The last few weeks, I have made a strenuous effort to achieve optimal coziness when I get up to write each morning. I think it’s important to be comfortable in whatever you do, but comfort is one thing, and coziness is at the next level. When you’re cozy, you know you’re doing something right. There… Continue reading

It goes without saying that I am endorsing Kamala Harris and, once again, declaring Donald Trump unfit not only for the presidency but for decent human society. If that puts you off from reading this, it’s unfortunate, but I can live with that, as I have a longstanding policy of refusing to pretend that supporting… Continue reading

There’s no accounting for taste, they say. There is accounting for sales and streams and concert attendance and chart position and licensing and endorsements, and you can look a lot of those numbers up on the internet, or in a magazine if they still make those. You just can’t account for why two people can… Continue reading

This may require some context. As mentioned in last week’s post, I have been writing a novel. One of the ways that I have decided to add texture and variety to the story has been to mix in special chapters at regular intervals between the narrative ones. The narrative chapters are straightforward accounts of the… Continue reading

When I first wanted to be a teacher, I had a few specific motivations. Those motivations saw me through several years of hard work, of which I remain proud and which I mostly do not regret. (If this is already feeling like a Dear John letter, it probably can’t be helped.) I had many teachers… Continue reading

Picture all of the pop stars, every one as they appear today, or on the day they died, running naked through the Atacama desert (this is not an exercise in sexual fantasy) their bare feet blistering on the rocks and sand, backs and faces scorched and sweaty (I repeat, this is not an exercise in… Continue reading

In an era where people increasingly know themselves through their relationships to high technology, it helps to examine our relationships with older technologies – the kinds of things that we have long stopped thinking of as such. Toys are one such ancient innovation, solutions to the perennial problem of boredom, and tools for the expansion… Continue reading

Greetings, passers by! A little while ago, I made a personal commitment to have something posted to this blog every weekend. I wanted to keep in practice, feed the fire as it were, so that someday I could look back at all the words I wrote and say, “if nothing else, I sure could keep… Continue reading

After this last weekend, I took a step back from my long-running Tumblr blog in order to focus myself on things that make me happier (a category, one might conclude, that includes just about anything that isn’t “posting on Tumblr every day”). Before I left the hellsite behind, however, I reblogged a post by a… Continue reading

The idiom in the title of this post is first known in the English language from 1959, a surprisingly recent date given that the English have been picking literal cherries since at least the time of Henry VIII. It is an evocative metaphor, taken nowadays to mean that a person, when presented with a constellation… Continue reading