Notebook

Highly subjective and therefore entirely accurate.

This is hands-down the best thing that’s come from having a website, and I can’t adequately express how much it means to me.

In Greek mythology, dreams were often personified as black-winged demons that enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods.

Books are meant to be highlighted and dog-eared, their spines cracked and lying facedown on the kitchen table.

It can always use more reverb.

Beautiful music for ugly running.

An ongoing exercise in accretion.

Collages of the Taipei+Tokyo ephemera in my suitcase.

Fresh meat, blouses, and turnip cakes.

Those who cut corners shall be eaten by predators and snakes.

I believe the function of art is to create a situation where language falls apart.

Landed in Tokyo. I do not know the day of the week or why it’s dark outside.

Hell can be described in a thousand ways, but heaven remains impossible to grasp.

A delightful collage of me walking through London three years ago.

The ambiguity forces us to supply our own nightmares.

“God is an experience,” an old man said as he reached for another cookie.

Here are the albums I played the most this year, the ones I kept revisiting because they challenged, delighted, and reassured.

Yesterday a man who smelled like gasoline attempted to enter the Capitol with a flare gun.

The bodhisattva was so overwhelmed by the suffering in the universe that the deity’s head split into eleven pieces.

"The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality."

Exciting opportunity! Make money at home! I’m offering five dollars and a mountain of gratitude to anyone who can identify this song.

This man was the antichrist. Yes, he was what the end of civilization looked and sounded like.

I swear I read somewhere that your uncoiled intestines can reach the moon.

The ancient Greeks believed dreams enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods.

We stood by the window and watched the howling dark, even though this isn’t what you should do in a tornado.

I’ve been trying to loosen up: fast collages, illegible notes in the middle of the night, and the smudges of a left-hander.

A lone helicopter crossed the sky. The temperature dropped. Dogs barked. Birds stopped chirping.

There's beauty in repetition, the steady accretion that comes with committing to one thing day after day.

I share this because I'm fascinated by the totems and rituals of others.

As I left New York City, the driver played Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” several times and never said a word.

An inauspicious flight number. The sound of the door closing. The metal roar of the engines.

I’m learning to find pleasure in the ultramundane and routine.

At first, I did not want to leave Vegas. Not so soon.

Polar horror is one of my favorite genres.

Eleven years sober and another year older.

I loathe these brutal nerves of mine.

I have a knack for taking the longest, most taxing route to common knowledge.

I loathe the moments when the suffering of others reminds me to be grateful.

There will always be demands and obligations, but they do not need me before eleven o’clock.

We’re deep into the 21st century, yet I still find myself waiting for the future to begin.

The Joshua tree was named by Mormons who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land.

"Virga" is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground.

Every year I feel a little more vertiginous.

Last night I stayed up late and stitched together my favorite pieces of the Mojave.

Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country.

Seven years ago, we debated how the world would end.

Why does the wind leave us feeling so exhausted and harassed?

Woke up the other day and watched a billionaire’s rocket explode.

And it was about the goddamned work of art in the goddamned age of mechanical reproduction, of all things.

She said we were looking at the Bonanza King Formation, which sounds like a doomed band from the 1970s.

I had time to kill at the Las Vegas airport, where it feels like being returned to a pleasant memory of 1987.

The desert silence baffles my Midwestern mind.

A delightful sense of slippage occurs when you can’t decide if something is brilliant or awful.

If starvation was on the table, would you rather eat your own finger or a stranger's?

I had no idea there was so much weather in the desert.

Death Valley is a place where ten thousand acres of scenery can easily go missing.

We need to make robots and zombies fun again

It’s cold in Vegas, and strange material is falling from the sky.

Yesterday C. and I took a break from our screens and drove into the Valley of Fire.

I pondered the idea of a Vegas-themed casino until I gave myself a headache.

These are days of shooting down unidentifiable objects in the sky.

We hit the brakes and followed a dusty road past a gigantic fiberglass ice cream sundae.

After all these years, how well do I know her taste? How well does she know mine?

Messiness will be a crucial tool in the footrace against artificial intelligence.

Time and space get wobbly in the desert. I think I’m puttering along, but the speedometer says 98.

An old man in a church basement said, "Stick around long enough, and this becomes a life spent stepping over dead bodies."

A few hours later, we wandered into the desert and touched some cacti.

The desert is littered with bizarre facts, and I often think I invented them, like a fragment from a dream or a misremembered film.

Here in Las Vegas, we’re catching the faintest edge of a weather event that sounds like something from a fantasy novel.

Repetition amplifies humor and pleasure.

We drove home on an empty parkway, feeling futuristic while fireworks burst alongside our car.

This year, release dates be damned. Here’s the music that delivered an unexpected thrill while motoring through the desert.

The unique scent of desert rain has a scientific name derived from the Greek words for stone and the blood of the gods.

Each time I step outside, I feel like I’m on a new planet, and I wonder if I will ever tire of the desert.

As I begin to orient myself in Vegas, I know I’m edging too close to the Strip when the plasma donation centers appear.

Due to some 19th-century railroad logic, Nevada is the only non-coastal state in the Pacific Time Zone.

I loaded a 15-foot U-Haul with our furniture and pointed it southwest.

I enjoyed driving along smooth parkways to a fast food joint that served spicy Korean pork in a cup.

Most Christian churches are located along an east-west axis, with the entrance to the west and the altar to the east.

The Pacific Time Zone is turning me into a morning person, and I do not like it.

We tooled around the city's perimeter, marveling at its sharp edges.

We made good time and hit Vegas a night earlier than scheduled.

When I woke up this morning, I struggled to remember the state I was in.

We woke to the melancholic stillness of a holiday morning somewhere in the middle of America. Even the International House of Pancakes was closed.

The billboards we passed felt like chapters from one big story: automatic weapon rentals, bulk ammo, Jesus Christ, and lawyers.

The road trip kicks off tomorrow, and my packing has been delayed by a much more critical matter: putting together a road trip playlist.

It’s one of those days when it feels like the world’s got its hands in my pockets.

It’s like some mythical creature from the past has wandered into the middle of a twelve-land expressway.

We convinced ourselves our tweets were important, newsworthy, career-making, or, god forbid, agents for social change, and it made us crazy.

My bedtime programming hums with the static of insomnia.

A shift in the light on the running trail. An unexpected connection on page 172.

William Gibson has nothing on the Catholics.

I often imagine my writing sessions should be quiet and humble, like those stern Dutch paintings of solitary women making lace in solemn bands of light.

I still have vivid dreams that my mother is still alive; I find her sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house by the sea, living under an assumed name.

Combing through eighteen years of digital cruft has led me down an unexpectedly emotional walk down memory lane.

All the leaves are on the ground now, and the bare trees reveal new scenery.

If someone behaves atrociously, we wonder how they sleep at night.

Perhaps it becomes self-fulfilling to imagine the future as stern and forbidding.

We spent a fair chunk of the ride debating whether laws were necessary.