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Posts published in “Thoughts”

A Trip to the Playground

I realize I am just a bit behind on posting photos of my children here. To rectify that, here is the first of a series of gallery posts from last year.

It was a beautiful day in September and it made sense to drag the children out in their finest rainbow dresses to the playground. Well, Cheeks didn’t wear a rainbow dress; she was dressed like a tiny Mrs. Roper. As one does.

Enjoy the photos after the jump.

A Minor Parenting Breakthrough

Yesterday I took Penny to the doctor. She’d been getting these low-grade fevers for a few days and then bouncing back, having some throat issues that were causing her to gag on her food, and was just kind of inconsistent in temperament. More inconsistent than is normal for a 4 year old, at least. Nothing too bad, but off for long enough that we decided a doctor visit was warranted.

The drive from our house to the pediatrician office is about 30 minutes, beach traffic permitting. And that means plenty of time for music.

The thought of Frozen II on loop yet again filled me with dread, so I made a quick playlist of albums that I anticipated she wouldn’t hate and wouldn’t end up with me yelling at Android Auto to play “Lost In the Woods” ten minutes into our drive.

The first album on that playlist was Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips. An all-time great album, to be sure. One that I’ve listened to maybe 80 million times, no exaggeration. And why aren’t The Flaming Lips more discussed? They’ve been putting out great records for decades, but no one talks about them. It’s weird, right? It’s not like they’re a band who put out a few records in the late 80s and then disappeared. No, they’ve been consistently making new work since 1986. I hear more talk about Neutral Milk Hotel and they only put out two records in the 1990s. It’s wild! Talk about The Flaming Lips!

Anyway.

We were driving down the highway, I put on the record, and halfway through the first track, “Fight Test”, she says, “I like this music, daddy.”

“Did you just say you liked this, kiddo?”

“Yeah! I like this music.”

I tell you I have had some successes as a parent, but this was a special one. I felt like I really hit the mark with my gamble with this album, one that is pretty high in my own personal favorites.

During “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1” I explained to her that this song was about a girl who fights evil robots to protect the boy who is singing, knowing full well that orienting her understanding of the song in the terms of a heroic girl would help her appreciate it. And I wasn’t lying. That is what the song is about, at least at the level of understanding of a young girl. I could have talked to her about struggling and overwhelming odds and caring for our loved ones who fight for us and she might have understood a little, but telling her it was about a girl who fought robots to save a boy sent the idea right home.

The appointment went smoothly. She was COVID/RSV/strep negative. It was a relief that we don’t have to look forward to that joy smashing through the house again.

Penny shushes me
Penny shushes me conspiratorially with her post-nasal-swab sucker in her mouth.
Penny enacts her diabolical plan of peeking into the hallway.

On our way back home, we listened to the driving playlist again which had reached Pulp’s This Is Hardcore when she pipes up behind me. “Daddy, can we listen to the girl and the robot song again?”

“Really??” I asked. “You got it, sweet girl.”

After the song, I skipped over “Yoshimi Pt. 2” and “In The Morning of the Magicians”, but she made me go back to the latter track because she “liked that one”.

What a car ride! After so many years of inane, mind-numbing children’s music, to be able to listen to something with Penny that I love and that she enjoyed was such a pleasure. It’s funny how these silly little moments can feel so profound and rewarding against the daily grind of parenting.

We went to the diner close to the house for lunch. She got french toast and chocolate milk and I got an omelette with home fries and rye toast.

David Lynch

David Lynch has died. If you run in the same media circles I do, this will come as no surprise to you. I won’t bore you with my waxing poetic about how important his work is to me (very) or how much I admire that he was able to do all the things he was (a lot) or how great of a loss this is to everyone who cares about art (huge).

No, I’ll take this moment to share one of my very favorite David Lynch moments, a moment which is directly responsible for the unironic addition of “get real” to my personal lexicon.

Let’s all go make something weird and important.

Rest well, David Lynch.

Happy Merry 2024!

Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope you’re fortunate enough to spend these dark winter nights with people you love, no matter what you celebrate or don’t celebrate. It’s a time for chosen families, for friends, and for people who love the hell out of you no matter what.

So put your feet up, eat something delicious, and sing loudly.

Some creative thinking for the dawn of 2024

Happy New Year, everyone! I was fumbling around the internet recently and came across a post on Fstoppers that provides a framework about how to process your creative output from last year and your creative goals for this year. I thought it would be fun and interesting to go through this list here to share with you all.

Note that I am going to change some of the photography-specific language in the questions to be broad. I’m a photographer, sure, but I’m also a bunch of other things all lumped together.

Ok? Ok! Cool! Let’s get going.

  1. On a scale of 1 to 10 how do you feel about your year as a creator?

    Pretty iffy, overall. I posted 18 times here for the entirety of 2023: 8 were photos of my kids, 4 were TBLR posts, leaving just 6 that were actual writing. Not so great? But I did restart my TBLR project and am pretty happy with how that’s going. There’s been a bit of a lull through the holidays and all that business, but I have one in process that will go up soon. So that’s fun. I also have six more Failure States planned for when I feel like wallowing a bit.

  2. What is one big lesson you learned as an artist this year?

    I wish I could say I learned something, but I am not sure what that would be? I haven’t pushed myself too hard this year. Granted we had a baby which took up a whole lot of time between January and the summer, but that’s not a good excuse. The honest truth is that I just didn’t make much time to be creative this year. Anxiety, depression, shit even just distraction. I’ve been not so good for myself this year as with many other years.

  3. Glance through your calendar for this year, are you happy with how you invested your time? Why or why not?

    Not really. I spent a lot of time in 2023 dicking around and not getting too much done. Not that my value is determined by my output, but there was quite a lot of time that I spent messing around that I could have used better. I log all the time I do professional creative work in a notebook that sits on my desk. For a good part of the year I also logged the time I did personal creative work, but that sort of dropped off. I suppose that I subconsciously felt ashamed or something about how little time I was logging for it. Kind of silly. I should probably start logging it again this year.

  4. What piece or series was the best one you produced this year, and why was it the best?

    I guess we can call this the resurrected The Black Laser Reads. I’ve been thinking about this for years but never felt like I had the technical skill to execute in a way I would have felt good about. But over the last two years or so I’ve been recording a lot of voice over auditions and learning a lot about processing audio for that purpose. Suddenly, this year, I realized I actually do have the skill to execute TBLR v2 in a manner up to my standards. That is pretty satisfying. I have so many books in line. I could fill my entire year just reading for TBLR and do nothing else. A bit of a trap there, actually.

  5. Evaluate your [output]. Are your pieces where you want them to be artistically? Technically?

    Nah, they never are. My work can always be better. I think, for me, that artistic and technical quality go hand-in-hand. If one isn’t in place, then the whole work is a bit of a failure. I always try to accomplish both and consider both in the evaluation of the work after releasing it to the world. And I am not writing nearly enough. Not nearly enough.

  6. What do you like about your [work]? What do you dislike about [it]?

    I like the creation of it. I like the feeling of focusing on a project and doing my best to make sure it comes out well. But I wish it were more varied. I love my kids, but I’d like to take photos of something that’s not just them. I love reading audiobooks, but I also need to be writing for myself. And I have some video work planned that I can’t get off the ground for schedule, childcare, and financial reasons. A lot of things I’d like to have done, but did not do for a lot of reasons that just feel like silly excuses no matter how real they are.

  7. Are you producing great work, mediocre work, expected work, innovative work, or poor work and why?

    Somewhere between good and average. Above average, perhaps?

  8. What did you accomplish this year that you are most proud of?

    I kept my kids alive and they are nice people. That’s it.

  9. What are you most disappointed about from this past year as a creator?

    It’s been a bit of a creative wash. A lot of attempts, a lot of struggle, a lot of effort and thought and learning and support work, but not a lot of results. Frustrating.

  10. What is one thing you want to stop doing (1), start doing (2), and continue doing (3) in 2024?

    First, I’d like to stop sabotaging myself and cutting myself so much slack. Do I need to drink a couple glasses of wine or beers at the end of the night? No, not at all. Do those things affect me? Sure! They definitely allow me to convince myself with excuses and they affect my sleep which makes the early mornings pretty useless. This isn’t even really about alcohol dependence or some feeling that I am an addict. I don’t feel that way. But I do think I could be better about saving that sort of thing for times where it makes sense and not rely on it as a way to blow off steam at the end of the night. Even if I knock out 30 minutes of work that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, that is a positive outcome. This was one of my major takeaways from our most recent Whole30.

    Second, I’d like to start writing fiction again. When we were living in my mother in law’s basement before Sarah gave birth to the triplets, I started a story that I quite liked. I worked on it until Penny and Bea came home from the NICU, but really lost the emotional steam for it when Olive’s health took a downward turn. In fact, that story has opened automatically every time I’ve opened Scrivener since then. That’s like 3 years now. That’s a lot of auto-openings. I need to get back to it. There’s no craft that I enjoy as much as writing stories, but there’s also no craft I feel quite so unsure, so unconfident, so weird about. That feeds into a lot of fear and guilt and other stupid, self-defeating nonsense. I just need to rip off that bandaid and build some momentum.

    I think the best way to do this is to set a real schedule for myself. For the last few weeks I have been deliberately waking up earlier. Trying to retrain my sleep schedule. Once in my younger adulthood, the middle of the night was a fertile creative time. Now, however, in my early forties with three children that just isn’t true anymore. It took me a while to realize this. No, that’s not quite right. It took me a while to admit this to myself. Hence the deliberate schedule shift. My goal is to get to the point where I can wake up early, spend an hour writing, and then engage with my day as a stay at home dad. Because that’s my life. I need to make it work. I want to make it work. The time for it is now.

    I’d also like to take photos of stuff again. I feel like I’ve fallen into glorified snapshot mode, which is fine, but is not creatively rewarding. I am still going to take too many photos of my kids, of course, but I would like to also take photos of stuff that’s not my kids. You get it.

    Third, I’d like to continue with TBLR and Failure State. Those are fun projects that I can work on when I am not fresh. That is, late at night, after a long day of small children screaming for my attention. I can absolutely zone out and edit mouth noises out of my performance of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” while exhausted. No problem at all. What I can’t do in that state is form compelling thoughts and ideas and then translate them into words. Best to use that time of the day for projects that don’t require 100% of my processing power.

So that’s about it. Some optimization for this coming year. Some places I’d like to put more juice. You know what would also be great? Getting a job. Or jobs. I’ve been seriously underemployed since Verdant collapsed and that is driving me nuts. But I’ll save that for Failure State: Verdant Construction whenever I get around to writing that.

A Musical Kids’ Remote With An Incredibly Strange Message

Anyone with children will know that kids toys love to make noise, especially cheap electronic noise. The books sing. The tables sing. The chairs sing. Everything sings these horrible, tinny, little songs that you can’t escape. They’re awful. I hate them. They are a one-way ticket on the express train to Headache Town for me.

I hate them so much, in fact, that when they come into the house via some well-meaning gift-giver I make them quietly disappear as soon as the children have wandered away from them. As my sister once said to me, gifts are meant to be given and after that it’s up to you what you do with them. I’m paraphrasing a bit, but that’s the gist.

However, one such toy found it’s way into our lives and made an impression on me.

When Penny and Bea were just becoming mobile, they were absolutely obsessed with the television remote. They are still obsessed with it, of course, but now they know what it does. Back then it was just a fun thing to hold on to that was always hanging around and being used by the grown-ups. The obsession got so serious that we had to hide the remotes out of their field of view or they would get upset at not being able to play with them.

Sarah or I—not sure who—had the brilliant idea of getting a couple of toy remotes for them to mess around with so the real remotes might lose their fascination. Sarah found one on Bezo’s store and it arrived shortly thereafter. The girls were happy and the toy became a beloved thing. Here is a photo of it.

The remote features a big 3 stage switch on the side to set it to off, low volume, or high volume. At first, this switch confounded the children. I could set it to off and be sure that I wouldn’t hear the beeping and chirping and music it polluted the room with. Gradually, as their fine motor skills developed, they learned to switch the thing on and had no reservation to set it all the way to high volume. Of course! Things are so much more fun when they are very loud, right?

And so, despite our valiant efforts to keep the thing set to off, we became acquainted with the music it made. At first you try to ignore it, let it fade into the din of two small children. Eventually, though, it starts to cut through the noise, it starts to insert itself into your consciousness, and you become aware of what it’s saying.

Most of the sounds the remote makes are pretty regular. Calling out the numbers. Stating the functions of the buttons. A song about how distressed the singer is that there isn’t more time in the day to watch television. You know, normal stuff.

Fortunately for you, you’re reading this in a multimedia format, so I can share the sounds with you. Here’s a sampling of what I am talking about.

There’s one song, however, that plays any time you turn the remote on. You hear it a lot because the kids are always switching the thing on and off. Then you start to really listen to the words the woman is singing from the remote. And then you realize that the lyrics are pretty weird. Like, seriously weird.

It’s great. And by “great” I mean “distressing”.

Seemingly innocuous, right? But really pay attention to what the words say.

Let’s gather round to pretend We’re going to enjoy some TV shows With our friends

Are we pretending to watch TV shows with our real friends? Or are we pretending to watch TV shows with our imaginary friends? Are we pretending to enjoy TV shows we are actually watching? What’s going on in this song? Is it calling for us to deceive our friends while we watch TV with them?

What adult thought this song was a good idea? Who paid so little attention that this thing is embedded in who knows how many toy remotes floating around the world?

The children will never understand the nuance if they even process the lyrics at all. But I’ve been thinking about this song for like a year and a half now. Maybe longer? I can’t figure it out. I don’t think I ever will figure it out.

But now I have shared it with you so it can take root in your mind. You’re welcome.


Listen to me reading you this post right here.

Thoughts on our 2023 Whole30

Sarah and I finished our sort-of-annual Whole30 this week. It’s a nice thing to do once a year or so when you feel like it’s time to clean up your act a little. And it’s a good way to be thoughtful about your eating and drinking, even if those aren’t problem areas for you. We’ve done it a bunch of times over the years and some are harder than others. This was one of the more challenging ones.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Whole30 is an elimination diet/habit-breaking challenge. For 30 days you don’t eat added sugar of any sort, grains, legumes, dairy, carrageenan, or alcohol. Additionally, you don’t recreate baked goods or treats with approved ingredients. So, no Whole30 cupcakes, no Whole30 pancakes, no Whole30 whiskey sours. You get the idea. Finally—and this isn’t a huge deal for me—you aren’t allowed to weigh yourself during the month.

Not so bad, right? With a little practice, it’s not. The real issue comes with the sheer amount of label-reading you are required to do. You’d be surprised how many items in your grocery store have banned ingredients in them. No added sugars isn’t just no white sugar; it’s also dextrose or maltose or sucrose or many others. No grains isn’t just no bread; it’s also no canola oil or corn starch or rice. No legumes isn’t just no beans; it’s also no soy sauce or peanut oil or tofu.

Go ahead. Read the ingredients in your pantry items. You’ll see all of these things in there. It’s a lot.

The first time you do this, it’s a real challenge and requires quite a lot of learning. But, as mentioned above, this isn’t our first time. It might be our sixth or seventh? We’ve got the label-reading thing pretty dialed in.

All that aside, I’ve got some thoughts and reflections about my experience on this most recent Whole30.

  • I lost 14 pounds this time, from 227 to 213. Losing weight isn’t the point, but it was worth noting.
  • I finally figured out how to make sweet potatoes that I actually like. The secret ingredient is salt. Here’s how you do it: peel and halve you sweepots. Slice into 1/4″ thick semi-circles. Toss with olive oil, more salt than you think, black pepper, paprika, cayenne pepper, and garlic powder. Spread on a half sheet pan. Throw into a preheated 450°F oven and let cook for like 35 minutes, stirring a couple times. That’s it. Fantastic.
  • Sliced napa cabbage is a great bulking item for lunch leftover stir fries. Finish it with a splash of rice vinegar.
  • I didn’t miss dairy at all. I like to have it as a snack, but I realize that I actually just like fancy cheese as a treat.
  • I also didn’t miss alcohol that much. I missed having something to sit down with and wind down, but not the beer or wine itself. It would be nice to find an adequate replacement. Tea won’t do it.
  • In past Whole30s, I would get through the first 7 to 10 days and suddenly feel great with all the added sugar and booze out of my system. This time not so much. The primary difference this time is that I have three small children and don’t get nearly the same quality or amount of rest I used to. Do with that observation what you will.
  • Radishes really scratch a lot of snacking itches. Dress with flake salt.
  • Thank god you can still drink coffee.

That’s it. I recommend the program if you’re at all interested in tinkering with your nutrition and habits. It’s pretty eye-opening and, once you’ve figured it out, it becomes a nice reset button.