Essays, odds, and ends from an unsettled mind.
For one month, I treated a coffee shop bulletin board like a social feed and said yes to everything on it. What I found was less about lawn bowling and more about the strange, tender economics of being noticed by strangers with a stapler.
One summer of hosting and haunting garage sales taught me that the prices are almost beside the point. What people buy, what they won't touch, and why this odd ritual refuses to die.
I committed to one hour every evening on the porch with no phone, no book, and no excuse. Here's what happened when my brain finally ran out of things to distract itself with.
The diner booths are empty, the bowling alleys are condos now, and most of us socialize through screens we resent. So I started loitering in a grocery store parking lot on Thursday nights, and something unexpected happened.
There's a half-finished manuscript in my desk drawer, a jar of dead sourdough starter in the fridge, and a guitar I haven't touched since 2021. I used to see a graveyard of failure. Now I think I was looking at a map of everything I'm still curious about.
Thirty days of tracking my spending taught me less about money and more about the strange theater of guilt, math, and self-negotiation we perform every time we open our wallets. The $4 latte was never the villain. Neither was the $400 chair.
There's a corner of the internet I visit every night where the same faces show up, the same jokes get told, and nobody knows my legal name. Sociologists used to call that a third place. Mine lives in a browser tab.
Somewhere between the newsletter funnels and the SEO audits, the personal homepage quietly went extinct — and I think we lost something when it did. This is a defense of the website that answers to no one.