Meanwhile… at 12,400 ft. in the Rocky Mountains.
I’d like to thank everyone in this coffee shop
I’d like to thank everyone in the coffee shop, everyone who did the right thing today. It took the whole team, I know, to make sure that Acacia and I could sit at this big table. Usually we end up squeezing into the corner, or knocking people over for space at the communal table. But this time, when we really need it, we’re sitting at this properly sized table.
Guy with your iPhone and nothing else – I know you usually like to sit at this table, and play noisy games by yourself, and not even move when there are three tiny, one-person tables open all around you, and we are looking desperately (not to mention obviously) around for adequate space to sit. But today you’re at the big, communal table and I’m grateful. I’m even a bit (I hope you don’t mind me saying this) proud, here today.
Med students who aren’t even going to buy anything but are gonna take up most of the space all day – thank you for using the medium-sized, square tables. They’re here just for you. They’re the perfect size for your big textbooks. I know you relish spreading your stuff all over your un-bought space, but today you have constrained yourself. Today you are not disrupting the ecology and economy of the coffee shop and that’s just so wonderful to see. Thank you.
And last but not least, you – young, angry man with a laptop. I feel your pain, I truly do. It’s awkward to sit there with the two soccer moms having incredibly loud conversation less than two feet from your face. On on your other side is one of those med students, whose music we can all hear blasting through his earbuds. But you gritted your teeth, you plugged in your giant headphones, and you’re getting work done anyway. And over here, at this mesa that is just the right size to hold my wife and I and our coffee shop related belongings, (even if I decide to open this big board game rulebook, which I brought just in case I get my work done) over here we are content. We are at peace. Today we will not struggle. This table doesn’t even have a wobble. It’s an incredible table, and we thank you for it.
Maybe everything really is gonna be okay. Maybe just maybe.
Some Favorites from 2017
These are just some lists of culture I encountered this year that I really liked and am happy to recommend to you. It’s not even all from 2017, necessarily. Back in the day, I used to create massive, well-considered lists. It was quite a joy for me. Ha! I guess I didn’t have enough to do!
Any strong recommendations from your 2017?
MUSIC
NEW MUSIC
– Susso, Keira – Oh please, please, please listen to this record. I love it so much. (Even it is from 2016.)
– Four Tet, New Energy
– Juana Molina, Halo
– Thurston Moore, Rock n Roll Consciousness
– Jlin, Black Origami
– Slowdive
– St. Vincent, Masseduction
– Binker & Moses, Journey To The Mountain Of Forever
– Milk Music, Mystic 100s
– Fleet Foxes, Crack-Up
– Kelly Lee Owens
My friends are super heroes
from Reality Hunger
by David Shields, 2010
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
What friends do
I need therapy, apparently. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. Therapy, or a coach. I need someone to talk to who doesn’t care how things come out. Who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome.
Tony Robbins / Tim Ferriss
BJ Miller
Let death be what takes us, not a lack of imagination.
– BJ Miller
Here are some books on my bedside table
Greil Marcus – Lipstick Traces
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940
Remaking American Theater
Robert Pinsky – The Sounds of Poetry
Walt Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself illustrated by Allen Crawford
The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
Susan Barker – The Incarnations
M.T.Anderson- Symphony for the City of the Dead
David Bartone – Practice on Mountains
The Selected Correspondance of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg
Tom Nissley – A Reader’s Book of Days
Kate Leth – Tips for Beginners: A Comic Guide to Getting Tattooed
Iris Apfel on Style
“The most stylish people I’ve ever seen in my life were in Naples right after the Second World War. They were practically in tatters. But the way they threw themselves together and carried themselves, they really looked like a squill ion dollars.”