What You Are Looking At This page contains words, written as letters, one letter at a time. If you do not see a specific addressee, please assume each was written to you. Many of these letters contain and are contained in stories, which I write in thematic sets. Currently, I am attempting to post 4 stories a week.
On Mondays and Wednesdays I post stories based on the illustrations and meanings of the Rider Waite Tarot, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I post stories centering around rain. I also write things that don’t count as stories, and those I post whenever I want, and on Fridays I try to write down my thoughts on some book, show, or other narrative that has passed in front of my eyes recently. Thanks for reading.
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* I wrote this as a guest blog for my wife, but I wanted to post it for myself as well. What interests me about this, after the fact, is how neatly it ties together two types of Space that preoccupy me – the space around me, that is ever in danger of becoming overcrowded with things, and the vast space above and beyond me, that I found myself thinking about even more than usual this week. The outer space is easy – I chose for this project a book embossed with a spaceship and grappling men with spacesuits and ray-guns. Because I love these things. And then of course, there is the main reason my wonderful wife got me the Kindle – so I would stop buying books and filling up our apartment with them, and maybe even get rid of some. Which I have. *
My wonderful wife got me a Kindle for Christmas a year and a bit ago, and I love it. I use it every day and it is full of books. I wanted to make a case for it and saw some cool projects online, so I took a bit from here and a bit from there, added some ideas of my own, and ended up with this.
 Finished Cover without Book First, materials. I found a book for $1 on the outside racks at the Strand. I loved it. An old ex-library, hardcover YA sci-fi adventure from the 1950s with a beautiful cover, and just the right size. (I have since researched the book and discovered it was written under a pseudonym by Isaac Asimov, an unexpected bonus bit of cool context.) For the inside I looked around a bit and eventually found some great fabric at Purl. It has trees and turtles and hedgehogs and squirrels. I like these things.
 Awesome Fabric Next, I eviscerated the book. That was hard to make myself do, and took a lot of psyching up, but once I began it took all of 15 seconds.
 The Once and Future Book I then cut some cardboard to fit just inside the front and back covers as well as the spine. I cut the fabric to cover the cardboard in two pieces, one containing the front cover and spine, the other for the back cover. For the front cover, I wanted to include a pocket to hold a small notebook, so I cut a square of fabric and sewed that to the fabric for the front piece. I then sewed the front and back pieces of fabric to their respective pieces of cardboard.
 Sewing a Pocket I used hot glue to attach the front piece to the inside of the book. I cut four segments of elastic fabric to use to hold the book in place, and glued them around the corners of the back piece of fabric-covered cardboard. Finally I glued this piece onto the back cover of the book, overlapping the fabric from the front.
 Finished Kindle Cover I was very happy with the finished product, except that the elastic was not quite tight enough to hold the kindle firmly in place. This turned out fine, however, as I need a place for a pen. I found a pen at Muji that fit perfectly in this space and provided the necessary snugness to keep the kindle from escaping without my consent. The end!
 Reading the digital version of a book inside the shell of the physical book.
If there were two things I could have more of they would be space and time. Over the last weeks in particular, but really over the last months and probably years, I have been spending much of my life fighting for time and space. In a very non-dramatic way. I have made various efforts over the years to schedule my time for myself more efficiently, but they always break down in the end. There are so many uses of my time that often I am paralyzed by the things I should do and want to do and end up doing something I neither should nor want to do instead. I accumulate too many activities, pursuits, projects and goals and make such incremental progress on them all that I drive myself crazy. I have had some luck recently by being ridiculously reductive in my scheduling of time. I wrote down every task I wish to accomplish on a daily basis, put them into my phone one by one and scheduled them as recurring tasks on a daily checklist. I included things that I never forget to do, like feeding the cat-demon every morning, to things I often forget to do, like writing a blog post. Then I did the same thing for things I need to do on a weekly basis. So far, it is actually (for the most part) working. I have known for some time that I have an addiction to games, however stupid and visibly pointless they are. Like stories, once I begin them, I have to see them through. So I am making this possible symptom of OCD into a way to make myself form useful habits. I am gamifying my life, and I am falling for it. And then there is space.
My preoccupation with and management of space actually takes up a good portion of my time. I have a lot of stuff. I am a binger and purger of things, a packrat with remorse. I am on a downswing now, and hopefully that will last. I have sold so many books this last year, something that is very difficult for me to do. I spend a portion of every day trying to remove some physical object from my space, and overall I have been successful recently. I have a bit of breathing room. The biggest problem is that I don’t really regret most of the things I acquire. If I did, I would easily dispose of them. I like and grow attached to the things I have, which makes it hard to part with them. In some ways, the limits of space that my apartment force upon me are useful. I am at the point now where I really have to get rid of a book every time I get a new one, and so I am extremely careful about what I buy. I definitely spend less money on books in particular these days, but I think I also spend more time carefully searching for the exact books I want, and a lot more time online and at the library, tracking down copies of books that I want to read but may not want to own, making it a trade-off of time for space. Really I just need a big house with many rooms and a lot of time to rearrange and optimize the collections of things that will fill them. A library or museum perhaps.
The other night, Catherine met up with a friend from her old office for dinner, then I met up with them later for drinks. Drinks were at The Gate, which I love. I am only kidding a little bit when I tell people it is one of the reasons that I live where I do. They had several special leap year beers on tap – that is, beers that date from 2008, the last leap year. I ended up tasting 4 of them, and drinking glasses of 2 of them, the Hitachino Nest Celebration Ale and the J.W. Lees Manchester Star. They were very different and quite wonderful. I tasted, but did not decide to drink real quantities of, the Samuel Adams Chocolate Bock and the Abbaye Des Rocs Grand Cru, which tasted a bit too much like chocolate and booze respectively. Both interesting though.
The night was a lot of fun, and I ended up drinking some of my own homemade lime-oncello when I got home, which definitely did not help my head the next morning. It got me thinking more about time though, and how we measure it. Leap years are special because they happen so infrequently, and we love to celebrate time intervals. We celebrate the end of each working day with happy hours, the end of the week more joyfully with weekend extravagances. We celebrate full moons, and new moons, solstices and equinoxes, though not like we used to, and we most notably celebrate all the yearly events that mark time on the calendar, from birthdays to anniversaries to holy days and new years. Leap years are even better because they happen with even less frequency (but more often than new centuries, or millennia which really, we can’t wrap our heads around), and most crazy of all, they exist outside or regular time, and have to have a whole new day added to the calendar, just for the year they are in. Leap years are great.
They also underscore the point, however, that the way we measure time is, while not arbitrary, at least a bit skewed towards certain goals and preconceptions. Drinking beer makes me think about this too much, as I can think of all the different time scales that that beer exists across. The untold centuries it took to manipulate the barley and hops into the specific breeds that were selected for making this specific brew. The tiny lifespans of the generations of yeasts that, God is good, turn it into fizzy alcohol rather than soupy porridge. The hours it spent cooking, the days it spent fermenting, weeks it spent sitting, years it spent mellowing and aging. I am drinking time in each sip on scales familiar and unfathomable to me. And the measures we use are only useful to us, and only sometimes at that. I think of boiling an egg, and really I don’t do that by exact time, but by feel. I need to cook it until it is cooked, not necessarily for 8 minutes exactly, say, but until it has absorbed enough energy from heat to change its physical structure into the form I want to consume it in. If I had that wonderful egg timer that you put in the boiling water and that turns red when the eggs are done, I could have a conception of time not in minutes, but in color.
Of course, about a paragraph in to this, I found myself wanting lime-oncello and have now consumed the ideal amount of that perilously alcoholic concoction (peel limes until blisters form on hands, soak in vodka until green turns to white, mix with simple syrup until you have a moment to spare, strain as many time as you can until you no longer have that moment, put it in the freezer until you want to drink it, drink it until this looks right.)
 Lime-oncello. Syrupy-liquid hyper-alcoholic lime essence.
I rely very heavily on auspicious timing. If I have a project in my head, and I am two days from the beginning of a new month, I find it very hard to start it until the new month begins. This is problematic. Recently, I began planning my days and tying up as many time consuming loose ends as I could so that I could force myself into the habit of daily writing once again. I was near a very auspicious day indeed at the time of my planning, a leap year. A perfect day to begin again. Then it fell out that my website was down for a few days around February 28th, and that pretty much killed my momentum. So I started writing offline, with the intention of posting when my website was alive once more. This turned out to be very interesting, as I began to see patterns emerging in what I was thinking about over the course of the week or so of writing. Indeed, there was even a clear theme (albeit a very general theme), Space and Time. So for this week, I decided rather than trying to post everything as I had written it, maybe even backdating so it appeared when it was written, I would shuffle and cut and paste and annotate myself and, abhorring an auspicious beginning, just start posting. On a Thursday, no less, the least auspicious day of the week.
*Originally written February 29, 2012*
Another transitional day means another attempt to make this a regular thing. Of course, as of this writing, my website is down, so this is currently an offline blog. I suppose that makes it an old fashioned journal? Got a new idea for scheduling now, along with a new general plan for making stuff happen and some tools to help with that…so far working out ok in other areas of life, so I will apply here. The other day I thought about what it would be like to publish a novel only on leap years. Every four years, a new book, like clockwork, but in between, nothing. It would be even more amusing to me if it were a long-form work of some kind, where readers knew they would have to wait exactly 4 years between updates. If there were many iterations of me, and multiple of them were capable of finishing works of fiction, one of me might attempt this project.
It is snowing quietly outside my window and has been for hours. Everyone else is asleep.
The Eyes of the Giving Machine circulated through the marketplace and reported back the locations of all the local mendicants as it walked its rounds. He proceeded to the nearest group of beggars and stood before them as they knelt, hands cupped and outstretched before him. His sensors quickly identified them and verified their registration with the Bureau of Beggars. He waited a moment while his Eyes returned to hover round his head with the final count of those gathered in the appropriate location for today’s donations. He instantly calculated the amount of today’s redistributed wealth each was to receive, and weighed each ones share of raw matter on his official scales before handing each their day’s wages. Paul and Greg straightened from their supplicant’s position and made their way to the nearest Converter with their earnings. Paul was very very old, though you would not know it to look at him, but Greg was still young and prone to dissatisfaction. “Not very much today now is it?” he complained as they waited in line for their turn at the Converter. “Yesterday I had almost half over again as much matter!” Paul chuckled indulgently. “Son, you have no idea how good you have it!” he began, and Greg quickly tried to interject, but it was too late. The old man had a speech in him now. Greg rolled his eyes and fixed an attentive look on his face. “When I was first begging, now there were some hard times! AI had just been perfected, but no one knew what to do with it, and Matter Conversion Technology hadn’t been dreamed up yet! Course, soon as they did implement AI things moved pretty damn quickly. I remember days when I’d be out on the street in the freezing snow, covered in filthy, filthy clothes, if I was lucky, beggin all day and maybe earning a coupla bucks for my troubles. People died easy back then, boy! Once the AI got going though, and they tackled the fundamental problems of human society, well, things got better right quick! Within five years they had a working model of Matter Converter and an entirely new social paradigm to go along with it. No one needed to work anymore, not less they wanted to, now that anything could be converted to and from raw matter into anything else. Once the Converters were in place publicly, and the distribution system had been ironed out, people were free to do exactly what they wanted. Take you and me, son. We feel no strong calling other than that of the road and the song of the birds. We don’t feel the need to live high on the hog, so we don’t need to! We show up at the designated time and place and perform the Rites of Begging, and that’s it! Done for the day, and we can do what we want. If what they give us ain’t enough for you, you can always go find a job for some higher wages, no one is stopping you.” Greg shrugged sullenly and took his turn at the Converter. He dropped in some matter and spoke a few careful words. The drawer opened and he took his breakfast out and stepped to the side. Paul took his spot and ordered up his own breakfast, then dropped in some more matter and pulled out some fishing line and some nice looking lures. “Come on, son, lets eat, and then what say you and I go fishing?” Greg smiled and nodded, mouth already full of eggs, ham and Hollandaise.
 The Six of Pentacles
The singer arrived in the town of Highridge in the late afternoon. He had seen the rain clouds in the distance since early morning, but was surprised at the intensity of the rain when he arrived. He was greeted at the edge of town by a huddled and shivering man who silently led him to the town hall. They walked along a path of wooden crates, placed to keep them from sinking into the sucking mud. “How long?” the singer asked. “20 days,” was the curt reply. They walked in silence the rest of the way. The majority of the townsfolk were gathered in the town hall, and a low buzz followed the brief silence their entry caused. The mayor rose to greet him and welcomed him to Highridge, then he and a few ministers led the Singer to the back room and closed the door. “20 days of rain!” the Mayor began. “And our Singer nowhere to be found. He was last seen in his house almost thirty days ago, but he was prone to wandering, and no one has been able to break down the door to his house to check if he is home! He certainly hasn’t responded to our repeated requests for entry.”
“The door is Sung shut?” asked the Singer. The Mayor nodded.
“He’s grown somewhat paranoid and withdrawn in the last few years,” he added. “He shuts himself in for days at a time and wanders off at random, but we don’t need him for that much, so it hasn’t been a big problem until now.”
The Singer nodded and stood up. “Best be about it then.” He opened his moth and began Singing, a soft tune that rose into a bright song of joy and youth, and ended on a note of pure exultation. The rain paused and the clouds began to clear as he sang, but as he finished, cloud cover drew over again, and the rain kept falling. He frowned. “He must still be Singing the rain down. I’ll have to stop his song first or the same thing will happen again. Who can lead me to his house?” The same guide as before led him out the back door of the town hall, and across the mud lake that the town had become, to a small house near the Eastern edge. The Singer approached the door and Sang a short phrase, then gestured for his guide to push the door open. They stepped inside and the Singer listened intently. He heard a faint sound from the second floor so they proceeded upstairs. The sound grew stronger as they approached a closed door at the top of the stairs. They opened it cautiously and the Singer snorted in disgust. The town Singer lay on the floor, clearly dead for some time. On a desk in the corner of the room was a small machine from which a dark and hypnotic sound was emerging. “The lazy fool was using an Echo Box,” said the Singer, as he walked over and pressed a switch. The sound stopped and he once again Sang an end to the rain. The clouds cleared, the rain ended, and he waited a few minutes after finishing to see if there was any sign of reversion. Finally he grunted in satisfaction and nodded to his guide to lead him back to the town hall.
The snow was falling heavily outside the church. Cold and dirty grey, it filled the air with chill and darkness so that the warm glow seeping out of the stained glass windows was only visible from up close. George and Henrietta trudged through the toxic slush and paused, huddling together under the narrow window ledge. Above them the glass blazed with color – a green tree grew from hard red earth bearing coins instead of fruit. Even now, weakened by hunger and the slow disease as well as the biting cold, the significance of the symbolism was not lost on Henrietta. She remembered the early warnings she had ignored and now, when it was too late to be bitter, she was merely disappointed and tired. The early years of the war had seemed…not trivial exactly, but irrelevant to her life. She had seen the escalation and resigned herself to the fact of its omnipresence. When the banks began to fail she was worried, but she knew they would rebound eventually. Things had been changing anyway, a new sense of hope prevailing and letting her brush aside the nagging doubt that nothing could stop what had begun. The banks did rebound, as did the market, but not so high as before and there were far fewer, and each more intertwined than before. The war continued even as each new day spelled victory. The long war against foreign faith and culture buoyed the religious extremists in her own country, until Religion became inescapably tangled with politics, just as the banks found themselves inextricably bound to the government. When the bombs began to fall in the Holy Lands, the three became one in a terrible fusion of power and greed. With the world shattering into long postponed feuds it was simpler to make one people of the nation of multitudes, one faith to ensure equality backed by the guns of the government, the dollars of the elite, and the spiritual drugs of the Church. George was coughing now and a door was opening in the side wall of the Church. A man poked his head out into the cold, a young clerik with purple robes over his crisp white button-down. He waved his hands to shoo them away and watched until Henrietta hauled George away from the wall and back into the snowstorm. Then he ducked back inside and closed the door, leaving the heavy silence of the outside for the quiet murmurs of prayer, computer and ticker.
 The Five of Pentacles
When Perkunas woke up, he was bewildered by what he saw. The world he had long slept in bore little resemblance to what he now beheld. Gone were the green fields and great grey mountains, the rivers of blackish blue, and the clear blue sky of the lands he had once walked as a God. Stretching out before him was a barren world of orange and grey, unbearably cold, and seemingly empty of life. A strange shoreline stood in front of him, but the liquid lapping its edges was not water. The sky was dark and turbulent, and the sun a distant and subdued ball of orange. Instead a great orb filled much of the sky, a huge shape outlined in the smog. He had not been fully awake in some time, but it could not have been so long that things had changed to this, could it? He sought the source of the new belief that sustained his existence and sensed those who thought of him, but was shocked at how immensely far away they were. Looking up at the sky again thoughtfully, he realized he must be very, very far from home indeed. He started walking through his new home and realized there was in fact an immense amount of liquid on the planet, but it was all frozen below his feet. He stretched his senses as far as he could, but could sense no life anywhere around him. Well, he decided, he was a rain god, whether or not there was anyone around to appreciate the fact. Perhaps a display of his power might draw the attention of some un-sensed new life, or… perhaps…maybe he could now shape a new race of life suitable to worship him. He was filled with a sense of purpose, and began to make it rain. The clouds above gathered as he urged the native gases into the air and drew them back down again as liquid rain. It was not water, but it fell from the sky, and it would do. For nineteen days he wandered the surface of the new world, bringing the rain with him wherever he went, searching for life, or the materials with which to make it. On the nineteenth day, however, he felt a drowsiness stealing over him. It grew steadily as the day wore on, and he realized abruptly that something was wrong. Reaching with his mind back to those whose belief sustained his newfound existence, he sensed with dismay that they were decreasing rapidly. But then he was so sleepy, and then he was closing his eyes and once again dreaming the long dreams of the gods. The clouds above dispersed, and the rain stopped. Back on Earth, the committee finalized the nomenclature for the various physical features they had recently mapped on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. The secretary began deleting the names of features that no longer warranted them, beginning with Perkunas, an oddly colored atmospheric anomaly.
* Perkunas is a Lithuanian Rain God. Planetary features are named according to their type and adhere to an elaborate set of rules. For example, craters on Saturn’s moon Mimsa are named after characters in Le Morte D’Arthur. Which is awesome. On Saturn’s moon Titan – which has weather – there are geological features known as a Virgae which are basically streaks of color that are observable from space, and which are named after various rain gods (on Earth, Virgae are an atmospheric phenomenon in which rain visibly falls from clouds but evaporates before reaching the ground) . For more fun with the intricate and amusing naming system foisted on foreign features, go here.
The day after he was born, pictures of Martin Green appeared in major papers, on television, and in all the supermarket glossies. The first child of the renowned and beloved actress Jessica Hart and the awesome giant of the art world John Green, the world could hardly wait to see him. In the beginning, they were not disappointed. The baby was beautiful and strong, smiling often, even in the light of a thousand camera flashes. He rounded out the picture of the Greens – long the most respected and admired couple in the public eye – so completely that none could help but love him. As he grew, he remained a media darling. His presence in the house seemed to only strengthen the bond between his parents, elevating their relationship to nearly mythical status, and to increase the passion with which they attacked their work. John entered one of the most productive phases of his artistic life, creating masterpiece after masterpiece on canvas and in stone, while Jessica starred in a series of acclaimed movies, amassing a slew of awards. The world waited anxiously to see what wonderful talents Martin would show, and each glimpse of finger-paint, as well as his performance in the kindergarten Christmas pageant were eagerly combed over for signs of early genius. He continued to grow, and the genius failed to manifest. In his high school years he rebelled against his media following and secluded himself from the public eye as much as possible. Without footage, interest declined somewhat, but it only came back tenfold when he was accepted into a prestigious art school upon graduation. Student shows were packed to the rafters in hopes of catching a glimpse of his work, and classmates and teachers found themselves waylaid to comment on his talent. He continued to be secretive, but word inevitably leaked out – Martin Green was establishing a reputation on campus as a third rate performance artist. The initial shock was tempered by the knowledge that the boy was still learning, and a hope that perhaps his art was simply too brilliant for the general public. But as the years and shows continued, it became clear that there was nothing special about the boy’s attempts at art. He graduated and got good bookings on the strength of his name and for a while people even showed up to his events. When they left confused, angry, betrayed, disappointed – and most of all bored, however, his audience dried up. He enjoyed a brief period of ironic attendance following the initial rise and fall of his star, but even that soon vanished. He continued to perform at smaller and smaller venues for several years, despite never once receiving any sort of critical success. Finally, on his 30th birthday, he used all of his parent’s connections to attain one last top-rate booking. For three full days he sat in a concrete throne atop a flight of steps in Central Park. He dressed himself as a king, in simple but expensive robes of red and purple, and a crown of yellow gold. Atop his head he balanced a giant coin, while he clutched another to his chest. Two more lay on the ground and he rested his feet upon them. For three days he sat there, retiring at sunset and returning at sunrise, unmoving, silent staring directly into the eyes of whomever came to see him. Critics were confused. One wrote that it was “an extraordinary display of control and restraint, but ultimately it was in service of nothing… the overall effect was of a resounding mediocrity.” Upon reading this review, Martin retired from the art world and the public eye.
 The Four of Pentacles
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