JULY 23, 2025 // WRITE FREELY, LIGHT AND FUN

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

I installed irrigation today. I would have liked to have done it slower and better, but there are constraints mandated by the economy. I crawled around the garden of the client on my hands and knees laying the 1/2 inch poly line, and connecting it to the 1/4 inch lines that connect to the little color coded faucets that the water pours out of. I hope the garden will thrive.

I did not take any photographs. The dog is asleep on her bed now. There is a ringing in my ears. I hear through the ringing the quiet percussion and determined hum of clothes drying in the dryer. This afternoon while walking to move the truck from an expired meter, I stopped and played a piano that had been wheeled onto the sidewalk outside of a Chinese music store, next to a cafe. There was a young man drinking coffee who nodded to me when I abruptly stopped playing to finish the work day.

You who are reading this, do you long for love or a vacation from the dull ache of a disappointment you thought you should have already outgrown? Or do you thrive quietly, and study this text as a pastime the way that well dressed men and women used to smoke cigarettes and read the newspaper. I am led to believe they did anyway, in the period piece television programs and motion pictures I have watched and can remember.

What photograph would appropriately accompany this writing? That will have to be an assignment for another day. Everything before me now appears unremarkable, and I have a hard time taking a good picture without natural light. It is 9:22pm, and though it is summer, the sky is dark and the lights of cars slowly driving east on Fulton I can see out of the window. There is the borrowed miniature classical guitar lying on the couch. There is my open handwritten journal with listed items to do and boxes to the right of each item. Some of them are checked, and some of them are not.

If you share something too personal, you sound like a deranged person, even on this perfectly anonymous time capsule, taunting the false promise of public exhibition, and whatever happens after that. I realized after a time that if you play music in bars, you are being hired to sell beer. More recently, I’ve considered that the cynicism of this thinking is just a tragic attempt at being clever. All the bros talking self improvement and micro dosing say that being kind, and being present builds a world made of kindness and the experience of creating it. I think they may be trying to help, but also God helps those who help themselves.

I don’t really know what the bros say or what God says. You know? I’m just thinking out loud here. The homework assignment is to find a photograph, however mundane or fantastic, that is appropriate to accompany this text. Then move on, and work on being better.

The End.