michael-dean-k/

(A writing exercise after reading Emerson's essay on how once you can see nature, you've unlocked a constellation of metaphors that can be used to describe anything. Take 1:)

Our clipped potential, like a tree’s arms trimmed for obstructing power lines, left a mighty trunk that bears no fruits, offers no shade;

Our unborn ideas, cities and cities full, like scattered brown pollen accreted on riverbanks of sidewalk;

Our restless mind, pattered with the sizzling doinks of a pickleball frenzy;

Our dreams faded, like disappearing engine hums of transatlantic birds;

Our interiors unguarded, like the iron fence with a body-shaped hole, bent;

Step not into the confusion of a gnat swarm;

See history clearly, without the illusion of time, and as you enter the park, see at once all past visitors at their moment of entering; see some trodden zones as a cacaphony of bodies, a mob of holographic sound, light, and limbs; see the edge where you make out human forms making out; see over time the cloud getting thinner and thiner until you see those picnicking, those illegally camping, that one who died in the park.

Frigid in the machine-cooled nursery I look out over the low-rise sprawl of roofs and canopies and see what I remember as and now call the pom pom tree, a sole trunk towering above treelines and wires, with wooden skeleton hands reaching up and into the blue, yet skewering only through shaggy green balls, the poms, again sighted all from this nursery, a mysterious one, for I walk down that main boulevard every afternoon but never notice poms for they glide above the sight lines of the side-walk, and so here, and so now, observing this dying thing suspended 30 feet above the town, the village of floating spheres, home to ticks and ants and loraxes I'm sure, it reminds me of what I saw yesterday, those Lesser Poms east of home at ground level, where that Japanese landscaper with her hedgeclippers existed in that only moment I'll ever know her, whom I said hello awkwardly, who did not see the unattended child of an aloof mother when he snuck an empty wrapper into her bush, or so I thought I saw and double-taked and daydreamed of moralizing him, and this is what I think as I type into my Oracle, who incorrectly diagnoses the disease of this pom tree as witches broom. Witches Broom? No Claude, no, this is not a clot of bird twigs, and so I sent it a pictures and then it tells me, ah, of course, Verticillium Wilt, and that seems still wrong but slightly closer to the truth, for it does look like this tree is losing its vascular system unevenly, and yet even more true because it resembles my own numb arm, an uneven vascular, where my daughter's heavy head—her 86th-percentile head—pinches my ulnar nerve for hours of unclocked time each day as I read pre-Socratic philosophers from ebooks and remember the times I had to be investigated in expensive offices where fast-talking doctors lathered my arms in jelly and shot electricity through them but could diagnose me no better than my pseudo-Oracle despite their graduate degrees, and now I look down and imagine my arm itself as the naked pom tree, with only scant patches of flesh and tissue over fully exposed forearm bone, and there it is that ulnar nerve in plain sight, and I see it black and dying and in need of a clip, if only to release that black astral voodoo I acquired from weak composure in an equitorial skirmish, and if only I could find and cop a clip from that landscaper who I will surely never notice again despite she herself is a walking distance mystery who will yet never step foot into this refrigerated machine-cooled nursery.

The other night, a cohort of drunk teenagers were screaming the lyrics to "Champagne Supernova" on a quiet train, trying to get a sober passengry to sing along at 10:45pm. At first, this looks belligerent. It was belligerent, but I tried not to judge, and instead imagined them as supremely wise beings, uniting in song and joy, with an inner knowing that this moment won't matter to anyone else (and might not even register to the majority, scrolling with headphones). Outside of this log, everyone will forget their judgment in a few weeks, and we'll flatten them into a caricature of youth. But to them? Maybe they'll remember this on their deathbed. Two of them could get married. I wondered how my life might change, for the better, if I were as careless and inconsiderate as them. I started singing along the lyrics in my head, because I liked Oasis once twenty years ago, and even imagined myself standing up and singing, being the bold #2 that gives the rest of the train permission to join. If that somehow erupted, no one would forget it. But they quickly changed to another song, and then another, and I didn't recognize any of them. Realistically, I would never do it. I'm too conscientious, mired in etiquette. Even though this just might be a band of idiots—possibly the same kids I caught running on the tracks a few weeks ago,¹ filming it, probably trying to go viral—I sort of envy their disinhibition. It's not that I yearn to be a menace, more like, I can't quite conceive how much I limit my life by deferring to the feeble opinions of others. Across the aisle, I saw a woman in distress, kind of over-dramatic, saying to the stranger next to her, "I'm going to complain to the conductor! This is horrible!"

I have been brewing on this Call for New Aesthetics. I’m stuck on the question of why we need a new aesthetic for the 21st century. To go one layer deeper, what role does an aesthetic actually achieve? Like let’s say you can trace the lineage from the iPhone’s design back to Bauhaus. If the Bauhaus never existed, and smartphones took on a different aesthetic, say one that is more ornate, would we not still have TikTok? I guess this all ties back to my conclusion at the end of architecture school, that probably played some role in leaving the industry: it is capital that controls everything, and as revolutionary as architecture aspires to be, it is something like frivolous dressing atop capital aspirations (picked this up from Manfredo Tafuri, a Marxist critic of architecture; IANA Marxist, but the critique is hard to forget). No matter how you design a bank, a bank is a bank. Bauhaus was not a revolutionary aesthetic movement, but a response to the economic reality of mass production (could be an oversimplification, but I think it's accurate to see it as a response, as most architecture is). There is a long history of architects trying to proactively change culture, but failing because they don't actually have leverage. And so what you really need is not just an aesthetic or formal style, but a reimagining of the programs, institutions, and rituals of society, and then a way to use form/ornament to realize those ambitious visions. Put another way, architecture can’t matter without the vision and power of a client, and I don’t think there’s a future for architecture within the OS of capitalism—but if capitalism is about to implode, maybe there’s a new opportunity.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

Waiting for my wife, I am sitting in the lobby of a firm I quit 4 years ago—though I haven’t entered the building in 5, since COVID—and I see Westler slip out the elevator bay; out walks Westler into the barrel-vaulted lobby, out through those gold revolving doors that started and ended many days of my years. Westler. He’s still here! Alive! I remember him like I do an old dream. His placid demeanor and dry humor, a goatee, his subtle mischief and possible creepiness. I don’t know if I ever really knew him behind that caricature. He designed multi-story basements for megapolic airports… I think (a kind of endless machine work, the coordination of billions of lines, cognitive sterilization, a tectonic death in service of a suitcase city, a labirynth of conveyor belts). Is he doing that same thing? Did they find some new VR guy to render his city of luggage? Of course I know absolutely nothing of Westler’s life—for all I know, he has a pearl of a daughter that makes sacrificing his peak hours worth it, forever—but in my assumption, that the company we both worked for is something of a life-sucker, a hunter and skinner of the young and ambitious, a building broker that drools steel angled towers across the East, across Dubai and Korea and Singapore, an entity in Bryant Park that overworks and underpays but leaks enormous partner bonuses that enables the CEO to buy luxury pets and park penthouses while speaking at Venetian conferences on the virtues of design, I imagine Westler as a sleepwalker. I imagine every day of the last five years, as he wisps out those gold-trimmed revolving doors, he finds relief in his break, but doesn’t stop to question the sacrifice, and knows not the basic mystery, “time flies.”

Now that I’ve retrieved my wife from the grips of her Tower, we are back in Penn Station—because no more trains run out of Grand Central this late—and we see a familiar figure, a man on fentanyl hunched over at 90 degrees. “Is that the same guy from this morning?” My wife said sadly; but I said, given he spent his entire day in the same spot, same position and same trance, he looks to me a whole lot like Westler.

This is an extreme comparison—to compare the default path to a lethal addiction—but it tracks to how I feel, an anger over a design firm kidnapping my very pregnant wife.

This morning I finally visualized the whole chain of command, the reason she works until 4am, and why 1 AM is considered a “good night”: somewhere in Dubai is a very rich man, and he’s decided to cure the anxiety over his massive pile of money but funding a Tower that, most likely, no one will live in. So he hires a team of henchman, the “client reps,” and it’s their job to dangle glamorous limitless design work to very hungry architects that fear the market could evaporate at any moment. So naturally, the firm accepts the work at half the rate, and I assume half of that is just cut off the top to reward and keep the partners fat (the 80%, the staff—they don’t matter, they are burnt and churnt over, with eager beardless faces eternally sending resumes, because where else in America can you build DUBAI). And so the client, being entitled and aware of our desperation, will throw a screaming fit if my wife and her 2 juniors can’t pull off the labor of 10 people, every single night. Staffing can’t be honest because it’s trying to survive, and business development can’t be selective because it knows it’s runway, and so what emerges is a kind of caste system where office workers are expected to work 80 hour weeks without overtime or questions.

Four Santas at the edge of Bryant park, each with a bike carriage and $60 glow light speaker, each blaring a different holiday song, co-constructing a wall of cheer, a terrible cacophony that blends with traffic and engines on 42nd, and for some unreasonable price, you can take selfies for $100 as they lap the Christmas market. People must do this. Otherwise they wouldn’t come back. If I were an out-of-towner, and in a festive mood, I guess I could see the appeal of a postcard moment like this, of being ushered around the center of the world by the boss himself, it just feels a lot funnier and weirder when you know the same place on a cold January morning commute. I am not a Christmas cynic, I’m just struck by the novelty of the sight, and in lieu of a picture, this is what comes out.

A gloomy day, where smoke rising from tar blends in with clouds, and through fog I see men in orange vests, smoking cigarettes and adding to the blur. Traffic is backed up, there are honks, and a baby wails through an open window of an SUV. I am walking south on Bell, where pidgeons flock, and realize the enormous weight of everything, all before I enter this French coffee shop. Upon entering I twist out my own head, assaulted by audiovisual XMAS slop; dear god … can I have a sricacha caesar wrap and a London fog? I contemplate emails and henchman and billionaires and babies and such, and so when I sit, I try turning off my mind. The XMAS slop is back, along with the chatter of screaming kids, and the woman to the left of me yapping on a mobile zoom call in a foreign language, and the couple to my right speaking Greek. This is too much, so I look for peace at the marble tables outside, but when I look at the fake wicker chair, I notice it’s covered in worms and birdshit. I realize this is a pessimistic log, a chain of unfortunate events, but sometimes this is the way reality presents itself. And even if it feels fresh to occasionally write with cynicism, it’s not a place to live; the literati too easily withdraw from polite society and cocoon themselves in with their own cannon, drooling acerbic puss into the gutters of Substack.

I’m at the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library. It’s old, almost like a church, and when someone slides their wood chair on the tile floor to get up, it lets out a horrendous screech that echoes through the whole hall. Surely, NYPL knows about this? I wonder, why do they not have felt tips on the bottom of the chairs? Have they tried this? Are they opposed? Would they stop me if, one by one, I personally installed felt tips on the bottom of each chair?

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.

The adult mind will frequently run into psychological dead-ends, points where no more evolution is possible within an existing frame, and so growth requires you to descend into chaos, to regress down the stack, in search of new directions forward, in hope of carrying some insights from old frames with you.

I don’t know if “growth” is the right word here, and “evolution” feels off to me, but it’s something like the advancement in harmony or complexity in your sense of identity, purpose, and responsibility. The moment that freezes, it’s as if you’re cut off from the core point of the human experience.

Whether you should take psychedelics, I think, is a matter if you can reliably dissolve frames on your own. If not, maybe you don’t quite need them; I imagine there is wonder, mystery, and value in the aesthetic phantasmagoria, and all sorts of things to learn from terrible trips of demons and such, but the main point might be the new directions they point you in.

Whether you descend abruptly or gently, assisted or natural, there is a natural fear of psychological death, and so to “descend into chaos” requires a trust that you’ll figure out how and where to swim.

It would be cliche and misleading to say today's park walk was "ego death," but surely it felt like a "pause" or a "lapse." It felt like a lucid dream, in that there was a remembered peace in irreality. Irreality, in this sense, I’d describe as a disassociation from the egoic frameworks that have had a strong hold over my walking life in recent weeks; instead, I felt an immersion in nature that felt mysterious. Like an animal, today, tomorrow, yesterday were fuzzy; all social and chronological constructions were, temporarily, erased. By saying it was “mysterious,” I think I mean that I felt the emotional power of a particular moment in a way that escaped classification, and so it has this effect of being suspended in outside the normal stream of the cradle-to-grave arc.

I’ve lived in New York my whole life, but I have nothing to say about it. Meaning, in Manhattan at least, I have no recommended pizza spots, no bagel stores, no upscale restauraunts. Almost every out of towner I meet seems to know the city better than me. I am willfully and unwillingly, an idiot in my own home. I stumbled in and just gawk at the mystery, still, every time. I mean of course I know some trivial facts (like how the skyline mirrors the bedrock), and I show them off when I can so my national and international friends don't get suspicious. 

Really, New York is a metropolis, a city of cities of cities. Austin is equivalent to Astoria, just one of several downtowns in Queens, one of five Burroughs. And so you’ll find whatever you need here, meaning, aside from the obvious places, you can surrender to the city and get swept into some odd and novel experience each time (alternatively, you can get caught in identical loops, only going to the same places). When I was in the psychedelic society I found myself in Gowanus, Brooklyn in the apartment of a 70-year philosopher with cancer as he took LSD and hallucinated St. Teresa Avila. When I was trying to start a virtual reality company, I was in Zillow’s headquarters putting headsets on executives, telling them we’d “put Manhattan in a briefcase.” When I needed money, I walked the same path every morning through Bryant Park, to the same corporate job. Now, as I start a family, I’m in a suburb at the edge, moving a little farther east every 3 years, and now I take the LIRR in to meet traveling writers. After many years, you realize New York isn’t one thing. Your take on New York is a reflection of yourself at that phase in life, and the city changes a lot less than you do.

When someone tells me New York is this particular thing or that, they're telling me who they are.

I’m watching a squirrel on a tree; specifically, it’s instinct to structurally brace itself against a wind gust. It is frozen alert, flat, legs wide, arms narrow, neck up at 30 degrees. It looks stuffed. Fake. Is it in fear or wonder or maybe just loving the breeze? Is it scared of the pongs from the pickleball courts, or curious about the strange spherical nuts curving through air, a sport played by millennials and elders on a Friday? I see it swallow, it’s tail fuzz blowing, attached to a white belly with orange at the ears and the edges of the eyes. I step closer and closer, until I can see the glass in its eyes. I look away for one second, look back, and it’s gone. A brown sock hops away through the leaves again, rummaging across the concrete to find another tree.

There has to be a better answer to the “why is nothing beautiful anymore?” discourse. This usually takes the form of plucking two objects, two hundred years apart, to make a point. If you take the best thing from the past and the worst thing from the present, you can make any conclusion you want, in any field. Are there not beautiful phone booths made in the 2000s? Might there actually be more of them than in the past?

Ultimately, though, I’m less interested in aesthetic studies if they don’t tie back to character. What good is beautiful architecture is everyone is ugly in spirit? I mean that. If we built beautiful, luxurious, maximalist cities, might that not reflect a kind of materialism in the soul of its people? Not saying that’s a given, but the real dilemma of architecture—the one that troubled me in my later years in school—is if the design of our world actually has any role in shaping its inhabitants. Maybe that’s an unfair thing to ask of bricks and steel. But maybe that’s why I shifted to other fields of design that are more influential in shaping virtue.

The Big Duck is a historical landmark in Long Island. A duck farm that sold eggs and produce used a 25’ plaster duck as its highway billboard. It became “world famous” from Robert Venturi’s book on architectural theory, Learning from Las Vegas, which coined the Big Duck as the microcosmic example of “roadside architecture.”

I recently spoke about said duck in a presentation to writers. The farm and the duck are useful metaphors, working in a duality. If you only build the farm, no one driving by will pull over to see what you’ve done. If you only build the highway duck, your farm is a letdown. The trick is to build both: to have the heart of a farmer, but to accept that it’s also your responsibility to appear on the highway.

Surprised to learn that John Olerud has one of the highest all-time OPS (on-base plus slugging percentages) in New York Mets history. He wasn't necessarily a power hitter, but for over a decade (1992-2003), he had more walks than strikeouts each season. He also set the NYM record for walks in a season: 125 walks in 1999. His skill was discernment, knowing when not to swing.

The morning after the wedding in San Clemente, I walk into a coffee shop to find a book club of seven identical surfer bros, each with bleached blonde hair and branded gear, taking turns reading the Bible out loud.

Last night I hallucinated trees and nature scenes as I was going to bed, which makes sense because we did a short two-hour hike in the PNW yesterday. This happened last time I was here (at Mt. Shasta), and probably happens after every hike (I think, but the two most lucid times happened to be in the pacific northwest). The visions were bright, lucid, and shifting every 5 seconds to a completely formed photo-realistic scene. I guess this is hypnogogic imagery. Or hyperphantasia? My guess is that, when the brain is immersed in a complex environment, it creates a strong impression on the visual/auditory cortex, and then when you switch to a dark environment, it’s still firing. (Fatigue/endorphins might contribute too?). Sometimes after parties or museum, I will hallucinate ambient chatter as I fall asleep.

On the gallery we saw some guy selling black and white doodles for $180, and they looked a lot like my (post-it) doodles, except less mature. My wife was critiquing it, just as the guy (Tykneenen) came up and introduced himself. Nice guy. Later, we guessed that he wasn’t part of the First Walk officially, just a local (a musician actually), trying to make some money and capitalize off the foot traffic. Not a bad idea. I showed him my gallery of doodles, and he was impressed by the perspectial nature (and even said that, from our brief interaction, that I inspired a new direction for him), and I realized, huh, I forgot how much I enjoyed drawing.

Looking at “The Where” exhibit by Karey Kessler gets me wondering how I might able to weave prose/poetry into art/geometry/composition. There’s another one I saw that had pages from a book as part of a collage, and I wonder how typewritten pages and cutouts might play a role.

I’m most inspired by Ryan Hamburger’s Monomyth exhibit, which feels architectural and similar to some of my own experiments from the past. It got me nostalgic for my drafting board. There’s something to using straight edges and lead pencils to construct things, and then using watercolor to fill them in. I have a fuzzy mental image of what I’d create if, suddenly, I had all the supplies I need. Something like a geometric fractal where shapes occur at all sizes, but at different angles.

If you printed every signed contract through Docusign and then stacked them, would it be taller than Seattle’s Docusign Tower? Yes, definitely, but could you match the foot print too? Like could you make the entire Docusign Tower just out of stacks of signed contracts?

On the bus she had short red hair, a mask, seashell AirPods, tubes with bubble blowers and bubble mix as earrings, and a free Palestine wristband. All signals. Should we attempt to describe ourselves through symbols? Or should we find content in knowing that within us is an uncategorizable mystery that no one else can ever possibly know?

Tempted to get a vinyl player because it would be a form of analog media my daughter could engage with. The core feature is not sound quality (the typical justification), but the fact that each album is an object, and a young mind can associate media with physical things. You can also, display your favorites on a wall, as a constant reminder of the ones you like.

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

1. Small bedrooms: not much bigger than the space required to get into bed. No TVs, computer, or furniture. A bedroom isn’t a place to spend time in. Instead, reallocate that space for well-designed walk-in closets and storage.
2. The core space of the house should be “the studio,” a series of spaces for making things and working together. There should be a hierarchy, many nooks for specific functions (organized with sound/sight in mind), that all revolve around a central rotunda (for discussion, relaxation, review, presentation, wall display, showing guests). Again, no TV, that could be in a separate theatre room.
3. Design art & ornament around spaces of biological rhythms. You’ll use your dining room 3x a day, and your bathroom even more. This is where you display family crests and things that will consistently remind you of your values.
4. Minimal friction to outdoor walk: ideally, most functions are on the first floor so you get get outside without thinking. A staircase will provide the slightest friction, making you go outside less than you could.
5. Be mindful of where you place clocks. If any. I would recommend not having them in bedrooms, dining rooms, or studio spaces. Maybe put one in the foyer. If you need to know the time, you go to the clock space. The time is not something you should be ambiently aware of.
6. Time capsule cube storage: as often as you can, document and throw out things that won’t have much sentimental or practical value. For things you do want to save, don’t just store them away, because you won’t be able to find them for decades. Create a system where each year gets a cube of storage, and at any point you’ll be able to find things from your past.
7. Family tree idea: I just like the idea of dedicating a wall to visualize family lineage.
8. Sunken floors: Slight level changes (1-2 foot) force an awareness that you’re changing planes.
9. No shoes in the house.
10. A silent chapel space (not necessarily religious), ideally separate from the house, accessible from the backyard, where you can go to reflect.

Futurists fear that robots and AIs will terraform and harvest the world, but it already feels eerie and unnatural to see midwestern fields carved out into perfect grids. It is as alien as crop circles, but more terrifying and less creative. Perfect 90 degree angles. It is brute order and dull patterns; a metallic fishnet over the midriff of America. I’d be surprised if there weren’t good reasons for this, but it is spooky in its orthagonality. FWIW, I am pro-grid; a grid-head FFS. But the grid to me is an invisible structure to guide the creation of complex, organic, natural forms, not the form itself, disappearing into the edges of sight.

I should make a case in r/GratefulDead that “St. Stephen” might be heavily inspired by the death of Neal Cassady.

Robert Hunter, their lyricist, confessed not knowing of the Christian “St. Stephen” until after the lyrics were shared with the band. So it’s not literal. Also, Neal died earlier in the same year (February 1968) that the song was first played (June 1968). The middle of the song is abstractly about death, but all the surrounding verses paint a portrait of Neal that, after reading 5 years of his letters, is now unseeable. Hunter knew Cassady well. Cassady was Weir’s roommate. Cassady was a “sacrificial muse” for much of that generation, so it’s conceivable. True inspiration or not, it will forever change the way I hear these lyrics.

• verse-1: He steals a roses (Neal stole many things, like 500 cars), and “wherever he goes the people all complain.” The verse doesn't explictly say St. Stephen was a thief, but he “had a rose,” he “goes in and out of the garden,” (as a theft might), and everyone is annoyed.
• v2: “Stephen would answer if he only knew how” relates to how, in Neal’s letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg, both masterful writers, he would excessively express how he couldn’t put words to his feelings.
• v3: About death.
• Bridge: “Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow” taps into Neal’s speed. On the road has the line, “the road ran straight as an arrow.” Also, “what a lot of fleeting matters you have spurned” ties to his range of chaos. “Several seasons with their treasons” refers to his shifting moods, and how he would predictably betray people (Carolyn, Kerouac) in search of something new.
• v4: “Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, One man gathers what another man spills,” Neal spilled everything, and Kerouac/Ginsberg saw immense value in what Neal thought was worthless confession.
• v5: “Saint Stephen will remain, All he’s lost he shall regain,” maybe talks to the enduring influence of his spirit. And then “been here so long he’s got to calling it home,” speaks to his nomadism. (This is prob the weakest link).
• v6: “Can you answer? Yes I can, But what would be the answer to the answer man?” speaks to their desperation, follow-up letters when their friend hadn’t answered them.

Over Utah I look down from my plane window and see a frozen red sea, of a pink-purple hue, not blood, but still, the wow hues of death … a red sheet of ice? I pinched my lip; feels real.

I think back to my sequence of day’s events (to see if I am in a dream and could be become lucid; this is how odd a bright red sea is to me), yet it all connects: hiking through a bayside trash park with CansaFis > talking to Will in Vesuvio > seeing Dan Shipper on my plane … it is … distinct … but it all connects, despite the real-life dream logic. (Not implying I think I’m in a dream—recently an Alaska Airlines pilot had an LSD-hangover, and thought he was trapped in a dream he could only escape by crashing the plane—I'm just trying to convey the oddness of this one thought spurred from a red ice sheet — and when I look down now it’s all normal, just trees and hills.)

I can’t remember the last time I studied a plane wing, but I’m doing it now. It started because it’s turning dusk and everything is dull except the sun beaming on one triangular solid, now gold, protruding towards the back of the right wing (I have poor plane vocab). It felt unreal, which was a frame-burst that got me remembering oh yes, this is a wing, and a wing is not just an ignorable plane part that blocks the midwest scenery, it is a product of centuries of engineering, an invention so stable and durable that I can sit and log ten of thousands of feet in the sky without concern.

My core value is contradiction, for there’s no other trait that leads to freer-thinking. If you are so stable in your beliefs, you run on auto-pilot. But if you are a Christian atheist, a Luddite technologist, a scrappy perfectionist, or any other kind of walking-paradox, a legless man, then you really have some explaining to do. In resolving the conditions between the two true but opposite things you harbor in one body, you think to make sense, and write to speak truth. This is where you find the work that matters. 

Why am I so inspired by the reckless and irresponsible Neal Cassady? It will take me years to find that out, if ever, but in that pursuit I invent some value system that is uniquely my own. This sort of embrace is, by the way, brand suicide. Your consumers are slow to update their mental model of you, and in the high-speed pizza counters of the Internet there is only small talk and one identity per person. To write for a niche, to stay on brand, to hit the same message, to do the things required for you to dominate the soul-gutting mediasphere is to mistake banal desperation for your alien soul. Do not trade oneiromancy for efficiency. Do not have one mind across all essays, let alone in one essay.

San Francisco, where billboards of slop promote slop promotions,

impossible benefits from machine intelligences;

San Francisco, where the Dead reborn in golden Park,

to dance with perpetual stank

face to nitrous balloons and tie dye,

until Mickey Hart plays cosmic harp,

with shamanic visuals to drunk men,

pointing and chanting his name;

San Francisco, where half the cars are driven by ghosts,

and sometimes catch fire at night;

San Francisco, where the powerful have,

their souls caught in their throats,

from crackled-out platitudes and slogans.

San Francisco, where that Transamerican pencil pyramid is,

a backdrop for cinema-quality technology trailers,

signaling their city is the city of new religion.

After reading the first 3 years of Cassidy's letters (the letters from the real-life Dean Moriarty), I find myself questioning who I am, the impossibility of anyone else being able to reveal that to me, and how I have to really be honest with myself to know it; I think this all while staring at the ceiling—as one does when trying to figure out impossible things—and I’m struck by the unfamiliarity of the stucco, plaster, or whatever you call it (I am outing myself as an architect who is illiterate in some absolute basics of building construction). It reminds me of my uncle’s old condo in Utah—the one I went to every President’s Week for a ski trip, the one we stopped by on that disastrous road trip. I wonder if western ceilings have thicker textures, more noticeable by the gradient hues of an uplight. Any time you travel, unless you are camping, a ceiling is the first surface to greet you, the white sky you never notice, with as many grains as stars if you’d care to count (this sentence tries too hard, but there’s something in it). I think all this thinking about ceilings is probably a distraction from the alienation I feel towards myself. Alone in SF. I mean, I could reach out to everyone (and maybe I will on Wed/Thu). This is likely over-dramatic, and likely due to being alone in a new city, but I do sense that all my recent focus on building software this year, as utterly exciting as it is, has distanced me from finding the soul in my own writing.

Should I be able to walk into Vesuvio and just make instant friends with strangers? What does that say about me if I can’t? Feels like the last 15 years have been a shift away from social fluency and sports and, instead, a shift towards obsession with creative expression and technical mastery. It’s a trade I’m glad I made. Once I have an intro or context, I feel fine, but there’s an inhibition I have in bursting through and creating contexts from nothing.

Among this cafe where I hear lunch talk about data centers, a homeless woman walks into a cafe with her suitcase. She walks right past me towards the counter, until I hear a loud electric tazor. “We don’t fuck around,” says the cashier. Terrified of that zap, of that cartoon sound, she runs out, leaving her bags. A minute later, the guy rolls her bags to the curb, and angrily kicks them over. How dare she?

I got into friendly conversation on a public bus in San Francisco, almost entirely due to the friendliness of the deadheads, and that, once you can tell, it’s an instant invitation to chat. I got tips for the show (ie: avoid the JFK promenade), and tips for the bus. Thanks to them I took a different route that went through Haight Ashbury, ground zero, which included a counter cultural museum, dozens of pop-up vendors, a rock band, and a nudist with a red sock on his cock. 

To what degree did this movement 60 years ago affect culture? I look to my left and see a white-haired woman in tie-dye furiously swiping through a feed on her phone. 60 years ago, it was edgy to wear tie dye to a concert. Now, the truly counter-cultural thing would be to wear a full suit and tie to a Dead and Company show. That might be the only way to actually feel the discomfort and community judgment that original hippies felt from straight society.

Walking through the architectural slop of suburban Queens, hot and windy, sandals digging into feet on a 20-minute walk from a bad haircut to the cute part of town to meet my wife, and now there are church bells. Typical ding dong pattern. And then three low, ominous hits. The new hour is here. Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. Power lines, planes, and Amazon trucks. Sun on a clean-shaven neck.

These details are arbitrary. It’s not enough to just render my in-moment perceptions into prose. There is endless detail and no time to turn each pebble. Which ones have significance? Which details create a third thing when you put two together?

The difference between an architect and an engineer is that an architect needs conceptual agility in an unknown problem space while an engineer needs sharp heuristics in a known problem space. They both operate in the unknown, but engineering unknowns are within equations, and architectural unknowns are the problem space itself.

Smooth haircuts and fat loss shot advertisements, a train full of sleepy heads not yet caffeinated but fixated on their little computers. The AC cranks.

It’s a July that feels like a September from kindergarten, and I just read a Substack post from “Worst Boyfriend Ever,” which felt like a second-rate beat impersonation, but I wonder how much is literary inspiration and how much is real. There is a brand of prose-poetry that feels anchored in real-life degeneracy, and while I was once inspired by that early on for its edginess, I realized it’s inauthentic to copy it, and even more inauthentic to aspire to live it. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued by him, and realize there are whole secret corners on Substack of this kind of writing that I’ve yet to find. (Note from future self: when writing this, I had only read a post of his where he befriended a homeless man. I didn’t yet know his Substack name was literal—that he started by writing about cheating on his girlfriend, and is now traveling the country in a van looking to fuck everyone in his audience.)

Of the 22 people in this train car, we are all zombies except the buttoned-down silver-watched slick-haired coke-eyed man who seems engaged in the best conversation of his life; his face is more animated than all the passengers combined, his forehead so scrunched that his eyebrows levitate above his head.

NYC is so interesting because it’s an open, secret, peaceful war of virtue clashes. You can’t really know what a passing stranger is like, but in the attempt to infer someone’s virtues, you sense that there are radically different worldviews all co-existing in a very dense space.

I am undecided to the degree that I want to write about cockroaches.

First, obviously, they are skeevy. Roach prose is definitely less gross than a Google images search, but still, it’s far from a feel-good topic. I don’t want to put my readers through thinking about them too much, let alone myself. But I feel intrigued to write about them; there’s the Burroughs-like writerly obsession with roaches in Naked Lunch—which feels like an honestly twisted curiosity that is nothing to aspire to—but it would feel insincere to mimic him. Still, experiences with roaches are uncomfortable and memory piercing and physiology altering and I guess I want to freeze them in text.

I am the exterminator because my landlords are very nonchalant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they just crushed them with their hands (I have seen them do this once, at our lease signing). I have a new habit of applying Indoxicarb near the radiator with a syringe; the theory is that, since they are scavengers, they will grab the bait, bring it back to the nest, and poison their families. I’m skeptical of this. In any case, this my 2nd time finding “roach droppings” under the radiator. Does it immediately expunge everything in their intestines? This time though, I looked at the underside of my Clorox wipe and saw what seemed like a microscopic baby roach, dead or alive I’m not sure, and I couldn’t tell if it’s legs were wiggling so I pinched hard just in case, but now I am in this ethical haze of seeing my self as a roach abortionist.

When falling asleep I felt a tickle on my leg, turned on the light, saw it was a roochie (disgusting). Flicked it off, and had something like a 2-minute battle with it before I trapped it in a corner and gave in my 5” thick “Interpreting the Renaissance” book (so far the only practical I've found for a Marxist textbook). Showered, walk back into the bedroom and immediately see another one, same size, in almost the exact same spot. My first thought was not “we have a problem” but more like deja vu or irreality or dream logic.

Reminder to future self: this only really happens once a year, and it’s usually on the day/week when it first gets abnormally hot/humid—need to apply bait in the radiators before then.

Beyond 11pm, all the food places near Bryant Park were closed, and so I found myself in a McDonald’s which led me to buy dinner for a possibly homeless man. He told me he lives in Connecticut, but his cousin (his ride back) didn’t show, and so he needs to wait overnight, needs money for food, has a spine injury, and I wasn’t sure if the whole backstory was real or an excuse. In any case, we talked for 10 minutes as we waited. As I left he reached out for a handshake and I saw what might have been infected blisters, and so I awkwardly offered him my pincers (thumb and finger). The gesture might have negated the kindness of me getting him food in the first place, and I feel bad about it.

Walk through Times Square with an empty, non-judgmental mind, and you'll see the variance in the source code of the species—in looks, language, class, culture, and mental illness. It's a place that belongs to no one and draws in everyone.

In addition to the full variety of human faces, I saw at least 5 rotating ring light cameras that would create 360 photo/video. ChakTok? Some had red fuzzy carpets. They ranged from low-quality rigs to fancy booths. In the last one I saw a 5-year old kid doing an awkward finger-pumping dance to the sound of Jay-Z’s “New York,” and I imagined him watching the output with an earnest technological awe.

There is also a man in a massive gorilla suit as if waiting for 100 humans to fight him, and among it all is a girl sitting in the center of the world, legs crossed, eyes closed, meditating.

The Sphere can trigger peak/mystical/transcendent experiences and the corresponding reflection that comes from that. When a concert is able to trigger that 10x in a single show, it’s special. But also, you become aware of the variance, and your expectations rise. You are so attuned to what a peak is, that the average moment is boring or flat, like a planetarium+.

My review/critique of the Dead & Company of the Sphere is relative to what's now possible in a venue. It's less interesting to compare the Sphere to a traditional venue to the new affordances of what a show could actually be. Even though the whole thing is generally mind-blowing, it’s worth it to be critical and imaginative of the experience (after seeing it in its fullness). Instead of just saying “it was insane” or “the visuals are distracting” we should give specific feedback that might even improve the future of shows in that venue. It’s an entirely new medium, and it could be up to fans to articulate what’s working and what’s not.

The Grateful Dead ethos brings a challenge to the sphere, because it's not a pre-determined set; each night is its own arc, and it's also semi-unpredictable if they'll stay in a segment for 3 minutes or 7 minutes. The video DJ is something like a live band member, the interface between the band and the audience. When it's done well, it's sublime, and it's worst it feels like tacky CGI that retracts from an otherwise performance (I felt this about the skeleton motorcycle during "I Know You Rider").

A peak experience at the Sphere would require procedural synesthesia. Procedural means you generate the effects live; there is some of that, but it's mostly stitching 2D video into fixed 3D CGI sequences. Instead, a Sphere "background" should be like an environment of "receivers" that get animated and modulated by the sound itself. A basic example would be a snare drum triggering a ripple. There was little of this! There were some accidental alignments, and those moments were when it felt special. A real-time link would give the experience of being inside the music. It's all about the conversion of sound to shape. This is hard on many levels—design and engineering—and there's a possibility that the Sphere couldn't handle something that was entirely real-time.

Some scattered notes:

• Warping 2D objects into 3D spaces (like they did with the Mars hotel—it was great, but only used once).
• Faster pacing: don’t dwell on a sequence for 3 minutes, but undergo subtle shifts and transformations every 3 seconds.
• Use effects to “green screen” out the musicians and embed them in digital environments (vs. putting them on screens)
• Spherical camera rigs (multi-angle)
• Fan footage (filter for anonymity)
• Lyrics, song name, text
• First person drum cam
• Tracers/looping — distortions in time
• More use of haptics (just drums/space, hit)

In the decade before pot was legalized in New York, if you wanted edibles, it came in the form of a homemade brownie, and it’s unbelievable to think the dosages of those might have been 100-300 mg per brownie. For context, the legal limit now is 5-10 mg per gummy. Here’s what GPT has to say on the level required for edibles to turn psychedelic:

“Edibles become distinctly psychedelic—with altered time perception, visual distortions, auditory hallucinations, ego dissolution, and intense introspection—typically around 50–100mg of THC, especially for those with low tolerance. For some sensitive users, 30–50mg can already induce quasi-psychedelic effects. Beyond 150–200mg, even experienced users can experience full-on tripping: melting visuals, looping thoughts, loss of body awareness, and encounters with archetypal or “divine” mental imagery.

There was zero issue in bringing edibles into the Sphere, and maybe that’s obvious, but I can only compare it to the paranoia of trying to bring brownies into MSG a decade ago (which really was more like eating the whole thing outside—50-100 mg?—before, for fear of getting caught, and then peaking right when the opener is done, to a 45 minutes experience of the chatter of 19,500 people turning into a terrifying white noise). Now it’s legal and destigmatized, and you can take small doses every 45 minutes to space out and control the high. They should probably have an edible stand directly inside the venue. Why not? Is an alcohol overdose not way more troublesome and messy than a weed overdose? Even though it’s all legal now, it will probably take another generation for it to be as casual as alcohol or coffee. Each has their function. Marijuana brings heightened introspection and perception, which is an obvious choice for any concert or aesthetic experience.

From the Venetian, we walked in 98-degree heat for twenty minutes to go to Shakedown Street, a Grateful Dead themed street fair in the parking lot of the Tuscany, which features, I imagine, some remnants of the original Deadhead culture (ie: people willing to camp in RVs in Vegas for 2-3 months at a time to sell merch during a Sphere residency), selling shirts and trinkets to tourists like us (just here for the weekend). Part of that culture is pranks (ie: the merry pranksters), and as we walked in, I heard two guys behind me saying, “let’s go fuck with some people.” Then I saw them run ahead, turn around, and greet us as boisterous trolls: “Make me rich! Make me really, really rich!” I guess they worked there. We collectively spent hundreds on merch.

1. On route to In'N'Out, we walked past the storefront of a VR arcade, and through the window you could see an overweight man in a headset, fully reclined, probably experiencing a roller coaster. As someone who has given a thousand VR demos, I know the vulnerability in being watched. We found that people were more open to try it if they were in a private room. This is the exact opposite. Hundreds will walk by and see a human vegetable, eyes occluded; he’ll never know you saw him, and you’ll never know what he saw.
2. An article with Jerry Garcia talking about virtual reality in 1989.
3. While the Vision Pro made my skeptical about the future of VR, the Sphere gave me hope. I could imagine albums evolving into multimedia experiences that layers performance, music videos, and lyrics on top of the song.

1. If Vegas is a city of simulations (imitative representations—Paris, Egypt, New York—in space and time), then the Sphere is its ultimate object; from within it, it can take the form of every and any situation. Usually the simulation takes the form of some plastic object in a chaotic skyline, but the Sphere is a Platonic solid. The only other perfect shape is the Luxor. The Luxor symbolizes the past; the Sphere symbolizes the future.
2. Inside of the Venetian—the hotel connected to the Sphere—the shopping mall is pseudo-Italy with eternal daylight, featuring Gondola stripe-shirted chanters, a painted sky of clouds, with pucks (sprinklers) spaced 15 feet apart. It is a 1990's low-tech simulation.
3. The perfect Sphere demo would be a film that transports you to Venice. It would be digital Venice inside of a plastic Venice inside of a sweltering Vegas inside of a desert. Nested simulations.
4. The Aronofsky Sphere demo, “Postcards from Earth,” is a tech demo posing as a documentary. Without a narrative, they couldn’t charge $150 for it. But now everyone is upset for overpaying for what is fundamentally an uninspired, dragged out, half-length movie. The footage itself though is awe-inducing though. I got the chills multiple times. It’s close to full sensory immersion. The haptics on the seat give you something that VR doesn’t have. You can really feel and smell like you’re in the backseat of a car on a bumpy road in India—it should've been in Venice.

Hiking through Red Rocks, we must have veered slightly off the main path, and so we found ourselves having to shuffle up a semi-steep 10-20 foot shelf. It seemed doable, except when you look down and start thinking about how every step really matters but you wore the wrong shoes for this and so a slip could actually turn out pretty horribly. At that point, I got locked in a sort of paralysis, and the only way up was to not over think, but to sort of bear crawl up and hope for the best.

• 08:44 AM – From our hotel window, we spotted a dead pixel on the sphere. Rumor has it that this happens often, and a technician will rappel from the top to replace it. There’s no footage of pixel replacement on YouTube—maybe it happens in the middle of the night.
• 11:07 AM – Seeing the mountains while driving out to Red Rock Canyon (outside of Las Vegas) reminded me that the first creative thing I ever got into was photography, probably largely inspired by this location.
• 12:01 PM – Would be interesting to learn how to “read” geology (similar to how someone can read sheet music). A trained eye can look up and down, and recount a detailed history of a canyon dating back millions of years (with far more detail than “this use to be an ocean”—which on it’s own is a wild insight) ... Architecture has a similar function—you can read the past values and abilities of a society by looking at the buildings that have been layered into a place over centuries.
• 01:15 PM – There are a few reasons why depth perception is skewed when you’re hiking out west in rocks (compared to out east in Forrests). 1) Fractality: unlike trees, identical rock formations can occur at radically different scales, giving you no familiar reference or anchor point. 2) With no foliage, you can see something miles away without any obstruction, so something that seems 1 mile away is actually 50 miles away. 3) Perspective… (forgot).

1. Did Jerry Garcia ever comment on the future of robots?” I asked this question to the robot in the Sphere lobby, and it gave me a BS response (effectively, “No, Jerry Garcia, the guitarist of the Grateful Dead, never talked about robots, but people do!”). I really wanted it to infer what Jerry might think about robot chaperons in the lobby of his venues, but I had to ask the human host to ask the robot question, so I couldn’t get too specific.
2. Most people seemed intrigued and revulsed by the micro-expressions in its face, except the guy behind us. He told us that several people have complained to the Sphere management that it makes them uncomfortable. He thinks humanoid robots will be commercially available in 3-4 years. He wants one in his kitchen.
3. Andrew said someone told him that the hardest thing for robots to recreate will be a sense of smell, and so in the future, if androids look identical to humans, they’ll use smell tests as proof of humanity.
4. The outer lobby of the sphere has black reflective floors, glowing hues on the parapets, and tangling installments that if you stare into, will trip you out.
5. The Sphere markets itself as a haven for “22nd century technology,” but the travelators are broken.

1. In JFK there are several tie-die shirts, which is the long-distance way to signal to someone (from 100 yards away) that you are, a Deadhead, and going to the concert, again. If you look closer, there’s less obvious, less multi-color, less standoutish merch (a black shirt with a skeleton as a casino dealer, which tells you they went to the ’24 Sphere residency). The mutual noticing of each other’s merch is something like an unstated invitation to begin a conversation, which if not undertaken, is sort of rude. “Strangers talking to strangers” (isn’t that in Scarlet Begonias?). This taps into some old Tim Leary interview I saw, where his vision for the counter-culture was for instant immersion in real conversation—it was about the transcendence of elevator talk / keeping to yourself; about breaking out of default scripts and internal monologues and to take a risk in creating an interaction with an unknown person for an unknown result.
2. Dead & “Company” has a triple meaning; the first impression is that company refers to the new band members. The cynical impression is that it’s the legal entity that John Mayer owns 51% of. The open impressions is that company refers to all the fans.
3. Unrealistic goal this trip: Talk to 100 strangers. Not every interaction counts (ie: small talk). It only counts if you personally make an effort to extend the conversation one level beyond banter.
4. From the gate you could tell this was a flight of Grateful Dead fans: an older man had a ’90 blue and orange (Mets colored) hat from their garden show (sold out on Amazon). Someone with dreadlocks loudly asked him “how many shows?” I couldn’t hear his reaction, but based on his eyes I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 100+. A man in a bucket hat with his wife brought up “idiots talking,” (during the show) and “Disney Dead.” In first class, I saw a GD sweatshirt, along with a white "Phil Lesh & Friends" hat. On the tram in Vegas: “How many under your belt?” She answered that her dad’s a deadhead, she’s been to 10-12, and she’s going all 3 nights this weekend.
5. My Uber driver has lived in Vegas for 16 years. He hasn’t taken his kids to the Sphere yet (but wants to, and asked me about pricing). We estimated how long it would take for James Dolan to make his money back (he said 10 years, I said 4). He used to be a trucker in New York and South Dakota, found it way too cold there, and is grateful he overcame his smoking addiction.
6. On the ride from Harry Reid airport to the Venetian, somebody graffiti’d the bear on a wall and wrote “dance like Jerry’s watching.”
7. On my first impression of the sphere, it took the form of an obnoxious, 300’ tall yellow emoji. I notice this from the middle of the bridge I’m currently standing on with a homeless man. Now it’s a tie-die riverish 3D lava lamp. Now it shows hippies dancing.
8. I landed a few hours before my friend, so I wanted to walk up and down the Venetian/Palazzo to get my bearings. This place is designed to be a maze (like Venice, except for different reasons). At some point I was walking outside, using my phone, and passed by what looked like two showgirls dressed in fluffy bird suits (insane for 80-90 degree weather), and one of them said “Are you texting us?” I gave a sheepish laugh and kept moving, but this was the first interaction that felt like VR Chat (absurd characters in an absurd place with little inhibition). The next VR chat moment was when I saw a guy walking around with blockish, red, knee-high shoes.

I had multiple, connected dreams about the show last night. Jerry is back and no one cares. Set 1 is only 3 songs that no one has ever heard, and the visuals are effectively a Windows screensaver (just black with a dim purple swirl). They cut it short for an intermission. You guys leave, thinking it resumes the next morning, but I stay and see set 2 which is also only 10 minutes. The band walks through the crowd to exit. I shake their hands and John Mayer tells me “good job.” We realize the Sphere broke and are expecting a refund.

Walking through midtown, I got the idea for a short story called "Sky Jail" or maybe “66 Park.” A billionaire buys the top-story penthouse of a mega-luxury tower, and turns it into a reality show social experiment. You sign a contract, and are forced to stay up there for a whole month. You can’t go down. It’s effectively prison, except it’s luxury beyond your imagination, and it’s all live-streamed. There could be a science fiction element, where drugs/food/pleasure/knowledge/technology are all combined to create an experience that is so beyond what someone has ever experienced, that they get depressed at the thought of going back down the tower, down the elevator to return to the real world. Every contestant decides to jump off the balcony, ending life “on high” (in literal/metaphor heaven—but it’s more like hell really). The twist is that a contestant goes up there, outsmarts the billionaire, and gets him to jump. It’s a modern version of the Faustian Bargain fable, but with modern social dynamics and supernatural magic replaced with technology.

I'm constantly procrastinating on deploying roach bait throughout my apartment, and that’s probably because I’m not sure if it’s the right move. If you get daily roaches (we don't!), then sure, you use the bait so that it comes up to your radiator, smuggles the food back, and then accidentally poisons the nest. But if you have a yearly roach, wouldn’t the bait just bring more roaches up into your walls?

In any case, I see this landlord-granted vile on my radiator everyday as I make my morning coffee. It reminds me how William S. Burroughs would inhale roach poison to get high when he couldn’t find drugs in Mexico. I asked GPT for more details (ie: is roach poison stronger today than it was in the 60s? Answer: yes).

I look on the ingredients of the tube, and it says: “Indoxicarb 0.6%, Other ingredients 99.4%.” This is a fascinating detail! +99% mystery? Is this because there are over 167 other ingredients and Indoxicarb is the most concentrated? Or is Indoxicarb the only one they’re legally required to disclose? What the hell is Indoxicarb?

Indoxicarb leads to a slow and painful death by paralyzing an insectoid nervous system. It takes days, sometimes weeks. The reason it’s good for nest-nuking is for its “tertiary transfer.” This means that when other roaches feast on their just-poisoned colony-mate, they too catch the bug.

At the Bronx Zoo, they've made the decision to sell 2 Churros for $7.49. If you ask them for one they will tell you it’s not possible. It gets worse. When you get the churros, you’ll realize that each one is over 18” long, meaning you’re really signing up for 4 churros. I told them I’d pay for 2 and take one, but I was peer pressured by mother-in-law into getting both and “saving one for later.” That was my intention but it didn’t happen. I ate three feet of Churros, immediately, and regretted it immediately, but especially after I woke up from a nap 2 hours, ready to puke.

Would it not be more economical to sell a simple 9” churro for $5?

The Zoo is a place where you can replace your stick-figure representations with direct perception. It’s easy to overlook everything: “oh look a rare bird,” and “cool, a giraffe.” But you can also stare intently at the facial hair of a gorilla up close for 2-3 minutes with complete focus and marvel at how strange it actually is.

I looked it up, and I’m surprised there’s no term for the uncanny that emerges from looking at non-familiar animals up close. It’s most obvious with cockroaches perhaps. That’s an obvious biophobia. Squirrels, dogs, and horses are good example of acclimated animals that we are accustomed to. But there’s a feeling of grotesque when you see a human-looking eye on a mammal as strangely-formed as a rare hog—familiar parts in an unfamiliar whole. Maybe the grotesque comes from imagining a human being transfigured into it.

Maybe the “evolutionary uncanny” is when nature reprises parts (eyes, lips, or hands) into whole that seems uncanny or frightening.

Throughout my time at the zoo, I had trouble putting the right words to what I was feeling, and I couldn't help but coin the phrase, "all of God's retarded creatures." This is obviously absurd and inflammatory, especially with the adjacent G-word and the R-word; I can’t say I even agree with it, but it speaks to the alienation and distance that language creates from nature (and the hubris of a linguistic creature).

This taps into an idea in DFW’s “Consider the Lobster” essay. Despite him saying how we should be more conscious of how we boil lobsters alive, he closes by confessing that he feels that animals are less morally important than humans and he’s not sure why. This has been an open loop for me. I have a positive regard for animals, but I know people in my life who exist on both extremes (ie: my wife sees dogs on par with humans, and my grandfather thinks dog == rat).

At some point while wandering the Bronx Zoo, I found myself thinking that nature is this force that rapidly mutates and complexifies life in order to find a "breakaway pattern." I am, obviously, as I write this, an inheritor of that pattern, and you, by nature of reading this, are an inheritor too. And so when I look at the rhinos, I don’t see cute or powerful animals, but sadness over a breed of mind trapped in a tankish form-factor. A human-centric way of seeing animals is that they're failed mutations in search of a perfect form, a being that can transcend itself.

It gets me wondering, “what is it like to be a Rhino?” This is the basic question of consciousness, and when you really imagine the felt experience of an animal (especially a caged one), it can feel uncomfortable, even alien. There are physical, sensory, and of course cognitive differences across species, and within a species—it all gets me wondering how primary language is to the human experience. Is it the thing? Without speech, there is no civilization; even if we are "trapped" by or language in some sense, we also owe our being to it.

Does DFW’s feeling that humans are the most morally important species comes down to linguistic supremacy? And is this generally true, or is it hubris?

Other notes:

• 12:30 PM – Evolution comes from tight feedback loops: in nature, in language, in identity, in art.
• 02:00 PM – A name for the lens when you look at an animal species and estimate how many years it might take for it to evolve into a language-using advanced society given the right environmental niche. “Monkey: 15 million.” Etc. I asked GPT, and it said that octopi, ravens, and raccoons show the most promise.
• 02:56 PM – Near the entrance of the Bronx zoo, they have neoclassical building with animal ornamentation, and there are many jokes to be made about monkey college.

**Don't forget the sun moves.** A galactic year is 225-250 million years (the time it takes for the sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way). Our sun is 18 galactic years old, and will only live until 40. For context, the aeon of time between the dinosaurs and ChatGPT is .28 galactic years, effectively, a single galactic season. Worth noting though, it took 3 billion years for multi-cellular life to emerge. So if life on Earth gets completely nuked, it could take 12 galactic years to re-emerge from scratch. We’ll be 30. Interesting to think—we have 3 shots to escape space-time.

It maddens me to think how much of life is constrained by fear and convention. Even if I’m relatively courageous and eclectic, there are ideas that pierce into my consideration as I rush to catch a train—I see dozens of secret doors, some dead ends, and some leading to a tangibly different life, and I brush them all off equally. Makes me think I need a yearly ritual where I go into Manhattan without any aim other than to approach 1,000 situations.

I like how you frame it as "beauty" instead of just writing quality. Composition isn’t just a theoretical thing that craft nerds care about, it leads to beauty. I’ve been trying to map this into “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” I think Essay Architecture sits in the 3rd, but the other 2 still matter. It’s possible to write a beautiful essay that is also an evil lie. I should probably write something how you don’t want to obsess over beauty in a vacuum—you want to use composition to articulate something good (generally subjective) and true (generally objective).

Another note on this is that maybe things shift from subjective/objective as you scale in an out. It’s a subjective choice on which medium you pick (writing/music/code), but then each medium has objective constraints, but then you have subjective liberty in how you solve each constraint.

It's an obligation to take risks so your life becomes an adventure, epic, a quest with an unknown end. There will be a thousand appeals to practicality. To this end, I wonder if ever an essay has been written to justify gambling. I don’t gamble much, but when I do, I do it extremely. I try to get it over with as quickly as possible. What I mean is that I don’t spend $10-20 per hand and try to enjoy gambling all night. I want the experience of a single intense moment where way too much money is at stake. Nothing devastating, but enough to feel like an idiot if you lose it. I know gambling addictions are very real, but I do not relish to relive the sting of losing $500 in a second. It's mostly a test. If the sting is strong, I'm weak. Myopic. Perhaps the occasional stupid risk is not immoral, but formative. For the vast majority, their ultimate sin is to have never risked enough. They sit on enormous potential and play everything safe and predictably. If you can’t take pointless risks, how will you take important ones?

Studio Ghibli—that's the meme, the vibe of the day.

Interesting how the thing that can go viral suddenly captures and permanently shapes everyone’s imagination. Out of all the possibilities, most people’s experimentation are now influenced in this one odd direction. What else is possible? It’s a weird moment, a race/competition for creative usage. There is stuff capable in 4o image generation that’s undiscovered by anyone.

4o can render a glass of wine to the brim. Another go-to example of the doubter has been eradicated.

It's possible that Dead & Co. will make more from their two Sphere residencies (2024 & 2025) than their entire touring career (1965-1995). They made $130m in 2024 (covers ’65-’88), and if they match that this year, they’ll have made equal revenue to ’65-’92). Some say ’92 was the symbolic end of the Grateful Dead anyway—Jerry collapsed on stage and cancelled the tour, and the last 3 years weren’t the same.

Tickets were $3 in 1969 ($25.97 in today’s value). That’s a 60x difference to Sphere tickets.

I think this instance is unique from Paul McCartney, Elton John, and The Rolling Stones: Jerry is dead, and it all happens from one city.

It is weird when you feel normal sights to brood with an unnameable terror. A smirk, or a construction barricade, or a passing flash of the Chinese language, for some unknown reason, are soaked with some unknown significance. The meaning is in the subtext, and you can’t crack it, and you know the mood will pass, but if you sit in it and bear it you might crack open some truth. It’s probably the collision of disparate things: the age of virality, an afternoon with a YouTuber now likely napping, the unimaginable leverage of AI, being 34, guilt over disappearing from Notes, the chaos of Manhattan, the week of grieving, the sushi order—they all come together into an unnameable roar. And now you don’t have a dollar to spare to two consecutive homeless people because you’ve actually lost your wallet, but you also didn’t even look up because you see some abstract benefit of logging this moment in case your unborn grandchildren see the value in your passing shapeless thoughts.

Through my childhood, all my waiting rooms experiences have felt like hospitals, but this one is a Starbucks. I imagine 50% of the 20 patrons are thinking about death (ambiently, at least). Of the 2 nurses, maybe one saw it today. Maybe I’ll see it today (we haven’t gone up yet). It’s just odd to me that a very familiar, very commercial Starbucks aesthetic, with Chuck Berry on the radio, is brooding with death in the subtext. This is no doubt better than sterile dropped ceilings, but it’s still uncanny. I don’t think our culture has quite nailed our environments that are adjacent to death. I will be very particular about the ceiling I die under.

I'm at a D-tier pizzeria and they’re showing CGI zombies on TV. I think part of entering the public sphere is learning to adapt to whatever is thrown at you. It’s just funny because so many restaurants take the idea of atmosphere so seriously, and now I’m here eating pizza as I watch people eat people.

After ordering my chicken roll I felt the impulse to grab my phone and process my email. Instead I let myself look around, bored. I noticed ornate lamps, an old pizzaman statue, the imagined lives of the two disinterested employees, and the multiple silos of spices in glass shakers. Each thing compounded into the next with associations and collisions of meaning, triggering something unsayable that you might call “a feeling.” (Is this what they’re referring to in that Black Eyed Peas song?) This only takes 10 seconds. It feels like I have access to awe-on-command, but often I’m just running background scripts. There’s a slowness and an intention required to see things outside of your preconceived schemas—to bypass your shortcuts of sight, and instead behold all things through twin lenses: of what the thing actually is, and what it might mean. And perhaps when you tap into that flash of mysticism, there’s an added meta-excitement, that you are—for just a moment—outside of yours illusions and ego games, a living being lost in a perceptual jungle-puzzle.

On the year's opening day, I came across mental illness twice on route to get coffee.

The first was someone in the cafe who was talking out loudly about a range of issues (including both her wide range of scientific research, and, suing Amanda Bynes); she’d talk into her phone, AI would respond, and she’d immediately cut it off into the next step of the conspiracy.

The second was an elderly woman, on a walker being guided, and she started waving to me like the Queen of England as I walked by, singing, “happy new year to you, happy new year to you, happy new year to you, happy new year to you” to the melody of the Happy Birthday song. Then she changed tone, almost like Sméagol to Gollum, and said, “don’t you fucking put that on Facebook.” I assured her I wouldn’t.

Neither of these things are that atypical in the privacy of your own mind (at least in mine—I think weirder things than suing Amanda Bynes, and will also loop absurd jingles and make abrupt persona switches), it’s just surprising when a stranger breaks a convention of normalcy in public. And what’s wrong with that? “Illness” is actually a terrible catch-all word for divergence, deviation, eccentricity. Of course, extreme mental variation can lead to illness (suffering), but it’s an assumption.

Three constraints for architecture:

• T1: Function of a building (function)
• T2: The spatial parti & poetic themes (form)
• T3: Transcendence (form enables function)

Developers and rationalists optimize for T1, and designers and artists optimize for T2, but T3 covers the existential purpose of architecture. Can form transform itself beyond a shell for inhabitation, and actually transform its inhabitants? This has been called “the revolutionary function” of architecture, and Modernism is a textbook of failed attempts.

Great Reddit comment on Open AI’s releases:

Isn't it eerie that a tech company, potentially wielding one of the most disruptive technologies ever, is presenting its "12 days of product releases" at a modest, four-chair table, sipping from mugs? While it's likely intended to be delightfully ironic, it feels almost like a bait-and-switch. They're giving a friendly, homespun face to what could shape a dystopian future of their own making.

The setting—something akin to a cozy living room—feels dissonant. They're discussing technology that operates at an almost incomprehensible level of abstraction, yet they're explaining it to us in what appears to be someone's home. They've abandoned the traditional Silicon Valley keynote spectacle for what they frame as an intimate conversation with us, the users.

Between the four of them, there’s a single MacBook and an iPad, as if the vast compute power of Microsoft Azure supercomputer network could somehow be distilled into two personal devices. I wasn’t expecting the grandiosity of a Steve Ballmer screaming on stage or the pomp of Google I/O, but this minimalism feels calculated, even unsettling.

And then there’s the context surrounding the company itself. OpenAI—a company in the throes of dramatic reinvention—has seen dozens of employees leave in protest, high-level executives resign without explanation, and even its CEO ousted and reinstated in a matter of days. It’s a level of instability and reinvention I’ve never seen before in a company of this scale.

I’m curious to see what the rest of these 12 days will bring, but this juxtaposition of power and humility feels deeply intentional—and slightly unnerving.

On the museumification of architecture: My first project in architectural school was a museum outside of Grant’s Tomb memorial. Public spaces like this often have the most freedom for architectural expression. Framed views. Framed objects.

But what happens when residences are designed as museums? Sure, maybe a rich client with a private art collection actually needs this. But there’s a disconnect when designers only think about the poetry of space, and completely forget that spaces are meant to be inhabited by humans.

I don’t mean to imply the stark opposite of this: a kind of “stern functionalism.” More so, function supplies the constraints from which to make beauty from.

I was standing up on the airplane, waiting in line for the toilet, and the announcement was so fuzzy and illegible that the woman next to me asked, “are we doing an emergency landing because someone’s giving birth on the plane?” A flight attendant confirmed the situation: the Wi-Fi was down.

"Evil thoughts from good men." I wrote this in the morning—thinking it could be a good title of a novel—before having a chilling evening that night, one that is effectively the perfect opening. One day I imagine I write this out at it's full potency, but I figure I will quit procrastinating and get some version of it written (I'm adding this 21 months later, in August of 2026).

My wife and I took a cab to catch a play of The Tempest, but were five minutes late; they closed the doors, and so we wandered into some random bar. After ordering drinks I went downstairs to the bathroom, returning to find an older woman sitting suspiciously close to my wife. She was farmer, from west of Oxford, in town for a labor protest. She beheld a witchly charisma, seemingly able to meander group-to-group in our half of the bar, making each one laugh, before returning back to us. I assumed she was just an eccentric British woman, perhaps archetypal of the culture, until she insisted that she was a demon in her ring door bell—an incredible premise.

She insisted on showing us her footage of the demon, but I refused. Even if it was a glitch, some visual artifact, or CGI, I try not to load my subconscious with paranormal imagery. But she insisted on explaining it—its "black skin... pointy little horns... and beady yellow eyes..." She told the story with solemnity in her face, and keep looping back to this description—"black skin... pointy little horns... and beady yellow eyes—" "Enough!" I cut her off after 3 or 4 loops. It was as if she were trying to hypnotize us.

Later she confessed that she had supernatural powers, that she feels bad about freaking out young couples in bars, like us, causing them to flee from the bar in terror. She asked if wanted to predict our future; I said no, but my wife wanted to see her read her past. After a few minutes, she started recalling details from her childhood, giving her sharp summaries of specifically how each parent treated her. She started to cry. After nudging me again, I agreed to let her tell me future. She asked what I wanted to know—"how will everything work out for me as a writer?" She burst out in hysterical laughter, and wouldn't stop. This went out for five or ten minutes. After she calmed down, she'd like at my with frightened eyes and apologize. I asked her to explain herself, and the moment she tried she just started laughing again. It felt like there was no conversation left to be had, so we signaled to her we were calling it a night. On the way out she said, "I'll see you soon."

Out in the cold air of the street, we confided in each other on how strange the experience was. We oscillated through various paranoias, wondering if she was a witch, if we had been given some voodoo, or if she had drugged my wife. We threw out her business card. But then I checked my phone and read the most mysterious text from my dad, sent around the minute we left the bar—"Your uncle was going through his attic and found this old typewriter. Do you want it?" It included a picture of the scariest looking typewriter I'd ever seen: black paint, it's prongs floating above the keys, looking like two pointed horns, and of course, beady little yellow eyes—it fit the exact description of the demon in the doorbell. The brand was Underwood, but I misread it as Underworld, as if it were a typewriter from hell. My body was pulsating with chills.

Over the next week I'd ruminate on if I should except this potentially haunted object in my home. I consulted my writer friends. One noted that Oxford is associated with black magic, and another said I should consult a shaman, or someone versed in these matters. Another said I should take it and use the occasion to write from my shadow. This calls forth the opening synchronicity—the log I wrote that morning: "evil thoughts from good men." Was this a sign to get that typewriter and write that novel on it? I will save my specific thoughts on the shadow for a future post...

Anyway, I called up Gramercy Typewriters and described them my Underwood, and how it was a "batwing"-style typewriter. They said those are rare and they don't know how to service them. Regardless, my indecision meant I never gave my uncle a definitive yes or no, and so he said he'd bring it to Thanksgiving. In the end, he forgot it, and I never heard about it again.

• Nov 15, 9:19 AM—A blistering toe, three suitcases with their guts spilled out, and a hotel room with an Oscar Wilde aesthetic: royal blue door trims, floral print, a British landscape, and of course his portrait.
• Nov 17, 1:34 PM—The first bell I heard at the one-hour mark was a dud, but 1:34 PM was a holy minute. I found myself at the right corner, at the time the sun carved a hole and illuminated the gold trim of the clock tower. There was a bagpipe player, who I could hear but not see, droning a deep note and riffing in some mysterious Celtic scale I couldn’t quite identify. It was crowded, but even a passing ambulance couldn’t and didn’t break the trance.
• Nov 17th, 11:31 AM—Our tour guide could easily make it on Twitter. “Those lions aren’t lions,” and “You’ve been lied to, that Buckingham Palace is not Buckingham Palace, I’ll explain why” (and then walks away, towards it—what we know it as is actually the 3rd extension, and no one lives there). “Here’s Big Ben, but that’s not its name.” Also, “we’re going to meet some spies, I’ve arranged it.” Hook after hook.
• Nov 18th, 7:07 PM—The holy grail of prose is the transfiguration of narration and analysis. It's not in the description of the foggy window, nor in the details of London's climate in November, but in using one for the means of the other.
• Nov 18th, 7:15 PM—Why does Shoreditch remind me of Manhasset? The rain blurs everything—the sidewalk has yellow jagged reflections of neon advertisements —and in passing I hear “it’s pissin’ out.”
• Nov 19th, 3:20 PM—Eleven strangers in an elevator. You know not the language they speak, or the clarity of their mind, or their proximity from death in recent months—but we all know how to occupy the silence of a 30-second ride down to slab where we will immediately disperse and forget each other.
• Nov 21st, 2:21 PM—Cognitive liberty is the ultimate right, and it’s one you have to claim for yourself.

• The circus spires of Manhattan, bedrock splinters, antenna azimuths, surrogate steel, offshore investments, east of east in the west, home.
• An exercise for airport queues: look at each face and imagine their unbelievable potential through a specific caricature (a princess, an astronaut). Next time you see them around the bend, imagine the opposite—their worst self (a killer, a leech). Then, imagine the realistic middle scenario.
• What do you call two people who share a half-sibling but are not related?
• Only converge into expansive containers. If you're going to put yourself in a box, ensure it has trap doors and mirrors on all sides.
• You can never know if the present moment will survive the great filter of human memory but you can be fairly sure it won’t.
• I remember logging about a (crypto?) ad near gate B24 a few years back. The act of turning a basic perception into a sentence records it to memory.