Letters to a friend
These words come from an awkward perch. If not for my robot devices to help this email might be unintelligible.
The first thing I want to be honest about is the fact that I said there was no way you’d find me in a grocery store after the 20th. I’m pretty sure I’m going to the grocery store tomorrow, so that sucks.
**My list**
Garlic
Milk
Mushrooms…?
Celery
The weekend was weird. Good, but weird. Saturday I worked too much. Sunday I was up, then down, then really down, but sensing a good bottom. I crashed early, today was better, still off, but not bad. I worked out, I ate a flavorful and balanced meal. Work was productive.I got a little fuck off time in.
I could have done more.
I’m uncomfortable with time off.
I’ve been overwhelmed for awhile now. There are so many areas and interests that need my efforts and attention. To take time off just means I have to double efforts in proportion to the time I take off. By the time you’re off it’s more like hospice than vacay.
So… I’m trying to head that off and keep things positive.
All my thoughts have been in letters
Life Astro has written me, its been a long time. SInce the passing of “G”.
*Note: I have to remind myself this public facing journal is freeform. Scratch isn’t a rebadged KFO. I consider myself plying my trade on the dinner theater circuit. I’m in the Poconos, the chitlin circuit. I’m trying to stay in the game but i’m far from the lights of my own personal Broadway.
Dinner Theater Circuit
A New York-centric article about the concept
A FIELD GUIDE TO DINNER THEATRE IN THE US appears to be an dormant, but it has a lot of great articles that rise above being just SEO blog entries.
Theater in the Poconos I don’t have a link here, but it is a memory, either from film or tv about being washed up and only able to get work in the Poconos, which it appears still to this day has a thriving dinner theater circuit.
Chitlin circuit
For me as a kid growing up I understood that Dinner Theater (in the Poconos or otherwise,) and the Chitlin Circuit to be the same thing; they arent, but certainly similar. I guess the big difference starts with the segregation, but also that the Chitlin circuit was about food and entertainment for the negro, but it wasn’t limited to theater. The first link above is a solid NPR take on the history of the CC.
Trigger Warning: Long FormUSA Today does a very passable piece on the Chitlin Circuit When I ready a piece like this I like to imagine that a writer actually made enoug money to pay their mortgage, or catch up to bills, as opposed to five cents a word.
Worth noting… Again, for my future self and any who ever reads any of these pieces, this is freeform writing. My approach (it is too little to call it technique), is to come to the keyboard and begin writing. I don’t have a outline, I have no idea what i’ll write. I do not force it. I will start and move on to whatever is there in my head. Post KungFu I am less likely to anchor my thoughts on a moment and then reflect and radiate in regards to my thoughts. I think I do still have that rabbit hole writing in me, but it was initially honed on the imagery of poetry, intermingled with looking back on interactions I had with my intimates. This is an informal journal that i’m using to open my mind back up to writing.
I haven’t written poetry in years and my inner circle is frayed. To lay the brick and bars of this gilded prison I broke away from nearly everyone, all in the hopes to securing a good life for my future self who will be incapable of working, but will probably live longer than what a younger version of myself (26 was my assumed death day, when I was a short sighted depressive.) imagined a short life ahead.
Things still in my mind
I can’t get Julie Powell out of my head. It is easy enough to armchair this rumination as a way of my mind to think about my mortality, something i’ve not really dwelled on in years. Since my thirties I pivoted away from obsessing over the hot breath of Death upon my neck. I still have to admit that I am not playing it safe. I ride a bicycle, have two sports cars, walk everywhere and enjoy sushi; between mercury and parasitic worms who would ever eat fish again?
Julie Powell had a good run. She tried to make something of herself, married, got a solid job, it didn’t fulfil her, eventually she came up with an idea that propelled her to work that writing muscle and advance her cooking skills. Every day she dialed in on just those two topics of Julia Child and her own personal reflections of Julia’s impact on her life and then she hustled and secured a book deal. Her life changed. She was alway human, never became polished and hidden behind a PR machine. She was my people.
Sure… I’ve made this Faustian deal with myself over the years. I want to do all of this work and then I want between sixty and eighty four months where I live a nice life, then I can shut it all down, move into some two hundred squarefoot ADUrent my house out, tend to the garden and hopefully have enough to end my last years (whether i’m cognitive or not,) comfortably. I don’t really have any other thoughts. I mean, regardless of our good or bad behaviors, our bodies are just filled with these terrible lottery tickets of death. Yes, I’d love to die unaware, in my sleep, beside (she won’t like that,) my wife. I’d prefer to not have a slow cancerous end and I used to think that I didn’t want my mind to go, in truth though, it appears to be very upsetting in the beginning, towards the end most present as unaware.
I dunno, because she wasn’t really a celebrity and was more a regular person who did an act we associate with celebrity, it is real. More importantly, I assume she wasn’t ready to go.
I’m not ready to go. This desire to stick around means i’ll have to do more to preserve my body…
Bury the lead
Work
I sent Rosie a link to a potential client scope of work. The client is young, late twenties, or early thirties. Her plan is to buy a house and immediately duplex it, with her portion of the house turning into a very usable suite:mbedroom, bathroom, medium sized living room with kitchenette, and she’ll share laundry with her tenant. The renter would get a proper one bedroom apartment, with a large living room, full kitchen, a bedroom and bathroom. This is a great plan.
On top of everything else, the client doesn’t even live in Atlanta, she is coordinating all of this from Florida, where she is remote working for a job that is yet again in another state.
Smart.
She isn’t necessarily a brilliant person, just someone who see an opportunity and she’s willing to take some risks. She has saved some money and is making a smart play to sacrifice now for her future benefits. If I want to hit SEO i’d say she is on the path to creating the mythological “passive income” the scammers and the suckers talk so much about. To be clear. If 1/10th of the passive income scams were legit there would be millions more rich people, as opposed to the tens of millions of people who seem to get suckered by get rich quick schemes.
Life
Shari wrote me.
Acronyms you forget the moment you create them.
11.13.22 #thedayafter #thekitchen #ktchn
Yesterday (11.12.22) Luke and I worked on computers. In looking back on our afternoon I am more aware of my desire to push to work. I do not want to take a break. I don’t mind chatting, but I don’t like to lose momentum. This is how a man operates when he thinks he’s running out of time.
I do think that.
I am running out of time...
House
Today I’m stealthing out the kitchen. Temporary Kitchen mk3(84) “TK3” is the third temporary kitchen to have been setup in the house, something which has occurred over the course of the two previous remodeling efforts. TK3 is me putting my “high concept with humble materials in a sustainable way” ethos to the challenge.
TK3 is both a live in place triage arrangement as much as it is a prototype for the new 384 kitchen. As I am in this business and also in the process of a remodel I’m eating my own dog food and I’ve decided to take my time, not feel rushed, not over spend. I’ve had a number of clients who had to make tough decisions as their budgets balloons due to the Covid-19 outbreak, how our capitalist world responds to disaster and opportunity and how all the aforementioned tilted us into this inflation crash. Yeah… I’m doing a temporary kitchen, it feels tone deaf and foolish to do anything but spend less to get us whole. This is a story about finishes though, I came to be here with TK3 cause I made the opposite decision when it came to high concept elements relating to the house and my infrastructure budget.
The problem about temporary kitchens is that they turn into sport. In the most spare execution of a temporary kitchen when you’re working with a card table, and a microwave oven, people will cheerfully take out any loan to get to cabinets and installed appliances. There is the temporary kitchen layout though where there is enough old kitchen and scraps to cobble together a functioning space. This kind of triage living often times allows for you to halt the hemorrhaging of funds by falling back to a fully functioning and livable “FFL” state. Temporary kitchens stick around too long, though as long as they’re around you do get to keep your cash. The silver lining to a good temporary kitchen is that you get to conceptualize and live with the space you’ve designed, if you have the will to rough a humble version of that concept into your living space.
In my FFL TK3 the oven is back! And because we didn’t have it for a while we got this amazing toaster oven, which is big enough to cook a whole chicken. We’ve also moved the fridge which gives us a preview of our enlarged appliance station. Pre TK3 we had an appliance area (it shared space with the fridge), an island, and a very shallow sink area, that was originally against a wall but is now back, sans the wall, about twice the size and it is now a peninsula. Everything is well enough as it is, but I want to push to have the kitchen feel cohesive and intentional, before thanksgiving 2022.
I think it is also me closing the chapter on the kitchen, I suspect we’ll be 9 months at a minimum before we’re ready to circle back to replacing the kitchen, but I really think it’ll end up being more like 18 months.
The Plan
I’m going to move the fridge one more time. Or this week I’ll go buy our new fridge. I’ll also stealth out all the riggery by bathing the entire lower kitchen in black. TK3 will likely be in deployment far longer than anyone (but me) initially assumed it would be.
iMac Project ii
#writing 11.12.22 #ipadpro #luke #imac #upgrade
The upgrade weekend is in progress!
Luke and I gathered at her house to tear the machines down.
in real time it’s 2pm. Actually its 9:45pm and we’ve completed the two upgrades.
To summarize this all started with a Woot buy.
I think of [Woot!}(https://www.woot.com) as a modern day version of Fingerhut. Refurbs, excess inventory. You can find it all at Woot!. The thing is that Woot feels like an all day casino. The deals don’t last, and you miss out if you sit around thinking about it.
When Woot posted their $169 deal for the MC813LL/A I was excited to be at the moment of a perfect rock bottom. At sub $200 the MC813LL/A which to the layman is better known as the 2011 Apple iMac 27" i5 4GB RAM 1TB HDD Silver, presents a great buy. All isn’t perfect. There are absolute downsides to this buy, it happened to us, but there is also upside.
I should also note that it is my intent to have Luke write this with me. The goal in this exercise is less “he said, she said” and more “writers room overlay”. I don’t know if this ultimately ends with this one voice, or if there are two. PS11.12.22
Downsides
-Both of us suffered hardware defects. My unit came with a dead fusion driver and also it looks like one of the fans has a auditory patina about it, which I noticed but attributed to a nearby fish tank. Once I got it to Luke’s shop We could hear the fan. I decided to keep the iMac despite both these issues, vs getting my money back. i recieved a partial credit towards repair they suggested. Luke’s unit came with two goofball sized dents. One dent on the rear, the other on the corner. She also has about 2% burn in on the corner of her display.
-High Sierra is the last supported macOS for this computer. It still gets security updates but you gotta be ok with High Sierra or downgrading to one of the five previous macOS versions that the MC813LL/A will support.
-Non retina display. It would be another three models before Retina would arrive in the form of the “BT0/CTO aka A1419”
-A machine this old is the digerati equivalent of an old German car. Parts will be coming to end of life. You will be repairing this computer. You’re in luck though. While this is no Dell Dimension, and you could use an extra pair of hands, tear down is mostly straight forward. The folks at ifixit have a pretty good breakdown of how to get it in to it. The comments section is worth looking at, though you should always try to weight out feedback, while you determine how you’ll go about breaking into the box. We did use the “prop your lid with two Bic pen” technique. This worked best for us. Our biggest issue was the first step which is removing a cable connected to the display. This is your blue or red wire bomb moment in breakdown. The first cable took a little more than 10 minutes, but we weren’t watching the clock and you have to go slow.
-Even if you don’t have to upgrade or repair your unit a partial tear down does give you a chance to assess and manage dust build up. unfortunately you have to go through the same initial disassembly to do this. In my estimation if you crack a computer open once, you really always end up going back inside of it again.
-The last downside is that when you purchase a computer like the MC813LL/A you are wrestling with obsolescence. If you find use for a computer which is one not advancing in functionality, often times doesn’t share feature parity with your other devices, and could have some features crippled over time. And I also forgot the very last downside, which is how it seems many great machines do everything well but the internet. Whoever thought that would be what made a computer irrelevant; some ol’ internet shit.
Upsides -The MC813LL/A running High Sierra appears to be fully able to access all current apple iCloud features. -The MC813LL/A comes with a super drive, an SD card reader, three usb a ports, FireWire 800, dual monitor display, is upgradeable to 32gb of ram, and has 802.11 a/b/g/n support -The screen while not retina is rich and gorgeous. -Even though the iMac went on to a much slimmer profile, the MC813LL/A has aged well in its industrial design language.
Why: Paul
In addition to what I paid for the iMac I also upgraded the dead hard drive to a Samsung Electronics 870 EVO 2TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-77E2T0B/AM) and also 16GB of Ram via OWC 16.0GB (4 x 4GB) 1333MHz 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM PC3-10600 CL9 Memory Compatible with iMac (OWC1333DDR3S16S). Both came from Amazon for an additional cost that was greater than what I would ultimately pay for the iMac. That’s 248.34 + $130 for a total of $378.38.
I didn’t have to do either hardware upgrade to not still feel a boost in performance from the older less powerful iMac I was replacing. And to be clear I would never have bought a MC813LL/A online for $378.38. One might say that it makes no sense that I’d build one either and shell out the same amount of money. Sometimes it does make sense though. New ram, a top of the line hard drive and most importantly a high spec “top of its game” slice of computer history.
There are moments in Apple Macintosh hardware where a really remarkable piece of hardware is let out into the open. Every time Apple makes something it is “Our best X yet” and that is true, and sometimes that thing they made stands the test of time. Regardless of how much life I wrestle out of this computer it is very exciting to have it.
Original post for the iMac project https://thisisthenew.me/blog/6sjt8k36b9bp22zg8zbkbzppchzge9
The scam of details
#writing 11.11.22 #ipadmini #bothered
This piece was originally written on iOS in notes. I forgot to give it a title and got confused when I went into the CMS. It has been reposted with a new title and is rich formatted.
This whole thing that happened with the old iPad mini 4 was a bummer.
I don’t know that I have it in me to relive, so I won’t
House I have to do base around the house. I think baseboard is a scam.
I think this means I can either make a material play (and cheap) and do an institutional vinyl. The walls are white, the floor is black I know I can make it work in the bathroom, and it would mostly fade away from the eye. This is the safe cheap choice. It’ll cost me a fifth what it cost to run wood. And I love a good base but I don’t know man.
It feels like shit is gonna go down.
The other thing I could do is go at the base from a very minimal but artistic way. i could rip incredibly thin strips and in addition to them having this incredibly slim profile, i would math them out against the walls they went against.
Life
Cocaine Country Dancing - Paul Cauthen
In for the kill
#writing 11.11.22 #ipadmini #bothered
This whole thing that happened with the old iPad mini 4 was a bummer.
I don’t know that I have it in me to relive, so I won’t
House I have to do base around the house. I think baseboard is a scam.
I think this means I can either make a material play (and cheap) and do an institutional vinyl. The walls are white, the floor is black I know I can make it work in the bathroom, and it would mostly fade away from the eye. This is the safe cheap choice. It’ll cost me a fifth what it cost to run wood. And I love a good base but I don’t know man.
It feels like shit is gonna go down.
The other thing I could do is go at the base from a very minimal but artistic way. i could rip incredibly thin strips and in addition to them having this incredibly slim profile, i would math them out against the walls they went against.
Life
Cocaine Country Dancing - Paul Cauthen