I almost quit again. We’d been in limbo and hit the crease in the ravine. I thought about leaving Spencer and Ben for dead, breaking my lease, and moving home. // One night, I walked out of the office and the parking lot was so dark and the wind was so pleasant that I paused for a minute. My silver 2013 Corolla was the only car in the lot. Ever since I drove it to Seattle I’ve identified with it: the misaligned seams, tightly organized interior, the surf rack that says “Go Bananas.” It sat there under the street light in the cold.
The stages in my little sister’s life have become measures in my own. I was already 20 when our family moved to San Ramon, but Isabella was 9. She grew a lot in our time there.
Bluegrass is about pace. / Mandolin, banjo, bass, in a harmonious flurry – mischief in the eye of the guitarist. He leans in, hair draping – and unleashes a quick, impossible rush of notes, blending with the general roar.
One night as I lay my books down carefully, and in the correct order, I was struck by an image: my collection of the Calvin and Hobbes Sundays, sitting in the lamplight.
Funny enough, I’ve never shared this song with anyone: “Puncture”, by Dot Hacker. The singer (I don’t know his name) starts in a slow whisper of a wail:
In college, I would look forward to the hours flying home and back. It’s an anchor in perspective. Every time I enter an airport, with the same wide sterile spaces and the same muffled noises, I enter that place inside of me. It’s like a series of flat white platters. Changes articulate themselves.
The deer looked straight at me. I didn’t slow my pace, kept walking down the path. As I got closer, it turned away, slightly at first then decisively. It galloped out of view, ears alert and twitching.
Honesty is a designer’s greatest asset. You decide to design when you’re dissatisfied with convenient answers. You dig to the root, and you trust that the right forms and structures will filter upward. This is intuition, or clarity. “Clarity / In the sense of transparence, // I don’t mean that much can be explained // Clarity in the sense of silence” (from George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous).
Nature or nurture, tradition or novelty — so many debates divide on this axis. They distract from a core truth: everything here and now came through a lineage. I’m not speaking of time. Lineage is the thing that persists, even if you can’t wrap your mind around it. Lineage is the nature of persisting. Any form that disrupts the flow of lineage disappears, but the flow never does.
Design and art are both about embodiment. Design is about posture, and art is about gesture. Design is about presentation, art is about what is presented.
I often find myself around cows, sloping around, looking for a place to be. In a field along the Lost Coast, I awoke to one outside my car window, a large black bull whinnying in distress.
Twenty minutes into the sauna, after I’ve built up a good sweat, my dad takes a seat to my left. The sauna has a window in the front, and a digital panel, but besides that it’s a wooden box, barely big enough for the both of us. Last year I came home and it was here.
If I could only paint you a picture: // My neon orange rain coat and black shoes on the yellow grass // The white car in the lot, the many cars in the many lots on the straight road // The hills where the cows feed, black beasts on the yellow grass
She reads a different translation from what’s on the screen. / At the desk, I try to piece together what the Russian was saying, / what he was trying to say to us. // And the whole while the projector is shaking /// It shakes the image on the screen
Orange spray paint on the sidewalk: / OB OB OB OB_ / notes for construction // The people walking / as though the letters are / not underneath their feet
The freighter drifted past and we nearly missed it, / as we’d missed the sunset. But we saw the light still shone / on the containers, snug in the orange moment.