This site is currently under construction. Though the blog is active semi-daily, the portfolio has been mostly archived and will only showcase newer work—anything done before 2020 will remain offline. As I’m currently working on a variety of new projects, there will be significant updates throughout the fall and winter. (There will also be a regular front page directing to the portfolio instead of the blog, but due to the fact writing is the only really active part of the site right now, I keep it on the front page.)

Anyway, thanks for visiting and hopefully the actual content of the site will be up sooner rather than later.

Wilshire and San Vicente

I had to get a new phone today. After years and years with my old iPhone SE, the screen cracked for the first time after I dropped it on Tuesday. The phone is so old that the repair shop didn’t have any screens in stock that would fit it. For some time now, it’s been slowly dying due to the increasing size of iOS and mobile apps, and so I took this as the final sign it was time to finally upgrade.

So I bought a new phone this afternoon. Afterward I had to go to Beverly Hills for a medical appointment, and I found myself sitting in the waiting room with some time to kill. Fiddling with this new iPhone, trying to figure out why Apple has made iOS so ugly over the past few years, I was struggling. Holding the phone along the base as I am used to, my thumb couldn’t reach the navigation buttons at the top of the screen—an action that was pretty simple on the SE. This seems like a flaw in basic functionality from a product design point of view, as my hands are a pretty decent size and should have no trouble reaching across a screen.

It felt really appropriate I was discovering this new inconvenience in Beverly Hills.

South Arnaz and Wilshire

Ten years ago, the iPhone was a perfectly fine device that was well-designed and comfortable. Somewhere along the line, though, that American idea of Bigger is Better seemed to take hold and the phones became more like mini-tablets. (I held on to my old phone for so long because it was the same size as an iPhone 6, which was nearly perfect.)

But in America, we take what we can get even—and especially—when we don’t need it. Beverly Hills is the type of city that exemplifies this idea. The palm trees, taller than most in the rest of LA, soar above Wilshire Boulevard. The showrooms for supercars that couldn’t be driven on a majority of the pothole-laden streets of Los Angeles appear sandwiched between realty estate agencies and hot yoga studios. The ostentatious houses that could reasonably house six families have two luxury cars in the driveway.

This sickening need for excess factors in at scale, from the obscene lifestyle indulgences of Beverly Hills down to the fact the smallest phones on the market are too big to fit comfortably in the hands of a grown man. The fundamentals of design are based around function, and we’ve warped that under capitalism to prioritize form, often to the detriment of everything else. Be they systems of urban infrastructure and city planning to products being of lower quality while getting more expensive, the language of constructing our physical reality has been upended by the profit motive.

God I hate going to Beverly Hills.

Tonight I got to see the Los Angeles premiere of Sarah Davachi playing The Will of Tongues in full at the First Congregational Church. It was mesmerizing, breathtaking, everything. It would lull me into a trance and then shock me out of it as the organ would go from a harmonized hum to an oscillating assault in a way that was a slow build but felt sudden. Really great stuff.

What I love about a show like this—beyond just the music—is that it’s an opportunity to enjoy something I otherwise probably wouldn’t in its purest form. There are any number of reasons I probably won’t sit down in my apartment and listen to a 90-minute organ work. For one, organs are best experienced in a hall (or church), not through shitty Bluetooth speakers. For two, the experience just feels right when you’re sitting in a silent pew and not a ratty couch as cars drive by.

But really, it’s just that organ music isn’t my thing most of the time. I would never find myself as invested as this work deserves outside of this experience seeing it live.

The rear organ at First Congregational

The dichotomy of live music against recorded music has been an ongoing conversation in my head for some time now. Live music feels like it should always be of the moment. Even if an act is playing composed works, it’s nice to experience deviations that might fit the mood of the room or night—yet I’ve really been a fan of the idea lately that all live music should be borderline improvised, while all recorded music should be meticulously composed and edited.

In a live setting, it feels conceptually appropriate to play something that only exists in that moment, for the people who are there to hear it. It transcends sound and becomes a component of connecting humans through place and time. Yet on record, music should be timeless and therefore crafted and refined diligently until something that can be listened to over and over is produced.

Tonight, I couldn’t tell you one way or another what was unique to the evening. While the pieces were composed, the organ was unique to the church and who knows how that might affect things. She certainly played with a ton of heart and some of the sounds that were produced had me paralyzed in awe. Throughout it I kept returning to some of these ideas about music, stuff that’s been on my mind throughout the making of the new ad lucem releases as well as a new solo album I’m working on now. It’s always welcome to experience something new and have it really charge how I think about something that’s been on my mind for a while.

The last time I took a drink was September 10th, 2021. A few days later, someone told me that there’s a debate as to when your ‘sober birthday’ is—some say it’s the last day you take a drink, some say it’s the first day you get through without one. Given that the latter was going to be the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I opted for the tenth. (Of course, now today is analogous with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, so I guess I just have to live with that.)

It’s difficult to write about sobriety for any number of reasons. For one, if you aren’t an alcoholic or an addict, there’s simply no way to understand it. I could talk about chemistry and obsession for pages and it wouldn’t clock with someone unaffected because there’s nothing like addiction within the rest of the human experience. To put it plainly, most people can have a drink to unwind at night. If I had even a sip of wine tonight, it would take a miracle for me to ever stop. The only way for me to stop drinking is to never start.

So it’s been five years and I still don’t really know what to say about it. Everyone has a different battle with this thing, even sober, and mine has not been particularly easy—partially due to other mental health issues, and partially due to the fact that I have this notion that alcoholism is this illness like cancer that just is supposed to filter out people over time. Keep nature balanced somehow. Maybe alcoholics are supposed to just live hard and fast and not see the second half of life. Maybe I’m spitting in the face of nature right now.

Celebrations

I know plenty of people who fucking love sobriety. They’re all smiles at AA meetings and they have found a new lease on life. It’s proof that the 12-step programs work. I go to meetings because they help me not drink, but I have certainly not found any sense of joy in living through listening to and sharing stories. I make sure to not bad-mouth AA or anything like it because I’ve seen it help enough people that I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone who might need a program from trying one out. The flip side of that coin is, though, when everyone around you seems to be feeling better and better all of the time while you don’t, it makes it harder to think that life is more worthwhile without a drink in hand.

Anyway, I don’t know. Every year around this time I go through the same struggle. I still don’t feel like myself anymore, and with each passing year, the idea of existing as a stranger in my own body and mind is more difficult to deal with. This is the one life I have, after all. I want to spend it how I want to spend it, and now most of the way I live is for how other people want me to be. People in recovery say, Don’t leave before the miracle happens, but I don’t believe in miracles. Everyone congratulates me and I really couldn’t care less. This feels more like condemnation than living, and I’m not getting any younger.

However, I do know these are largely selfish and self-destructive thoughts. Most days it’s about trying to find reasons to care. I’m a person who lives for the full experience of being alive and nothing allowed me to feel the entire spectrum of emotion quite like a drink. It’s a double-edged sword because that extreme also replaced every relationship, subdued every ambition, and deviated me from any direction I was trying to take my life. The fact I thrive in chaos really helped, but for the most part, everything was a mess. I get it, but I also prefer it. Five years in and it has been the worst half-decade of my life, at least in terms of the things I care about. But people say I’m ‘doing better.’ I just don’t believe them.

I tried to add an archives page to the blog a couple days ago and the entire site collapsed with the message This Website Has Encountered A Fatal Error strewn across the bottom. I’m still trying to figure out what I did wrong. One of the hurdles I have is a lot has changed since I learned to code and build out WordPress themes back when it was still a new thing. Most now isn’t even code-based, and the parts that are require an industry-level knowledge base to understand.

Beyond just being an inconvenience to dig up pages that actually have the code and examples I’m looking for to build out pages with, it just kind of makes me feel bad about the internet. There used to be something incredibly fun and rewarding about spending an afternoon—because, really, that’s all it took in the days of simple HTML sites—making a personal web page.

Reflecting

These days, we live in the age where everything fails after a couple years. Smart phones, appliances, cars. Nothing is built to last. We can look at old furniture, hand-built by craftsmen, and admire its longevity and attention to detail. When I was growing up, I remember companies still offered lifetime guarantees on what they sold. Somewhere along the line, that all stopped. That’s kind of a parallel to what I imagine the not-too-distant future will be like for people online, surrounded by social media AI slop, where nothing is real and no voice is authentic, wondering what the early days of the internet were like.

There’s a purity and connection created between a person and an object when something is done by hand. It’s a kind of transference of humanity to an object. The combination of technology, capitalism, and trade expansion has always disrupted the processes of personalized building. From log cabins to the suburban sprawl, from loom-spun sweaters to fast fashion sweatshops, from painted portraits to the photograph to AI slop—we’re always in a state of ‘progress,’ yet simultaneously lamenting the fact the objects that inhabit our lives were always better back in the day.

Nothing is ever better because it becomes automated. It just becomes more convenient. It’s justified to the masses by way of ‘consumer savings,’ yet the harm comes in the form of disrupting community businesses with box stores, with individual creative designs replaced by templates, with personal interactions turning into people consulting AI bots about their lives. Industrialization has been a slow burn and the jump to what comes next has been a long time coming, but it’s almost here and I don’t think people are prepared for how this is going to alter the very nature of what it means to be human. It’s just so sad.

Off Wilshire