text

In & out

April 28, 2023

You know, vaguely, the dinner party line: did you know 7-Eleven is amazing in Japan? And yes it is, of course it is. Japanese 7-Eleven, which I beseech you...

Wait for one

April 26, 2023

When I first got Basil, I would speak vaguely of the sort of dog I wanted: black, around 50 pounds, a shelter mutt goofball. Nobody could visualize this....

Meow full

April 24, 2023

Of course this happened at a conference. Of course. You are provided several community-building activities, told to choose one, and it is going to be Meow...

Bar Generic

April 21, 2023

How much fruit juice can you get away with? Is 5% an ABV you can find yourself agreeing with? What is the purpose of using spirits at all if they’re not even...

Clothing rules for 2023

April 11, 2023

On the plane to Tokyo, I threw together some rules for clothes I buy, because I knew that Japan is both the best country for retail on the planet and they...

Won the travel lottery, here’s a whole city

April 6, 2023

One of the things I’m really good at, and probably one of the reasons that text works as well as it does, is recommending stuff. Nothing really lights me up...

Soft power, minimal form

April 4, 2023

The tl;dr: there was a streak of design-y minimalism in clothing in the Western world for a couple of decades, thanks largely to Apple and tech. Then we...

Hachi selfie, take four

March 27, 2023

Hachi was an extremely loyal dog, owned by a professor in Tokyo. Every day the professor would go to Shibuya Station, and Hachi would wait until the...

The shrink

March 20, 2023

I’d like to expand on a post that I saw recently & wrote about in last week’s letter, because I think it’s important, and it seems to have resonated with at...

You have eight seconds to step into the batter’s box and start reading this text

March 16, 2023

“Baseball is boring.” “It’s slow.” “You just drink beer and barely pay attention to the game.” I know. I suppose this makes it different from other sports,...

Casual dress for formal weather

March 14, 2023

A text reader recently asked me what one uses to bike in the winter. If you live in a warm climate, you may allow this text to wash over you, smug in the...

Three nothing

March 10, 2023

I got curious one day about soccer. I know Marseille’s team is a big deal; I know they play during winter. So I looked up their schedule, and found that they...

It gives me no pleasure to report that the men are arguing about JavaScript again

March 8, 2023

Lately, there has been a debate about, god help us, JavaScript. (This summarizes it.) This happens every so often. In this text, I’ll be writing a little bit...

The technodangle

March 6, 2023

Most carry decisions make practical sense. You are schlepping. The city acts without apology. Things should be lightweight, deft, scalable for complexity....

The world's only gin

March 3, 2023

I went back through the whole archive of text to see if I had written anything about Nordés, which is perfect, and it turns out I had written precisely one...

Today in things I can't believe I am doing

March 1, 2023

Okay, so (slaps table) here’s the deal. The last time I went to Japan, I got detained three times at Haneda on the way back because there was apparently a...

Tolerate it

February 27, 2023

Adam is onto something here, and I replied, twice. Go read all of that. Even the other replies are pretty good! Who can even say that, goodness.

Text text

February 23, 2023

Store Design preorders open in a week, and I am mostly terrified about it, for all of the regular reasons and a few non-regular reasons. Here is one of the...

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?

$ · 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...

Blue tote parrot

December 14, 2022

I’m sitting next to a blue canvas tote. I’m going to try and describe it now.

Chaos

December 12, 2022

In the absence of justice, in the absence of a team you’re rooting for, there is only chaos. There is the chaos of an underdog ruining everything, the chaos...

The primarying Eschaton

December 9, 2022

Okay. In 2005, which was still a very post-9/11 world, Congress passed an act that told all of the states to ask for more verification before issuing their...

You can have a little collectivism, as a treat

December 6, 2022

A couple of weeks before I started writing text, I was in Lisbon at a natural wine bar. I’d show up alone with my journal, find myself in the middle of...

More assorted questions I’ve had lately

December 2, 2022

Why can’t I figure out the battery capacity of my AirPods Pro? Batteries degrade over time, and for other Apple devices like your laptop or phone, you can...

No gods but moderation

November 30, 2022

A few years ago, I called something “crazy” in a Slack room and was very rapidly pinged, in private, by a moderator, that calling things crazy was ableist...

Thanks for clearing security. Here is your plant.

November 22, 2022

When you know O’Hare better than you know your own family, when you call flights segments, when you weave the B-to-C concourse tunnel like it’s the...

When does the next thing happen?

November 18, 2022

A few weeks ago, I wrote some text about the new dialectic, which tl;dr is a constellation of small, private, pseudonymous spaces. Since then, social media...

Dopp Gang

November 16, 2022

Dudes don’t usually need much to clean up: soap, comb, shaver, deodorant. For doing this on the road, and for all other sundries, there is the dopp kit,...

Ask a question in the Flame Free Zone

November 14, 2022

Screw it, we’re doing forums. Forums will never die. Everything else will die. Forums are the closest thing we have to immortality. Forum people will outlast...

Pruned bonsai

November 10, 2022

I used to throw parties that drew over 250 people. This was easy. You became known as a person who was good at craft beer, during a time when “craft beer”...

At least, like, ten or eleven questions about the direct-to-consumer bardo

November 8, 2022

It’s that time of year in Chicago when it’s cold enough that you don’t want to be outside any more than the bare minimum, so when you’re early to a place you...