Human Ghostwriter

House.
I walked to your house from my house. It took hours.
Sidewalks I walked when I was still young.
Grown through and grown over. Grass, chamomile, alder,
smoke, tar and asphalt, exhaust.
You'd think home was the first thing we lost.
You can't live in the past, there's no past.
You can't live in a headstone, you can't.
You are a house
Nobody lives in a house
You are a house
Nobody lives in a house.

I drove out of my way a few minutes.
I circled sunken graves for an hour.
There's a cure now, but that doesn't matter.
I found you; I should have brought flowers.
Singing “Twilight,” I almost forgot.
You'd think you were the first thing we lost.
If you can't live in the past,
You can't live at all.
You are a house
But no one lives in a house now.
You are a house
Nobody lives in a house
Nobody lives in a house.

[I'm working on an album about the friends I played music with in high school and where all of us ended up. It is a middle-aged millennial's nostagia record. This one is for a friend who had cystic fibrosis and died at 19. He would have loved The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and I wrote this inspired by listening to their song "Gig Life" a few too many times.]

It's a shame that the 1953 Peter Pan is problematic as shit. There's so much great swashbuckling physical comedy. They didn't need the reductive, dehumanizing portrayal of native Americans. They didn't need to make every woman (including Nana the dog) insufferably jealous and possessive. I would have gladly watched 90 minutes of Hook, Pan, Smee, and the Crocodile beat each other to death.

Markwayne Mullen sounds like a baseball player's name in an old Japanese videogame.

If I were the Atlantic editor who greenlit the headline calling Khameini Jr. "The Most Dangerous Man In The World," I would die from embarrassment. The dumbest headline in the world.

"Daddy, I want you to crash into that car." -My daughter, age 2.

It never caught on as a society-wide term for probably obvious reasons, but I am a true believer in "satisficing": identifying what is enough for you to have a good life and using that as the benchmark for personal satisfaction. Consciously detaching from what other people are doing, from advertising, from every message that says consumption is the road to happiness. It is still not easy to get what you need, but your wants will always be able to outpace your material welfare: that way lies madness.

We pulled up trees and made our homes on black earth. We shot a glance across the new plains and mastered space. Headroom forever; we must shout our prayers here because God is too far away to hear us. 85 thousand watts through a Fender twin, thin clouds precarious above us. We believed we were lost, and we believed in ourselves. We will be buried in old hills. We will fire harpoons from a Sprinter van at the giant's eye and he will bash at us with an oaken club. We will be lost in labors and rise triumphant from toil. We have Moral Support:

https://parachuteday.bandcamp.com/album/moral-support

#HGMUSIC2026

Enduring a parental visit. My dad is great. My mom is... not. She lost her phone. Then her credit card. Then her wallet. She cried at the mall. She crashed the rental minivan into our neighbor's parked car. She got really angry when she said she had never caused a car crash before and I mentioned the two times I was in the car when she caused a car crash. She asked me if she could sue the neighbor for parking weird (good luck, lady). She made a cool dinosaur volcano cake. She cried because I did the dishes in my house. She has asked about the family sleeping arrangements dozens of times and continually aggressively offers to change places with literally everyone even if it involves waking my sleeping children. She's having a super duper normal one and I am concerned for her.

[Me channeling Rodney Dangerfield at the Tax Law Conference]

Wake me up when the sixth Sigma gets here, will ya?

Listening to the Stephen Fry retelling of the Iliad and I have learned a few things:
1. My next Shadowdark campaign is gonna be obnoxiously bronze age collapse-related.
2. "Pig-eyed sack of drunken shit" is entering my insult rolodex.
3. Life sounds like it was so horrible.

Imagine reading anything at all on Reddit and thinking, "My computer's giant robot brain needs to use this information."

Any good grand strategy games set in the Bronze Age?

If my month keeps going like this, I'm gonna have to start a totally unlistenable extreme metal band.

The FCC's equal time regulations, in any sane world, would be unconstitutional. It is a content-based restriction on political speech. Fuckin asinine.

There's a guy in this lunch spot wearing a cowboy hat and looking *really* self-conscious about it.

There is no secret to life and that alone should be liberating.