Hello, Stranger... Season 1

hello, stranger it's the small hours of the night again, and i just had to run down to the office to get more journal paper. of course it had to be another sleepless full moon tonight, right?  but i’m actually glad, because i wanted to write one last time before i took off for the summer. not that popping into the office during the wee hours of the morn is anything unusual these days.  i don't have insomnia, i joked to a friend the other day.  i'm just working from the da Vi

hello, stranger - here’s something that came up the other day: when i first washed up out here i was invited by a friend to attend a class – if you want to call it that – where we clipped pictures out of magazines and glued them to a piece of poster board to create a collage of the life we wanted to have happen.  a vision board, as it's called.  and as i was desperately trying to make sense of things at the time, it seemed like a pretty reasonable way to spend an afternoon. s

hello, stranger – New Mexico was on fire, so i drove back out to California. not that that was the main factor in my decision, but any hesitation i had in taking off to escape the heat of the desert for the weekend was killed off by the smoke screen high above and drifting west from the wildfires raging in the mountains around Ruidoso.  and besides having some people to see and a party in Venice Beach to attend, there was a little shop along the boardwalk that sells mushroom

hello, stranger - well what a difference a little bit of writing can make…  and if that's not my understatement for the year so far, i don't know what is. i'm not sure where i was at with things the last time i reached out, but i can tell you their damned sight better since then. feels like the waves of good stuff have been rolling in pretty steadily lately – and even where they're not i’ve been too busy lowering my shoulder into whatever comes up next to really much notice

Hello Friend - Today I am realizing it’s very telling that I kind of enjoy the inconsistency of your letters. Keeps me on my toes with anticipation and even though I know you will get to it eventually, it still feels like a surprise every time. Being the one who has stayed behind, I find myself expecting to be forgotten. That may seem self-deprecating but it doesn’t stem from a lack of self-worth, more from understanding that most stimulation comes from daily and direct inter

hello, stranger - well that was a longer hiatus than I ever intended… don't worry, i'm still alive and kicking – although, if i'm to be honest there's been a lot more kicking than living. it's been so long that i'm not really even sure where to start. i look back to February and think about all that's happened since then – most of it good, some of it bad, none of it great, and all of it too boring to really be anything other than necessary. so it's been a rebuilding period –

hello, stranger – well the gods have spoken, and i've decided to hide out this weekend.  my much anticipated road trip to California has been canceled due to driver stupidity – mainly my own, for allowing myself to get distracted - but also because of the fact that the ding-dong ahead of me didn’t have intelligence enough to understand the concept of a turning lane, and came to a dead stop for no reason in the middle of a busy road. that's pretty standard for out here though,

hello, stranger – please pardon the delay since the last time i wrote. it hasn't been from lack of wanting to - or even trying, for that matter.  my head’s just been in a fog these last couple weeks; or maybe it's actually been coming out of one… either way, if the first half of the month was like a runner taking off from the starting blocks, the second half was a lot closer to tumbling full-steam down the basement stairs. ignore the weight of your own expectations at your o

hello, stranger - let me tell you about the dumbest thing i've ever read: when i first washed up out here i had to work as a tutor for a while. mostly i taught math – don't ask me why in the hell 21-year-old design students needed to know quadratic equations – but on this one occasion i was asked to proof read a script that a student had written for a film class.  the person who’d originally been charged with the task had given up after about six pages, which was obviously w

hello, stranger – it's the end of the second week of the year, and so far so good. i've been keeping my nose to the grindstone pretty well, sticking to the “Dry January” thing (for the most part – i had a tall glass of scotch on the rocks the other day, but that was a sort of “brake-glass-in-case-of-emergency” type of moment), and it appears the world hasn't descended into a fiery hell pit of chaos and despair this year just yet. and if we're on the brink of it i wouldn't kn

hello, stranger - and so the new year started off with a bang, as they tend to do every year - if, by a bang you mean the general hush of a blanket of promises to oneself to hit all the right marks this year, to shape up and fly right, or - at the very least - to stop driving things into a ditch at the worst possible moment. yup - if that's what comes to mind when you hear the word “bang”, then the fireworks are still going off like crazy out here. they are for me anyways.

hello, stranger - it's funny how the mind automatically goes back to the familiar, particularly in times of distress or deep melancholy.  in my case it obviously seems to go straight back to the ocean.  i guess you can take the boy away from the seashore, but not the seashore away from the boy. but the West has its own special draw, which i think i share with most people who are willing to cross that border.  i remember the first time i saw it, that first cross-country trip,

hello, stranger - today is an anniversary of sorts, for me anyways.  not that it’s worth celebrating, or even really matters too much. i’m just including it here because if you’re going to take anything worthwhile from whatever i write to you, its probably a pretty good reference point of where i’m coming from. it’s the Friday before Christmas, and on this special day i’ve poured myself a little whiskey and am sitting out underneath the stars to put pen to paper, in yet ano