a note about the creative class

He steps out of his luxury car, the silver lining. Wears wide-striped shorts, derby, and thin necktie. Walks into the diner, head up in a cloud of blood.

She drinks from a Gatorade bottle of vodka and blueberry-flavored caffeinated water. Litters the streets, watching at the window again in orange kite time.

about just getting it over with and replacing the TV

After over 3 years' procrastinating, I scheduled a day to replace my old TV.

The day came, so I left work early and Googled something like, “things to know before buying a new TV.” I spent several minutes skimming a few pages that each listed 9 or 10 factors, like the different screen-lighting technologies, how many and what kinds of ports and jacks you might want, the relevance of frames displayed per second, and so on. None of this was especially helpful. I probably couldn’t tell the difference between an LED, QLED, OLED, or UHD.

But one hint made sense: a good 55” TV will cost around $500.

Okay, so on to Best Buy, where I found a wall of 55” TVs. Only three of them cost about $500. Obviously, no Best Buy employee would go near a customer, so I took the time to Google each model’s specs and a couple reviews until I found a reason to justify picking one TV over the others.

Including research, driving, checking out, and everything, I spent maybe an hour buying an appliance worth over $500—an appliance that I spend significant quantities of time using and want to enjoy almost every day. It was the only way to pull the trigger.

Before I even dragged the box all the way into the house, I realized the TV was too big for my TV stand. I was so focused on the thing itself that I forgot about where it would go, placing time and value before physical space.

A person can get bogged down overthinking these things.

about how dreams are interesting only when they are yours

Dreamed we sat around in your old room. But the room was a basement space, so I watched a guy at ground level cutting back shrubs. He cut way too much! Also saw a bouncy castle outside, your kid nephew about to have a birthday party. We amused ourselves somehow. I played with old action figures. A Krusty the Clown whose head was supposed to boing up on a spring, but the mechanism was broken. We wrestled, I flipped you—flipped you more skillfully than we could expect—and we started laughing hard and like when you laugh even though nothing particularly funny happened. Woke up in the laugh and felt like after Padre Island, how I missed this.