Welcome back to the ground. I'll put the kettle on.
Sound Scapes·
Coffee Jazz
what's this?Most Saturdays and Sundays I try to work from a lower register and let intent meander where it will. These soundscapes steep my mood and can secure some respite from otherwise chronically high autonomic arousal. Melancholy and nostalgia are near neighbors around here and I find them enjoyable and restorative sometimes. The backgrounds are line drawings of streets in cities I've called home, and in tracing them I find some hours of catharsis.
In this section, you can browse some favorite playlists of mine and toggle ambience. The day mode plays the tin-drum drizzle of rain on a car roof, and the night gives an accompaniment of crickets, both of which cast me back to long, slow summers spent reading sun-faded, spine-split paperbacks borrowed from here or there. Hopefully, it makes a nice background for you as well.
Warm, mellow jazz for slow mornings and late nights. Here we're thinking steam curling from a fresh cup and leaning back to watch passersby out the window. Featuring soft horns, a lot of brushed drums, and some gentle piano good for candlelight, quiet work, and unhurried time.
Jazz
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Digital Gallery
what's this?On coming to California, a favorite memory was my first visit to the science center, a museum which so filled me with awe that some fraction of my decision to go to college is owed to its inspiration. Later, amid years of physics, there would come hours, sometimes days, when chalk-choked, sum-sick, and spent I could stomach the sight of the blackboard no longer. So I would slip off to the J. Paul Getty Museum for invigoration, where my eyes could play chase or hide-and-seek with Monets or Rembrandts and my overtaxed circuits for scratching out mathematical machinery stayed sleeping.
Having dipped a toe in to taste for art, I find myself somewhat ruined; one ought to be careful what one develops an appetite for. In rationing my visits to museums, however, I have found my most potent panacea for burnout, and in this section I wanted to bring a little of that experience to the site. The curation is simply of works that, at one time or another, arrested me. If you have a recommendation you suspect might similarly freeze me, I should love to hear it!
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Poetry Collection
Through the Ages
A History of Earth
what's this?One can only feel astounded when tracing the long string of lucky, luckless, contingent happenings which have led all the way from time's beginning to today. It is strange to consider that long tendon of chance, that thread of consequence that runs from the pharaoh's proclamations to your first cries from the cradle. Strange, and stranger still, that nearly every opportunity, and our existence itself, has been bequeathed by people long bygone.
But turn from the past to face the future's sprawling reach along that same chain, and vertigo sets in. The prospect that its vast extent might count you among its very first links weighs heavy. In our time we form the bridge: a deep past behind us, all possible futures ahead. Every effort, every human act, has led to here. And now, for this moment at least, the "after" is all up to us.
With this idea of the great chain linking past and future generations, I wanted to create something that would help me intuit a sense of history's sweep, then leave the long thread dangling to punctuate the importance of our today, a sort of blinking I-beam cued for the history we're typing out now.
Through the Ages
