Blog Posts
Letter to Alice Mae [003]
28.08.2026 Hey Kid! You made it! Welcome to the circus. It has been a couple of days now and we haven’t met as you and your mom were in the hospital for a minute, but by all accounts are both doing fine. I don’t know what to tell you about…
Philosophical Musings: On Truth
Before I stumbled into graphic design—and later, as a novelist, learned to fabulate as a vocation—I was trained as a journalist. I was taught how to get the story and to how confirm the facts through interviews and research to get to the “truth” of the matter. I remember when…
Letter to Alice Mae [002]
22.08.2026 Hey Kid! Well, today’s the day. Everyone is waiting on tenterhooks for you to arrive. I’m not sure how fast we have regressed back into the Dark Ages by the time you read this, so a tenterhook is, according to my Magic Space Phone (do you still have those?)…
Philosophical Musings: On The Liberty of Conscience
To know one’s self, or to know God, whatever that means to the individual, means to be actively involved in seeking that knowledge. One cannot plant a flag and say, “Here is what I know to be true, this and no further,” without it quickly becoming a false claim. One’s…
Philosophical Musings: On The Gospels
I am well aware that the damning sign of an amateur scribe is to start off a treatise with a trite dictionary definition, but when thinking about what gospel means to me, I’m at a loss to think of a better one. The first definition listed is tripartite: the teaching…
Letter to Alice Mae [001]
29.07.26 Hey kid. This is an inauspicious start to all this, but I’m sitting at the Kaiser in Vallejo with your great-grandmother with little else to do. I guess I should have brought along a book. I don’t remember my own great-grandmother, Mary Lewis, but there is a black and…
The Home Stretch
I made it. By hook or by crook, I reached my sixth decade more-or-less unscathed. My knee may be crap, but the old mind is a steel fucking trap (even if the cheese in it has begun to go off). Sixty days ago, I set out to record what I…
Seven of Diamonds
My dog Biscuit and I were walking back from the neighborhood park yesterday, a morning ritual every day I don’t have to catch an early ferry to San Francisco. Our route skirts the edge of the Catholic graveyard that holds the remains of my previous three generations so I always…
Philosophical Musings: On The Garden
A lot has been made over the past 3,000 or so years about our sudden eviction from the Garden of Eden and all its verdant paradisaical splendor. Sure, you don’t miss your water until your well runs dry and all that, but it always struck me as strange that our…
Schrödinger’s Turtle
I experienced severe cognitive dissonance Saturday morning upon turning on the news and hearing that Lindsey Graham, 71, senator from South Carolina—and one of TFG’s* stanchest supporters (except when he thought for a moment that it didn’t benefit him and longer)—had shuffled off to Buffalo. In the days leading up…
Philosophical Musings: On Genesis, Pt. 2
Even as a child, I rejected the idea of original sin, instinctively knowing better than to take the rap for something I hadn’t done. I knew, even then, that I would probably do enough stupid things in life to legitimately feel guilty for, there was no reason to front load…
Philosophical Musings: On Myth
This Fourth of July marked one year since I took the Stars and Stripes down from the front of the house and put it away. The myths that had sustained my faith in our country’s leadership—which, to be fair, had been on shaky ground for some time—were proving not up…
Philosophical Musings: On Genesis, Pt. 1
As I have been blessed with what could only be called a spotty memory (perhaps a learned coping mechanism, but I don’t really remember, so I guess it works). As I result, I can’t recall any of what my years of Sunday school and catechism actually taught. Over the years,…
Back to the Holler
Last weekend Biscuit, the missus, and I drove back to the close-knit Fairfax neighborhood that had sustained us through some pretty heavy changes from the mid-oughts through to the edge of lockdown, with caring, understanding, and a healthy dollop of humor. The block-long American sycamore-lined street had once been the…
Philosophical Musings: On Faith
In accordance with the wishes of my father—whose own father was a Mason and a virulent anti-Catholic—I was raised in the Roman church. I went to mass every Sunday with my grandmother and sister while my mom, a convert, sang in the folk choir; this was the ’70s after all.…
History Rhymes
French president Emmanuel Macron dragged TFG* by the good ear to the Palace of Versailles to sign an Agreement to Accede, an Acquiescence, if you will, to bring a stop (a pause? a lacuna? a smoke break?) to open hostilities in the Persian Gulf that have pretty much fucked the…
America Jumps the Shark
The country was one year past its 200th birthday in 1977. Our living room televisions, when the adults let us near them, had all of three channels, one for each existing network. Every Tuesday night, however, the dial was set on ABC to pay deference to the unifying paragon of…
Philosophical Musings: When the Saints Come Marching In
Taking a break from the news and the eternal doomscroll really does a mind and body good. If it wasn’t for the mysterious bug that had cut down myself and my co-workers like summer wheat, I would have had a better chance to feel rejuvenated by our road trip. At…
Wagons North; or, No Sleep ’til Deadline
This weekend, the missus and I took off up the 101 for some much-needed change of scenery, as well as a break from the news. For a couple of years now, when we head up to the redwoods, we have been staying north of our old Arcata stomping grounds in…
The Ghosts of ’80s Retail
Yesterday was a strange day, crawling up and down ladders all day while working on installing the museum’s summer show was really bringing back memories of practically living on a fiberglass stairway to the stars back in the ’80s. As if summoned by my verticality, two blasts from my remote…
Not Shit, Energy!
Driving back home from the San Francisco Ferry yesterday, I passed my local gas station and the price per gallon had actually dropped from the $6.19 that it had topped out at in recent months— down to $5.99. I’m not complaining, but to me, it is just further proof that…
Rabbit, Rabbit
Make no mistake, we’re in a tight spot. Moving into the twinned summer months of June and July, the country feels like it’s just waiting for the next shoe to drop. The war/not a war/war in the Persian Gulf limps along while the president said today that he “couldn’t care…
Not Dark Yet: Wrinkles Are Punk as Fuck
Paul McCartney just dropped a new collection of music that his fans are warmly receiving as a late-career masterpiece. The forever Beatle will turn 84 next month. Neil Young, the baby here at a mere 80-years-young, released a new live set with his latest band, The Chrome Hearts, today as…
Shit From an Old Notebook: Thoughts on the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (The World Would Be a Better Place If We…)
Short answer: Shut the fuck up. Slightly longer answer: I think William Wordsworth was on to something when he lambasted “modern” materialism in his 1802 sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us. He begins: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay…
It Was Later Than I Thought
I don’t know how I always end up sprinting for the ferry every morning, but I do. My boilerplate weekday morning includes rolling out of bed at 6 o’clock, making coffee and toast, feeding all the animals, and checking in on the downfall of civilization. Depending on my capacity for…
The Ride
My father’s favorite ride at the Anaheim Disneyland was Peter Pan’s Flight, the one where, once the family was buckled in, a disembodied Pan cheerfully exclaimed, “Come on, everybody! Here we go!” I don’t know if it brought back memories of visiting the new park with his father or if…
Shit From an Old Notebook: My Hometown
The 1970s were well established when I attended Mills Elementary School on the East Side of town—the other side of the tracks—that is if tracks had ever run down the middle of the quaint Main Street that effectively cleaved the town into West Side and other. Being the ’70s, we…
What I Saw On the Parkway On a Cold Autumn Morning
Upholstered cane back chair (1) Dead opossums (2) Sheet of aluminum that is going to be a real problem when the wind kicks up (1) Witch (1)
Once More Into the Breach: 2026 Edition
It turns out that “May you live in interesting times,” is not a Chinese curse after all, but rather—like most things that seem all neat and tidy but end up causing wide-spread pain and misery—from the English: Austen Chamberlain, older half-brother of Neville to be precise. Austen’s mother, Harriet, died…
The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future—Stephen March
It has only been three years since Canadian writer Stephen March took a hard look at his country’s downstairs neighbor and found us… well, let’s just say that we aren’t going to get our deposit back. Like a tenant that has decided to start cooking meth in the kitchen at…
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If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
— Ken Kesey
Román Leão 