djb.

Oh, take me to the city,
And leave me there for a day —
Let me gaze at the tall buildings,
And watch me go astray.
The directions become all jumbled,
Could this be east or west?
The sun never sets behind the hills,
And wearily, I wish for rest.

You are you who are. You are not a bombthrower. You value friendship over allyship, collaboration over partisanship, civility over cruelty, cocktails over asceticism, and you’ve used this space to argue repeatedly for those things. Not everyone will agree that you’ve made the right decisions, or that these approaches are the rights ones in our dystopian Trumpland, so you’ll need to acknowledge that the problems of the present are big enough to require all sorts of solutions. Not everyone who cares about these issues will agree with your approach, and – you know what? – that is just fine. You’ll also need to make sure that the affective approaches you care about aren’t understood as a more “reasonable alternative.”

Continue reading “all/nothing”

I wrote a post on a plane from San Antonio, post AAR, to San Francisco. I had every intention to publish it, once I landed, but never did. And then the usual distractions of familia obligations over the holidays ensued. I’m back at the office. Digging myself out of a post-AAR-Thanksgiving email hole. But I don’t want to loose sight of the importance of writing.

Continue reading “post-AAR; the way ahead”

From 2003 to 2012, this site was host to a fairly regularly updated blog, by me, “the buddha is my dj.” By around 2010 I had stopped posting as regularly, and did a long slow fade out trying to figure out what I was up to, what the point of the whole project was. Then I gave up. Then I archived everything on WordPress.

The long slow fade out was the result of a lot of factors (too much of the wrong kind of attention, my decision to focus on my “career” rather than my “hobby,” having a kid, you name it). A couple of years ago, I decided to resurrect the blog. I thought it would be good to have a space where I could wrestle with some thoughts and ideas or research projects I was working on. I tried to post regularly, but nothing came of it beyond the random thought separated by months.

This past August, I was invited to give a “book talk” during which a very kind woman came up to me and said that she was a long-time reader of the old blog and wondered if I was going to write again. I said I’d been thinking about it but nothing had gelled. I’ve got a lot of things going on, work, family, whatever.

I’m done making excuses.

Continue reading “here we go”