Now:

A page that updates periodically about what I’m up to and into right now. You are viewing the version of this page from September 2, 2026.

Making

I sent off a couple of big freelance projects and now I’m in the slow, broke gulf between contracts. Freelancing is pretty nice except when you don’t get to do it.

I am trying to fit in some For Me projects—I have this silly artifact thing I keep chipping away at that I hope will make a good portfolio anchor, when I get it actually done instead of getting lost trying to find a Pantone book from 1976. And, after overwhelming public response to the mention of the idea, I am working on a zine about traffic cones that I might try and get a small run of printed (ideally riso, in black and fluorescent orange, obviously).

Doing

My little brother stayed at me and Laur’s place for initially just the first two weeks and then all of August. So between work and trying to work more I’ve been doing the most cost-effective Pittsburgh tourism I can manage. Going downtown just to walk around. Picking up an extra ticket to a movie we were seeing already. Hitting the museums on free-with-your-library-card day.

Last week the weather was briefly tolerable, which permitted a lot of photo-walking: a pleasant, healthy and free (once you have the camera) activity I highly recommend. My brother brought this old little Nikon he’s been shooting with and I wanted to encourage him to comb through for good ones and run up a little website, but I haven’t seen it go up yet.

Last night we saw Sierra Ferrell downtown. It was a cruddy day leading up to it and we ended up a little late due to baseball-related traffic and stood behind four women who paid $100 each plus venue drinks to stand in a circle and talk to each other. But the show itself was very good, and it was over at a respectful 10 PM for a Tuesday night. As we walked from the venue past PNC Park to go over the bridge the Pirates beat the Giants (13-12!) and they set the fireworks off. Delicious little moment of time.

Thinking

I have officially settled in with the Adderall, which I am only taking on my studio days, which I am mostly spending doing job applications and recording them on a spreadsheet, which I am mostly using just to track which companies issue the quickest rejection emails.

I’m working gradually on the mystery of why I feel like such a dumb asshole all the time. Probably part of it was the ADHD making me constantly humiliate myself through bubmling oafishness, and now I’ve got that medicated so that excuse is cashed. I’m guessing another major part of it is being perpetually broke. So I’m working on that now, as hard as can be expected. Assembly-lining job applications and just burning off my whole morning doing 30 of them. Writing an AutoHotKey script to paste my Linkedin URL and portfolio link and re-do the insane way a computer ostensibly built to parse résumés decided to parse my résumé. Pitting my dinky one-man computer setup for bulk applying against various expensive enterprise computer setups for throwing applications away. There must be a crack somewhere.

I posted elsewhere about this but I keep thinking about how strange Linkedin is. Like to me it’s the website equivalent of going to the dentist: a grueling necessity of adult life enjoyed only by total freaks. I am only making use of it out of financial desperation and obligation to my loved ones. And then I log in and the only website I’m 100% confident knows I don’t have a full-time job shows me an ad for a $62,000 Sprinter van. It feels like when my bank sends me mail asking if I’m thinking of buying a house. Do you guys not know how much money I have? You seem mad when it’s zero.

Reading

I liked Whalefall a lot. Followed it up with this book Neptune’s Fortune, about a guy who spent his whole career seeking one specific shipwreck, and there was a lot in there about this old book I Dive for Treasure that inspired a generation of treasure-hunters, so I had to read that. That book sort of fascinated me: it’s obviously all made up, but in a way that feels so quaint now. In trying to learn more about its author I found a book called Paper Diver that claims to debunk his whole story, which sounds fun, but it’s by some Texas historian and is only available on his website for $40. I sent that guy an email asking if I could just pay him for a PDF and he told me the publisher didn’t give him one. So then I went to the library, and of course Allegheny County doesn’t have a copy of this random guy’s anti-biography of an older random guy. But Cleveland apparently has two epubs and a paperback, which I requested through interlibrary loan. So really it’s like I’m the one digging up treasure. The treasure of knowledge, which is the most valuable kind of all.

While I wait for that to arrive I’ve been blowing through some other stuff: John Green’s tuberculosis book, Alex Branson’s The Money Wars, a couple of alien books. Been taking the bus places a lot more often this month, so even if most everything else sucks my book-reading pace is way up. I was in the middle of They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves, a book on the cultural and social genesis of alien abduction, which I was really enjoying, and then today my library copy of XX came in so I jumped over to that. Barely scratched it so far but I like the presentation a lot: some normally-set text and some website mockups and some emails, sort of a narrative collage of invented sources, which feels like something I’d make. Also the inside cover is printed with 20 mockups of the same book from different decades, which is so pointedly something I’d make that I was bought in before I read the title page.

Listening

With my brother around I haven’t had a ton of time to listen to new music, but I did like this new Andy Loebs album. I finally got around to the new King Gizzard as well and I think it’s alright. Not an immediate fave, but the Gizz approach to musicmaking is sort of bulletproof because the worst thing I can say about one of their records is “Well, those guys are having fun.” The vocoder stuff is silly but the rest reminds me of The Silver Cord, which I thought was just fine until I listened to it very stoned.