This piece is an experiment in “

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January 11 2025 – What I’m doing

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January 18 2025 – Winter in the PNW has been unusually dry and sunny. It’s beautiful, and joyful if you don’t stop to think about the disastrous climactic changes it might portend.

January 22 2025 – What I’m doing

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April 1 2025 – Over the last few days I’ve been rereading all my /now updates starting from the

in November ‘23. I’ve been journaling in various forms for years now and still I am surprised by its usefulness. It’s so easy to forget our moods and modes, our thoughts and experiences. I maintain that journaling is a way to live longer. Through it and through intangible other forms of reflection I am determined to defeat the notions that time flies, that life is short.

Looking back at what I appended to

on January 14th, a mere two and a half months ago, I am taken aback by what I wrote:

I’d forgotten this. This is one of the joys of writing. Most things I write I leave for a couple weeks while I occupy myself with new ideas only to come back to the old ones and find myself yet again intrigued and surprised by what this person who I supposedly am had to say.

January 18 2025 – In early February we have a couple plans for gatherings with friends. We also intend to visit Victoria. I look forward to it. I’m realizing I have a positive association with February. Perhaps because it’s the month when we usually get snow in the PNW and for a couple days our surroundings are awash in white, soft and bright.

February 1 2025 – What I’m doing

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February 4 2025 – As foretold the annual snowdump came down in February, this time on the very first evening of the month. For people like me that rely on outdoor sports like soccer and biking for exercise it’s rather inconvenient but that inconvenience is more than repaid in stunning views of snowcovered mountains looming above the clouds, lit in the early sunset. Not to mention the ease with which one could drive up one of those mountains for a weekday evening of skiing in Vancouver. I go on slowtrudging walks and soak up the scenes.

Diligently the neighborhood character that in the spring and summer tends to the garden in the nearby rotunda today scrapes off the snow from a sidewalk path and peppers blue salt into the gash of concrete as if to cauterize it. I greet him and he responds with a grin. Living the dream! he says. On the roads his mechanized counterpart heaves aside large mounds of snow effortlessly and from its back showers a trail of salt. I walk ten minutes to one of the sushi restaurants in the area to pick up my lunch. Too hungry to wait until I get home I pause and stand beneath the awning outside the restaurant and drink my miso soup and watch the neighborhood go on without me on its natural rhythm.

June 24 2025 – The decision Z and I made in February to upgrade apartments in Vancouver was a brilliant one. For a while, we’d pined for a second bedroom. Both of us work mostly from home, so even a large one bedroom apartment is an uncomfortable fit. Every few months, I scanned Facebook Marketplace for rentals and we even visited a few places, but we never found anything good. Then, one night, after watching a YouTube video about the slight rent decline in Canadian cities, I searched again. This time, I found one option that actually looked good. Within a week, we’d signed the lease. It all happened very quickly. With the passing of time it has only gotten clearer that our decision was a good one.

February 4 2025 – I have loose plans to watch Mickey 17 with friends when it comes out in theaters. It was written and directed by Bong Joon-Ho, who directed and cowrote the magnificent Parasite.

March 8 2025 – What I’m doing

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April 25 2025 – This spring has been a turbulent time for me. For several weeks issues of immigration and taxes have plagued my thoughts mercilessly. They are the kind of issues I wish I could banish from my life forever. They are meaningless problems that threaten retaliation not by a person but by an amorphous, impersonal entity of brute force and unreckonable reach. The task is not so much facing reality but placating a selfappointed arbiter of it. To avoid these problems is to risk persecution from the world itself.

Unlike interpersonal problems, these allow little opportunity for persuasion or compromise or compassion, unless a not-fully-dehumanized bureaucrat sneaks some in between the paperwork. The main recourse is just that – paperwork. For people in my situation that means hiring my own (expensive) functionaries to prepare papers that will please the faraway and faceless adversarial functionaries so that they in turn dissuade their armed counterparts from deploying violence on me. But fear not! For our underdog has been schooled in the art of reading instructions carefully and filling out answers dutifully even for questions absurd or irrelevant. He knows how to deal in this horrible cypher of ink and paper to earn whatever prized document he needs to secure passage between manufactured realities and to live a life unhounded inside them. Let’s not dwell on those not so well prepared or those of lesser means.

February 4 2025 – May is the month the European soccer season climaxes. Crowned are the winners of leagues and cups alike. Arsenal, the team I support, are still in the running for two major honors: the English Premier League (EPL) and the UEFA Champions League. Two days ago they defeated the reigning EPL champions by a whopping and unforeseeable 5-1 scoreline. And yet our biggest competitor this season is not them, but Liverpool, who are six points ahead of us with a game in hand. In early May, Arsenal will go to northern England and duel them at Anfield, Liverpool’s fortress. That will probably be Arsenal’s biggest match of the season. I start to feel a bit queasy thinking about it now, three months ahead. It’s shocking how thrilling it is even from a thousand miles away to support a sports team embroiled in genuine competition.

June 1 2025 – What I’m doing

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June 24 2025 – I had a moment last week when I realized I was finally out of the woods. There are no longer any tax and immigration issues for me to address. The tallest wave has come and gone and I’ve not drowned. It sounds melodramatic but I was in physical pain for much of the spring. The patch of excema that flared on my left hand appears on the way to recovery. I can breathe a ragged sigh of relief. I feel free to let my mind loose again.

Now, my most pressing concerns are meaningful ones. Z and I have a London trip to plan. And before that, perhaps also a small anniversary weekend away together. And when July arrives, my day-to-day job will be to enjoy the two whole months of uninterrupted sunny weather we get in the PNW.

There’s also the question of where we will live next year. It could be Seattle or New York if Z gets her long awaited green card, or it could be somewhere in Europe – the UK, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany. We’ll see.

(While writing the above, it occured to me that this experiment of “

” could expand its scope beyond the current year. The piece might be called what I’m doing in my life and it could be dense with references to other pieces, including this one.)

April 1 2025 – Spring is springing and I’m already looking forward to paddleboard season. Many of our friends in Seattle own paddleboards and we all go out on the lake regularly in July and August. I expect this summer we will spend many more hours out on the water. I’m also looking forward to Sports Days – afternoons we spend in the park playing volleyball and soccer, listening to music, snacking, and drinking cold beverages. And a new tradition I anticipate will involve lots of leisurely communal outdoor time in the backyard of the house that my friend owns and a bunch of us live in. It’s going to be great.

July 2 2025 – What I’m doing

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July 20 2025 – Last week, Z and I went paddleboarding for the first and I’m afraid perhaps the only time this year. We bought paddleboards in August of 2022 and have been enjoying them every summer in Seattle since then. For two and a half years, I had an apartment in Capitol Hill, a six minute drive up the incline from Lake Union. At some point, we discovered Terry Petus Park, a lovely little lakeside spot tucked beside the houseboat neighborhood in Eastlake. In the summers, we’d go down there with friends and launch into Lake Union from the treeshaded dock and spend a few hours out on the water chatting, listening to music, and having drinks.

In late 2024, I moved into my friend’s house in West Seattle, and nowadays Z and I spend more time in Vancouver. We haven’t tried paddleboarding in Vancouver yet, but we expect it to be less convenient. There is far less access to lakes than in Seattle, where it is abundant. The biggest problem, however, is that Z and I are going to the UK for most of August. Come September the warmth will evaporate rather quickly. You can’t have it all.

April 1 2025 – Some friends and I are thinking of taking a trip to the San Juan Islands or to some other natural destination in the region. If indeed we do so in August it may coincide with some of our birthdays.

July 20 2025 – Z and I have booked a trip to England and Ireland. We’re going to Dublin, County Clare, County Kerry, Bristol, & London. We also intend to visit Bath and Cornwall. It’s going to be great. In London, we are going to attend Arsenal vs Leeds. I’ve never attended an Arsenal match. Watching them play a Premier League game at the Emirates Stadium will be a dream come true.

April 1 2025 – Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie comes out in September. He is one of my favorite directors and film writers. I really enjoyed Licorice Pizza in theatres and There Will Be Blood is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. I have multiple friends who would also be excited to see his newest work in theatres.

July 20 2025 – I saw somebody wearing a motorcycle helmet adorned with big furry rabbit ears and it reminded me of Donny Darko. I watched it for the first time in the summer of 2023 and I want to watch it again. It occurred to me that I should host a series of spooky movie viewings in October. We could watch one per week and let friends know ahead of time so they have it in their plans for October. I’d probably show a David Lynch film, too.

July 20 2025 – Thanksgiving is a big holiday in the US. I get the Thursday and Friday off. Last year I thought about going to Mexico City to visit my grandparents, but didn’t end up doing it.

February 4 2025 – In the spirit of living with forethought and premeditation, I suggested to my mom that we begin planning a post-Christmas trip to Mexico or Guatemala, somewhere warm. In years past I’ve intended to buy flights for the holiday season months in advance but never managed it. Hopefully this year.

April 1 2025 – Z began learning to snowboard this season and has been slowing buying her own gear. The current season is winding down now but I look forward to the next one.

July 20 2025 – On condition that we go to Indonesia in the spring of 2026 to see her maternal family, Z has agreed to visit Mexico for Christmas of this year. I’m excited to explore the Yucatan peninsula, a part of Mexico I’ve never seen.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. Even though I think the greatest possibilities await in the virtual world of computers, I don’t think virtual books need to be digital. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their intangible attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.

A modern torchbearer of

is comedian-journalist Andrew Callaghan. He roams America in his RV interviewing the country’s kookiest characters and recording their antics. Like Thompson, Callaghan throws himself into the action. With false innocence, he encourages his subjects to rant and reveal their quirks and delusions. In Return to Tallega, Callaghan shows the unhinged debauchery of beer-soaked racing festivals of the American South much like Thompson did with The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. Tom Wolfe compared the techniques of literary realism

in the otherwise mechanical machine of journalism; he might’ve enjoyed seeing Callaghan modernize the practice with literal electricity.

Ironically, the old writing principle show don’t tell can lead us

as it has The Pudding: a digital publication specializing in ‘visual essays’ developed by ‘Journalist-Engineers’ that write both prose and source code to create their articles. Their piece How Music Taste Evolved, more app than article, lets the user click through pop music history to hear snippets of songs that topped the charts from 1958 until 2016. Instead of forcing you to read about the contrast between the swaying, dreamy sound of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and the youthful pep of Stagger Lee, it lets you hear it. And if you’re not interested in pop music from early 1959, then you can leap forward to whatever decade interests you. The involvement of the reader is literal.

As refreshing as it is, the piece is far from fulfilling its potential. The first improvement is obvious: automatically update every day with the newest song at the top the charts. (The equivalent for printed books, publishing new editions, is pathetic in comparison.) The piece could take its interactivity to the next level by letting you save songs to your music library or dive into specific artists by linking to their Wikipedia articles, which also update with new information and themselves lead to other articles. Or it could browse the internet on your behalf to find live performances and interesting articles, showing new things every time you visit.

Using technology, we can bring information alive and make our interactions with it more meaningful. As Michael Scott puts it:

The benefit of combining mediums is clearest in education, where you want to build both analytical and intuitive understanding. A musician trying to teach music theory should think twice about writing a traditional book. Alongside their theoretical explanations, they could offer an interface that lets the user add notes to a music staff and hear what they sound like; or listens to the user play their instrument and transcribes it in real time. A writer passionate about Hemingway’s writing principles and bent on teaching them may feel the urge to write a book; and, although it would educate aspiring writers, it would lack the interactive experience offered by Hemingway App, which shows a writer in real time what rules they are breaching. (To what extent the rules can be codified is a different question.)

As one of the architects responsible for the daring design of the Seattle Central Library said:

What if a memoirist publishes a piece overlaid with their revisions to show the process of expression and expose the artifice of memoir? Or what if an English professor does the same to compare writing styles and the emotions they convey? What if a novelist publishes a first-person novel in real time to make it feel like the character really exists and is experiencing events alongside the reader? What if the author then goes back and rewrites previous parts of the novel to show the decay of memory and its corruption in the construction of personal narratives?

Long before the birth of the digital world, writers like Hunter S. Thompson breached conventional forms to create new experiences for readers. And writers can continue to experiment within the book-bound format without intervention from outer disciplines. But they could also work with designers and engineers to create literature’s equivalent to musical technology like synthesizers and drum machines — the tools that Herbie Hancock used to

time and time again. If we give artists creative technology, we’ll get back experiences we didn’t even know we were missing.