Archive (Page 15) • text

Pastis limestone text

February 21, 2023

The last and most important thing you notice is the limestone. Marseille is built on it, and you won’t notice this until you’re hiking its outer reaches,...

The other despair period

February 17, 2023

Years ago, I wrote about the despair period, my term for the very beginning of a creative project where I spend about an hour staring at the wall, processing...

All clothes every year

February 15, 2023

It gives me no pleasure to report that I have been baited again. We saw this coming. It could not be helped. This is the nature of bait.

The bar, the space

February 13, 2023

I saw a hateread recently that I will not be linking, but I will describe it. A young couple, probably somewhere in their 20s, moves from San Francisco to a...

Who is it for?

Premium post · February 9, 2023

I am bad at most things in life, but I’m good at writing marketing pages. I can take a thing that I know you probably want but are a little afraid to invest...

There is only one bakery in all of France

February 7, 2023

In order to get a sense of the bakery, you should look at what is missing. In my neighborhood, within a quarter-mile radius of where I am presently sitting,...

The non-secret punk operation

February 3, 2023

I found a good clothing brand the other day, and like all good clothing brands, it’s literally one person doing everything. It’s called Never Cursed, and I...

The secret punk operation

February 1, 2023

Fat Tire is not a good beer. I’m sorry if you think it’s a good beer. I’m sorry if your first taste of American craft beer was Fat Tire, and I’m sorry if it...

The parrot

January 30, 2023

Before I was born, my parents had the great idea to get me a parrot, and so they did.

What your brand of bag tells me

January 27, 2023

The bag is a signifier. The bag teaches others how to see you. On trip, your bag is more for others than for you. Here, in brief, is what your bag says about...

The possibility space

January 25, 2023

You need a few stories before I get to the main story, so we’re going to hop around a bit. This story is about coffee, but really it’s about opinions.

Rusted ding

January 23, 2023

It doesn’t look as durable as it is at first glance. Wafer thin, white, hollow thunk if you flick it, blue or red rim as a treat. Enamelware will stack into...

Carbonated pickle brine

January 19, 2023

Geuze is what happens when you let perfectly innocent beer go bad creatively. It’s a wild beer, made in one region of northwest Belgium where the free-...

A full list of the durable objects I bought while on the ground here in Marseille, so far

January 17, 2023

There is never enough in the space. This is, I think, how they want it. You must buy, schlep, and leave behind. Two wastebaskets I throw stuff away next to...

Notes on images

January 12, 2023

Since I’m out more, I’m also taking more photos. The camera sat dormant for a minute. The skies were gray, I didn’t go out, I worked too much, I didn’t post...

Grinding at work

January 10, 2023

Grinding is an unsolved problem. The goal is to take some oblong-shaped beans and turn them into something that looks consistently like sand, if you’re doing...

Lessons from deep rest

January 5, 2023

I took two weeks off because it was the holidays, because I was really tremendously tired, because I did 70% of my business’s annual sales in the final three...

Define an area as “safe” and use it as an anchor

December 22, 2022

Growing up, my father had a little black box on his bookshelf that had OBLIQUE STRATEGIES in gold lettering on the side. Inside was a deck of around 100...

Rewriting the rules

December 20, 2022

In 2019, a couple of incidents happened in my local community that prompted me to devise a slapdash code of conduct with several friends. This would come to...

Take notes

December 16, 2022

I am absentminded and hang out with lots of different people, and I think through writing. So I do a thing that everybody thinks is weird & unusual, but...