At Heathrow, saying a very slow goodbye to another successful journey. The more I travel, the more I realize what sorts of experiences hold value for me, which are monumental wastes of effort and time and money, and how little my inhibitions serve me. It's all there for the taking ( Read more... )

I do not speak Latvian. Not even a little bit ( Read more... )

Every now and then, the underbrush has to get razed to the ground. The sturdy redwoods have seen it before. They're scarred and blackened, but they'll survive this one and the next. As for the underbrush... well who gives a shit?

To recap: I pulled every string and called in every favor I'm owed so as to sleeplessly drive 330 miles and be made to feel like dogshit for 12 hours and turn around and drive right home again, left to my thoughts and the hum of the road ( Read more... )

So far, 2010 has been a mixed-bag. The good, the bad, the infuriating, the little discussed. But I'm sticking to my resolutions - even the ones I'm making up well after inadvertently accomplishing them. I'm not going to tell you what they are (not because of any initiative toward secrecy - I just can't accurately state them yet), save that they ( Read more... )

February, huh? Okay ( Read more... )

I've been in the grip of an unusual euphoria lately. The past few weeks, I've worked harder than through almost any period of my life. Valentine's Day, in the restaurant biz, is a serious affair. And when it trips and falls on a Saturday, all hell breaks loose and ugly and furious and cutesy. The whole weekend is a blitzkrieg of table-waiting ( Read more... )

The Bon Iver song "Blood Bank" helps me to remember that the world is a complex, multivalent thing and that I don't know shit. Because this song can come along and totally floor me and it was probably relatively easy for dude to think up in the first place.

This snow is getting a little bit ridiculous. I'm all down for winter adventures and extreme weather, especially if I can sound self-important in the retelling. But this is bordering on the absurd. 3 weeks of crippling conditions. If you're reading this somewhere warm, go fuck yourself.

It was "Classic Cars". Just couldn't figure it out. Went through three full albums twice through but happened to jump to the wrong part of the song each time. Do you know how hard it is to maintain a small snippet of a song in your brain without correct lyrics to look up, all the while inundating your ears with albums' worth of similar-sounding ( Read more... )