“God is an experience,” an old man told me as he reached for another cookie. “Not a thing or a concept. God is an event.”
I thought about this last night while I watched the snow come down, my nose pressed against the cold glass like a little kid—not judging or wanting, just watching. They’re calling it Winter Storm Blair. I’m not sure when we started christening snowstorms, but like everything else these days, the weather is branded and marketed, which leaves me even more disappointed when it fails to perform as advertised.
When I was a little kid, and I imagined the distant future, I always pictured people being nicer. They wore similar outfits and smiled and got along.
Meanwhile in Washington DC, they’re certifying the presidential election, and there is no insurrection this time because the man who tried to overthrow the government won. The other day, I performed some dark calculations while running around the pond: If I get lucky and live to eighty years old, I’ll have spent a tenth of my life with a grifter-clown as the leader of my country.
Yesterday at the library, there was a low-level thrum of anticipation as Winter Storm Blair approached, a subtle magnetic force that pulled us a little closer. Strangers smiled at one another. They told each other to keep warm and stay safe. A snowstorm might be the last benign unifying event.
They advertised fourteen inches, but we only got six. Still, it’s enough to soften the world a little. Enough to remember childhood winters and marvel at all this strange material from the sky.
Most of all, I’m grateful to be surrounded by snow because I can finally enjoy The Coldest Season in its proper context.
When making this sort of list, there's the temptation to go flashy or hyper-obscure, to use the occasion to advertise one's esoteric taste. So these are simply the new albums I played the most this year, the ones I kept revisiting because they challenged, delighted, and reassured. These records shifted my horizons, and more importantly, I enjoyed them.
A shimmer on the horizon. Extremely patient and a little gaudy, but never forgetting that music is a direct line to catharsis. These four songs are pop music from a much better future.
"Derived from the fiery Roma wedding music of Kavala, in northern Greece, eastern Macedonia," this album has been a steady companion for my ugly morning runs around the pond, and it delivered my favorite musical moment of 2024: Lale Pashmiri's accidental laughter in the middle of a hypnotic vocoded verse at the 1:43 mark of "Lali Lale". It's the sound of reckless abandon, ecstacy in its strict sense of escaping the body to join something greater, even if my running style is anything but.
This nostalgia-soaked opus will fill your living room with shag carpet, sploshed drinks, and overflowing ashtrays made of amber-tinted glass. At some point, it will soundtrack your grocery shopping, and you'll realize it's not an album, it's a haunting, the sound of a forgotten beehived girl group circa 1963, maybe the Rubies or the Sapphires, fooling around with the occult. As much as I've listened to this album, it shape-shifts and evaporates like an expertly blown smoke ring, and the only thing I can do is play it again.
Madeline Johnston's voice sounds like it's fighting its way through the static on a radio in the kitchen of a different decade. This is beautiful vapor, the afterimage of a flashbulb popping off after the encore of a band that littered the stage with only the finest reverb pedals.
These ten tracks have nicely filled the DVA Damas-shaped hole in my soul. Spiky vocals cut through the coldest of waves, and it's a durable album for running through the frost.
The color blue in all its permutations, aquatic and airborne, and it inspired me to get with the spirit of the twentieth-first century and create my very first personal automation. Fifteen minutes before sunrise, this album plays throughout our flat. Sometimes I wake up to the sub bass. Most of the time it seeps into my dreams.
Seedy and a little tacky like remembering a night in 1994 when people earnestly said things like "trip hop" and "acid jazz" and "dub techno" and thought new hybrids of music would lead us to utopia rather than the inevitable flattening of everything into an endless sheet of liquid crystal gloss. But the production here is so plush and friendly that alright, sure, I'll sink into this corduroy couch with cigarette burns in the cushions while Strange Days plays on mute and you tell me all about the Information Superhighway.
Dignified music for the right side of dawn. Stately orchestration woven with long threads of burning synthetics that conjure something beautiful entering an elegant room like Gerhard Richter's Woman Descending a Staircase in all her streaked glory.
The sun goes down at 5:23pm, and the temperature is an unseasonable seventy degrees. The skies feel hungover, damp and grey, which matches my mood. Yesterday a man who smelled like gasoline attempted to enter the Capitol with a flare gun. A few hours later, my country elected another man to do more or less the same. Again.
Materially, my life is the same as before. I trade encouraging nods with joggers as I run my morning laps around the pond. Strangers make room for each other at the supermarket. But my mind is stained with suspicion. Did you vote for him? Did you want this? This is the zone of horror: the inability to see the world as others do and vice versa.
I feel like a fool for allowing myself to hope for a few weeks, mainlining punditry from CNN and The New York Times and The Guardian, assuming we would choose consensus-driven reality over the poisonous feedback loops and silos of the internet, where the extreme left and right have driven each other into madness. But now I must accept that I’m the one who’s been living in a silo because the internet has won.
The bodhisattva was so overwhelmed by the suffering in the universe that the deity’s head split into eleven pieces.
"The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality."
Exciting opportunity! Make money at home! I’m offering five dollars and a mountain of gratitude to anyone who can identify this song.
This man was the antichrist. Yes, he was what the end of civilization looked and sounded like.
I swear I read somewhere that your uncoiled intestines can reach the moon.
The ancient Greeks believed dreams enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods.
We stood by the window and watched the howling dark, even though this isn’t what you should do in a tornado.
I’ve been trying to loosen up: fast collages, illegible notes in the middle of the night, and the smudges of a left-hander.
A lone helicopter crossed the sky. The temperature dropped. Dogs barked. Birds stopped chirping.
There's beauty in repetition, the steady accretion that comes with committing to one thing day after day.
I share this because I'm fascinated by the totems and rituals of others.
As I left New York City, the driver played Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” several times and never said a word.
An inauspicious flight number. The sound of the door closing. The metal roar of the engines.
I’m learning to find pleasure in the ultramundane and routine.
At first, I did not want to leave Vegas. Not so soon.
Polar horror is one of my favorite genres.
Eleven years sober and another year older.
I loathe these brutal nerves of mine.
I have a knack for taking the longest, most taxing route to common knowledge.
I loathe the moments when the suffering of others reminds me to be grateful.
There will always be demands and obligations, but they do not need me before eleven o’clock.
We’re deep into the 21st century, yet I still find myself waiting for the future to begin.
The Joshua tree was named by Mormons who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land.
"Virga" is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground.
Every year I feel a little more vertiginous.
Last night I stayed up late and stitched together my favorite pieces of the Mojave.
Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country.
Seven years ago, we debated how the world would end.
Why does the wind leave us feeling so exhausted and harassed?
Woke up the other day and watched a billionaire’s rocket explode.
And it was about the goddamned work of art in the goddamned age of mechanical reproduction, of all things.
She said we were looking at the Bonanza King Formation, which sounds like a doomed band from the 1970s.
I had time to kill at the Las Vegas airport, where it feels like being returned to a pleasant memory of 1987.
The desert silence baffles my Midwestern mind.
A delightful sense of slippage occurs when you can’t decide if something is brilliant or awful.
If starvation was on the table, would you rather eat your own finger or a stranger's?
I had no idea there was so much weather in the desert.
Death Valley is a place where ten thousand acres of scenery can easily go missing.
We need to make robots and zombies fun again
It’s cold in Vegas, and strange material is falling from the sky.
Yesterday C. and I took a break from our screens and drove into the Valley of Fire.
I pondered the idea of a Vegas-themed casino until I gave myself a headache.
These are days of shooting down unidentifiable objects in the sky.
We hit the brakes and followed a dusty road past a gigantic fiberglass ice cream sundae.
After all these years, how well do I know her taste? How well does she know mine?
Messiness will be a crucial tool in the footrace against artificial intelligence.
Time and space get wobbly in the desert. I think I’m puttering along, but the speedometer says 98.
Years ago, an old man in a church basement said, "Stick around long enough, and this becomes a life spent stepping over dead bodies."
A few hours later, we wandered into the desert and touched some cacti.
The desert is littered with bizarre facts, and I often think I invented them, like a fragment from a dream or a misremembered film.
Here in Las Vegas, we’re catching the faintest edge of a weather event that sounds like something from a fantasy novel.
Repetition amplifies humor and pleasure.
We drove home on an empty parkway, feeling futuristic while fireworks burst alongside our car.
This year, release dates be damned. Here’s the music that delivered an unexpected thrill while motoring through the desert.
The unique scent of desert rain has a scientific name derived from the Greek words for stone and the blood of the gods.
Each time I step outside, I feel like I’m on a new planet, and I wonder if I will ever tire of the desert.
As I begin to orient myself in Vegas, I know I’m edging too close to the Strip when the plasma donation centers appear.
Due to some 19th-century railroad logic, Nevada is the only non-coastal state in the Pacific Time Zone.
I loaded a 15-foot U-Haul with our furniture and pointed it southwest.
I enjoyed driving along smooth parkways to a fast food joint that served spicy Korean pork in a cup.
Most Christian churches are located along an east-west axis, with the entrance to the west and the altar to the east.
The Pacific Time Zone is turning me into a morning person, and I do not like it.
We tooled around the city's perimeter, marveling at its sharp edges.
We made good time and hit Vegas a night earlier than scheduled.
When I woke up this morning, I struggled to remember the state I was in.
We woke to the melancholic stillness of a holiday morning somewhere in the middle of America. Even the International House of Pancakes was closed.
The billboards we passed felt like chapters from one big story: automatic weapon rentals, bulk ammo, Jesus Christ, and lawyers.
The road trip kicks off tomorrow, and my packing has been delayed by a much more critical matter: putting together a road trip playlist.
It’s one of those days when it feels like the world’s got its hands in my pockets.
It’s like some mythical creature from the past has wandered into the middle of a twelve-land expressway.
We convinced ourselves our tweets were important, newsworthy, career-making, or, god forbid, agents for social change, and it made us crazy.
My bedtime programming hums with the static of insomnia.
A shift in the light on the running trail. An unexpected connection on page 172.
William Gibson has nothing on the Catholics.
I often imagine my writing sessions should be quiet and humble, like those stern Dutch paintings of solitary women making lace in solemn bands of light.
I still have vivid dreams that my mother is still alive; I find her sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house by the sea, living under an assumed name.
Combing through eighteen years of digital cruft has led me down an unexpectedly emotional walk down memory lane.
All the leaves are on the ground now, and the bare trees reveal new scenery.
If someone behaves atrociously, we wonder how they sleep at night.
Perhaps it becomes self-fulfilling to imagine the future as stern and forbidding.
We spent a fair chunk of the ride debating whether laws were necessary.
Maybe they’ll wind up on the evening news someday.
Changing the clocks should be the year's biggest celebration with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving.
I’d like to live in a world of apologetic gods and talking satellites.
These summery November days echo my sense of losing the rhythm, of being out of time.
And my mind turns gullible in the small hours, ready to believe anything.
The leaves have fallen, and we crunched over them while dressed for spring.
C. and I celebrated her birthday at the Largest Korean Sauna in North America.
I took an afternoon drive through Indiana the other day, and it was clear that America is not doing well.
I ran from my screen like someone in a zombie movie.
She hummed with the nervy energy of a talented yet unrecognized mind.
I keep this one in my wallet.
Yesterday in twenty-first-century America, I idled behind a jeep with an InfoWars license plate.
I stood in line at the Gas ‘n Go behind a man with a pistol tucked into the elastic waistband of his sweatpants.
The real heroes of this blessed land are the short-order cooks at Chinese takeout joints who manipulate fire, oil, and steel like gods.
I have zero interest in football, which can make it challenging to move through American life.
Service plazas are modern works of art where I can eat slick food next to twelve lanes of humming traffic, lording over a glittering river of steel and glass.
Hill House, famously not sane, bothers the soul because Jackson describes the perception of horror, not the horror itself.
I've been stuck on the last 20% of a story I'm writing about a haunted frequency, so I went to the museum to shake some ideas loose.
The first thing I do with a new notebook is write something stupid and messy on the first page.
Maybe I was primed for horror because I woke before dawn on a Sunday morning.
This morning I fed a robot a few sentences from the novel I'm writing, and it generated some startlingly accurate pictures.
I sneeze whenever I glance at the sun, which I’ve always taken as proof I am a night owl.
The Rockies appeared through the gloom, slow beasts moving across the continent at the speed of time.
“Science shouldn’t explain everything,” she told me.
Maybe you’ve heard the stories, the baroque theories on late-night radio or the soliloquies of sunburnt men who mutter at the traffic.
A heat dome has settled over the Middle West, the moon was extra bright last night, and I saw a rainbow in the parking lot yesterday.
The sun went down at 8:49pm, the moon is in its last quarter, and tonight I'm wondering if the health of a society can be pegged to the nerves of its motorists.
A floppy-eared dog gnawed a bone while a clown smiled above the bed.
My map is upside down, inscrutable, and probably for a different planet.
The Night of the Hunter opens with the disembodied heads of five children floating in the cosmos and gets weirder from there.
My first memory of God: I was five or six years old and feverishly rubbing a white crayon into a dark blue piece of construction paper.
I’m always in a heavy state whenever I see Greenland, usually red-eyed and emotionally shredded.
I still find myself stopping in the street, stunned by how low the clouds hang on this island.
The photograph of my mom refuses to leave the auditorium. We jiggle the cords, but she’s still there, twenty feet tall and gazing at the water.
I never know how seriously to take anything anymore.
I keep colliding with people in the streets and shops. I just can't pick up the rhythm here.
While explaining myself to the grumpy clerk behind the glass, I realized I had no idea where I legally lived.
I borrowed the internet of a fast-fashion shop that closed at noon because too many of its workers had the plague.
I woke up wondering if I would live my life any differently if I measured my age in days or hours instead of years.
The end of another year, and exhaustion hangs heavy like a fog.
The desert is a land of religious vision, the home of desperate saints and ascetics dragging themselves across the sand in search of revelation.
Maybe it's limbic and hardwired, this desire to see the divine rather than hear or touch.
There are over a thousand responses from visitors now, far more than we anticipated at this point.
In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers reappear in South Dakota, wholly intact and without explanation.
The ancient Greeks believed God was a geometer, but I think Agnes Martin was closer to the mark.
But Christ, who wants to remember this year, let alone provide the soundtrack?
Saturday afternoon at the museum. 25% capacity, masks, and decals on the floor reminded us to keep our distance.
I’m fantasizing about the desert again.
Insects buzz in the trees like bad reception, but the nights are finally cooler and crisping up.
I enjoy skipping through frazzled sermons, nutritional advice, alien abductions, financial planning, and light drizzle at the airport.
Just after midnight, a metallic voice began to flicker through the radio static.
The body remembers slowly and forgets very quickly.
We’ve entered the last stretch of summer when everything is overripe and so green it feels obscene.
A tropical storm blew across the city today.
Finished Stephen King’s The Stand today and, even at 1152 pages, I was sad when I read the last sentence, as if a friend had left town for good.
And for a moment I wonder if it will keep raining until everything is washed clean.
Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor.
This morning in the park, I sat across from a woman who was talking to the pigeons gathered around her feet.
Sometimes you come across a phrase that haunts you all day.
We check the death tally each morning like the weather report.
His spirit runs through nearly everything we hear today.
A woman was visibly upset in aisle six because they were out of antibacterial hand-wipes.
A man studies yesterday’s horoscopes on the train.
You can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water.
We took a ship through the Finnish archipelago towards a small island in the Baltic Sea.
Maybe the universe is sympathetic, after all.
Pictures, songs, and paragraphs wash across my screen one minute and disappear the next.
The endless churn of the digital jukebox brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase from 1944: “the freedom to choose what is always the same.”
Blade Runner is a story about god, a fever dream about grabbing your creator by the throat.
Meanwhile, we fight amongst ourselves, slinging hashtags and hysteria.
This story has seeped into my dreams, grinding at my thoughts like sand in the teeth.
Slow-motion strings and liturgical drones from Athens, Greece.
