I’m All Lost In, #139: Goodnight Tokyo; Purging my apartment; Empty libraries. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#139

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Long Lines > Short Lines Lines around the block—at shops, shows, and restaurants—represent a public policy victory for any municipal government.

One local line that delights me every year is the crowd that forms on summer evenings at the ice cream shop below my apartment. I’ve even memorialized it in a poem:

My neighborhood would score even higher/
if the DOT surveyed at night/
when youth appear in clinamen lines.

But there’s trouble afoot. For the first time in memory there are no lines forming. As we head into summer 2026, it’s eerily quiet at the ice cream shop on my block.

Madison Square Garden > All Other NBA Arenas The packed crowd leaning into the action at Madison Square Garden during this week’s NBA finals is a metaphor for Manhattan. Specifically, for its density; at 28,000 people per square mile, NYC is the densest major city in America. And, in turn, the most electrifying.

Madison Square Garden’s unique geometry—steep raked seating, concave bowl, low ceiling—creates a distinct, intimate and energized feel that mirrors NYC itself. The Garden is notably different from all other stadiums in the NBA where the seating sprawls out rather than stacks up.

This serving of urban energy is infectious. And as Knicks Nation captured America’s imagination this week, it’s hard to ignore the other metaphor flowing out of Madison Square Garden: The joyous urbanism of New York City, MAGA’s ultimate bogeyman, is countering Trump’s bitter, shrinking, nativist regime with big city hope.

Channeling Iga > Channeling Self 2 When Valium Tom went up 4-0 in the first set, I knew I was running out of time to change the course of our Saturday morning tennis match. I didn’t, however, turn for help to the classic tennis primer The Inner Game of Tennis [I’m All Lost In, # 134, 5/10/26] by 1970s tennis coach W. Timothy Gallwey. Gallwey wants players to find their “Self 2,” one’s free-flowing, unconscious physical persona that’s capable of transcending the analytical, often critical, cognitive “Self 1.”

Instead, I thought of WTA tennis star Iga Swiatek. Iga’s an oddball—even a headcase [I’m All Lost In, #127, 3/22/26]—and she’s been struggling on court for the last two years since losing her No. 1 ranking. Last year’s Wimbledon trophy (!), notwithstanding.

But I find her inspirational. Before every serve, Iga goes into a spooky, reverent Zen-murmur (which reminds me of Franny-Glass’ nervous breakdown.) I get comfort and ASMR just watching Iga go there as the camera angle zooms in on her service motion.

I started thinking about Iga’s serve mantra as I stepped into my own serves midway through my match; I’d been out of sync and double faulting up to that point. By channeling Iga, I nudged my game into a flow state; I fell into a spry groove for the next 10 games, even winning one service game 40-love as I iteratively built up from solid serve to solid ground strokes.

Valium Tom ultimately won the match, but I had turned it into an exciting contest by pretending I was someone else.

Perhaps, there’s a best- selling book idea called the outer game of tennis where the way to get outside of your head isn’t, as Gallwey has it, by creating a physically intuitive version of yourself, but instead by just being someone else entirely.

This Week’s Obsessions:

A new entrant in my City Canon; my Elliott Bay stamp card was filled up, so I got this Tokyo novel for free Tuesday night, 6/9/26.

1) Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida

Maybe I’m not obsessed with Atsuhiro Yoshida’s short novel as much as I am obsessed with keeping his sprawling cast of characters straight.

Mitsuki, a props procurer for movies. Kanako Fuyuki, a hotline therapist who doubles as an orchard thief on her days off; she’s also searching for her long lost brother, Ren. Moriizumi, who runs a phone disposal service. Matsui, a cabbie. Shuro, a real-life, gumshoe detective who has evidently inspired a film franchise. Chatty Kisa, Yorie, Fumina, and Ayano, who run a late night restaurant together; Ayano was once in love with the mysterious Shuro back when he was a struggling magician. Haruka, Ayano’s confidante, who it turns out, works at the film company that’s making movies about Shuro. Ibaragi, who runs a re-fab junk shop. Eiko, a young actress who’s been cast in a movie that’s in production at Haruko’s company. And Emi Fukuda, an elevator operator who’s in love with a bat that hangs around her backyard. She’s apparently “waiting for it to transform into a beautiful young man dressed entirely in black” who would “linger on the veranda behind the curtain hoping desperately to be reunited with the woman inside.”

These are just some of the eccentric characters in this light-hearted and lightly philosophical novel of intertwined stories about Tokyo in the wee hours.

The stories also establish intertwined themes, such as the search for a missing puzzle piece—or person.

As for lightly philosophical:

The item might have seemed like no more than a broken telescope. Ibaragi, however, was always happy to see broken goods put to new uses. … Whenever something created for a specific purpose wore down—and this was true of most tools that humans built—it was liberated from its human-imposed application. Only then was it set free.

2) Purging My Apartment

Inspired by boxing up Mom’s apartment last week [I’m All Lost In, #138, 6/9/26]—and more so, by finding a few meaningful souvenirs from her life, such as her 1951 high school diploma, her laminated teenage social security card, some lovely black and white photos, and some family-heirloom paintings that I wanted to put on display back home in Seattle, I was prompted to purge my own apartment this week.

I imagine cleaning out your own place is a classic psychological response to a parent’s death … Setting the stage for the next phase of your own life?

Regardless, there I was Tuesday cleaning out my closet, hauling bags to the dumpster in my building’s garage, and tossing out old clothes and keepsakes. My apartment feels 1,000 pounds lighter.

One thing I unearthed in my closet, but definitely didn’t throw out was the Watergate Blanket. Mom knit the blanket while rapt in the historic televised hearings during the summer of 1973. It remained part of our household during the rest of the 1970s and '80s. She mailed it to me sometime in the early 2000s.

After unearthing the Watergate Blanket from my closet, I aired it out in the June weather all week.

3) The End of Libraries

My default is to be skeptical of manifestos that proclaim righteous defiance to change, new technology, and the modern world. MAGA slouches toward originalism. Leftists fetishize authenticity. I see fire and brimstone politics as they both demonize phantom conspirators.

It’s with that major caveat, that I actually side with the curmudgeons and recommend this recent essay in the Yale Review by writer and academic Shiela Liming who sees—in the “exsanguination” of university libraries—an ominous sign of the times about technology’s destructive affect on the brain.

Liming writes the essay from her POV as an Edith Wharton scholar. She spent years immersed in Wharton’s own personal library where she (Liming) saw evidence of Wharton’s intellectual evolution in the marginalia of her (Wharton’s) books.

And so I give you as curmudgeonly an excerpt as exists, but one I found myself cheering on:

By studying Wharton’s physical books, I could see from the annotations how she interpreted those texts, incorporating them into her own writing. The writer writes, according to Derrida, in order to discover what they think, including what they think about what they have read. That same writer then tries to convey those ideas to a new reader, who reads to discover what they think about what the writer thinks. But both writer and reader are playing (another favorite word of Derrida’s). Both are engaged in a game that has no end, and the text is the field or pitch or court on which it is played. Derrida calls that game deconstruction.

But though he is best known for it, Derrida didn’t invent the process. Deconstruction is not something that one does to a text; it’s something the text does to itself. It’s an inherent feature of highly volatile processes, and one that turns physical books into objects of fantasy. Books exist to impose dreams of stability and order on the processes of reading and writing that are attached to them. The author might be living or dead. In either case, the book contains the event that is or was the text, to keep it alive and make it cohere. Or, to put it another way, the text is the ghost, while the book is the medium through which the ghost speaks. Without the medium, the connection between speaker and listener is broken, and the line goes dead.

This is why, Derrida says, there is no history without language. We humans communicate knowledge about the past through language—through conversation, through storytelling, through education, and, yes, most of all through writing, which creates a semi-coherent, semi-anchored record of that language. We present that record in the form of a book, something that can be turned to and consulted over and over again. And then, finally, we store that book in a place where we can get at it: a library. For someone like Wharton, that can mean a personal library, filled with the remnants of one’s own engagement with those texts. But since few of us can afford to build a three-thousand-volume personal library, there are also shared libraries, the public ones in our towns and schools.

That’s how a library becomes a final and crucial step on a chain of accessibility that permits contact with the text. There are, of course, other ways to gain access to the text: bookstores and classrooms and PDF files that can be downloaded, legally or not, from the internet. But those other ways place barriers—often financial, sometimes technical, sometimes physical—between the reader and the text. They introduce friction. Reading a bootleg PDF isn’t the same as reading a print book. Twenty years ago, UX researchers were already noting that in online reading, large sections of a text are skipped or scanned in accordance with digital scrolling habits.

I’m All Lost In, #138: Stealing pens; Lists; and Roland Garros. Plus This Week in X>Y.

Mom, 15-years-old, Brooklyn, 1949. Roz was one of the great ones.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#138

The Week in X > (is Greater than) Y

My Childhood Street Today > My Childhood Street 40 Years Ago Mom’s funeral this week brought me back to Beech Ave., a suburban stretch loaded with teenage memories. The old neighborhood is still lush and idyllic. But it seems even better these days than it was when I lived there decades ago. There’s a rail-to-trail bike route where an ad-hoc path behind the YMCA used to be. And even more, there’s a bench and micro-park at the corner where the trail crosses Beech. I imagine this spot would have been a midnight temple for me.

If You’re a Wallflower: Dancing > Not Dancing If you’re uncomfortable at a club or an ‘80s dance party, boogieing and gavotting by yourself is the best way to hide from people. Bonus: The exercise will put you in a good mood. I’ve taken this step a couple of times this month. Once in Queens and once in Chicago.

Remaining Silent > Responding There were two instances this week when upon being bullied, I mostly (and atypically) remained silent and let my antagonist talk on and on, unspooling as they tied themselves into knots. Initially, I was kicking myself afterward for not having the presence of mind to call out their audacious behavior. But later, when it occurred to me that their hot words and my cool stoicism were all that remained, I realized their inappropriate lecture became more evident to all.

This Week’s Obsessions

1) Stealing Pens

I love being able to reach into my backpack and dip my hand into a reservoir of pens. Until about a year ago, this option was readily available to me.

I’m not sure why this is no longer the current state of affairs, but I’ve been frustrated by the lack of pens in my life lately. Is it a sign of the digital age; i.e., are there not as many pens floating around in 2026? I’m not sure, but my supply always seems low.

To address this persistent shortage, I’ve resorted to a tactic I perfected and enjoyed years ago: Stealing pens. Actively. Apparently I’d been neglecting this pastime lately. Until this week.

So far, my pen pilfering spree—at restaurants, at the CVS, at hotels, at convenience stores, at airports, at bars—has netted a respectable cache.

2) Lists

It started two weeks ago and has continued with abandon.

After noticing a pair of colorful lists that were included as part of the small explanatory cards alongside two separate art pieces in two separate MoMA exhibits, I’ve started seeing lists everywhere.

In a card describing Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, the MoMA exhibit curator wrote:

She occupied roles as wide-ranging as the head of a perfume house, a publisher, the administrator of a joint stock company, and a filmmaker.

Six floors down, in the museum’s exhibit about the Nakagin Capsule Towers [I’m All Lost In, #137, 6/2/26], an accompanying card explained:

Initially marketed as micro-dwellings for commuting businessmen, they were repurposed into second homes, offices, student housing, and even tearooms, libraries, galleries, and DJ booths.

As I set out to concoct a poem through a mash-up of these two inventories, more lists caught my attention. In the Iliad, in Book 13, Homer gives us a list of human pleasures:

A person can get tired of anything—/of sleep, of sex, of dancing, of sweet song,/far better objects of desire than war./ But Trojans are insatiable for battle.

And just three pages later from the same chapter, a list of talents:

You cannot have it all!/A god give one man skill to fight in war,/ another may be talented at dancing,/another good at singing and the lyre, and in another heart, farsighted Zeus/places good judgment…

Of course, there’s also the famous catalogue of ships in Book 2.

This week, the lists have been showing up in real life. As we boxed up my mom’s apartment (RIP Roz Feit, June 8, 1934-May 30, 2026), I found myself cataloging everything we schlepped down to the cars: Two black wooden chairs; a recliner; two boxes of kitchenware; a flat-screen TV (which she hadn’t turned on since my dad died two years ago); a couch; a rolling table; several double-tied contractor’s bags of clothes; several double-tied contractor’s bags of trash; several more of recycling; and one contractor’s bag of towels. An end table. A box of hangers. An antique set of Jewish encyclopedias. A bed.

Roz Zivotofsky, Thomas Jefferson High School, Brooklyn, NY, graduation, 1951.

And on Friday afternoon, June 5, in a quiet room at Rockville’s Sagel Bloomfield Danzansky Goldberg Funeral Home on Rollins Ave.—where putt-putt golf and Ernie’s Pizza used to be in the 1970s—they gave us a formal list confirming the items of Mom’s clothing we’d chosen for her burial.

3) Roland Garros

My therapist likes to tell me “Josh, you know: You can’t predict the future.” But I can!

And I have been for the past fortnight as I constantly tuned in the French Open, pro-tennis’ spring grand slam. In fact, I’ve been predicting the future much longer than that; at least for the entire time I’ve been an Aryna Sabalenka fan.

From the moment I first happened to see one of her tortured matches on the restaurant-bar TV in September 2023 and instantly became an unconditional fan of this jinxed supernova, I have foreseen the kind of naked implosion that went down this week on center court in her Rolland Garros quarterfinal match.

Just two points away from victory—up 6-3, 5-3, 30-Love—World No. 1 Sabalenka tanked against No 25 Diana Shnaider. Daffy Saby, as we call her in my home, lost the next 9 games in a row. Her quest for an elusive 2026 grand slam victory went kaput 6-3, 5-7, 0-6. Yes, 0-6, the ultimate example of being tilted.

Had she won the match, her subsequent route to the championship trophy would have been tantalizingly close. The coast was clear. All Saby’s main rivals—Rybakina, Coco Gauff, Iga, Mboko—had already been knocked out in earlier rounds. But the tennis gods love steering Saby into the rocks (or guiding her forehand into the net). Especially in the big moments. With all eyes on her in the runup to the final, there was no escaping the pending reality of a high-profile meltdown and defeat.

Yes, she’s already a four-time grand slam champion, including winning the 2024 and 2025 U.S. Opens. And yes, she’s risen to World No. 1—and has kept the spot for more than a year and a half. But I have long known Sabalenka’s true fate: She is doomed to botch things in glorious fashion.

For the record: Much like former world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, who has never been the same since losing to Qinwen Zheng in the 2024 Olympics, Saby’s downfall was set in motion when World No. 32 Hailey Baptiste beat her last month in the quarterfinals in Madrid. Sabalenka is still World No. 1 and will be considered a favorite to win Wimbledon next month (and the U.S. Open in September).

But a note to my therapist: I know Sabalenka won’t win either tournament.

I’m All Lost In, #137: The Nakagin Capsule Tower; NKD NA whiskey; Silence Please teahouse. Plus the Week in X>Y

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#137

(This post covers 5/22/26-6/1/26)

The Week in X > (is Greater Than) Y

Hudson News at Sea-Tac, 5/31/26

A Mainstream Book Chain > The NYT We live in an era of spineless corporate self-censorship and odious government erasure. (See this week’s combination of both: A tortured NYT headline timidly and ridiculously saying Secretary of Defense Hegseth “appeared” to show an “anti-diversity stance” by blocking merit-based promotions for female and black officers at a disproportionate rate; I can think of a couple of clearer words to describe Hegseth’s ongoing pattern of sexism ‍and racism in his bigoted‍ ‍campaign against women, African Americans, and LGBQT people.)

And so it was heartening to notice the opposite impulse at Hudson News, the Swiss-based airport bookstore chain. During this busy week of traveling (NYC and Chicago) I noticed identical Hudson News displays at O’Hare, JFK, and Sea-Tac flaunting a shelf of proudly woke books about Iran. By Iranian authors. (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is a personal favorite.)

Seeing the displays was a bit like seeing a tattoo peeking out from under someone’s rolled up sleeve at a corporate meeting.

Or like a middle finger to Donald Trump.

Curry Dishes with Less Curry Sauce > Curry Dishes with Lots of Curry Sauce Exhibit A is the delicious Green Curry at Sticky Rice, a lively Thai restaurant on Orchard St. in NoLita. Unlike typical curries where you have to go wading for the provisions, the coconut milk in this dish was secondary to a tall pile of green beans, bamboo shoots, and basil.

I’d also recommend the cozy vegan veggie curry puffs as a starter.

Taking the Red Eye > Flying During the Day They’re cheaper. There aren’t check-in lines. And you’re more likely to sleep; not only are you ready for bed anyway at this late hour after a full day, but they turn out the cabin lights, it’s quiet, and the person sitting next to you is likely to be sleeping themself rather than chatting at you.

And the best part: You don’t lose a day to travel. Go to sleep on Thursday night in Seattle—as I did on my flight out of Sea-Tac this week—and wake up on Friday morning in Chicago before catching the El train toward Forest Park, getting off at Logan Square and catching the 76 bus east toward Nature Museum. I alighted at Diversey & Western/Elston two blocks from my Airbnb.

This gave way to a full day. I met my magical college friend Zoe downtown later that morning; we did the Riverwalk and drank 7-11 Slurpees; and I had a gummie in the evening before going to a dance party with some old high school friends.

Zoe & Me, Downtown Chicago after the Riverwalk, on the way to get Slurpees at 7-11, 5/29/26

This Week’s Obsessions

1) The Nakagin Capsules

As part of Japan’s Metabolist architecture movement—an eco-physiological philosophy from the 1960s (of course!) which sought to entwine buildings and biology with “design and technology that denotes human vitality”—architect Kisho Kurokawa built an apartment complex of 140 prefab modules in downtown Tokyo. Attached to a pair of steel towers, the single-occupant-capsules came online in the heart of Tokyo’s up-tempo Ginza neighborhood in 1972.

MoMA currently has an exhilarating exhibit on the Nakagin Capsule Tower that includes reconfigured module A1305. I checked it out on Monday, Memorial Day.

Capsule A1305

Capsule A1305, a fully restored unit from the Tower’s top floor on display at MoMA, 5/25/26

The Nakagin Capsule Tower photographed in 1972 currently on exhibit at MoMA.

Named after a real estate company that backed Kurokawa’s urbanist vision to give “nomadic office workers” a space “to rest and recover,” the Nakagin module hive was basically a Lego building of sleek Star-Trek-style, work-week pied-à-terres for suburban businessmen. Not only did the design embrace the new age of mass production, but the solo capsules were, in Kurokowa’s words, also a “declaration of war” against it “in support of the restoration of the self.”

The gendered marketing advertised the micro-apartments as bachelor pads. The efficient oval layout came with: wall-screen TVs; submarine windows that looked out onto the glittering city; handset phones; and Sony stereo systems. And perhaps more germane to Kurokawa’s architectural philosophy: the units also featured built-in, multi-purpose furniture.

Kurokawa explained the Metabolist part of capsule living in his manifesto “Oh, the code of the cyborg!” which he published in Space Design magazine in 1969: Individual capsules could be swapped out iteratively for upgraded models that were manufactured off-site and snapped into place as needed.

“[Kurokowa] envisioned architecture capable of growth, adaptation, and transformation through what he called ‘metabolic cycles,’” MoMA’s Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design Evangelos Kotsioris writes in the exhibit notes. “Whereby at predetermined intervals ‘only those parts that had lost their usefulness’ would be replaced and, as result, resources would be conserved.”

The Nakagin Capsule Tower didn’t work out as Kurokowa envisioned, but perhaps not coincidentally, it did ultimately sync with his generative, Theseus's-Paradox conceit. Shifting purpose rather than evolutionary maintenance became the defining MO of the complex over the years as Nakagin’s micro-spaces were re-mixed into offices, student housing, tearooms, libraries, galleries, and DJ booths. “This is not an apartment house,” Kurokawa famously declared when he debuted the project design in 1969.

With an embattled history that included revivals of creative new uses alongside lost years when the units fell into disrepair, the building was decommissioned and disassembled in 2022.

2) NKD Whiskey

NA spirits are typically too sweet. NA wine is a glass of apple juice role playing as a glass of chardonnay. Thankfully, after I complained about this sickly state of affairs late Saturday afternoon to the earnest bartender at Hekate, an all-NA neurodivergent-friendly dive in the East Village on Ave. B & E. 11th St, he poured me a glass of NKD whiskey.

ALT Distilling, the Louisville, Kentucky-based company that makes NKD whiskey (pronounced “naked”), extracts the alcohol through a process called vacuum distillation while lightly singeing the oak-flavored brew with some caramel for the subconscious.

Last week was my 13th in a row booze-free. It also now marks the moment when I finally found a substitute spirit that doesn’t need to be cut with two cups of soda water. Drink a glass of NKD neat for its burn and peaty weight.

*Hekate, a warm, go-to spot for me ever since ECB and I first hung out there in March 2024, is closing. They have a GoFundMe to help them keep the doors open until October.

 3) Silence Please

In another long-running quest for quality: Last week, my commitment to discovering exemplary coffeeshops took me to Silence Please, an up-the-stairs, second-floor oasis on Bowery & Grand in NoLita. Set up in a stereo-speaker design work studio, this coffee and teahouse is ”A place to slow down,” according to the website. “To tune in and listen gently. We believe silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of attention.”

Channeling this yoga-practice (AI?) wisdom, Silence Please is a bit Kurokowa-esque. It blurs out the grungy street below, re-making the art gallery that once occupied the spot into an elegant coffeeshop that honors the gallery mood. Delicately placed around the room, the stylish, artisan speakers echo the space’s original art show aesthetics. And the speakers are functional too, lulling the room with jams like the laid-back, guitar-jazz hip hop playing on the Tuesday morning I was there by Japanese rapper Ken Tin Min.

Crowded with diligent creative souls working at lap tops, the long library-table seating lets folks hunker down for hours to the soft tunes. There’s also peaceful window-table seating for casual coffee dates and inviting couches for solo reverie. Bonus: there’s a small, vinyl record shop and secondary seating by the barista bar and baked-goods case in the far-flung back room.

Silence Please, upstairs on Bowery between Grand St. & Broome St, 5/26/26

I’m All Lost In, #136: Off-peak ridership; Ambient Crafts; and the Iliad. Plus the Week in X>Y, including DJ Mudede.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#136

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Nil Elses upstairs at the Crocodile Hotel, 5/16/26

Leaving > Staying

Up three flights of stairs. To an electronica show. These are my favorite coordinates.

The first set I came upon Saturday night in Belltown at the Crocodile Hotel annex was an inspired combination of ambient waves and glitch beats by Nil Elses. It seemed like the perfect resting place for the night. The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But the next act—a spoken-word dose of atavistic left-wing Romanticism (over an endless drone, appropriately enough)—was a detour into banality. Andrew Sullivan once correctly labeled this type of idyllic Year-Zero politics “Reactionary Utopianism.”

I was thrilled when my fellow ambient music traveler texted me from across the room: “I’m bored.” We promptly disregarded Seattle’s progressive peer pressure to stay put and voted with our feet. We headed toward the exit and down the stairs during the middle of the tedious, aimless set.

Intellectuals > Dudes I wish I’d walked out of Shibuya HiFi when I went to one of their curated nights two years ago; Shibuya HiFi is Ballard’s self-proclaimed Tokyo-inspired listening lounge on Leary Way.

The DJ that night was playing 1960s-ska singles. I’m a fan. But evidently he had nothing to tell us about the music. No context. No background stories. No narrative. Instead, we got a man-boy lecture about the high-end Klipschorn speakers. Adding to this indulgent rhapsody about stereo equipment, the lazy DJ winged it, playing record after record while not telling us anything more than the artists’ name. This lack of prep was astounding for the steep ticket price. Could you imagine if a female DJ had tried to get away with this sort of mediocrity.

While he’s no heroine, two years later: It was the excellent Charles Mudede [I’m All Lost In, #54, 10/25/24] to the rescue. This past Wednesday night, the local urban architecture magazine Arcade commandeered Shibuya HiFi’s fine-tuned yet squandered listening lounge and brought in Seattle cultural critic, free-form intellectual Mudede to spin a night of his favorite cityscape tracks.

Mudede as DJ, Ballard, 5/20/26

Providing historical context (the emergence of trip hop at London’s Africa Centre in Covent Garden), personal memory, cinema theory, and hip hop expertise, Mudede gave the attentive audience a meaningful sequence of jams:

1) Set to an aerial escapade above the streets of San Francisco: “Roof Top” from Bernard Herrmann's 1958 score to Hitchcock’s Vertigo; 2) “Gutted,” the UK dub step classic from Burial’s 2006 debut; 3) “Respiration,” Black Star’s 1998 “conscious” hip hop classic; 4) Constantly on the turntable in his back-cottage teenage bedroom where his parents exiled him, Charles escaped virtually to “This City Never Sleeps,” an elegantly drawn-out Grace Jones-style experiment in dub from the Eurythmics’ 1983 Sweet Dreams (are Made of This) LP; 5) “Erotic City,” a loopy and magnetic 1984 Prince B-side that out-smuts every song on the overrated Purple Rain LP released the same year; 6) “Time Forest,” a stunning 11-minute track by eco-ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yiroshi from the groundbreaking 1986 album Surround (imagine Eno set to the Tokyo subway); 7) “Unfinished Symphony,” from Massive Attack’s 1991 trip-hop masterpiece Blue Lines.

As an outro, Mudede played jazz bassist Mingus’ 1956 hard-bop breakdown of Gershwin’s city-pollution standard, “A Foggy Day.”

4 > 3 I arrived at Court 3 early last Saturday morning and practiced a few serves. Aces all. It was an Elena-Rybakina omen. I went on to win 4 games off JFTA World No. 1 Valium Tom, the most winning games I’ve ever tallied against him..

And notably: Down 5-3, I staved off a break and match point at ad-out. I was evidently channeling the Inner Gamer of Tennis [I’m All Lost In, #134, 5/10/26] without even realizing it. Which seems appropriately in-the-zone of me and uncharacteristically nonchalant as well.

This Week’s Obsessions

The 1 Line, 5/15/26

1) Crush Load With all the new service coming online in the past year, light rail ridership is setting record highs. Notably, off-peak ridership is up.

The trains were certainly packed last Friday evening around 10 o’clock as my troupe of friends decided to forgo one full train and see about the next. But the next train was overcrowded as well. Realizing the numbers weren’t going to let up anytime soon, the five of us squeezed on.

You could attribute this passenger crush to the Mariners game, but that doesn’t diminish the high ridership. In fact, it confirms the popularity of Seattle’s light rail service. In short: Packed trains as a function of popular events is exactly what the service plan envisioned.

As Seattle continues to grow, this kind of non-rush-hour demand will continue to grow too. For example, my group wasn’t coming from the Mariners game. We were coming from a standing-room-only pop show at a small club in Pike Place Market, The Rabbit Box. Evenings of overlapping events like this are the norm in cities. As is mass transit.

2) Ambient Crafts

Speaking of crowded events…

Soft Portals’ digital flower flow, live at Internet Development Studios, 5/21/26

The room was percolating with stillness Thursday night at INTDEV studios on Post Alley where immersive-quietude duo Ambient Crafts were prompting community. Ambient Crafts is Isla Vidal on atmospheric loops and reverent vocals, and Soft Portals on meditative visuals, generative graphics, and 14th century Persian poetry. (At one point, Vidal sampled and hacked the poetry, looping it into the mix.) And so the simpatico pair of electromagnetic whisperers set the scene for the night’s curated slate of artists. This is the conceit of an Ambient Crafts show: Group exhibitions recast as a night market where the artists set up booths for bazaar goers to check out the imaginative wares.

On this Thursday night’s rendition you could sit for a technology hacker who projected your silhouette in visual synesthesia; you could inhale decayed peach with the guidance of the night’s scent librarian; you could attend a tea ceremony in the well-appointed side room of drapes, rugs, and low tables where a tea master invited you to join him on the cushions; or you could get to work with scissors, glue, and magazines at a crafting table. The hands-on installations, which also included a tapestry projectionist, gave free rein to earnest conversation all evening. There was also pita, hummus, and veggies, plus plenty of throw pillows and a few couches for lounging.

The mood was akin to a late-1960s Fluxus happening without any of the didactic theory. As Soft Portals said in her closing remarks about art’s ability to “alchemize hardship” : “We really hope you guys were able to slow down and be grounded. We hope the art was supporting you, rather than telling you how to feel.”

Full transparency: Soft Portals is my friend XDX, a recurring character in these weekly accounts. And I’ve been shamelessly writing about Ambient Crafts’ every chance I get [I’m All Lost In, #120, 2/1/26.]

3) A Zoom Class on the Iliad

Thanks to a marvelous tip I got a few months ago from my poet and high-school-English-teacher pal Dallas, I signed up for an online class on the Iliad. Yes, we had to buy the prof’s own translation of this classic classic ($20), but the prof is Ivy League University of Pennsylvania professor Emily Wilson and her 2023 translation is being acclaimed as the standard for the next generation. I was eager to take the class. (Wilson is already revered for her 2017 translation of the Odyssey; the first published in English by a female scholar.)

The first class was this week; about 250 people tuned in. Wilson lectured for 45 minutes and then took questions from the lively comment section for the last 15 of the scheduled hour-long session. We went more like 75 minutes because she was geeking out over the questions.

Wilson is a hoot. Ah ha, I thought to myself when she did a few over-the-top thespian readings (first in ancient Greek, then in English) as if she were in the shower playing all the characters to act out a few choice, epic scenes.

I’m All Lost In, #135: Fiction at the Bolshoi; Modular Seattle; and Desmond Dekker’s inversions in A-flat major. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#135

The Week in X > (is better than) Y

Adagio > Andante, Moderato, Allegro, Vivace, and Presto. And Largo is the best.

I cued up a 16-hour box set of Franz Joseph Haydn’s complete string quartets this week; in addition to inventing the form, Haydn wrote 68 string quartets in total between 1775-1803. They span his Op. 1 through Op. 103.

I prefer the slower movements, and I started collecting Haydn’s adagios—and his occasional (even slower) Largos—all in one soothing playlist. If only Haydn’s BPM had slowed more dramatically to the near-”Grave Lento” as well. There would be world peace.

The Vegan Menu at Moonlight Cafe > The non-Vegan Menu at Moonlight Cafe I know that sounds like I’m stating the obvious—after all, the Central District’s no-frills Moonlight Cafe on 19th & Jackson is one of Seattle’s vegan bright lights [I’m All Lost In, #66, 1/18/25.] But Moonlight has a full, traditional-Vietnamese menu as well, and my non-vegan friends fall for it every time.

I try to warn them: While the parallel vegan menu is presented as a substitute for the “regular” menu, the nod-and-wink conceit at Moonlight Cafe is that the vegan menu is the raison d'être at this Vietnamese comfort-food institution.

And so it was on Wednesday evening that while XDX remained politely reserved over a tallow-burdened pork soup, I dug into a Seattle classic: The Saute Broccoli with vegan chicken.

Moonlight Cafe, 5/13/25

Hart Crane > Hart Crane After squinting through several cryptic poems in Hart Crane’s 1926 debut White Buildings (as in: the bright glow of urbanism), I’m sad to report he’s not living up to his canonical hype as America’s machine-age bard. Crane supposedly up-cycled 19th century Romanticism and its reverence for the natural world by celebrating the beauty of America’s young, new century, its subways, skyscrapers, and most famously, one of its harbingers, New York City’s majestic Brooklyn Bridge.

Reclaiming cities as wonders of the natural world is exactly how I frame my own poetry project; traditionally, cities are seen as symbols of sinister inauthenticity. And so I was excited to learn that exalting the city had been Crane's project. I hoped reading him on this centennial of his debut collection would prove to be a highlight for me in 2026. The year’s not quite half over yet, so we’ll see.

Hart Crane’s White Buildings, First Edition, 1926

This Week’s Obsessions

1) City of Night Birds

Well this was predictable. After 30 unconvincing pages, I included this novel on my list of last week’s obsessions under the header: “I’m Not Obsessed with This Contemporary Novel“ [I’m All Lost In, #104, 5/10/26.] It turns out I am.

I realized this when I fished the book out of my backpack on the #8 bus Wednesday evening and started reading it again. I nearly missed my stop. I eagerly picked it back up few hours later; that’s when I began underling. “We all had the emotional stability of an atom missing an electron.”

Before the night was. over, I had read another 80 pages.

The book is about a fictional elite Russian ballerina named Natalia Leonova. And as I noted last week, Natalia’s backstory—told in flashbacks—kept me from abandoning the book right away. Accordingly, when that story line came to its surprising crescendo around page 60—going to see her mother meant going to the cemetery—I was hooked. Natalia’s past has now collided with the increasingly intriguing real-time story of her minefield relationships with Nina (an old bestie) and with her mysterious Bolshoi rival Dimitri. I’m sensing more secrets to come in this world where ballet is metaphor.

More underlining: “She didn’t want anything frilled and beaded that would remind her of a costume…;”

“I meandered to the center—the middle of the stage, the center of gravity in our universe, to which everyone—dancers from the corps to the principals, the conductor, the orchestra, the light designer, stagehands, and even the director—were inexorably pulled…;”

“…her face would light up in recognition—not of the choreography or the music, but the turquoise-embroidered bodice and tutu…”

2) Modular Seattle

Speaking of metaphors: Think of a modular synth artist as a DJ whose circuit patches are samples. Modular synthesizers are electronic music rigs that musicians patch together during performance to iteratively create new combos of sound effects as opposed to using a pre-programmed synth.

Avant-garde and retro all at once, modular synth music is crackling in Seattle right now thanks to Modular Seattle, an informal collective of experimental musicians who host generative synth nights

They usually hold the shows at Substation [I’m All Lost In, #27, 4/19/24], a former industrial site on the edge of old Ballard. But last Saturday night they set up shop at Pacific Science Center, the kid-friendly museum at Seattle Center transformed on this evening into a lingering hipster music scene. The event was branded as Science After Dark, SAD.

Like Haydn’s contemplative adagios ^^, we were in 60-BPM mode. Rather than arcing cello lines and plaintive violin melodies though, it was transistor drones, archival sound clips, and blocs of sound waves. You could practically see the atoms gathering in collapsed time.

Modular Seattle at Science After Dark, 5/9/26

3) Playing Desmond Dekker’s Shanty Town on Piano

Between his two rock steady hits, “007 (Shanty Town)” (1967) and “The Israelites” (1968), you wouldn’t be faulted for believing Jamaican artist Desmond Dekker descended from Orpheus. This fellow could write a catchy pop tune. And perform it with star power.

I’ve been miming his star power in the privacy of my apartment all week practicing “007 (Shanty Town)” on piano. I’ve dedicated weeks to this song before [I’m All Lost In, #29, 5/3/24.] This is an obsessions column.

It’s a pleasure to play thanks to Dekker’s pallet of inversions. Written in the key of A-flat major, his score playfully flaunts all three voicings of the root: A-flat/C/E-flat; C/E-flat/ A-flat; and holding down the wistful verses, E-flat/A-flat/C, the second inversion. Dekker lingers in the wistful mood in the final bar of his I-IV-VII verses with an inversion of the IV chord (a D-flat major played as F/A-flat/D-flat) and then rushes mid-verse to the VII, an aching G-diminished passing chord (G/B-flat/D-flat). This premature chord change creates a dragging blur against the right-hand melody, the D-flat IV note, which stays put despite the moving chords below. Remaining stationary like this, the D-flat highlights the tug underneath as Dekker sings: “Rude boys take the wheel/Toss them all to jail/Rude boys cannot fail/’cause they must get beer” stretching out the words “wheel,” “jail,” “fail,” “beer” to emphasize the rude boys’ mundane cycle of aimlessness.

In contrast, the chorus is all energy, showcasing an overload of tied notes and smashed-together triplets as Dekker starts the melody line from the III note, the C, to string together the repeated opening line: “I’m a loot/I’m a shoot/at my will.” This sets up the last two lines of the chorus where Dekker drops the melody to the root, the A-flat, and ready-set-go, climbs 9 half steps to the VI note, the F, for the first two weighted words of a triplet: “Step up,” and “bomb up.” As in: “I’m a rude boy, step up diversion” and “I’m a rude boy I bomb up the town.”

I’m All Lost In, #134: Flow States. Plus the Week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#134

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Sweetened sediment at Mintish, 5/9/26

The Dregs > The Coffee This rule is specific to Turkish coffee. I first tried Turkish coffee before I drank coffee. Back in 2013 on my trip to Istanbul.

And I’m glad I rediscovered it this week at Mintish, the Palestinian coffeeshop on Capitol Hill [I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/9/26.] It’s just as I remember it too: There’s a heaping tablespoon-worth of silt at the bottom.

The prized sludge takes on disproportionate prominence in the slight, traditional Turkish coffee cup, which feels symbolic of the fact that the tasty bitter sediment defines this drink.

Mintish adds hazelnut syrup into the brew too.

3 > 2.5 For the second weekend in a row, I won my tennis match; I play every Saturday morning at Volunteer Park. This past Saturday I beat R___, a regular JFTA (Josh Feit Tennis Association) rival who I’d never beaten before. I’ve occasionally pushed him to long deuce-ad games. And I once won three games in a row to nearly stage a comeback. But this Saturday I won outright. 6-3. That’s not the headline, though.

It’s this: There was a group of Gen-X women playing doubles on the court next to us. After the match, one of them came over and invited us to join their mixed-doubles summer league. She also asked what my rating was. When I said I was a 2.5, she said: “No. You’re at least a 3. We were watching.”

Interrogating Memory > Protecting Memory Walking the two blocks back to my apartment from the bus stop late Tuesday night in the soughing midnight weather prompted my brain to call up a recurring image from high school: Sprinting home across the suburban landscape at 5 am from my girlfriend’s house. (That summer after 11th grade, I would stay up watching the 11 o’clock news with mom while I waited for her to go upstairs to sleep. I think she was on to my subterfuge, but when she finally headed up, I’d sneak out through the sliding-glass back door and go over to S_____’s. Several hours later, I’d sprint back home, leaping across the pavement, before my parents woke up.

Part of this comforting memory includes the “Stingo!” speech from 1982’s Sophie’s Choice when Meryl Streep (as Sophie), Kevin Kline (as Nathan), and Peter MacNicol (as Stingo) high tail it to the Brooklyn Bridge one late night with a bottle of champagne. Leaping up onto a lamppost on the side of the bridge Gene Kelly-style, Kline offers a wild toast as Streep and MacNicol look on. It’s an exuberant moment in the mostly brutal movie.

I’ve always been wary to peek back at this scene. What if I had it all wrong? I didn’t want to upend the sanctity of my memory. But I finally went and watched it. And I’m glad I did. Going back in time neither contradicted nor affirmed the past. It merely enhanced the present.

While I’d remembered the wattage of the scene, I never actually remembered what it was about.

Kevin Kline as the unstable Nathan Landau, raising his glass of champagne to the night:

On this bridge on which so many great Americans writers have stood and reached out for words to give America its voice... Looking toward the land that gave us Whitman... from its Eastern edge dreamt his country's future and gave it words... On this span of which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote, we welcome Stingo into that pantheon of the Gods... whose words are all we know of immortality. To Stingo!

This Week’s Obsessions

1) The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

Out for a pop-psychology stroll, 5/6/26

Written in the early 1970s when even sports was under the influence of the counterculture, Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis feels like it could be called: “Zen and the Art of the Kick Serve.” With theories about “Self 1” (the judgy critical mind) and “Self 2” (the untethered body), Gallwey’s tennis primer was published in 1974, the same year another hippie classic came out: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Gallwey, the captain of the Harvard tennis team in the early 1960s and later a tennis coach, was all about flow states, “quieting your mind,” and doing away with judgment by observing what IS.

It’s all pop-psychology stuff that’s become ubiquitous and mainstream these days (the banal intro to the 50th anniversary edition I just bought is by NFL-coach-as-guru, the Seattle Seahawks’ Pete Carroll.) ‍ ‍

The hippie factor in Gallwey’s book is high. The first big metaphor he makes compares tennis skills to a flower:

When [a rose] first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds or not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is. Similarly, the errors we make can be seen as an important part of the developing process…

Tennis itself becomes an all-purpose metaphor in this self-help classic. Gallwey’s inner game of freeing the mind to the body can be applied to any pursuit. While my tennis playing could certainly use more Zen, I was using Gallwey’s advice this week to think about piano playing. Stop trying too hard and play unconsciously. A perfect assignment for Self 1 to let go and let Self 2 play the crushed blue notes in Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold On Me.”

2) Unflappable Mayor Wilson

Erica posts my column on Thursday morning, 5/7/26

Speaking of flow states, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is confounding mainstream conservative media outlets like the Seattle Times right now with her insouciant left-wing charisma as she settles into the rhythm of governing.

Trying to stop Wilson’s momentum, the Times fabricated a mayoral PR crisis by pretending her consistent progressive script is actually a source of political malaprops. They published a column this week wishfully titled: “The gaffes are becoming a pattern for Seattle’s new mayor.” The truth is: Wilson is at ease burning it up with her nonchalant jujitsu.

I write a column for PubliCola; always a nice task. But more so this week: When I sat down at Plus84 Coffee on Tuesday evening and wrote a response to the Seattle Times, I was peaking, getting into a flow state of my own as I offered my less-tortured assessment of our straightforward mayor.

Trying to portray Wilson as gaffe-prone when all she’s doing is demonstrating her commitment to the progressive agenda that she openly ran on last year is just sour grapes from the Seattle Times. It also shows how flummoxed they are with her casual charisma. As they reported themselves last year, the anti-Wilson campaign couldn’t get traditional anti-left memes to stick to her. This latest iteration doesn’t track either.

3) I’m Not Obsessed with This Contemporary Novel

I keep trying to get hooked on a 2024 novel I bought this week, City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim. It’s about a Russian dancer named Natalia who’s trying to return from an injury (both literal and figurative) in the cutthroat world of St. Petersburg ballet.

It’s not poorly written. Nor is it particularly well written.

Either way, I keep hoping I can remix the specifics of dance (La Bayadère and frappés) into a metaphor for universal themes. Like tennis!

And Kim’s jump cuts to Natalia’s coming-of-age backstory have stopped me from giving up just yet.

I knew that Mama couldn’t teach me happiness because she’d never been happy. At least not since Nikolai—a name that was within my name, yet so unfamiliar to me. Mama never talked about him with me; everything I know, I heard through whispered conversations between Mama and Sveta when they thought I was asleep.

——

In closing, a Quote of the Week, overheard while I was walking through Myrtle Edwards Park by Elliott Bay—and paused to look out from the W. Thomas St. Overpass.

“Looking out at Elliott Bay makes me want to quit my job.”

Elliott Bay, 5/5/26

‍ ‍

I’m All Lost In, #133: Chang-Rae Lee; “Goodnight Baby;” “You Really Got a Hold on Me.” (Plus the Week in X>Y)

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#133

This Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Armistice Coffee, follow-up visit a week later on 5/2/26

Taking the Bus to the Light Rail Home from Green Lake > Driving Home from Green Lake After having lunch at Restaurant Christine on N. 56th St. in Green Lake last Saturday afternoon, I took the #62 bus to the closest light rail station, the Roosevelt stop (a nine-minute route), so I could jump on the train and head home to Capitol Hill. My plan for the rest of the day was to write at a coffeeshop in my neighborhood. Rather than heading down the stairs to the train though, I decided to see if there were any promising coffeeshop options in Roosevelt. A quick search on my phone listed a few, including one called Armistice. And I noticed it was open until 10pm. It was only 1 o’clock, but wanting to support a business with humanist business hours, I walked the three blocks there; it’s at Roosevelt Way NE and NE 68th. Enclosed in large, wrap-around windows and swaying street trees, Armistice is a roomy industrial-style coffeeshop with lots of nooks and seating. There’s a wine bar and outdoor patio seating too.

I never would have discovered this oasis if I’d been locked in the myopic trajectory of a car. I settled in for the rest of the afternoon.

Mementos Tucked inside a Valuable Old Book > The Book (in this case, a signed, 1930 second edition of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems with a personalized inscription worth ~$5000) Precious keepsakes tucked inside an antique book are like ads in old magazines. Both have more time-machine superpowers than the book or the magazine itself .

4/24/26

My friend Dan recently gave me a belated gift for officiating his wedding last year [I’m All Lost In, #112, 12/7/25]: A signed, 1930 second-edition hardcover copy of American poetry icon Robert Frost’s collected poems.

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

Yes. That Robert Frost. Pg. 275.

Dan’s grandfather was a young English professor who traveled in the same Boston-area academic circles as the older Frost. Along with Frost’s bold signature on the title page, there’s also an inscription to Dan’s granddad penned in deep black dated July, 1933: “We have ideas yet that we haven’t tried.” It’s the concluding line of Frost’s own 1928 poem “Riders.”

The 96-year-old book, published by Henry Holt & Co, is timeworn but also in excellent condition. Some of the pages are still uncut. The internet says it could be worth as much as $7,000 and least $700. It’s when I gently thumbed through the musty tome, though, that my breath caught. I found three artifacts tucked inside halfway through on pg. 161 like pressed flowers. It was a trio of early 1930s New Yorker clippings still convincingly intact. All three were poems by an American poet named Frances Frost.

No relation to Robert, Frances was a popular poet at the time herself and appears to have had plenty of poems published in the New Yorker in the early 1930s; she had been a student at Middlebury College along with Dan’s grandfather in the mid-1920s.

Beneath one of Frances’ poems, “First Snow in the Hills” (published in the November 14, 1931 New Yorker‍ ‍with a snippet of a theater review on the flip side), there’s a handwritten note. Someone, perhaps Dan’s grandfather or grandmother, wrote: “This sounds like Robert rather than Frances?”

Fair.

In the woods the chipmunk moves like a pattern of shadow
Toward his hour of sleep; mountainward and alone,
Charging the flying dusk, the doe is blown;
And through frosted leaves, the youngest gray squirrels go
Explaining to one another about the snow.

New South Lake Union > Old South Lake Union The sad news that Seattle’s Best Karaoke (SBK), the no-frills karaoke spot at the border-edge of Downtown, Capitol Hill, and South Lake Union is closing after 30 years because the landlord capriciously terminated  the month-to-month lease stirs up memories, reflection, and politics. But hold the knee-jerk indictments of corporate colonization.

Yes, the sterile Amazon neighborhood needs an indie bookstore, an arts space, a live-music venue, a vintage shop, late-night food options, and certainly SBK. But this formerly too-quiet no-man’s land of parking lots, clandestine office spaces, warehouses, and industrial mashups, plus a convenience store, always needed those things. Moreover, it’s now given way to a busy, mixed-use housing and international tech district for a young, largely nonwhite workforce. With parks, an arts college, food trucks, pizza places, sexy restaurants like Paju [I’m All Lost In, #87, 6/14/25], and the city’s hippest EDM queer bar, Kremwerk, I find myself in SLU more often than I did when SBK (and Re-Bar) were the only attractions. Dare I say Kremwerk—which I have a poem about in my second book—is more radical than the old Re-Bar.

Footnote, though: Does anyone remember the prescient Consolidated Works art gallery and performance space at 410 Terry Ave. where Amazon headquarters are now?

This Week’s Obsessions

1) On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

I picked up Chang-Rae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea when sci-fi writer Chloe Gong included it on her list of cyberpunk must-reads in the NYT last November [I’m All Lost In, #110, 11/22/25.] But I was quickly bored by the aquatic rather than cybernetic narrative; the protagonist, an agile young woman named Fan, is a skilled tank diver in a fish harvesting colony.

Fortuitously, I picked the book back up this week and read on. Fan, as the remainder of chapter one explains, is a quiet apostate who has become legendary for abruptly leaving the sheltered company town to search for her mysteriously excommunicated and banished boyfriend, Reg. The world beyond Fan’s anodyne and efficient colony is one of ad-hoc, post-Wal-Mart America “open counties” and sequestered, elite “charter villages.”

Admittedly, I was still only reading along absentmindedly. But then the narrator, who plays the part of an epic bard, ends chapter one with this delicate mic drop: “Why before leaving she had to poison some of the tanks is not fathomable.” This jarring line in an otherwise chatty prologue alerted me that Lee was a devious writer with a story to tell.

On Such a Full Sea is turning out to be more post-apocalyptic than cyberpunk, and so far, more Greek myth than novel. “So Fan went this way,” chapter four beings after she slips past the gate. “Instead of heading north or south on the main coastal tollway she veered westward, onto the olden roads…”

A bit like young Oedipus being found abandoned and near-death by a local shepherd, Fan is rescued at the beginning of her new life on the side of the road by a bearded and gruff, but curiously gentle, open county prepper whose “nose looked like it had been broken multiple times.”

And so Lee’s futurist mythology begins.

2) Goodnight Baby by the Butterflys

Myrna and Mary were originally in the Crystals

I consider myself well-versed in early-1960s girl-group pop [I’m All Lost In, #15, 1/25/24.] But I had never heard of Bed-Stuyvesant’s Butterflys. It turns out they were indie-label mates at Red Bird with fellow real-life teenagers: the Shangri-Las, the seismic juvie-hall hitmakers, (Leader of the Pack, Walking in the Sand, Give Him a Great Big Kiss) from Queens.

Originally called The Buttons, The Butterflys’ story is one of fits and starts. And it overlaps with the story of more famous Crystals (He’s a Rebel, Then He Kissed Me, Da-Do-Ron-Ron.)

The Butterflys’ only hit (in air quotes) was their 1964 debut single Goodnight Baby. Written by Brill Building genius Ellie Greenwich and including the important lyrics “One kiss can lead to another/And baby, you know they always do,” it comes with a lightly sinking, nearly-spoken-word iambic verse over a big beat, quiet brushes, and “shoop-shoops” and “ooooohs.”

I'll be standin' there by my window
Watchin' you 'til you're outta sight
Then I'll lay my head on my pillow
And dream about the things we did tonight

The teen-opera angst builds into the chorus with the lines: “Better go home now/Please think of me when you turn out the light.”

I went public with my obsession on the #8 bus late Monday night when I cued up the Butterflys on my iPhone speaker to disrupt a tense standoff at the front of the bus.

3) Playing You Really Got a Hold On Me on Piano

Speaking of early 1960s pop. I’m also obsessed with the Motown standard You Really Got a Hold On Me, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles 1962 smash and Motown’s debut single. As I seem to regularly [I’m All Lost In, #27, 4/19/24], I re-learned this pop blues song in A on piano this week reveling in Robinson’s meaningful inversions.

I’m All Lost In, #132: Ani-marathon; the #8; Let Me Be. Plus this week in X>Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#132

This Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Anker’s MacBook Pro Charger > Apple Charger $27.99 as opposed to $117.59. And also: Because it uses a USB-C cable instead of Apple’s finicky MagSafe attachment, I’m betting the cord on the Anker version won’t inevitably (and promptly) devolve into something that looks like your dog’s chew toy.

Dividing Your Poetry Collection into Sections > A Continuous Scroll of Poems I’ve been obliviously submitting my 69-poem-manuscript as one non-stop epic without realizing the wisdom—and energizing touch—of divvying it up into sections. Full credit to my friend Dallas, a high school English teacher and poet, who suggested taking this consequential action. “Great way to control themes and pacing,” he texted as we traded messages about submitting our current and respective magnum opuses.

I’d add my own take to Dal’s reasoning: Sections don’t merely help you manage a manuscript. They first help you clarify it.

Walking > Wallowing I was feeling so sorry for myself last Saturday night that I nearly induced cold symptoms. The psychosomatic blues.

Rather than moping all night, I made an 8:30-pm-decision to get off the beanbag and out of the apartment. I joined my pal Glenn and his out-of-town friend C__; they were hanging out on the back patio of the Lookout Bar & Grill [I’m All Lost In, #61, 12/14/24.] We had a lovely time bloviating about the topics of the day, but more noteworthy: Walking the 20 blocks to the bar was enough to jar me out of my imaginary cold right away.

Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. —St. Augustine

Walking also provided a dopamine antidote to the blues later in the week. I was gloomy on Thursday afternoon and wisely decided to walk it off, trekking home from Pioneer Square up Yesler to 12th and into Capitol Hill. Once again, my mood lightened.

And while, I wasn’t blue on Tuesday: An evening walk through the Olympic Sculpture Park to Pocket Beach made for an excellent time in its own right.

Pocket Beach, Elliott Bay, 4/21/26

None of this is a revelation. I’m a lifelong walker; I once even had a blog called The Pedestrian Chronicles.

This week’s obsessions:

1) The Ani-marathon

I saw Momoru Oshii’s 1995 anime cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell back in February [I’m All Lost In, #122, 2/15/26.] It was playing on the big screen at SIFF Uptown. Watching this breathtaking art film made me proud of the human race.

This week, at SIFF’s Downtown location, I got to see Oshii’s earlier anime epic, Angel’s Egg (1985.) I was awestruck again, captivated by the movie’s haunting images. For example, the ghostly schools of fish shinnying as shadows on the sides of ancient buildings and abandoned infrastructure. I actually hadn’t realized Angel’s Egg was an Oshii film. When the lights came up and I turned to XDX to say I thought the movie rivaled Ghost in the Shell as a cult masterpiece, she broke the news. I gasped. It was as if a fairy had just appeared in front of me.

The lairs of Angel’s Egg, 1985

Oshii’s Angel’s Egg imagines a Garden-of-Eden Bible story filtered through an anxious dystopian manga novel. Set to long stretches without dialogue, a determined young girl guards and cradles a mystical egg (as if it’s an infant) while she rummages through the wastelands of a world ravaged by an end-times flood: Gothic ruins; damp, stone streets, alleyways, and dirty rivers; twisted underground caverns and dreary rain. Presumably it’s an underwater city domed by Noah’s capsized arc; that’s the other Bible story Oshii reimagines in the film.

Appearing as a cosmic messenger, a reticent caped boy with an electronic staff and billowing hair alights from a colossal, groaning space-rover and accompanies the girl on her sullen sojourn through the sodden cityscape. Rather than becoming her ally though, and despite the growing affection between the quiet pair, the heroic boy is calmly intent on cracking the egg. Noir mysticism ensues featuring Oshii’s array of hand-drawn cinematic images. Dripping lairs and cryptic stairwells. Steampunk machinery. An orbital electric eye in the pink-and-orange sky. Glass water jugs and floating Greek shrines made of stone faces. Twisted trees and cracked embryos. Fossils of dreaming birds. Howling winds.

Sorry for all the melodramatic lists. But alongside an eerie experimental score by composer Yoshihiro Kanno, Oshii’s slow rush of symbols defines this fable more than the minimal though poetic script.

Angel’s Egg was screened as part of SIFF Downtown’s Ani-marathon, a two-week run of Japanese anime classics. The festival actually started late last week with a Friday afternoon screening of Satoshi Kon’s‍ ‍Millennium Actress (2001). I saw that one too.

Millennium Actress is a sweeping love story about a fictitious legendary Japanese movie star named Chiyoko Fujiwara who, as a young teenager, fell for a mysterious revolutionary. Chiyoko is now an elderly woman and as she reminisces over the story of her desperate romantic pursuit, her recollections merge with the scenes she once played on camera as the heroine of mid-20th century, genre-action-films: Samurai movies, WWII epics, and late-’60s sci-fi.

Chiyoko’s narrative also melds with the story of a documentary filmmaker named Genya Tachibana. He’s interviewing her for a retrospective. And he’s desperately in love with her. Tachibana’s interview with the elderly actress serves as the conceit for the film’s narrative. And for its parallel-universe jump cuts as Tachibana and his sidekick cameraman are transported into Chiyoko’s dreamstate world.

Anime is good at dreamstates. As their audience, we are transported there too.

2) The #8

I love that Seattle has a Millennial mayor whose politics match the Millennial punk rockers Tacocat; or at least match their riotous 2014 pop-punk anthem demanding better public transit, F.U. #8.

Back in January, I wrote about Mayor Wilson’s plan (to come up with a plan) to upgrade the infamously slow and erratic #8 [I’m All Lost In, #118, 1/18/26.] It was the former-Transit-Riders-Union-leader’s first executive order as mayor of Seattle.

This week, she unveiled SDOT’s fix: Adding a dedicated bus-lane on Denny Way eastbound between 5th Ave and Fairview Ave. N where the #8 inevitably gets stuck behind cars queuing up to get on I-5.

ECB reported the street-makeover details on PubliCola:

On Wednesday, Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp that will divert cars off Denny at Boren, closing down the perpetually clogged pathway at Yale … Crews will paint nine new blocks of eastbound bus lanes on Denny between 5th Ave. downtown and Fairview Ave. N just before the freeway, where they’ll join up with an existing bus lane that will be shifted from its current location in the middle of the street over to the south curb. Yale Street, a notorious choke point, will no longer provide access to I-5; instead, southbound I-5 traffic will be funneled along Boren Ave.

The overdue War on Cars has finally begun as Mayor Wilson tries to re-balance Seattle’s streets; The Urbanist reveled in the nerdy transit policy details too.

I’m mostly reveling in how this great news maps my own transit life. Catching the eastbound #8 on Denny Way at the Cedar St./5th Ave. stop in front of Zeek’s Pizza has became a defining detail of my 2026 now that XDX lives three blocks away from the stop in Belltown.

The #8 stop at Denny & Cedar St./5th Ave, 4/25/26

3) Let Me Be

I excised them from my feed once before [I’m All Lost In, #8, 12/7/23.] But the Beatles are back. For some reason. Persistently.

I was a Beatles zealot in elementary school. And I remained equivocally pro-Beatles throughout college. But I don’t need dudes playing Beatles riffs nor more clips from the Let It Be movie (original or restored version) on my feed.

Once again I’m clicking “not interested” and “not relevant” as I try to send my algorithm the message that I don’t believe in yesterday.

Midsummer Dream House publishes my poem “Ampules in Medias Res”

Some of the images in my poem “Ampules in Medias Res” channel an electronic music show I saw last summer. The artist, Chaia, had some eloquent stage banter about the history of the Jewish diaspora. She plays experimental Yiddish ambient [I’m All Lost In, #89, 6/28/25.]

Given her re-mix aesthetic, I don’t think she’ll mind that I ended up sampling her imagery into my own story.

This week, the gorgeous online poetry journal Midsummer Dream House published the poem.

I’m All Lost In, #131: A Bowie song; a Goethe novel; and a different podcast than usual. Plus the week in X > Y and two music recommendations.

I’m All Lost In…

the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#131

Before I get to this week’s roundup, here’s a pair of music recommendations:

The first one came up this week as a reverent Yes, please while I was going through my Abstract R&B playlist looking for an album that could ease me into the night: The Ahmad Jamal Trio’s casual live record, 1958’s But Not for Me.

The second recommendation is for when night actually comes: Code, a 2014 release from the slightly mysterious electronic musician Jun Nushimura.

Ahmad Jamal, 1958. Maybe skip sprightly track 2. Otherwise this album is the height of Cool jazz.

Jun Nushimura’s 2014 debut, Code

The Week in X is greater than Y

Voice Memos > Texts Dictating texts can be more efficient than typing them. Unfortunately, playing CEO on your phone in public is obnoxious and absurdist. And the mondegreen mess of typos you get is just as bad as the typos you get from eking out texts on the iPhone keyboard.

Better to try voice memos—an outright upgrade to full-fledged recordings. This throwback to voice mail constitutes a dignified dispatch of TLC between friends or loved ones. And it doesn’t create the anxiety of an incoming call.

Voice memos whisk in with the mini-dopamine thrill of text messages. They can also come with the intimate din of someone banging around their kitchen or hustling to catch the bus while their familiar voice provides a clarity that’s often missing from ambiguous texts.

Replacing the Tooth on the Right Side > Replacing the Tooth on the Left Side 2026 in dental surgery continues apace [I’m All Lost In, #119, 1/25/26 & I’m All Lost In, #130, 4/12/26.] On Thursday morning, I went for step 2 in getting a tooth implant on my upper left side. This was a follow-up to my January visit when they initiated the treatment plan, yanking the tooth (the first left-side bicuspid) to deal with an infected root canal below. An alarming blister had formed on my gums there which is what roused me into serious dental care. I think the root canal got screwed up because I’ve actually been missing the first bicuspid on the upper right side for a decade, and I’ve been avoiding chewing there. That likely traumatized the left side thanks to excessive wear and tear.

During Thursday’s visit, I told the dentist that if the replacement on the left went well, I’d finally replace the longstanding MIA tooth on the right too. But when he looked at my x-ray, he suddenly recommended replacing that one first.

Improv at the oral surgeon’s doesn’t seem like the best move, but he convincingly explained that swapping sides would allow more time for the bone to grow back on the left above the spot where he’d yanked the tooth in January. The additional bone marrow would make it easier to do the implant next year, whereas the right side was ready to go now.

And so upon leaving the appointment I had a post that looked like a plastic divot from an Ikea shelf screwed into the marrow on the upper right rather than the upper left as first planned.

Aryna Sabalenka’s Serve > Aryna Sabalenka’s Serve My favorite tennis player Aryna Sabalenka, or Daffy Saby as she’s known in my household, has been World No. 1 for a solid year and a half.

Conventional wisdom holds that Sablenka, as reiterated in a surprise Esquire cover story this week, is unbeatable right now because she’s chilled out. Specifically: As opposed to being the power-hitting, hot-headed Goliath she used to be, she’s more Zen these days. The commentators say Sabalenka’s tennis enlightenment has shown up in the guise of her more evolved game: Playing the net, using drop shots, and being a more nimble mover. She’s no longer just standing there blasting from the baseline.

Sure. But I think this narrative belies the fact that Sabalenka’s power game, especially her devastating serve, now comes with even more thunder than it used to. The data bears me out. Saby’s serve is about three miles-per-hour faster this year than her career average (109 mph v 106 mph). And she’s hitting more aces (4.9 per match v 4.7).

I think this reliably heroic serve is making the difference in 2026. I’m not discounting the theory that Daffy Saby is a more well-rounded and relaxed player than she used to be. But it hasn’t come at the expense of her power game. To the contrary: She’s gotten more powerful as she’s mellowed. Her return speeds have ticked up too. (Footnote and a sign-of-the times confession: I used A.I. to find these comparison numbers.)

Speaking of lightning-bolt serves: I’m happy to report I hit an ace myself last Sunday morning during my match at Volunteer Park’s Court 3 against Valium Tom. And not just any ace. It was down the center T on game point.

“Clearly,” Tom said after I felt compelled to announce that I’d placed the hot-shot serve on purpose—as opposed to my usual speculative approach.

This Week’s Obsessions

1) The Chorus to Bowie’s 1972, Post-Ziggy-Stardust Single: John, I’m Only Dancing on Piano

I’ve written about practicing this self-consciously comely bit of rock & roll camp before [I’m All Lost In, #36, 6/21/24.] This time I’m specifically fixated on the archly artistic finale to the chorus. I’ve spent several hours this week trying to match the walking B-down-to-D (and then back up again) half-steps melody in the right hand with the syncopated E-to-E octave bobbing in the left.

And if I can get the melody and the bass working at the same time, I want people to stop telling me how hip the past is. *

*A re-mix of one of my all-time favorite lines: “And if we can get Sonny, Trane and Ornette Coleman working at the same time, I want people to stop telling me how hip Paris is!" —LeRoi Jones, Original review of Coltrane Live at Birdland, 1964, collected in Black Music, 1967.

2) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Goethe

Notwithstanding: the past does include the novel I’m currently reading. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795.) It’s the German literary giant’s first (and some would argue literature’s first) coming-of-age novel. It’s about an idealistic theater kid named Wilhelm Meister who wants to escape his bourgeois trajectory to pursue a life of art instead.

The opening chapters track pre-teen Wilhem’s fascination with puppet shows. When he figures out that the puppets aren’t moving or speaking on their own, he wonders “but, then, how came it all to be so pretty, and to look just as if they both spoke and moved themselves?”

Mesmerized by the makeshift theater and curtain his father had set up, he “lifted the…screen, and poked in my head” trying to fathom: “Where were the lights and the people who managed the deception? I wished to be at the same time among the enchanters and the enchanted, at the same time to have a secret hand in the play, and to enjoy, as a looker-on, the pleasure of illusion.”

Soon enough, Wilhelm is regularly enlisting his siblings and other neighborhood kids to help turn his parents’ sitting room into a stage for his own productions. These rudimentary affairs—unintentionally comedic to the grown ups assembled—turn into Goethe’s metaphors for the mechanics of human artistry. They’re also prompts for Wilhelm’s yearning discoveries. On one opening night when the motley troupe suddenly realizes they’ve forgotten to memorize their lines—they thought their costumes alone would compel them to inhabit their assigned “personages”—Wilhelm attempts “in the heat of invention” to bail them out by reciting lines from a different play they’d performed. He’s hoping to superimpose one play onto another. It may be the world’s first mashup.

In addition to anecdotal allegories like this, Goethe also presents more straight-forward moments to lay out Wilhem’s (and I’m guessing Goethe’s own) inquiry into the life of an artist. When—as a sophisticated teenager now—Wilhelm is wrestling with his dreaded preordained life in commerce, Goethe scripts a philosophical back-and- forth between Wilhem and his clever, more practical best friend Werner about the standoff between art and capitalism. A snippet:

Werner: I know of nothing in the world more rational than to turn the folly of others to our own advantage

Wilhelm: Perhaps it were a nobler satisfaction to cure men of their follies.

3) Not the Tennis Podcast I Usually Listen To: The Player’s Box

Jessica Pegula in typical eye-roll mode.

I check in on the WTA website several times a day. I have a subscription to the Tennis Channel (I signed up for it when I got back from Indian Wells in early March, and I haven’t stopped watching since.) And of course, I religiously tune in every new epidose of The Tennis Podcast when it hits on Monday morning. Still. it’s not enough tennis content for me. So, I’ve started listening to another podcast: The Player’s Box.

This boisterous show, which comes out every Tuesday, stars four American WTA normies, and besties: World No. 5 Jessica Pegula; World No. 17 Madison Keys; doubles star Desirae Krawczyk; and veteran doubles specialist Jennifer Brady.

The Player’s Box distinguishes itself from typical hot-take analysis and tennis news roundup podcasts with the free-wheeling group’s high-school-cafeteria camaraderie, inside-the-tour-locker-room knowledge (and cheekiness), and low-level sarcasm about pro tennis and life in general. They’ve also got a battery of playful, regular conceits such as “Unforced Error of the Week” or sometimes “Winner of the Week.” These are sit-com-style mishaps or mini-success stories from their personal lives, which is largely what this entertaining podcast is about. Many of their blunders are airport related, given their lives on tour.

It’s a treat to have a superstar in the lineup like Pegula; she won the 500-level Charleston Open right before last week’s episode. And even as she regularly idles in teenage eye rolls, she has the warmth of a mom and a vet (she’s 32) and the last-word insights of a calming head coach.

I’m All Lost In, #130: A 1960s art film; another Tsvetaeva poem; flossing and gummies; plus the week in X > Y, including tax breaks for developers > fees on developers.

I’m All Lost In …

the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week …

#130

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Tax Breaks for Developers > Fees on Developers Urbanist Mayor Katie Wilson is throwing out her slow-growth predecessor’s stubborn “I’m-from-here” comp plan so she can build “taller, denser, faster” instead. It’s why I voted for her. [I’m All Lost In, #107, 11/1/25.]

This renewed push for density and affordable housing gives me an opportunity to promote a policy I think should be front and center to any housing plan. I’ve editorialized for the concept many times on PubliCola: Funded inclusionary zoning, or FIZ. The idea pairs inclusionary zoning (the requirement that developers include affordable housing units in their developments) with the tax-break-incentive approach that rewards developers if they choose to build affordable housing.

Erica has a TLDR summary of the concept on PubliCola this week in her related article about a group of developers who are calling for a break from the fees they pay for affordable housing. Developers are currently penalized when they build housing; you’d think they were synthesizing opioids.

Erica writes:

The concept [FIZ] flips the script on development, treating density (i.e. apartments, i.e. renters) as a good thing while also ensuring that affordable housing gets built. Developers aren’t charitable organizations—if a project doesn’t make sense to them, they won’t build it—so instead of penalizing new housing with fees, cities like Portland are trying incentives to build new housing at all income levels.

Public Tennis Courts > Private Tennis Clubs Too good to be true, I kept warning myself after a friend of a friend told me one of his co-workers had recently joined a tennis club. Evidently, the colleague now has easy access to courts, tennis partners, leagues, and lessons.

Finding a regular tennis game and partner in Seattle is a tough draw. People are reluctant to commit to anything. And it rains so much. Would the Sand Point Tennis Center be a game changer? The $200 membership fee wasn’t unreasonable.

But I was right. It was too good to be true. The membership doesn’t get you anything other than more fees, including $54 to reserve a court and another $15 if you want to invite a non-member to play. By comparison: It costs $16 to reserve a court at a city park. Which I ended up doing in protest this week.

Also: The Sand Point Tennis Center’s website is insistently evasive. I got lost in the circuitous links, bewildering guidelines, and the unfriendly, gatekeeping jargon.

Individuals who wish to play on a team can submit a request to be added to the waiting list at your NTRP. When a volunteer captain needs another player, the TCSP Team Coordinator will pass on wait list player information.

Meanwhile, as far as I could tell, their flex leagues aren’t coed. This undermined the overriding reason for wanting to join in the first place.

My unforced error of the week? Unwittingly putting $200 on my credit card to become a TCSP member before I realized how absurd the place is.

Talking to Strangers > Remaining Aloof File this under city serendipity. I went to an art film classic at Northwest Film Forum on Wednesday night (more on that in a moment). As we were waiting for the film to start, the young, bearded guy sitting in the row behind me noted—amiably as opposed to unctuously—that one of the slides cycling through onscreen was an ad for a film his friend had made with Charli XCX. I set aside any grumpiness that a boring and braggadocious statement like that might prompt, and I took up the overture. I started chatting with him.

Let’s join the conversation midstream:

Him: I’m visiting from Boise.
Me (on a whim, but kind of figuring): Do you know Glenn ___? Him: I had dinner with him last night.
Me: Ah, yes. I was supposed to be there. Dinner with Glenn and his friend C___. But I couldn’t make it.

We immediately took a selfie from our movie theater seats and texted it to Glenn.

It turned out this fellow from Boise was a filmmaker himself and was doing reconnaissance on the Seattle art scene. He wanted to see if he should move here. He craves a collaborative culture where other people are looking to team up on projects. After living in Boise for 10 years, he’s decided that’s not the case there.

After the movie, he and I and XDX strolled through the Drag. XDX had joined me for the movie. She filled him in on the local creative technology and immersive art scene; XDX designs generative light shows [I’m All Lost In, #120, 2/1/26.] And I told him about my writing, including my past life as a news editor when I’d edited local filmmaker Charles Mudede’s crime blotter column, the basis for Charles’ notable film Police Beat. Charles is also Seattle’s all-star public intellectual [I’m All Lost In, #54, 10/25/24.]

Him: I saw a lecture by Charles before coming to the movie.

This Week’s Obsessions

1966. Original poster.

1) Ingmar Bergman’s Persona at Northwest Film Forum
The movie I saw on Wednesday evening was Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. NWFF was screening Persona to celebrate the movie’s 60th anniversary.

At times psychedelic, at others ethereal, and mostly stark, Persona is a tense meditation on self reflection dramatized symbolically enough through the story of an actress in the throes of a personality crisis about her role in the world. Bergman echoes this universal narrative with hyper-meta touches of self-conscious cinema. This includes sampling spooky footage from old movies. And more dramatically, showing the machinery of film itself both functioning and going awry. Movie projector lamps. Film reels. And faltering, frozen, and eventually disintegrating frames.

I’m most interested in Persona as an instructive artifact of 1966, a monumental jump-cut year that—just like the aforementioned frames in this film itself—ripped the 20th century apart mid-stream and then continues on, .

Zeitgeist Time cover. 1966

1966: In June, the civil rights movement flares into radical politics as militant spokesman Stokely Carmichael coins the phrase “Black Power.” The Velvet Underground are in the studio in the spring recording their seismic experimental debut LP. Second Wave feminists founded the women’s rights organization NOW. Teenagers riot on Sunset Strip against curfews. (There’s a poem in my first collection about this historic night of youth-movement consciousness.)

… Coltrane’s Meditations. Revolver. Pet Sounds. The Byrds’ 5D. Steve Reich releases Come Out, his groundbreaking exercise in sampling, looping, and mixing. Ralph Nader and the corporate accountability movement come to the fore with Nader’s investigative expose Unsafe at Any Speed. LSD is criminalized, ironically marking the emergent power of the counter culture. Three years before Stonewall, queers riot against police brutality at Compton’s Cafeteria. Susan Sontag publishes her critical theory masterpiece Against Interpretation.

And, along with two other groundbreaking art film’s—Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Fémininand Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup—Bergman releases his shattering film Persona.

Wonderfully, the theater was packed for this iconic movie. A good sign for Seattle on a Wednesday night.

Bad sign, though: There weren’t many places to get food afterward. Too bad the Boise filmmaker was looking for a late dinner. There were only a couple of places I could point him to at the witching hour of 9:30.

2) Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva, Week No. 2

For the second week in a row, the Poet Laureate of Night, early 20th century Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva [I’m All Lost In, #129, 4/4/26] is on my list of obsessions.

Last week I was savoring Tsvetaeva’s odes to the feeling of hope that midnight stirs in the human heart. This week I’m reveling in her odes to the hope that despair stirs in the human heart.

Casting the ruthless desert as the personification of love, her 1923 poem Sahara shimmers: “we entered one another’s eyes/as if they were oases.” But reality sets in two stanzas later: “Don’t search for him./ All deserts forget the thousands of/those who sleep in them.”

There’s no evaporating Tsvetaeva’s soul, though. Even the “stifling” desert’s “reliable grave” cannot erase the “charming tremor” of the human spirit—and body. Tsvetaeva concludes: “the Sahara in one/seething collapse will/cover you also with sand like sprinkled/foam. And be your hill!”

Exclamation mark, hers.

3) Flossing

This is another repeat from last week; this one having transitioned into a fixation after first being on my X > Y list (flossing with a tooth-brush attachment > than flossing with a floss pick or a strand of floss.)

All I have to add to my earlier summary is this: Floss in the shower. Perhaps while the Anastasia Potapova v. Lilly Tagger match plays in the background on the Tennis Channel.

P.s. I could have promoted another recent X > Y item to an obsession this week: Gummies > Booze [I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/9/26.]

As I approach 50 days without drinking alcohol, gummies have taken whiskey’s spot on my regular Friday evening agenda. This past weekend’s highlight: Standing in front of Safeway’s spice shelf for 15 minutes late Friday.

I’m All Lost In, #129: Upstairs on Pike St.; late-night poetry; ancient poetry; and the week in X > Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week…

#129

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Flossing with a Floss-Pick Attachment > Flossing with a Floss Pick by Itself or with Just Floss Four out of five dentists will surely disagree with me. As will all the women I’ve ever dated, expert and dedicated flossers one and all. Keeping your gums healthy with a sole piece of flexible floss is surely the most effective method. But as a sudden convert to this satisfying and salubrious bedtime ritual, I give credit to the more user-friendly option for turning me into a home hygienist: The toothbrush-floss-pick-attachment combo.

A blessing for home hygiene.

I’m not dexterous enough to angle around the interproximal back corners with an elusive and lone strand of floss. Nor with a floss pick. Those awkward options have been a longstanding deterrent. So, thank you to my dentist, an outlier among those proverbial Four-out-of-five. She was slick enough to drop a couple of these ingenious flossing contraptions into my complimentary goodies bag after my lengthy cleaning appointment last week. The reserve of attachable floss picks is an added delight.

Asking Questions > Making Statements ECB and I went to a town hall on Friday night where Mayor Katie Wilson took the stage to be interviewed about her disappointing view on surveillance cameras. Basically, the usually lefty mayor says she’s inclined to go along with her conservative predecessor’s tough-on-crime plan to expand CCTV police surveillance in a few more neighborhoods. My sense is that Wilson is stuck between two constituencies that are hard-earns for white progressives like her: POC elders who want the cameras and younger POC voters who don’t; the white left is against them obviously, which smacks of privilege to older POC voters.

In a supposed nod to her younger base, Wilson announced she’s pausing the expansion while she first contracts out a study to try and answer some basic questions: How effective are cameras at deterring and solving crime in the first place? And how much of a threat do they pose to privacy, particularly for immigrants, trans people, and people seeking reproductive care?

Surveillance opponents got organized and packed the room, dominating the follow-up Q&A portion of the program. Their concerns are legitimate and serious: They worry the authoritarian Trump administration will step in and use the cameras as part of MAGA’s war on brown people and the trans community.

It’s certainly smart for the left to hold one of their own like Wilson accountable. But…

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, Town Hall, 3/27/26

But they’d empower their cause by asking questions at public forums rather than giving lectures (or demanding endorsements for socialist candidates in other races.)

Pressing Wilson to answer actual questions, such as asking her to identify the metrics she’ll use to evaluate her study, would heighten civic discourse rather than shut it down with performative, wide bro stances and folded arms.

Extensive Footage > Snippets I’m a fan of idyllic, rainy reels with hashtags like slowliving, calm_nest, cozyworkspace, serenyvibes, quietmoments, and stillness. I've been sprinkling my feed with them lately.

But these calming clips are sabotaging their own sweet intentions by ending abruptly after just five seconds. I don’t want to worry about impending endings when I’m trying to relax.

Drawn to slow media, I’ve switched to uninterrupted Youtube footage of long-form rainstorms.‍ ‍

This Week’s Obsessions

1) Paper Fan Cocktail Bar

Pro-housing YIMBYs advocated for and passed a bill in the state legislature this session that stopped local jurisdictions from prohibiting ground-floor housing in traditionally commercial districts. The bill, SB 6026, allowed housing wherever commercial development is allowed. I support the idea—any new housing is good housing. And doing away with housing prohibitions is smart public policy. But I think the opposite configuration is also MIA in Seattle: Commercial development in residential districts. I raised this point when the legislative session got underway in January [I’m All Lost In, #118, 1/18/26.]

And now for my second flip rejoinder to this legislation that allows housing development on the ground floor: How about allowing commercial development above the ground floor? I’m thinking of urbanism in Asia where commercial districts flourish in alleys [I’m All Lost In, #122, 2/15/26] and shops are stacked horizontally [I’m All Lost In, #109, 11/16/25.]

So, I was happy to discover the Chinese-owned, Hong Kong-themed Paper Fan Cocktail Bar this Thursday night. With seating for just 18 people, it’s a small, dimly-lit second-floor lounge tucked away up the stairs from noisy Biang Biang Noodles on Pike St.

I’m still going alcohol free (41 days at this point), so I had a sweetened matcha NA cocktail. However, my two comrades, Colby and Glenn who’d been before and were eager to return, ordered Paper Fan’s specialty: Boozy tea-infused drinks that alter your senses with floral and ethanol scents. They also tried a shot-glass sampler of smoky Baijiu, China’s popular grain liquor.

The food and drinks at Paper Fan are great—in addition to the matcha, I had a dripping and delicious tofu bao. But it’s the epic and chill-all-at-once mood that makes good on the dramatic promise of a second-floor spot.

I would definitely not go here on a first date. But it’s perfect for a third.

2) Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva described fellow early-20th century Russian-poetry icon Vladimir Mayakovsky as a “singer of gutter miracles.” This lyrical phrase comes from Tsvetaeva’s 1921 poem To Mayakovsky where she also dubs him: “clumsy-footed angel” and writes, “Hullo there, you who prefer/topaz to diamond!” Tsvetaeva was certainly writing about herself. As most of us do when attempting to explain our hero artists.

Tsvetaeva is my hero this week. I’m reading her Penguin Classics Selected Poems. I’m mesmerized by her “deeply faithless” vagabond verse. And her evening excursions where night is “the first mother of songs … in whose fingers lies the bridle of the four winds.”

Her post-midnight walks through the windswept streets of Moscow are a function of insomnia. And insomnia is a function of longing. Written in 1916 when she was 24, her Insomnia cycle is an after-hours mission statement of simultaneous disappointment and exuberance:

As I love to/
kiss hands, and/
to name everything, I/
love to open/
doors!/
Wide — into the night! …

This night today I am alone in the night —/
A sleepless and a homeless nun!/
This night today I hold all the keys to this/
the only capital city …

I am/ only a shell where the ocean is still sounding

These lines were enough to convince me. But then, on the heels of my current obsession with luminous neighborhood windows [I’m All Lost In, #127, 3/22/26] (an extension of a lifelong obsession I first contracted in the teenage suburbs of D.C.), she concludes with these supreme lines:

Here’s another window/
with more sleepless people!/
Perhaps — drinking wine or/
perhaps only sitting,/
or maybe two lovers are/
unable to part hands./
Every house has/
a window like this./

A window at night: cries/
of meeting or leaving./
Perhaps — there are many lights,/
perhaps — only three candles./
But there is no peace in/
my mind anywhere, for/
in my house also, these/
things are beginning:/

Pray for the wakeful house,/
friend, and the lit window.

3) Roman Poet Ovid

Tsvetaeva’s bohemian POV also embraced free love. For instance, her 1915 friends-with-benefits poem, I’m glad your sickness, includes the lines: “calmly now embrace/another girl in front of me, without/any wish to cause me pain, as you/don’t burn if I kiss someone else… you do not cause/my sickness. And I don’t cause yours.”

This is a great contrast to the other poetry collection I’m obsessed with this week, ancient Roman poet Ovid’s Heroides (Heroines).

Judge a book by its cover. These cool-looking Penguin Classics are overflowing with divine poetry.

Ovid’s set of epistolary poems, with hilarious opening lines like “Will you read? Does your new wife forbid?”, features angry letters from mythological women such as Penelope, Briseis, Phaedra, Dido, Hermione, and Medea written to their boorish and villainous exes. The letters come with incisive ripostes: “both your ships and your promises/sail from this shore on the same wind;” “thus you spoke, with tears flowing down your false face;” and perhaps my favorite line, written by Hypsipyle in her letter to Jason, who abandoned her for the infamous murderer Medea: “I would have been Medea for Medea.”

In Ovid’s 8 BC feminism, flummoxed women anguish (through the voice of a male poet!) over the systematic sexism that traps them in Catch- 22 lives. It makes no difference if one is a slave like Briseis pleading paradoxically to the enemy’s general Achilles “what I received when you conquered me/give me again” or a queen like Penelope who’s discarded life leads her to conclude “Just remember, I was a young girl when you left;/ if you came at once you would find an old woman.”

As with Tsvetaeva (who committed suicide in 1941), many of Ovid’s heroines, like Phyllis who “longs for poison,” eventually take their own lives too.

——

Lastly, two recommendations: A coffeeshop and a movie. To mark the historic light rail opening across Lake Washington last Saturday—nice coverage from Ryan Packer at the Urbanist—I caught a new 2 Line train from Capitol Hill late in the afternoon for a casual 30-minute ride to Bellevue’s Spring District.

“District” is a misnomer. It’s mostly a desolate cement landscape with a prefab park in front of a brewery that looks like the school bus-zone in front of my old high school. But I did manage to find a miracle coffeeshop about three blocks away. Like the excellent Mintish [I’m All Lost In, #127, 3/22/26] Diwan Coffeehouse is Palestinian owned. And committing to Levant lusciousness, they serve lattes with shredded, sweet kataifi dough on top. Also a miracle: It’s open until 10 pm on Friday and Saturday nights.

Coffeeshop Oriented Development, Diwan Coffeehouse in Bellevue, 3/28/26

Given my well-documented obsession with genius American novelist Edith Wharton [I’m All Lost In, #99, 9/8/25], it may be surprising to hear that I’d never seen Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence. I haven’t read the book either, to be honest. But now that I’ve seen Scorsese’s riveting, straightforward version, and now that I’ve fallen for Michelle Pfeiffer’s nuanced Cousin Olenska (as hard as Daniel Day-Louis’ Newland Archer fell for her), Wharton is on my must-read list again.

I’m All Lost In, #128: The movie of Dorian Gray; a delicious Egyptian meal; a delicious vegan snack; and this week in X > Y.

I’m All Lost In,..

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#128

The week in X > (is greater than) Y

1) Walking in the Street > Walking on the Sidewalk Rats everywhere. They squeak and rustle in the shrubbery along the blocks that converge toward my apartment. I’ve noted some particularly notorious stretches on my walk home: the path under the canopy by the low-slung apartments on the south side of Mercer between 17th & 19th; next to the Safeway parking lot either heading north on 14th or east on John; the stretch of 15th just north beyond Pine St. where the rodents linger on both sides of the block; or on any non-arterial really, as the overgrown grass shrouds the skittering just beyond.

If it’s safe—and even when it’s not so safe—I’ve started drifting off the sidewalk and edging away from the bushes into the street where it’s less anxiety inducing to avoid cars than rats.

2) The Preview > The Movie Last month I saw a promising coming attraction for a new animated sci-fi movie called Arco. It looked lush and elegant. And exciting: Time travel. A.I. High-stakes pursuits.

This past Wednesday night, XDX set up the projector in her apartment, and we streamed it on the wall.

The movie was charming for a while. Artisan animation featuring: gentle robot servants and floating sleep nimbuses in hushed idyllic homes; automated street scenes of self-driving cars and e-scooters gliding past the shops of the future; and sylvan colonies atop fantastic infrastructure. This was the setting for Arco’s classic plot which starred a time-traveling lost boy from a distant-future ecotopia and a sullen and brainy girl who’s stuck in humanoid suburbia circa 2075. They collide at random and careen toward a tear in the sociopolitical continuum.

Too bad the movie itself—as opposed to the intriguing preview that hinted at philosophical tension—seemed more like a hijinks Saturday morning cartoon than a midnight movie.

‍3) -145 > +110 I asked Valium Tom to explain gambling odds to me; in addition to his literary brain power [I’m All Lost In, #123, 2/21/26], Valium Tom is an A math student.

Don’t worry, I’m not interested in gambling. But the Tennis Channel uses Las Vegas odds to tell you who’s favored in my beloved matches, and I haven’t been able to make any sense of it. For example, my favorite player Aryna Sabalenka was favored to beat Elena Rybakina in this week’s seismic women’s Miami Open semifinal -145 to +110. Huh? (Saby did end up winning convincingly in straight sets, setting up a final with Coco Gauff, which she also won big.)

An A.I. agent explained the odds this way:

-145 means that player is the favorite — you must risk more money to win a smaller profit. Positive odds, e.g., +110, mean that selection is the underdog — a smaller stake wins a larger profit.

I remained confused in part because the A.I. went on to say betting $145 only gets you $100 while betting $100 gets you $110. I couldn’t follow the lack of parallel construction; why did the winner’s -145 translate into betting a commensurate $145 while the underdog’s +110 translated into betting $100 not $110?

I’m not sure I’ve made sense of it yet, but I was able to find my own phrasing. Rather than framing things as what you win, frame them from the POV of the risk. You stand to lose $145 versus losing $100.

It’s been a week of confusing wording all around. I have to admit I had similar trouble parsing a statement I came across while reading the intro to a book of classical poetry: “The law is honored more in breach than in the observance,” the editor wrote, paraphrasing a famous Shakespeare line from Hamlet. I was taking the word “honored” literally, and so it took me a while to grasp the meaning: People break certain laws more often than they follow them. The additional implication is that it’s better for society when we breach certain laws.

I also had some trouble tracking one of the pivotal sound bites in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book I returned to this week after my disappointing foray into Aria Aber’s novel Good Girl [I’m All Lost In, #126, 3/14/26.] Wilde’s quip-prone stand-in Lord Henry advises Dorian: “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

I understood the idea of curing the soul with the senses, but I didn’t follow the idea of curing the senses. Is there a problem with the senses? Eventually, I gleaned that if you view the senses as sources of depravity and the soul as a moral force, Wilde means “regulating” or “curbing” rather than “curing.”

The real source of confusion for me, though, is this: I don’t consider the senses as prompts for bad behavior. Nor do I consider the soul as a moral spirit. I’m hardly qualified for a battle of wits with Oscar Wilde, the pithy master of instant philosophy. But my credo would be: “Feed the soul with the senses. Feed the senses with the soul.”

This Week’s Obsessions

1) The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Movie Version, 1945

Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, 1945

After delighting my soul and my senses with Wilde’s novel, I watched the 1945 Hollywood version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a quiet and surprisingly arty MGM film of shadows, haunted music, and gothic scene setting written and directed by Albert Lewin. (A young Angela Lansbury has a major role in the movie too.)

It’s a spooky flick thanks to lead actor Hurd Hatfield’s friendly yet unrelenting flat-line delivery. And chilling eyes.

While the movie largely follows and quotes Wilde’s novel verbatim, there are some changes, including a significant one. Lewin adds a new character: Portrait artist Basil Hallward’s niece Gladys Hallward, Dorian’s love interest (played by Donna Reed.) This improvisation on Wilde’s fable enhances the plot because it adds more substance to Dorian’s psychological paroxysms. It also helps deliver a more dramatic wallop to the already-stunning finale when the devil completes Dorian’s bargain and transfers the monstrous and doomed soul within the painting’s frame into Dorian’s corporeal frame. Some 30 years later, the Exorcist would echo this scene with its own haunted climax when young priest Damien Karras summons Satan’s soul into his own.

There’s a second excellent dose of artistic license in this movie rendition as well. The music. Not only do we get to hear the tranquil sounds of Chopin and Beethoven conjured live on a charmed piano—something we only get to read about in the novel —but we also get to witness one of Dorian’s “curious concerts, in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes,” as Wilde puts it.

19th-century Orientalism and Lewin’s apparent fetishism for “exotic” music are slightly cringe. But the jarring house concert scene that suddenly surrounds Gladys and Dorian’s dangerous courtship quietly captures Dorian’s growing disassociation and the emperor-has-no-clothes dynamic that exists between him and his intimidated acquaintances.

2) Au Beur

It was as ephemeral and unconcerned as an hour could be. Somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 pm on a late Saturday afternoon. The perfect time for getting a table at Au Beur, the Egyptian-French pop-up that settled into Fisherman’s Terminal off W. Nickerson. Au Beur is slang for a North African resident of France.

Setting up shop at the worker-owned, locally-sourced Filipino Pidgin Collective restaurant, a refashioned brewery space in the vague North Interbay neighborhood, this one-time menu featured a bevy of North African dishes.

We went wild ordering three servings of pita bread, a plate of toasted Egyptian short-grain rice, and three bowls of classic Middle Eastern spreads: Harissa (red-chili paste) mixed with shredded carrots, mashed squash, and fig tapenade; hummus loaded with charred veggies, pine nuts, and za’atar; and the evening’s prize, toum (fluffy, creamy garlic sauce) with a heavy dollop of diced onion, sumac, and celery cream spooned into the center.

A spread of Egyptian-French spreads, 3/21/26.

Hummus with charred veggies, Au Beur pop-up, North Interbay, Seattle, 3/21/26

XDX also ordered the cardamom and caraway seed chocolate mousse for dessert.

3) Melt-In-Your-Mouth Vanilla and Carob Treat

Consider this a follow-up to my Vegan Ice Cream is better than Ice Cream Ice Cream item from a few weeks ago [I’m All Lost In, #124, 3/1/26.]

In other words, XDX isn’t the only treat fiend. In addition to digging into the mousse at Au Beur myself, I breached my no-sugar diet at home this week. I blame it on one month now of being booze free.

Couple that with yet another lengthy dentist appointment and I award snack of the week to my improvised dessert: Take an Alden’s dairy-free vanilla bean frozen chocolate-cookie sandwich, smash it down with a spoon into a short chilled glass, and sprinkle two heaping scoops of carob powder on top.

Wait for it to begin melting before serving.

I’m All Lost In, #127: Low-brow capitalism; Low-IQ AI; and the paradox of empty houses; plus the week in X > Y.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#127

The Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Umm Kulthum > Fleetwood Mac Seattle's coffeeshop soundtracks need to change. It will be a welcome day if I never hear Fleetwood Mac nor Steely Dan in a coffeeshop again. Or any Velvet Underground/David Bowie/Joy Division-induced 1980s alt-radio jams either.

And so it was a tonic to hang out at the excellent new Palestinian-owned coffeehouse Mintish [I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/9/26] once again last Sunday where Nasser-era Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum starred as the morning radio prompt. As the ouds, zithers, violins, and tambourines backed her melismatic pop-opera vocals with micro-tones, my morning became one with the cafe.

I’m not suggesting that every coffeehouse in Seattle play Middle Eastern music in the morning. But both Stevie Nicks and the alt-rock classics have become interminable.

Baristas of Seattle: It’s time to take advantage of the music catalogs at your fingertips in the 21st century. Give us coffeeshop moods rather than rock radio.

Upright bass > Tanpura More from the land of micro-tones by way of an experimental gig at Wallingford’s reliable underground arts space, the Good Shepherd Chapel. This past Thursday night, local guitarist Trevor Eulau, aka Sh'ma (sh’ma is the Hebrew prayer word for “hear”), performed a complex yet somehow casual set of Eastern mode jams; he was seated on a meditation pillow.

Turning sitar-influenced guitar fingerwork into a hybrid of flamenco rhythms and Yiddish folk, Eulau anchored his playful guitar pyrotechnics to the passionate upright bass flow of Tony Lefaive.

Sh’ma, aka שמע, at the Good Shepherd Chapel, 3/19/26

‍As Elau’s Indian classical music expertise transformed his open-ended guitar compositions into ragas, it was hard not to imagine a tanpura drone in the mix. Elau’s decision to go with slappy, action-packed bass playing instead was a lovely mind scramble. American jazz rather than a meditative drone was the perfect choice for the international mashup.

Magda Linette > Iga Swiatek Tennis star Iga Swiatek—unbeatable in 2023 and most of 2024, and also the reigning 2025 Wimbledon champion—has always been a mysterious sort [I’m All Lost In, #54, 10/25/24.] Officious. Simmering. Robotic. In the habit of whispering to herself during her clinical and joyless wins, she’s a picture of inner turmoil and anhedonia.

This week at the Miami Open, World No. 50, Magda Linette beat Swiatek in the opening round. Linette, a 30-year-old journeyman from Swiatek’s native Poland, ended Swiatek’s 73-game streak: Swiatek, who’s 24, hadn’t lost a round-one match at a WTA tournament since 2021.

Tennis journalists ranging from the in-depth data-nerd blogger Ben Rothenberg, to an earnest Instagram Reels mason who goes by Christian’s Court, to the NYT’s tennis desk were all agog. (Me and my tennis fanatic bosom buddy Lee were texting about it right away.)

Urgent incoming text from fellow tennis fanatic Lee, 3/19/26

Admittedly, the tennis media had already been psychoanalyzing Iga. After her towel-tossing meltdown during her trying quarterfinal loss at Indian Wells to World No. 9 Elina Svitolina two weeks ago, Swiatek had suddenly lost her last five matches against top-10 players. She’d slipped to World No. 3.

In the larger scheme of things, World No. 3 is an exceptional ranking. But in the Iga-Swiatek scheme of things, the combination of her strained and remote personality with her downward trajectory was a story.

The media wants to know: What’s wrong with Iga?

The story is fascinating because Iga herself, like an AI suddenly achieving consciousness, is asking the question as well. On Thursday night, her existential mind poured out to the reporters in Miami:

This is like the worst nightmare a top tennis player can have, dropping in matches in terms of the level…

Honestly, now tennis feels complicated in my head…

I just must—I don’t know; unconsciously or consciously it’s hard for me to say—change things, and then my tennis kind of collapses….

I feel like I carry a lot of expectations, and I can’t really fulfill them right now. I need to get rid of them, because my game hasn’t been good enough to have any expectations….

I think I’m a bit confused, but there’s no way but forward…

I’ve always been an overthinker; lately it’s just been really intense… It’s hard for me to get rid ofmany thoughtsthat I have…when you overthink stuff on [the] tennis court, you’re never going to be smooth, you’re never going to be loose, you’re never going to have a good timing.

I feel like I make so many bad decisions or mistakes that it’s hard for me not to think. And later on—when you feel like your level is dropping and the stress comes in and your body gets tense—it’s even harder. So it’s been like a circle that I’ve been going through in matches.

After beating Swiatek, Linette lost in the next round in straight sets to Alex Eala, the World No. 31.

This week’s obsessions:

1) Empty Houses with the Lights On

3/16/26

Something is happening where nothing is happening. This is the koan on my block.

A trio of new townhouses has gone up at the corner of 19th & Mercer. Now for sale and staged with model furniture, the otherwise empty three-story homes are ablaze with lights all night. The ghost-lit development is adding life and energy to my muted street where the handful of neighborhood restaurants, shops, and bars close between 8:30 and 10 every night. The windows in the nearby housing go dark around the same time.

I’m a pro-density zealot. I’m excited that people might soon be moving into the new housing. And I’m holding out hope they’ll be as lively as the current invisible residents. But here’s my fear. Once real people do move in, the lights will shut off too early.

3/16/26

Obsessed last month too, 2/14/26

‍2) Low-Brow Capitalism

Web pages that idle in circular logic. International phone numbers no longer in service. Third-party subcontractors with mysterious urls spiked with dashes, misplaced capital letters, and pound signs. Customer service reps who speak like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is the hybrid world of internet enshitification [I’m All Lost In, #106, 10/26/25] and submerged capitalism that I found myself in Monday afternoon as I tried to retrieve a refund from the hotel I’d stayed at two weeks ago. No shade on the owners of the hotel; they were mensches [I’m All Lost In, #126, 3/14/26.] In fact, they suggested the refund themselves, profusely apologizing for the faulty lock on the door to my room.

When the refund failed to show up in my credit card account, I reached out to the hotel. They told me the refund had been deposited into the Expedia.com account connected to my reservation. The thing is: I hadn’t made my reservation through Expedia; I had made it through Booking.com, Expedia’s competitor.

And so started my journey into the brownfields of capitalism. I called Expedia first. They seemed to be the ones last seen with my reservation. When I eventually reached a live customer service rep, he asked me for an “itinerary” number. All I had was a “confirmation” number, of course.

“This conversation can serve no purpose unless you have the itinerary number,” the human Expedia rep told me. I eventually pressed him to look for my reservation with my confirmation number.

“There it is,” he said, though he suddenly sounded anxious. He abruptly provided me with a phone number for a company called M-Tu.com. And after reading me a separate, comically lengthy string of numbers, he told me to provide them with that. The phone number for M-Tu.com didn’t work. Nor did a second one I found on their lo-fi website. I sent them an email, but did so without hope.

I called Booking.com next. I gave the service rep there the confirmation number from the original sale. She was about to tell me the name of a “Partner Offer Company” that had apparently taken over the reservation. But then I got disconnected. I called back and reenacted the same series of pro forma computerized options before connecting to another human. This led once more to the mystery of Booking.com’s “Partner Offer Company,” for which it turned out there was no name nor contact information.

The folks at the hotel were as bewildered and frustrated as me. At this point, they simply Venmoed me the $184 refund.

My hypothesis is that my MIA reservation was channeled into a crude, penny-ante commodity market where third-party subcontractors come together to trade, nickel & dime, and survive on the detritus of an economy in collapse.

3) Low-IQ AI

‍A similar dispatch from the shoddy world this week: Startled by a Downtown Seattle Association fact sheet describing five discrete categories of trendy, affluent Seattle consumers who are supposedly keeping our local economy flush, I wrote a column for PubliCola about the unstable political situation we’re in. French Revolution Vibes, as my headline had it.

There was something else I could have written about, though. And I alluded to it in the column: ”[the report] reads like [it was] written by AI, an intern, or both.”

The shimmering, banal, and redundant prose the DSA used to describe Seattle’s rarefied consumers seemed like a warning sign in its own right about Seattle’s economy. Namely: That’s AI behind the curtain.

As with the three-card monte runaround I got trying to find my hotel refund, it was the same trick trying to make sense of the Downtown Seattle Association fact sheet. When I asked some basic questions—such as how they first identified the five discrete sets of consumers (“Was it based on surveys that member businesses had done with customers?”); how they came up with the descriptions; and why the percentages they’d divvied up between the five groups didn’t add up to 100—I got an unusually complicated answer from the usually helpful DSA spokesperson.

He told me: “These are not narrative descriptions that we authored but were generated” from an ArcGIS platform called Esri Tapestry that’s “used by retail brokers...”

He explained that the DSA hired a consultant called Downtown Works who oversees the program. I sent my questions to the owner of Downtown Works. She never responded.

I ended my PubliCola column with this:

The DSA profiles don’t add up to 100 percent of downtown Seattle’s customer base. Evidently, shoppers who account for 10 percent of downtown customers are going unnamed. ‍

3/3/16

Nova Literary Arts Magazine publishes my poem "Mental Health Poem."

I wrote "Mental Health Poem" two years ago. And I'm happy to report it was published this week by the gorgeous Nova Literary Arts Magazine

The opening line: "Airports remind me of the fertile crescent."

Please click the link above to read the whole poem and to peruse the journal, of which the editor says: “Volume 57 opens with an epigraph– ‘Why should [we] live in a world without feeling its weight?’ There’s something to be said for friction: the grit of textured pages between your thumb and forefinger, the little heaviness of a magazine in your bag– the way it forces you to consider what you’re thinking and doing. Every issue of Nova is a continued argument for the value of friction.”

I’m All Lost In, #126: Empty tables; my own personal prohibition; and Aria Aber’s Berlin. Plus the week in X > Y.

I’m All Lost In, #126

This Week in X > (is better than) Y:

My Memory of The Bats > The Bats The upbeat and gloomy sound of New Zealand’s The Bats. It’s the perfect example of the neo-1960s folk rock + garage rock equation that defined mid-80s alternative radio. Exhibit A: The band’s wistful ballad “Tragedy.” Or their equally miserable and jangly tunes “I Miss These Things” and “Candidate.”

I’ve written about this era before [I’m All Lost In, #101, 9/21/25]. It was my glum heyday. I was 19. I referred to the mopey swirling genre as “Smash Jangle.” I started an imaginary cassette label (for my own songs) called Sad & Groovy.

I don’t know why. But the Bats were hanging around my algorithm this week. So I tuned them in 40 years later. It’s sweet music, but it’s true what they say about going home again.

Café Mon Amour > All the Other Cafes in Palm Springs, CA I spent Sunday and Monday in Palm Springs, CA drifting from café to café. There’s no shortage of coffee shops and cafés in this languid bourgeois town. Stand in the sun-drenched center of the commercial district at S. Palm Canyon & W. Tahquitz Canyon and search on your phone for “nearby coffee.” You’ll get 20 results.

The one to choose is Café Mon Amour. Tasty quiche. Excellent croissants. Welcoming staff; the two people running this Parisian flight of fancy have the entrepreneurial air of a husband & wife team. And most of all: Step down into the sequestered salon to the left of the front counter and settle into one of the comfy chairs for hours of reading and writing at a votre propre table.

The 3 o’clock closing time goes against everything I believe about coffee shops [I’m All Lost In, #119, 1/25/26]. But I savored the quality time in the café’s quietude. They have perfect sandwiches too; I had the cucumber, tomato, onions, olives, pesto, and greens on baguette.

P.s. I feel compelled to note that I stayed at a magical motel during my Palm Springs getaway. It was located in the not-very-bourgeois outskirts of downtown. Only a 10-minute bus ride into town. Or a somehow lovely 20-minute walk past the car wash, the shuttered IHOP, the dusty gas stations, the dive-bar taquerias, and a sleepy escort walking along the nondescript drag early in the morning. The motel, the Stardust, came with free Oreos, Aztec-tiled floors, ballet costumes, and a dynamite shower. And as with the standout Café Mon Amour, the husband and wife entrepreneurs who ran this place were all TLC on their dream.

The glass door that opened directly onto the pretty pool next to my room was broken. They let me stay for free.

The Stardust, Palm Springs, Sunday, 3/8/26.

On the walk from downtown back to my motel, S. Palm Canyon Drive, Sunday, 3/8/26.

Saby > Mboko (for now) My favorite tennis player 27-year-old (soon-to-be 28-year-old) Aryna Sabalenka beat legit teenage sensation Victoria Mboko at the Indian Wells quarterfinals on Thursday.

World No. 1 Sabalenka was at the top of her game against Mboko. After trading service holds with the formidable heavy-hitting 19-year-old, Saby gave a flawless tennis clinic. She won the tiebreaker 7-0. And she went on to win the next set 6-4, taking the match in straight sets.

It wasn’t as clear cut as that sounds, though. Mboko, who has catapulted from No. 350 to No. 10 in the last 14 months, was fierce and cool. (Before facing Sablalenka in the quarterfinal, Mboko herself dismissed superstar Top-10 player Amanda Anisimova, 6-1, 6-4 in the round-of-16 stage.)

Sabalenka had the skills and insuperable form to stop the surging Mboko. But the poignant foreshadowing was impossible to ignore. I felt like I was watching something I was never going to see again: Sabalenka playing at hall-of-fame level and Mboko in pursuit. This dynamic will reverse during the next two years.

This Week’s Obsessions:

1) ‍ A Picture (of Empty Tables) is Worth 1,000 Words.

I can’t get this image out of my head:

Dinner hour, Bombo Italian Kitchen at the new convention center, 3/11/26

Erica and I went to the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual shindig on Wednesday where dorky socialist mayor Katie Wilson spoke. Mayor Wilson’s playful remarks self-consciously called attention to the political differences she had with the audience—the capitalist-class busybodies who were in attendance that late afternoon on the fifth-level ballroom floor of our city’s new, publicly-financed $2 billion convention center.

Wilson’s socialist talk of affordability aside, the real indictment of Seattle’s economy was happening down on the ground level where the posh restaurant bar sat empty.

Annual attendance at the new convention center is up over the past year, but given the overhead of the massive expansion, the complex remains financially “fragile,” according to a recent Seattle Times article.

I couldn’t agree more with the article’s quotes from local architect David Dahl. Dahl was an original critic of the project when it was still in its planning phase. Fast forward: Dahl told the Seattle Times earlier this year that “the space should be better used to benefit people who live here.” And more:

He finds its presence to be a void — a city block empty of the bustling restaurants and bars blocks away on Capitol Hill. So while he remains skeptical of its long-term benefit, the reality is it already exists and therefore should be opened up to classes and public speakers and dancing.

In a way, he agrees with the center’s officials: “It needs people in those buildings.”

I have to wonder if Dahl was making a pun by suggesting that the ritzy complex should be “opened up to classes.”

2) No Booze, Week #3

As I was winding down on Tuesday night, I thought some wine or whiskey would be the perfect pairing for my night-table novel. However, I’m not drinking alcohol right now [I’m All Lost In, #124, 3/1/26.] I’m not sure how long this impromptu project in abstinence will last. And I’m not feeling any magnificent physical change. But it’s psychologically satisfying to know I’m exorcising poison from my body.

I’ll be honest: I seriously like drinking whiskey while reading novels. Furious note taking ensues. Is the pot shop still open? I wondered, surmising that reading while high might be fun; there’s a dispensary just a few blocks from my apartment.

I was surprised to find that yes Ike’s stays open until 11:45 pm. And it was busy when I walked into the store at 10:30. There’s a night-owl, stoner community I never knew existed. I bought lime gummy drops with five grams of THC. These were the chill option rather than the stoned option that had me laughing last week on the couch at my Indian Wells Airbnb. [I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/1/26.]

Tuesday night’s lime-drop gummies were more sleep inducing than comedic. And unfortunately, they didn’t seem to prompt the kind of genius that whiskey does.

Alternate theory, though: The lack of literary insights could have more to do with the novel I’m reading than with the cerebral shortcomings of THC.

3) Part Two of Aria Aber’s Novel Good Girl

The novel I’m reading is the same one I was reading on the plane to Indian Wells last week, Aria Aber’s Good Girl[I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/9/26.] And I’m being too mean. It’s no masterpiece. But it is fun.

Having read the first 100 pages on the flight from Seattle, I raced through the next 100 pages on the flight home Monday night. The second hundred pages are much better than the first.

Rather than settling into the story of protagonist Nila’s relationship with her blowhard boyfriend, Aber lingers instead in Nila’s internal monologue. This tact lets Aber’s thoughtful and poetic voice take over. The sensation of moving at such velocity against the rain felt as though my mind wasn’t really mine at all but someone else’s, the city’s, disintegrating in the wind.

That adrenaline-rush snippet is taken from a nighttime bike ride. It’s one of many examples from Nila’s reveries that turn the narrative into a long-form poem about youth and the city. Indeed, as with all coming of age novels, Good Girl is about the city. In this instance: Nila’s coming of age story in Berlin. She’s the first-generation daughter of Afghani immigrants who’ve moved to Germany where my origins could be vague and malleable.

Nila’s dreamy transformation blends her identity with city aesthetics. “Your father will be ashamed if he sees you like this. You look like a gypsy.”/I looked beautiful, I thought, elegant, even with mascara smeared on my cheek.

More so than city culture, Aber blends Nila’s character development with city infrastructure itself, including its buildings…

I thought of the elevator, the twelve stories the length it would take to run and go home;

They had survived Nazi Germany and the DDR. Buildings: a shelter for human activities; how little we think of them, these buildings, and yet they are so much more durable than we;

its trains…

Doreen and I sat in silence on the train … I could see our faces side by side in the black window, where our reflections seemed despondent, spectral, as if sketched in oil…

and its parks…

I lay down on my back, staring at the system of leaves comprising the crowns of trees; … the snowmelt unveiled networks of grass.

Unfortunately, young Nila’s malleability is also shaped by the aforementioned stupidly mysterious lech she meets in Berlin’s club scene, her boyfriend Marlowe. I’m onto the final section of the book now and as it begins, Nila leaves Berlin on a trip to Italy with Marlowe. By taking Nila out of Berlin (and sequestering her with him) the novel has suddenly lost its energy. I’m hoping this an intentional literary ploy, and that Aber will quickly place Nila back in the more formative setting of the city.

I’m All Lost In, #125: My translucent backpack; Aria Aber’s debut novel; Dave’s WTA overrated & underrated spreadsheet.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#125

First: The week in X > (is greater than) Y.

Gummies > Booze I marked two weeks of no booze by chuckling to myself all night on the couch at a Coachella Valley Airbnb in Indio, CA.

Four nights at a Coachella Valley Airbnb, 3/4- 3/7/26.

‍New Coffee Shops Off the Drag > New Coffees Shops On the Drag I’ve already declared the obvious: Late night coffee shops are better than your typical Seattle coffee shop. Those close at 6 pm [I‘m All Lost In, #119, 1/25/26.]

Time to add another coffee shop metric to my public policy agenda: Site the new shops on residential streets away from the main drag. As Seattle’s population continues to grow and diversify, and new cafes open: Let them be like Mintish!

Mintish is a new spot tucked away on Harvard Ave. E. one street west of the Broadway commercial strip. It’s on the ground floor of a new housing complex on a block with other low-slung apartment buildings and the neighborhood library.

With its date cakes, pistachio cookies, and Turkish coffee, plus its halloumi, olive, tomato, cucumber, and mint sandwiches, Mintish strikes a legit Levant mood. Drawing a sharp contrast to our country’s current juvenile turn to nativism, Mintish echoes the Yemeni coffeehouse wave that’s bringing late-night coffee culture to America  [I’m All Lost In, #74, 3/15/25.]

3/1/26 at Mintish

Indeed, just like the Yemeni coffee chain (Qahwah House) featured in the NYT link above, Mintish experimented with deep late-night hours during Ramadan for the daily break fast. I landed there on a recent Friday night simply because it was one of the few casual places still open at 11 pm as I was coming home from a show. I must have been grinning ear to ear when I ordered my pistachio almond milk latte because the barista suddenly started smiling at me. I proceeded to say how excellent I thought it was to have a place to go to so late.

It was packed.

Mintish Cafe, 11 pm, 2/27/26

Footnote: I know I wrote this as an X > Y item, but Mintish nearly crossed over into an obsession this week. After the Friday night excursion, I found myself going back both Sunday and Monday morning.   

Playing a Tiebreaker > Hitting Around The one-hour bloc of time you get at Seattle Parks’ tennis courts is awkward. It’s too short to play a full match, but it’s too long for just one set.

Thank you Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe for the joy of a tiebreaker. After Valium Tom and I finished a set last Saturday at Volunteer Park, we still had ten minutes left on our reservation. Sensing how sad I was about the prospect of leaving the court early, Tom quickly asked: Should we hit around?

How about a tiebreaker, I cried; Coco Gauff’s recent 15-13, 28-point tiebreak against Elina Svitolina was still pirouetting in my brain.

A tiebreak’s high stakes, first-to-seven, must-win-by-two format is such a rush in its own right there’s no need for the prerequisite deadlocked set to give it meaning.

Tom beat me 8-6.

Onto this week’s obsessions.
1. My New Translucent Backpack

They don’t allow traditional backpacks at the Indian Wells tennis tournament. So for this week’s getaway to Southern California’s “tennis festival,” as my friendly Gen Z barista called it when I tried to explain where I was going, I bought a $9 stadium-approved, small-scale (12X6X12), translucent backpack from Amazon.

It looks like a tween-fashion fashion statement. And after relying on it all week to secure my phone, Propranolol, phone charger, wallet, sunscreen, Indian Wells’ grounds map, notebook, paperback, and gummies as I crisscrossed the tournament complex without ever losing a thing, it occurred to me how ingenious purses are. The fact that it’s also a see-through purse staved off the panic attacks I was bound to have when I inevitably believed I’d lost my phone. Nope. One quick look and all is in order.

Possessions intact and anxiety free is a revelation in living as I trekked from stadium 3 to stadium 9 to the food court’s vegan counter back to Stadium 3, from stadium 2 to the very berry smoothie stand to the player practice courts to stadium 7 and to the chill-out fountain area.

Indian Wells, 3/5/26

2. Aria Aber’s Debut Novel

Before I committed to Aria Aber’s 2025 debut novel, Good Girl, which I held in my hands at the Elliott Bay new-paperbacks table a few weeks ago, I chose to go with her award-winning 2019 book of poetry first. Her poetry, while perhaps youthful and didactic, was very often beautiful [I’m All Lost In, #121, 2/7/26.]

I started the novel this week on the two-and-a-half-hour flight from Seattle to Palm Springs; when we landed, I was already 100 pages in. It’s a salacious though oddly staid coming-of-age tale about fucking, clubbing, drugs, and crushes. Hopefully, Aber’s stand-in first-person narrator Nila, the 19-year-old daughter of Afghani immigrants in Berlin, comes to her senses soon. Because so-far, Nila’s crush is a banal stereotype of an aging, know-it-all hipster named Marlowe (i.e., the 16th century English poet and playwright). He’s an ex-novelist. I don’t know yet whether to blame Nila or Aber for the bad taste in men. Brooding and controlling, Marlowe is a hunk who teaches Nila photography, mostly by having her pose nude. And he sets all the idiosyncratic rules of their budding relationship.

Like Aber’s poetry, the novel is youthful (well, at least Nila is.) Though it’s not didactic (well, Marlowe is.) But it too is very often beautiful. Or that is: More like poetry than a novel.

Boys who looked like they could be my brothers, who were just as lost as me, and as hungry for joy and violence.

Aber’s expertise isn’t so much in long-form story telling—I’m not interested in Marlowe’s pain and suffering—but in expanding isolated incidents into meaningful, lone vignettes. Like when she describes the poignancy of riding the subway home high after the sweaty club with her former schoolmate bestie Anna. As they fail to reconnect.

“She rested her head on my shoulder, took my hand in hers. ‘Are you mad at me?’ I asked … ‘No, oh my God, is this about your birthday? I’m sorry I forgot it! I’m not mad at you.’ … But generally, I stood clutching my bottle of beer or listening to a random man with a wrinkly forehead tell me about how he missed his girlfriend while he put a hand on the nude part of my shoulder where the strap had slipped off.”

And later, another scene from the club the next night as Nila disingenuously bonds with Marlowe’s actual girlfriend:

We hugged and, in that moment, because of the ecstasy and the horse tranquilizer and the perfect little camellia in her hair, because of the hi-hat and the disco sample mixed into the techno track, and because Anna had left me, I loved her.

3. Dave’s Underrated Overrated Spreadsheet

Remember my Brooklyn friend Dave, the numbers guy [I’m All Lost In, #118, 1/18/26]? Well, he showed up to the Indian Wells tennis tournament in Coachella Valley this week brimming with stats for our gang’s three-day vacation. Specifically, he had a spreadsheet and some color-coded charts he’d created during his six-hour plane ride from JFK. His graphs and numbers tracked the most over- and underrated players on both the women’s and men’s tours.

Prompted by my long-standing and bratty claim that Jasmine Paolini is overrated [I’m All Lost In, #63, 12/28/24], Dave delved into the WTA’s official player rankings. Those rankings are based solely on points players accumulate by winning matches over the course of the year; the WTA assigns a different fixed set of points for different matches. Dave then compared each player’s WTA ranking to the deeper-dive Elo ratings compiled by Jeff Sackmann at Heavy Topspin (subhead: The Tennis Abstract Blog, Tennis Analytics by Jeff Sackmann.) Instead of just awarding points based on the official value of a match, Sackmann’s numbers add context by considering factors such as “the quality of the opponent.” In other words, in the Elo system, if you beat a higher ranked player, you get more points than if you beat a lower ranked player.

Looking at the difference between the more generic WTA rankings and the fine-tuned Elo ratings, Dave charted each player’s change in status from biggest point gain to minimal change to biggest drop. Thus, he was able to plot the WTA’s most underrated, fairly rated, and overrated players on the tour.

I was right. World No. 7 Paolini is overrated. She’s still in the top 20 at No. 13 on the Elo scale, but falling 6 points in that rarified group—an 85% decrease—constitutes a significant drop. And for the record, according to Dave’s stats, the most underrated WTA player turned out to be one of my favorites, Markéta Vondroušová; she’s ranked No. 46 by the WTA, but No. 16 by Elo.

More important, over the course of the 18 matches I watched during our three days at the tournament, Dave’s system largely checked out. For example, according to Dave’s chart, American player Taylor Townsend is one of the most underrated players in WTA with a 42-point difference between her conventional rank (No. 85) and her Elo rank (No. 45.) No surprise to anyone privy to Dave’s charts: Townsend easily beat the much higher-ranked World No. 33 Marie Bouzkova in the first round, 6-1, 6-2; Bouzkova is actually No. 47 when you go by her Elo rank, a 13 point drop which put her squarely on the overrated side of the equation. Also not a surprise: Townsend lost in the next round when she faced World No. 28 Marta Kostyuk who’s No. 15 by Elo standards. That 13 point jump makes Kostyuk, like Townsend, one of the most underrated on Tour.

Dave’s rankings account for these different levels of underrated players; he made two charts, one for the WTA’s top 60 players like Kostyuk and another for the players ranked 60 through 120 like Townsend. Kostyuk is the 8th most underrated player in the WTA’s top 60 while Townsend is the 5th most underrated player in the 60-120 tier. No wonder Kostyuk beat Townsend so convincingly, 6-3, 6-2.

For even more context, Dave also color-coded the charts to show a player’s age group; this additional detail can help forecast how much momentum a player might have to either leap further up the ranks or fall further down. Younger players, for example, have more room for improvement than older players.

The combo of a young player who’s also high up in the underrated ranks is a keen way to identify a relative unknown to pay attention to. One of those players I went to see at Dave’s prompting was a young Austrian named Lilli Tagger. She’s ranked No. 119 by straight WTA standards. But No. 67 by Elo. Which gives her a plus-52 point difference. This makes her the second most underrated player in the 60-120 tier. And lo and behold: We watched her sail through her opening round match 6-2, 6-4 against the official World No. 58, Varvara Gracheva. And then two days later, we saw Greek star Maria Sakkari beat Tagger. Handily. Sakkari is underrated herself. She’s World No. 34 by the traditional standard, but World No. 28 by the Elo standard, a 17.6% jump. While it evidently took Sakkari a set to get used to 18-year-old Tagger’s stunning one-hand backhand (!), she quickly adjusted and posted a convincing 7-5, 6-0 win over the teenager.

One-to-watch, Lilli Tagger on Court 3 serving and winning against the supposedly much-higher-ranked Varvara Gracheva, 3/5/26.

I’m All Lost In, #124: Triangulating Wilde, Schumann, and the Transit app. Plus: This week in X > Y.

First, this week in …

X > (is greater than) Y:

Hacking for Affordable Housing > Rezoning for Affordable Housing

Given how difficult it is to do proper urban upzones in traditional single-family-home neighborhoods, I’m hopeful about an emerging tactical and practical way to usher in the dense, multifamily housing we need for addressing the affordability and climate crises: Instead of fixating on wholesale land use changes, focus on discrete housing regulations with piecemeal reform. Devious density.

I’m not advocating for timid tinkering around the edges. I’m thinking of ingenious hacks that are possible within the restrictive height limits, contorted floor area ratio guidelines, and setback requirements that currently define and limit the number of units you can fit into an apartment building. Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.

Pro-density progressives in Washington state have already had success with this sneaky inside-out approach. In 2025, they won parking reform, which maximizes the square footage available for housing by lowering building costs and forgoing the need for carports and underground garages. Similarly, in 2023, advocates succeeded in passing the nation’s first-ever single-staircase bill, a reform that frees up space for more units by getting rid of unnecessary mandates for two staircases.

In the current legislative session, pro-housing advocates are now on their way to passing elevator reform, which will lower costs for developers, hopefully hastening construction of more units.

As I reported on PubliCola this week: While the elevator industry stripped out a push for universal reform, urbanists are still set to pass a deceptively specific change at the ground level. The legislation will change elevator size guidelines for six-story apartment buildings. This detail-oriented code change will open the doors to multifamily housing in neighborhoods where the the macro zoning remains antagonistic to this type of renter-friendly development.

Vegan Ice Cream > Ice Cream Ice Cream

That’s my conclusion based on the scoop of black sesame ice cream I had for dessert Wednesday night at Ramie, a sleek Vietnamese restaurant on 14th. Their rich after-dinner delight, dappled with peanut crumbles and topped with light coconut-cookie wafers, has the body of a malty, craft beer.

Rather than calories, you’ll be measuring each woozy dollop in dopamine.

XDX’s birthday dinner at Ramie, 2/25/26. Footnote: Ramie is unobtrusively located—even elusively located—between Pike & Pine on 14th. Walking in is like entering Platform 9 and ¾ at King’s Cross.

1 Week without Booze > 1 Week with Booze

I didn’t set out for a week of sobriety on purpose. But after I drank too much whiskey on Friday night (and the previous Thursday, Wednesday, and Tuesday nights), I decided not to drink on Saturday night, 2/21/26. From there, I segued into a week of abstinence.

My no-booze resolve was fortified the following Tuesday night, 2/24/26, when a former regular bartender at Bimbo’s showed up as a sub for one of the current staffers. I hadn’t seen N— since 2023. He looked 10 years younger. I was agog. He reported he’d given up alcohol these past two years.

Realizing I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since the previous Friday night’s shipwreck, I decided to continue my liquor-free streak. I ordered a club soda and grapefruit juice instead of my regular whiskey.

At that point, my impromptu detox turned into an insistent one. I continued to stay away from booze for the rest of the week. I can’t claim to feel any magical transformation, but I do keep finding excuses to extend the booze boycott.

Going with soda water and grapefruit juice, Friday night into Saturday, 2/27 into 2/28/26.

Onto this week’s obsessions:

1) The Picture of Dorian Gray

It seems symbolic of the oddly mellow mood I’ve settled into in 2026: I’m not getting annoyed by Oscar Wilde’s petulant parade of contrarian oxymorons. In fact, as I calmly savor his 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, I feel invigorated by his smart-ass aphorisms:

I can believe anything, provided that it’s quite incredible;

the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible;

the only difference between caprice and a life-long passion is that caprice lasts a little longer;

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex;

the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

I was particularly struck by that last one. It has me surveying a supercut of memories, reflecting on questions of agency versus fate, and contemplating my own personal space-time continuum versus the universal one.

A quick note on the “hideous Jew” antisemitism afoot in this novel: I must say, I prefer this brand of antisemitism to the more ubiquitous puppet masters version. As opposed to the prominent 19th century and early 20th century Rothschild story line that casts Jews as conniving international capitalists, Wilde’s anti-Jewish bigotry flows from a separate, though equally prevalent strain at the time: Jews were reviled as conniving gutter-district, Tin Pan Alley hustlers. It’s actually a bit of underworld chic if you ask me. And I suspect, with Wilde’s flair for contrarianism, he saw it that way too.

“Don’t run down dyed hair and painted faces,” Lord Henry, Wilde’s stand-in, responds to Dorian in defense of a tawdry theater run by “the horrid old Jew.” Henry concludes: “There is a extraordinary charm in them, sometimes.”

2) The War of the Romantics

Forest Scenes, 1850-1851, or Op. 82. Nine solo piano pieces by Robert Schumann.

Chapter II of Dorian Gray begins with this sentence: “As they entered they saw Dorian Gray. He was seated at the piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann’s Forest Scenes. ‘You must lend me these, Basil,’ he cried. ‘I want to learn them. They are perfectly charming.’”

I immediately sought out and streamed these nine thoughtful yet playful late-Romantic piano pieces. And then, inspired by their confidence, I mischievously added them to my 21st century neoclassical playlist knowing full well they’d show up on shuffle as Easter Eggs for unsuspecting listeners.

I also read about these Schumann pieces. It turns Forest Scenes was a flashpoint in a 19th century debate between the traditionalist Romantic composers like Beethoven-loyalist Brahms and the new Romantics like Liszt and Wagner.

The conceptual split—which reminded me of the analog v digital fixation in the early 1980s guitar magazines—was between the traditionalists’ notion of “pure” music versus the new idea of “program” music. The “pure” music camp believed compositions were an expression of beauty in their own right. The “program” camp believed compositions were representations of specific things in the material world.

Such as forests.

This debate played out in a standoff over how to title pieces. The purist camp preferred literal catalog titles. Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, for example. Whereas the new Romantics were keen on evocative titles like the Moonlight Sonata, a title that was given to Beethoven’s aforementioned Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2 five years after his death.

It’s no wonder a picturesque title like Forest Scenes would be at the center of this debate.

It’s also no wonder that Wilde’s fable on the supernatural relationship between a portrait and its subject—a de facto manifesto on the meaning of art—would call attention to a piece like Forest Scenes that figured so prominently in a defining artistic debate of his century.

Not so subtly, the book opens with a slam-poem preface of sound bites about art. A snippet: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all”

Wilde’s seminar on the philosophy of art continues with Lord Henry’s non-stop decrees about artists, such as this typical one about inferior poets (“absolutely fascinating”) living “the poetry they can’t write” while great poets (“the most unpoetical of all creatures,”) write poetry about lives “that they dare not realize.”

So far (I’m only halfway through the novel), my favorite exposition on the arts in Wilde’s immoral book is spoken by neither Wilde nor Lord Henry. It comes in Chapter 7 from theater-district actor Sybil Vane. Her backstage lament about “the empty pageant” and “the false orchard” where she “knew nothing but shadows” frantically and eloquently lays out Wilde’s thesis on the discrepancy between real life and artifice. “The words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say,” Sybil Vane tells Dorian Gray.

Full circle: There's also a line in The Picture of Dorian Gray about classical composer Richard Wagner, the aforementioned new Romantic. Lord Henry’s wife tells Dorian Gray: “I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.”

3) Triangulating the Bus App & the #8

Triangulating The Picture of Dorian Gray and Schumann’s Forest Scenes is definitely an easier trick than triangulating the capricious #8 bus and the fluctuating arrival times on the aggravating Transit app.

But I have it down to a science. Mark the moment when the wait time suddenly shifts from 45 minutes to 4 minutes with one whimsical tick as it invariably does. Subtract (-) the difference between the scheduled arrival time of the subsequent bus and the original arrival time of the bus you’d been waiting on. Then add (+) the 10 minutes it takes to walk from XDX’s to the stop at 5th & Denny. Lastly, subtract (-) feeling slightly anxious about the oddball characters who are out and about in Belltown at this hour. Patiently following this formula will (=) get you to the stop 5 minutes before the bus arrives.

At least it did last Wednesday night after I obsessed over the app from XDX’s apartment as I tracked several buses come and go before mastering the rhythm of this meterless cadence.

———Quote of the Week: Circa the mid-1970s

I was watching Youtube this week of the 1976 women’s U.S. Open final between World No. 1, American Chris Evert and World No. 2, Australian Evonne Goolagong when a collision of feminism, sexism, and eventually some enlightened commentary about Goolagong’s Aboriginal identity served up a slice of mid-1970s perfection.

Of course, it was the female broadcaster, Julie Anthony, who schooled the male broadcaster, Tony Trabert.

Early in the second set (at the 5:37 mark), Anthony attempts to promote the growing prominence and savvy of the newly established WTA with a comment about Evert’s and Goolagong’s women-centered business prowess.

Julie Anthony: One sign showing how big tennis has gotten is that both of these girls are wearing their own personal line of tennis dresses.

Trabert misses the point and utters this classic: Both very attractive.

Cue my quote of the week: Anthony, a pro tennis player herself, blows by Trabert’s stupid comment. Without missing a beat, she hits back with a quote that pulls the focus away from the dresses as pretty set pieces and puts it back onto a substantive element of the branding. And then, shazam!, she turns the moment into a quietly political nod to Goolagong’s Indigenous heritage:

Anthony: Evonne’s logo is a tall tree by still waters, which is what her name means in Aborigine.

I’m All Lost In, #123: Tom’s 100 book recommendations; my poem about a historic letter; and my new blue glasses.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#123

First, this week’s X > (is better than) Y …

Noise Complaints > No Noise Complaints

There’s a classic urban story out of Ho Chi Minh City this week:

A traditionally rambunctious neighborhood is gentrifying. The new professional class that’s moving in has started complaining about the nightlife noise; karaoke bars and motorcycles in this instance.

I’m not taking sides. But I will say this: I’d rather live in a city where a standoff between social vibrancy and economic vibrancy exists, than in a place where it doesn’t.

The Supreme Court >The Left Complaining About The Supreme Court

The left is cheering this week’s 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision against Trump’s tariffs. Let our glee serve as a reminder. The Court is a good thing.

Or at least let’s understand that we can’t have it both ways. Progressive need to stop badmouthing SCOTUS so often even as we turn to it for relief. Deriding the Court is a line of populist thinking that undermines democratic thinking.

Has there been a recent run of terrible Supreme Court decisions? Of course. Overturning a federal right to abortion in Dobbs. Giving Trump presidential immunity in Trump v United States. And in recent years prior to the Trump era: 2000’s infamous Bush v. Goreruling curtailing the democratic process.And2010’s Citizens United ruling making the way for unlimited corporate campaign cash. But there’s also a sweeping history of great Supreme Court decisions such as: Brown v Board mandating desegregation in public schools; Miranda outlining civil rights during police stops; and Obergefell legalizing gay marriage. And certainly—like this week’s ruling—important remedial decisions that save the day with legal basics such as confirming that our derelict president did in fact need congressional approval to enact these tariffs.

It’s worth noting that Trump-appointee Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority against Trump’s tariffs.

Ask my friend Glenn: Long before everyone was so surprised by Coney Barrett’s status as an iconoclast and long before the New York Times started printing agog articles like this one about her, I predicted she’d disappoint Trump. She’s a civil libertarian. A radical Christian? Yes. But a civil libertarian.

This is exactly why I’ve always been at odds with my fellow lefties’ tendency to vilify the Court. Coney Barrett’s anti-MAGA streak provides a perfect example of just how multilayered and intellectual the Court can be (as opposed to strictly partisan.) As the popular political arena gives way to bullying and shoving, I’m all in on a formal institution like the Court. It should be heralded as an example of the left’s ideal, versus Trump’s mob-rule model.

Yes, the court is made up of ideologues. Always has been. Many of the left’s own cherished precedents were decided through an ideological lens rather than through an unimpeachable legal one; just google penumbra and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The saving grace is that rather than making policy based on deceptive sound bites, divisive appeals, and populist rage, SCOTUS has to engage with precedent, the rule of law, and complex reasoning. Justices can still issue terrible rulings. And have. Like in 2024 when they  kneecapped the authority of federal agencies to regulate the marketplace. But in an era when sweeping executive and legislative decisions are made outside the boundaries of logic and fair play, our judicial system remains the last guardrail.

By way of example: The civil-rights left is currentlyand successfully fighting ICE in the federal courts—along with legally defeating many other Trump transgressions, such as: his cuts to federal funding; his attack on DEI programs; and his assault on our elections system. And certainly progressives are looking to the Court to overturn Trump’s dangerous rejection of the EPA’s underlying rationale for and power to regulate greenhouse gases.‍ ‍

But our simultaneous hostility toward the Court echoes Trump’s own ongoing poisonous rhetoric; immediately after this week’s ruling, Trump attacked the court as “unpatriotic” “fools,” “an embarrassment” and “lap dogs,” as he careened into conspiracy theories about the Court’s political motivations and allegiance to “foreign interests.”

Last June, after another good ruling against Trump’s tariffs [I’m All Lost In, #85, 6/1/25], he reacted similarly, and I wrote this:

The Trump administration’s reaction to this legal reality check on their policies—telling judges to run for elected office themselves and condemning the judiciary as  “tyrannical”—mimics a traditional tenet of fascist movements: Attack the rule of law by trying to de-legitimize the courts. It’s a dangerous escalation of the “activist judges” talking point that was popular with Republicans during the Reagan-through-Gingrich era. This is why I was never comfortable with a recent leftist cause celebre (after Roe was overturned) to blame the Supreme Court for our problems.

As we cheer this week’s tariffs decision, let’s not lose sight of the idea that this ruling represents more than a victory against the core policy of Trump’s nativist economics. Respecting the Court also represents a victory against Trumpism in general.

In the Year of the Fire Horse, Action and Spontaneity > Planning

Yes. But don’t be reckless.

According to Vogue, during this year’s specific Chinese Zodiac combination of element (fire) and animal (horse)—last seen together in my favorite year, 1966—you shouldn’t confuse being busy with being productive.

Onto this week’s obsessions:

1) The Phinney By Post Book

I could make this another X > Y item: Book Recs From Valium Tom > Book Recs From Anyone Else.

Valium Tom is Tom Nissley, my preternaturally calm, but more importantly, brainiest of bookworm friends. Tom established his super power for recommending books long before he opened his successful shop, Phinney Books, which celebrated its 10-year anniversary one-and-a-half years ago [I’m All Lost In, #37, 6/28/24.] Time flies.

Two memorable book recommendations Tom has given me are: Marshall Frady’s literary, political biography Wallace (1968) and John McPhee’s artistic sports biography Levels of the Game (1969). One chronicles demagogue candidate George Wallace’s racist campaigns for governor and president. The other details the origin story of trailblazing tennis genius and civil rights icon, Arthur Ashe. The poetic symmetry of these two American gems of late 1960s journalism should give you a titillating inkling of Tom’s bibliophile brain. But that cultural sweep is simply Tom in default mode. He unobtrusively yet enthusiastically suggested these books to me on separate occasions. The Frady back in 2017 when Wallace was becoming relevant as a Trump corollary. And more recently in 2024, the McPhee [I’m All Lost In, #21, 3/7/2024] when my newfound tennis obsession was first finding form.

Both of these exquisite, on-point recs are included in Tom’s new book: The Phinney By Post Book: 100 Books You Might Not Know About That We Think You’ll Love.

This stately book, which reminds me of an understated indie film (and features gorgeous prints by Tom’s talented sister Elinor), collects 100 casual yet in-depth micro-essays about some of Tom’s favorite non-fiction (“true”) and fiction (“made up”) literature. All the essays were originally published on postcards and tucked inside Phinney’s monthly picks as part the store’s bespoke subscription program. Unlike publisher-driven subscription models, Phinney’s features “books from the past, ones we love, but think our well-read subscribers likely haven’t read.”

One I’m seeking out right away: No. 51, How I Became Hettie Jones (“true”) by Hettie Jones, the white, Jewish ex-wife of Beat poet-turned-Black-Power poet Amiri Baraka, aka, LeRoi Jones.

For those that don’t have the privilege of knowing Tom (the person who prompted my move to Seattle 27 years ago, by the way), his lovingly curated list and accompanying essays approximate the revelation of hanging out with him. Or specifically, coming to appreciate how gracefully his brain works.

From his postcard essay on Frady’s Wallace:

The further I read into Wallace, the quieter the echoes of Trumpism became. It is less a portrait of a type than of a person… The louder echoes are literary ones: Frady, a Southerner himself, saw Wallace as a character in the Southern novel… a ‘palpable, breathing articulation into flesh’ of All the King’s Men’s Willie Stark (himself an articulation into fiction of the real-life Huey Long)…”

And from his postcard essay on Levels of the Game, which McPhee premised on Ashe’s 1968 U.S. Open semifinal match against tennis rival Clark Graebner:

The contrast between the two players is almost mathematical, laid out by McPhee (and by the men themselves, who analyze each other’s game and character in long candid paragraphs) with the clear, straight lines of a tennis court. On one side there’s Ashe, black, liberal, artistic, free-swinging, and cool, and on the other, Graebner, white, conservative, businesslike, stiff, and anxious.

With those lines set, I’ll leave it to you to find how McPhee blurs them with the patient, wry precision of his portraits.

2) I’m Trying to Write a Poem About a Historic Letter

Speaking of Arthur Ashe, I started writing a new poem this week prompted by a documentary I watched two years ago, American Son [I’m All Lost In, #20, 2/29/24.] The film was actually about 1990s Taiwanese-American tennis star Michael Chang. But the scene I remember most, and that I’m stuck on this week, is about a five-page letter that tennis elder statesman Ashe sent to 15-year-old Chang in 1987; Ashe died in 1993.

Citing his own experience as a role-model minority and describing the worn trajectory of new, young stars, Ashe urged Chang not to turn pro as a teenager.

There is something epic about a seasoned grown up trying to counsel a cocky, ascendant youth. In this film, it reads as a fable.

As I set out to write my poem, I had 15-year-old me in mind wearing my Converse high tops and blue button-down Oxford. And I’d hoped for a sweet coming-of-age dispatch that reflected on the sudden adolescent cognizance of agency. But my words seemed to be telling a different story. One that was influenced by the fact that I knew how Chang’s story ultimately played out. His career ended with a yearning sense of disillusionment.

My poem seemed to be about fate as opposed to free will. Here’s the opening stanza:

Poem for 15-Year-Old Michael Chang

Ashe sent you a five-/ page letter warning you not/ to turn pro so young./ The subconscious is timeless./ Your decision means nothing./  

I’m a good Marxist. And I still believe in seizing the historical dialectic as an action figure in the material world. But lately, I’ve been reflecting on the slightly heretical idea that the details of isolated decisions are subservient to a larger super narrative. A quip from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I started reading for the first time this week, strikes me as a metaphor for this grander, paradoxical version of free will that’s on my mind:

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

3) New Glasses

My Warby Parker life.

I lost my glasses in June 2022; I left them on the roof of XDX’s car while we were taking an I-5 road trip south to northern California. In September, 2022, I decided to replace them with a subtle fashion upgrade. Rather than reordering the clear Warby Parker “Chamberlain” frames I’d lost, I bought a pair of rosewater tinted Warby Parker “Durands.”

I lost my glasses in November 2023; I dropped them somewhere along Westlake Ave. N. as I biked in the rain to a failed piano lesson. To replace them, I ordered two pair in December 2023 [I’m All Lost In, #12, 1/4/24.] More Warby Parkers. Once again, I bought a pair of the quiet rosewater “Durands.” But this time, instead of my traditional wide frames, I went with smaller, medium frames. I also got a dark blue (“shoreline”) pair of “Newman” frames, one of Warby Parker’s more fashion-conscience looks.

I lost both pairs of glasses in September 2024 and June 2025, respectively. First, the blue pair went MIA on the floor of the Booth Theater on W. 45th St. in Times Square when ECB and I saw a Broadway matinee. Next, the rosewater pair went missing at Poquitos, the trendy Mexican restaurant on the Drag. I’ve been without glasses ever since.

I finally ordered new glasses earlier this month. Just one pair. Luckily, the optometrist reports that my eyes haven’t gotten worse even though I’ve gone glasses-free for the past seven months.

The new pair arrived on Tuesday. Synthesizing the best of my Warby Parker history, I got medium frames in their “Bram” style, a similar fit to the arty “Newmans.” And I went with a slight teal color; a combo of the former dark-blue shoreline pair and the rosewater pair.

New glasses, on the #8, 2/18/26.

They arrived just in time for me start reading Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

——

As a WTA super fan, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the two instant-classic semifinal matches that took place Friday at the tour’s 1000-level tournament in Dubai.

In the first match, World No. 5 Jessica Pegula beat World No. 6 Amanda Anisimova, coming from 1-6, 1-3 down to win 1-6, 6-4, 6-3; Pegula also beat Anisimova last month in the grand slam Australian Open quarterfinals before she lost there herself in the semis to eventual AO champion, World No. 3 Elena Rybakina.

Pegula and Anisimova, along with their compatriot, World No. 4 Coco Gauff, are the top American players on the women’s tour.

In the day’s second semifinal showstopper: World No. 9, Ukrainian Elina Svitolina, beat Gauff 6-4, 6-7 (13-15!), 6-4. You can watch the entire, insane 28-point, second-set tie break here, which Gauff won before Svitolina beat her in the third and deciding set. Svitolina seems to have Gauff’s number. She beat Gauff last month in the Australian Open quarterfinals as well, dismantling her 6-1, 6-2 before losing to World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the AO semifinal. (By the way, Saby and World No. 2 Iga Swiatek opted out of this week’s tournament in Dubai, pushing back against the WTA’s pressing schedule.)

Svitolina, who’s practically elderly by WTA standards at 31, was ranked as high as World No. 3 in her youthful heyday back in 2017. She seems to be having something of a renaissance this season after returning from maternity leave three years ago in 2023.

I’m a little smitten with Svitolina. (Pegula beat her in the final on Saturday, 6-2, 6-4.)

I’m All Lost In, #122: A cyberpunk classic; a directorial debut; and garbage TV.

Before I get to this atypical all-movies & TV version of my weekly obsessions list, here’s the latest in X > (is greater than) Y.

Alleys > Streets

The alley off Mercer St. between 1st Ave. N. and Queen Ann Ave. N., 2/10/26

I had just spent two hours immersed in New Port City circa 2029, aka near-future Tokyo as envisioned by the 1995 cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell. No wonder coming upon Rich Rich, a downtempo bar located off Mercer St. and tucked in an alley between 1st & Queen Anne Ave. N., made me feel like I’d been transported to Tokyo’s legendary, narrow backstreets of misadventure and black-market commerce.

This new, small-scale and dimly-lit night spot seems more aligned with flamboyant fishbowl cocktails than with film noir and whiskey neat, but marked by a tawdry splash of pink neon tubing hanging over a weathered door and trash cans, this is the kind of clandestine hideaway Seattle needs more of.

I’ve never been to Tokyo, but I experienced some divine alley culture when I went to Istanbul more than a decade ago. Pioneer Square tries, but I’m still waiting for Seattle to activate its alleys. Rich Rich is a promising and unassuming start.

Back again, 2/12/26

Rich Rich, 2/12/26

Turning Off Smart Features in Gmail > Leaving it on as the Default

You can get rid of those Gemini gmail summaries by going into your settings and unchecking “Smart Features.” I committed this minor act of resistance on Tuesday after yet another A.I. summary sneaked into my life trying to be a surrogate for actual engagement.

When you disconnect from these dumb dispatches it feels like that moment when the crying baby on your flight finally falls asleep.

Custard Pies > Fruit Pies

That’s always been my preference. Malty pumpkin over sticky apple at Thanksgiving, for example.

And it was sweet bean pie at XDX’s on Saturday night.

Sweet Bean Pie from classic Seattle bakery Baked from the Hart, 2/7/26

You could also title this item: Staying In, Eating Pie, and Falling Asleep on the Couch > Going Out; we were supposed to go to the LSDXOXO show at Substation.

XDX bought the pie earlier in the day at Baked from the Hart, a South Seattle cafe on MLK Way located a block from the Mt. Baker light rail station. This legendary local business—it’s been around since 1971—is owned by Seattle’s premier pie-maker Bill Hart.

….

Okay, prompted by an unprecedented streak of movie theater outings, it’s time for this week’s list of obsessions.

Going to movies used to be a mainstay of my existence. Until about 15 years ago. Does anyone go to the movie theater anymore? Yes. But not nearly as much as they used to. And I’m certainly part of the 20% decline in attendance that’s happening in the 2020s. It was actually back in 2010 or 2011 that I decided movies weren’t relevant anymore. That they’d become remote, like jazz. I don’t watch them at home much either. And similarly, despite the days of prestige TV, I also don’t binge on shows. After overexposure to the tube during my 1970s childhood, I ran screaming from TV in the early 1980s.

There are recent exceptions. Like the super trashy HULU drama Tell Me Lies and the omnipresent The Bear [I’m All Lost In, #64, 1/4/25 & I’m All Lost In, #39, 7/11/24.] And in the last 10 days, I hit all three SIFF Cinema locations, going to movies at: Cinerama downtown (I saw current Academy-Award-Best-Picture nominee The Secret Agent); SIFF Uptown in Queen Anne (I saw 1995’s Ghost in the Shell); and SIFF Center at Seattle Center (I saw an arty new release, The Chronology of Water). I also binged on a TV show (The Summer I Turned Pretty) at my apartment.

1) Ghost in the Shell

Cyborg Motoko Kusanagi in Mamoru Oshii’s anime classic, Ghost in the Shell, 1995

As I said, I was immersed in Ghost In the Shell, anime filmmaker Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 tour de force rendition of the late 1980s cyberpunk manga series by Masamune Shirow.

Thank You to SIFF Uptown’s Tuesday night theatrical screening for said immersive experience. Their big screen showcased the film’s maximalist but somehow subdued dystopian canvasses along with its avant-garde soundtrack—an eerie score of somber Gregorian arias for the hip hop era.

The panel discussion afterward emphasized the movie’s influence on subsequent films like the Matrix, Avatar, Ex-Machina, Her, as well as its prescience on today’s hot topics like LLMs, A.I, and pre-programmed identity. Check.

But I see the movie as a culmination of earlier and similar 20th century obsessions about techno-fascism, robotics, cybernetics, transnational corporatism, and—as voiced in 1940s hard-boiled detective narratives—existentialism.

I’m thinking a little bit about Fritz Lang’s 1927 demagogue-android epic Metropolis.

Fritz Lang’s diabolical Android in 1927’s Metropolis

Mamoru Oshii’s Puppet Master A.I. in 1995’s Ghost in the Shell

There’s also Philip K. Dick’s philosophical 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; credit to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the 1982 film version, for bringing PKD’s gaudy and sullen urbanism to the fore.

But mostly, I’m thinking of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. Much like Ghost in the Shell, Gibson’s masterpiece confronts the calculus of merging A.I.’s. Both stories also present their lofty questions about technology in rainy metropolis landscapes where the masses are caught in a violent crossfire between deceptive governments, megacorps, A.I.s, and underworld criminals.

Most important, the mercenary protagonists in both Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell, hustler/hacker Case and cyborg Motoko Kusanagi, respectively, play the role of angst-ridden humanist envoys in these corrupt worlds. Ghost in the Shell’s Motoko is, in fact, an amalgam of Neuromancer’s main character Case, Case’s bionic-“razorgirl”-assassin compatriot Molly, and the novel’s eponymous A.I. itself. This may be where Ghost In the Shell’s brilliance lies: Making its protagonist Motoko Kusanagi the embodiment of questions about consciousness rather than merely facing technology’s spooky evolution as a witness.

Ghost in the Shell is breathtaking. Watching it made me feel joyous about being a human being. Not because of Motoko’s cyborg conundrum. More: I was thrilled that a magnum opus like this existed in its own right, captured on film as proof of human artistry. As I watched each frame shimmy and morph, I pictured thousands of paintings contained in one dusty film canister. I took comfort imagining someone unearthing it in the future.

More data to enter into the A.I. processors.

Motoko Kusanagi approaches her assassin skydive.

2) The Chronology of Water

The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut (yes, the Twilight Kristen Stewart), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 where it got a 6-plus minute standing ovation. Nearly a year later, the movie is finally in wide release. I saw it on Thursday night at SIFF Center with my film aficionado pal Annie.

Like Ghost in the Shell, it also harks back. Specifically to the trippy intro of 1969’s Midnight Cowboy. But whereas director John Schlesinger’s flickering montage of past traumas serves as a brief backstory prologue (with occasional flashbacks throughout the rest of the film), Stewart’s lysergic-pastiche-mode of story telling (and nightmarish close ups) works as the film’s main narrative MO.

The film is based on writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir about her monstrous father, her escape into competitive swimming, her alcoholism, her precarious marriage (Lidia’s the monster now), and her redemption as a writer. Watching these nonlinear snippets collide in Stewart’s stream-of-consciousness narrative seems akin to how Gen Z experiences pop music history in the streaming era: As separate items that coexist on one platform. Donna Summer, Charlie XCX, Ella Fitzgerald, James Blake exist simultaneously.

New Yorker film critic Richard Brody points out how Stewart’s apparent free-for-all represents the opposite of freedom (ha, maybe like Spotify’s algorithm) and thus becomes a powerful metaphor to Yuknavitch’s trauma:

The Chronology of Water compresses the overflowing story of Lidia’s turbulent life into aphoristic flashes and lyrical outpourings. The leaps in time have the eerie effect of effacing time—the layered succession of images implying their simultaneity in Lidia’s mind. Stewart’s method of memory leaps suggests that a storehouse of memories is, essentially, simultaneous, with no fixed sequence beside the deep grooves of connection cut in the mind by the inescapable force of emotion. The movie’s remarkable approach to memory presents it as the opposite of free association—call it compulsory association, the suppression of freedom by the power of ingrained and imposed patterns.

I was riveted by Stewart’s REM-sleep approach to plot. It took 10 minutes or so, but after I synced up with the dreamlike cadence I felt like I’d learned a new language. I almost turned to Annie to declare that Chronology of Water was important cinema and unapologetically great.

But a moment later, almost as if on cue, the movie settled into a more traditional mode. This shift, about a third of the way into the film, coincided with the movie’s sudden and overblown (and generic) tale of artistic angst and genius. Perfectly, this uninspired section focused on bloviating counterculture bro Ken Kesey. (Yuknavitch studied with Kesey at the University of Oregon in the late 1980s.) The Chronology of Water never got its flow back.

I’m inclined to agree with the New Yorker’s Brody, who called the movie an “an Extraordinary Directorial Debut” while concluding: “Stewart’s adaptation, for all its ingenuity and audacity, falls short of transformation.”

3) Season 3: The Summer I Turned Pretty

I imagine my earlier outburst about movies (no longer relevant) and TV (I don’t watch) marks me as a snob. But here I am binge watching this sappy teen drama.

Worse than sappy, I should say. The retrograde gender stereotypes aren’t merely prevalent in this script, they write it.

No matter. I’m hooked. I’ve been watching Season 3 all week, invariably siding with one stock character over another in college junior Isabel “Belly” Conklin’s comfy, corny coming-of-age story.

As the banal soap opera unfolds you’ll never take her boring boyfriend’s side and probably always agree with Belly’s smart, smart-aleck, and slightly prim but teen-hearted mom.

…By the way, The Secret Agent was fine. Maybe too long. I hope it wins the Oscar for best picture.