PicoBlog

Boley, OK (undated) photo credit: Oklahoma Historical SocietyIt was a pleasant spring Sunday morning in Boley, Oklahoma, cool but sunny. I arrived at St. John Baptist Church just a few minutes before services began and found a place in the second row of pews. There was room for probably 100 people, but when the service began with a rousing acapella rendition of a gospel song, there were no more than a dozen people in attendance.

I’ve been grappling with the best way to share the news of my new book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, which was published Tuesday, July 25. I decided to just share the beginning with you. Below is the Author’s Note and Preface, which I think lays it all out pretty well. if you have more questions after you read this, let me know.

Have you ever been stung by a jellyfish? Maybe not recently, since it’s winter, but on a summer beach trip? I definitely have, because I go with my family most summers to Hilton Head, where you have to look out for jellies. Sometimes we also see them washed up on the shore. I’ve been thinking about jellyfish because I recently read a book called The Thing About Jellyfish. It’s a novel, not a nonfiction book, but it includes a lot of interesting jellyfish facts.

What you are about to see is a gallery of Apple Macintosh computers. Some of the most beautiful and wonderful Macintosh computers of all time. And not a single one of them is real. These are all the creations of Dana Sibera (also known as @NanoRaptor), an astoundingly talented designer who has created an alternate Universe filled with the Macintosh models that could (nay… should) have been. Some of them are downright silly.

Hello Friends in the Computer, It’s been a little over four months since I was laid off. We immediately jumped into the holidays and what I affectionately refer to as “Dead Mom Season”, so I was basically treading water and not able to really process the shock or fully think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I still don’t know what I want to do, but now I have a plan on how to figure that out.

Frustration- the emotion that follows any scratch on your car, a hole in a t-shirt, or a broken cup. Basic human psychology makes us hate anything that is imperfect or mildly inconvenient. We like new, untouched, shiny, and smooth. We hate deformed, scratched, and dusty. The art of Kintsugi criticizes this way of thinking and offers a beautiful way of dealing with it. Buddhists say that you make up the waves in your own mind.

Bear with me here, readers, for this is rambly. But it’s a big day, a day that calls so much of what I stand for, and what I have written about over the years, into question. My mind has been in a fog for days now, anticipating today. For many years on my blog, I would post photos of those two scoops on my wedding anniversary. When Julie and I were marri…

You might not know the term airspace. But you know it when you see it. It’s the feeling of every coffeeshop with $9 pour-overs. It’s the Joanna Gaines section of Target. It’s stark white surfaces, abundant but well-manicured houseplants, and reclaimed wood tables, warmly lit by Edison bulb light fixtures. It’s warm sterility. It’s deeply millennial. It’s also increasingly out of fashion, supplanted by dark, moodily painted kitchens and decorative maximalism.

Resonance is not an exact reiteration. Rather it’s something that strikes a chord, that inexplicably rings true, a sound whose notes are prolonged. It is just-glimpsed connections and hidden structures that are felt to shimmer below the surface of things. Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things On Twitter several weeks ago, my friend, the ever brilliant Lee Vinsel, asked me to explain what I mean when I write about Trumpism.