In the year and a half prior to the Shit Going Down, I had retooled my guitar rig for playing mostly with TBGB. A rack-mounted Kemper Profiler into a Mesa 2x12 cabinet, and a truly giant pedalboard to control it all comprise that rig. In keeping wit...
On the morning of Thursday, March 5, Hell Year, I was getting ready to check out of the Westin in Waltham, Massachusetts, my home away from home for most of the previous year. Without thinking too much about it, I threw the little vial of lavender o...
let the night air cool you off
tilt your head back and try to cough
It had to be fifty years old, the pine that had been felled earlier in the afternoon, and whose trunk was now stacked for pickup by the curb. It didn’t know it was dead yet. Th...
Friday I bought and downloaded the absolutely brilliant Reunions album by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. A few singles have been out for a while, and I’d been eagerly awaiting this first full listen for months. And about halfway through it, I ...
This is a post from my ancient blog, orginially going up on this day in 2011, about the events on this day in 2004.
It was a beautiful, warm, sunny spring morning in Chicago. Monday never felt so good.
There was so much change in the air for us. My j...
The other day I did a curbside pickup of some lab glassware—as one does during pandemics—and the guy threw a Sudoku book in the box. He probably thought he was being nice, or maybe he just had a lot of stock and wanted to get it off his ...
I’m starting with a picture of Arlee I took while we were walking earlier this week. Largely because it’s a cool picture, but also in no small part because I know that putting a picture at the top of the post means my banner headshot won...
sanity matrix
Friday Five was a custom at a previous blogging locale where one would share five usually unrelated thoughts, none of which ever got developed much beyond a couple sentences or maybe a paragraph. Gonna give it a shot here.
Like so many...
I thought the right thing to do was to let him pull the new vanity up the stairs by yanking on the dolly, while I stayed below to push and steady from beneath. If something went wrong, I didn’t want him ten steps up and stuck between the 100-po...
Right up front: Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, and Cryptonomicon is my favorite book. Yet I remain objective about his body of work and its flaws, and in particular, I’m not afraid to call out that Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, his most rece...
