ✨ Content ✨ again. my attention is raw from the mechanical chafing of feeds and for-you-pages and infinite wells of engineered psychological anesthetic. i want to stand and take a deep breath at the start of the day and put down my coffee and roll up my sleeves. i want to…
through this friendship i see my own immortality. moments disintegrate into lifetimes; timelines and horizons surrender their weight freely through the shutters of an upstairs window. in every story we share, in every deep wake-the-neighbors laugh you give me, in every “listen man i really need you to be here for me tonight”. our love makes us outlive centuries. is what you know i meant when i…
the disc spins to a stop. unbeknownst to you, this is the last time the two of you will speak. the bits and bytes you two carefully arranged together: all the memories, all the Really Useful Links you swore you’d return to, all those digital tears in rain. today, something in the drive’s alignment has shifted, and stories once freely exchanged will now be held captive behind the high walls of file…
listening to new wave and photographing wyoming sunrises at treeline and downshifting into every curve in the road and smelling ponderosas and piñons and being sure you know the difference, and watching a tense cowboy standoff between the two peaks at opposing ends of the valley while they dare each other to make the first move, and looking up from the trail and breathing out into a sky that…
i think there was once a version of me that was so assured, he could wield his confidence and resolution like a claymore; the heart, the backbone to raise the blade and the conviction to bring it back down, but tonight i watched that young knight felled by naught but a clumsily-flung text message.
there’s a comfort to be found on the occasion that i manage to have a bad day on the same day a friend is having theirs. it’s so easy and right just to toss my stuff into the back of the car to make room in the passenger seat; let’s talk about it, what happened, how are you feeling about that? i think it’s the same comfort one finds in paying for lunch — no no, let me get it this time, no no, i…
i dream often of montana — a land with a sky so big it makes it okay to feel so small; nights so quiet, your brain can’t help but to stop hollering. just look at the stars.
when it comes time for an online retreat and rendezvous, meet me in that reticent old website of ours. we’ll while cyber seconds and digital days in our private, furtive corner of the ‘Net.
i sometimes worry, when i choose calm nights in over late nights out, over opportunities for wild adventure, over the unknown, that i’m letting an older version of myself down. i’ve seen my future. i know my path leads ultimately back from the concrete canopies of the city into the hushed breeze, fir tree, mule deer, muted steps, evergreen forests i grew up in. i know that old man finds the kind…
i shouldn’t be solving for all of these frictional and angular feelings, like some tired old mathematician draped over his battle-worn chalkboard. i should be in the wilds of the rocky mountain north, examining bellflowers and fireweed and potentilla and heartleaf bittercress and alpine larkspur (not to mention subalpine larkspur!) aside the trail up to some unnamed mining peak. i ought to be…
when was the last time you felt the kind of overwhelming, reverberative joy that quiets every frenetic thought of life beyond that moment? one which comes at no expense; one you may feel wholly and safely and freely — when was the last time you felt a joy that took days to fade?
i’m walking along sidewalks and i’m dog ear-ing books and i’m certainly not here to make friends i’m holding hostages to tell sophomoric stories with neither plot nor punchline i’ve all the anxious insecure energy of a man raised a small town fire sign, preening and self-absorbed and superior, and i’m spending it in shops like it's a soho salary so that i may narrowly afford the chance to attend…
in loving you, i don’t want you to feel (as young lovers often do) that i’m The Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To You rather i want to follow you around endlessly and leap over myself to open every sort of door for you, just to be by your side through so many diverse and wondrous experiences that i may witness each of countless Best Things That’ve Ever Happened To You, as they happen, time after…
i don’t want to be remembered as funny, like a dog with a bark that you’d cleverly remark to your friends is almost human. and i don’t want to be remembered as bright, or sharp, like the blade of a curving knife twisted between teeth… i want a legacy of eager observation and humility, of knowing nods and favors done and errands run. i’d like for my advice, if ever sought, to be sought because when…
born young and raised in a small town right on the border between the Wild West and the Internet; guts and love and glory in the last two places in America where you can truly get lost.
i don’t want to “hang out”, i want to know a love so calamitous & deafening that far distant poets must take cover from our ensuing avalanche; diving under desks to attempt approximate couplets, desperate to echo even a fraction of the fusillade and thunder they saw in our hearts i want to lean too far into an embrace, lose my balance and tumble endlessly with and into one another down the slope,…
some personal news: i’m moving! far, far from the intersection of Art & Technology — i’ve found a little ranch up at the end of Route 287 between the towns of Care & Consideration; there’s a little diner where you can sit and drink coffee from an off-white victor mug that never empties. you can while the day there, meeting quiet neighbors and kind, chatty strangers; drifters all, who don’t ever…
i don’t think i want “equity in the form of vesting options and a clear path to promotion”, i want a well-organized kitchen with open cabinets, so when the sunlight pours in through the large bifold window over the sink, it shatters into millions of prismatic shards on every glass i want to let in the early spring morning sun & its crisp breeze chaperone to glance across neatly stacked white…
instead of redesigning your portfolio try carefully folding it into the shape of a sailboat, letting it drift off down the creek, and enjoying the rest of your walk through the wild woods, unafflicted. breathe deeply from your lungs, perhaps for the first time in a long time.
i don’t want to “carve out a few minutes to connect about this role”, i want to carve out a little plot of land in the wild western united states and watch the sun rise over the rockies and watch the steam from my coffee drift up to intermingle with the cool mists of the morning i want to sleep in a subalpine field among the elephantella and the limber pine and the wildflowers, running out of…
i find myself once again at the gate of the rocky mountains, the bold defenders of the western coast. the golden gaze of the sun lights the path from these quiet plains to the patient and sacred evergreen woods. in the words of our poet cy warman, “i just feel good all over.”
why concern yourself with "developer experience" when you ought to be concerned with "the human experience"? what is autocompletion in the face of the exquisite, spectral agony of realizing you’re falling out of love? what is a “build time” under the glare of impending, relentless mortality? one day, you will die, and your legacy will be washed away when someone forgets to renew the DNS.
i’m on the search for a monumental, destructive, tectonic, soul-awakening, heart-shattering, immense, immersive, inundating, once-in-100-lifetimes kind of love and for some reason i have decided i will find it on a mobile phone app