Open mic night down at the bar wasn’t planned as a Tom Petty tribute but it just morphed into that organically. Deep cuts for which everyone miraculously knew all the words and sang along.  It’s interesting to see all these 40 and 50-something musicians, mostly pro or semi-pro and the kind of whistfulness that took hold of them.  Tom Petty songs represent an attainable kind of brilliance.

-Someone remind me next year to get into Inktober before the month starts? It looks like fun.

-Members of my family are caught up in bizarre conspiracy theories involving the U.S. government. It’s interesting to watch the means by which access to constant streams of information leaves people vulnerable- whole populations being pushed in one direction or another via suggestion, each individual becoming an unwitting agent in a giant game of telephone. The true definition of “meme” got co-opted somewhere along the way and it’s a shame.

-I miss having conversations. That seems like a ridiculous thing to say, doesn’t it?

Stuff like this gets to me.  It’s sort of like asking why someone would choose laminate counter tops when they could have gone with the imported Italian marble.

The idea of a perfect plane of smooth, unblemished ceiling depends on fabricated gypsum board. Prior to the late ‘50′s you were going to pay a crew of highly skilled plaster people a week’s pay to get that nice smooth surface.  These were cost-effective solutions to a tricky problem and pretty much the only way to make those decent homes affordable.

(I won’t get into how erasing all evidence of the craftsperson’s hand is a hallmark of classist design ideology).

-The old air conditioner is churning, trying to keep up with this heat. It overloaded a few times earlier today, condenser coils iced up from the humidity.

-The last few nights I’ve had the pleasure of sleeping in an empty room. So empty the walls reverberate when I draw my fingers across the sheets. I figure you can fill an empty room up with dreams.

-For some reason I have a bunch of Bruce Springsteen lyrics running around inside me today. This is atypical.

Do you ever think about the Voyager spacecraft?  (Voyager 1, obviously. Nobody thinks about Voyager 2).  

It’s been zooming away from me my entire life, making little signals. Always getting farther and farther away.  It’s out there. Twice as far from Pluto as Pluto is from the sun.