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 October 6, 2026.

Making

I have been actually making some stuff lately, or it’s been five weeks since I thought about this page and have happened to chug out a couple of ideas in that span. Some posters, and I laid out a zine I’m working out how to get printed, and I cleaned up a bunch of bumper sticker ideas I had in my scraps document that I am also working out how to get made.

Freelance has been, uh, pretty dismal lately. I have one warm lead on a small gig and I am leaning on some regulars this month but overall the well is as dry as it gets, which means I need to devote more of my office hours to a blend of self-marketing and applying for full-time jobs, the ratio of which changes depending on how much self-worth I can scrape up that day. I realized the other day that as of October it’s been two full years since I had a real graphic design job.

That big project from early this year is, far as I’ve been told, just about to come out for real, and another thing I worked on this summer is currently with the printer, and both of those things I am really hoping put my name in front of some people who can offer me similar work. In the meantime I am strongly considering just eating a few months of box-stacking at Costco or whatever (even though last time I was this low they didn’t call me back. You can’t advertise that kind of job and then reject people who are desperate. Come on.)

Doing

A lot of September was just about surviving, which is also what I’m back to this week, but a couple weekends ago we went to Philly for two shows and a little bit of bumbling around, which was lovely. I like Philadelphia a lot. I’m sure people who live there full-time find things to hate but as a tourist, thumbs up.

The main reason we were over there was to see Phoebe Bridgers at the Sixers’ place. I walked in basically assuming my usual “clueless goofy boyfriend at the Concert For Her” role but she is just straight-up really good and I had a great time. They’re coming up with lighting technologies I didn’t know were possible.

I’d also never been to one of those put-your-phone-in-a-little-bag shows before and it only took one night to completely sell me on the idea. Yondr should be the fastest-growing company in the world and we should be ruling out phones at every show and at the movies and at like, the park. It was so nice to be at a concert that size and see straight to the stage with my own eyes instead of watching a thousand teenagers shoot B-roll. Those three newspaper op-eds a month are right, phones are poison, but it was kind of crazy how instant the reversal was.

Thinking

Lately I have been feeling like a real dumb piece of shit. I think it’s mostly because I’m broke and because I keep having to work on the weekends, which would not be happening if I had a normal adult job. In some ways I am a victim of the meat grinder and the whole country is designed to keep me and people like me barely on this side of solvency, but there is also a sense of moral failing to it that I try to reject out of leftism and don’t always do so cleanly.

The rest of this feeling is probably just chemical, which I also try to ignore and don’t always succeed. Especially when I’m at work on a weekend and there’s nothing to do but simmer about what a fucking loser move that is. And if some of that is my brain tissue getting saturated with the wrong molecules, I think at least a portion of it is just based on the objective evidence. My depression is a lurid pie chart.

The thing is that I’ve tried a few medications and they either didn’t do anything noticeable or made me feel like a plank of wood. But they did lower my heart rate enough that I could go pull fifty bucks at the plasma place when I needed it, which was pretty nice and I kind of miss. Plus there’s only about five weeks left until it’s fully dark at 4PM, and when that hits I think I’d take plank-of-wood over total despair. So I’m thinking of trying to get back on something for all of that.

Reading

(Guy who just explained that I am so depressed lately I can’t really enjoy or connect with anything) I don’t know what’s going on but I keep hitting duds in the book department. Jurassic Park was fine, and then I was sort of adrift. I opened this book about David Lynch’s DUNE that sounded interesting and the author kept writing stuff like “Boy, oh boy” and I couldn’t stick it out. I tried reading one of my wacko alien books and it was too weirdly written to hold me.

So I broke the glass and started The Mercy of Gods, the new one by the Expanse guys. It is not grabbing me the same way those books did but it is pretty good and the setup feels like a very classic scifi idea they’re reexamining in a neat way. I’ve at least managed to stick with it for the first two thirds.

Listening

I was just thinking recently about what might make my 2026 best-of list, because since I set up my little apparatus for blasting through new music I haven’t been spending a lot of time with any specific records. I did really like this new 0xGRLF00D album, somebody I think is underrated. Check them out if you like Graham Kartna or Pilotredsun or other weird sounds.

Oh, I also heard the Bleeds deluxe reissue by virtue of being in the car with my girlfriend a lot. Still a great album and for the new B-sides they got Andy Loebs and Fire-Toolz?? I need to know which member of Wednesday fucks with Orange Milk Records.