I shall miss the springy seats, perfectly inclined for napping;
The new ones are perfect for staying alert and working, which is to say
they are not perfect.

To live here in San Francisco no mean state of awe. It is an orgiastic undercurrent of gratitude.

There is unquestioned magic here, and protective madness too, which you contract breathing in the piss fumes of sidewalks minutes before you inhale eucalyptus-laden fog.

I suspect no one knows how or why New York is; it is a phantasmagoric hallucination of many generations.

“What are we doing?” I eventually ask.

“We are writing,” he replies, before typing out three words and then deleting them.

Now that Lent is over, I can resume two of my favorite habits: drinking and thinking about writing. Sometimes, at the same time.

The sort of poem that comes to you while in gridlock traffic. Free verse with incidental meter.

I think that is the real delight of nature: we know what will happen, and yet we are never quite sure.

Certainly the most hilarious fear is that the app was designed to be so addictive that it would be downloaded to government phones where it could mine for data, something that could be done with a halfway decent solitaire app.

I think one of the principal benefits of owning a business is that, at a certain level of success, you get to have a building with a lobby, and playing in this lobby is music you chose.

If I were given perhaps ten miles left to live, I think I would walk most of them in San Francisco on a foggy afternoon.

OpenAI released ChatGPT-4 last week, a headline which inspires the same feeling as “Norfolk Southern Announces Faster Trains.”

The bank run is not the most important scene in the film, and recent references are not entirely spot on — the Bailey Building and Loan did not collapse, Silicon Valley Bank did; Mr. Potter did not have a full head of hair, Peter Thiel does.

I have determined that it would be preferable to order a glass of milk at a bar than to order something called a “No-jito.”

“…this idol is a clever mechanism, and actually digests these offerings through some inner mechanical workings before regurgitating them alongside previous sacrifices, which causes the natives to whoop nightmarishly and post on social media.”

Which, then, is the ideal for online communities? … a “pluriverse” or some hodgepodge of the above, is a coy answer that history would suggest is unlikely, at least while maintaining a single cohesive society.

“There is less cigarette smoke these days, and that is a shame — there is nothing like a stranger’s cigarette on a crisp spring evening.”

“I can see a future where fire is an illegal domain, like tobacco in some nations and the gasoline engine in California thirty years from now (the modern republic seems to recoil from the glow of combustion).”

Through it all, and likely knowing far more about the goings-on of the world than you or I do, Queen Elizabeth II was somehow a steadfast and unchanging presence, an almost natural feature in the landscape of humanity.