Category: Personal

I couldn’t finish a very good book because it got me thinking about Max Weber, economic theory, and Donny, a boy I used to play with when I was little.

Tonight, we’re on our way back to Chicago from the Big Easy, riding on Amtrak’s City of New Orleans. The trip – and traveling on Amtrak – has been a tremendous success.

Measure twice, cut once – and when you cut, cut carefully. But seventeen year old me had trouble doing those things.

I’m fine, and everyone I know is fine. COVID, climate change, insurrection, it’s all someone else’s problem because my family and I are just trying to figure out how to make it where we are, you know? I mean, things are hard enough as it is, I don’t need to start getting all bummed out by the stuff going on in other places with other people.

With fifteen years into our house, we’re the old-timers now. It’s us that are now bedrock of a community.

We need to create ideas. We still need to come up with new concepts to solve problems, create new ways of doing things – and we don’t have the benefit of being Paul McCartney

It would seem nice to just get on a plane and find yourself somewhere better, right?

It’s been an awful long time since I wrote to you. The truth is I’ve been writing a lot since then, just not for you.

I am jonesing for travel and crowds in the worst way imaginable.

There are a few things I want to take from 2020, that were either forced upon me, or learned through trial and error.

Here is my annual update on newsletters I like, and that you should be reading.

I marvel at writers who constantly dash off fully formed thoughts and ideas, quickly turning them into plays, poetry compendiums, op-eds, novels, and witty bon mots for social media.

The tree in my backyard is dying. I don’t want to let it go.

I’ve always felt a crucial something has been missing from my interactions. Furiously attempting to connect with as many people as I could during the pandemic, I didn’t realize – as I finally do now – that I was missing subtle social cues that just don’t transfer electronically.

Here we are now, living through a major event that will most certainly earn pages in future history textbooks.

So much is changing so fast. What seems like normal today, would have been unimaginable last week. With video, we hope to document the change in our world and in ourselves.

This whole virus thing is overwhelming. It’s clear that the next couple of weeks are going to bring major changes to our lives.

Even now, thinking about it, my muscles tense. I get nervous.

It’s been a few months, so I bring to you my Fall 2019 Media Diet. Oddly, I’ve felt like I’m just not consuming as much new stuff as usual.

Here are a dozen or so newsletters I get that you might consider reading too.

I consume a lot of media. So, with a tip of the hat to Jason Kottke, here is a rundown of some of my media consumption from this summer.

I’ve been looking for ways to relax and find calm. Here’s a video I made about it.

Waters Elementary School. The amazing garden is pictured just off screen, to the left. This last year was rocky for my son’s school, Waters Elementary, a public school on Chicago’s...

The stories that survived – from thousands of years ago – are sweeping, and sometimes very personal. We’re reminded by Ammurapi’s undelivered clay tablet plea that real people existed 3,200 years ago, who harbored hopes and dreams just as we do today. The distance of time and lack of written records separates us from ancient people, but it does not make us very different from them.

Above, the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest, where I've got to get to at some point. Lately my idle moments have been spent surfing Orbitz, Hotels.com and every manner of travel...

Aren’t you enough? I don’t really mean you, per se. I mean the plural you. All of you reading this.