I recommend dual sinks.

See also: “What Happens to The Married” & “Home Depot“

Meg and I took a 6-hour roadtrip down to South Padre Island last weekend. It’s amazing to me that taking a car trip can still be so romantic. The car as an intimate space. You’re not distracted by your normal routine–there’s nothing to do but talk to each other, listen to music, or look out the window. We stayed off of the big interstates for most of the trip, took 183 down to Corpus Christi through small Texas towns. I saw a huge row of wind turbines spinning on the horizon. Tractors running in the fields. Cones from Dairy Queen. Little traffic. No stress.

Yes, it felt like a victory of sorts.

I’ve been told it’s a good thing to have, so after going years without one, I finally have an online portfolio of my work.

My idea for the page all started with a venn diagram I’ve started drawing for people in conversation:

For a long time I just thought of myself as a “writer who draws,” somebody who communicates with “pictures and words together.” But I’ve slowly accepted that the other big piece of my life is The Web. The really interesting work, the work that I’m good at, it happens in the overlap of those three worlds.

After the venn diagram, I struggled to come up with some decent writing to describe what it is that I do:

Then, after that, I sketched out the design:

But I can only do so much on paper. The final form doesn’t really come into view until I start working with code and see the way the elements play out on the screen. Funny enough, most of what changes when I get to the code stage is the writing! I’m constantly cutting words, switching things around…

…I guess you could say a web page is like what Valery said of poems: “Never finished, only abandoned.”

Check out this white-out interview with Ed Champion.

True story.

Thanks to everybody who has bought a copy of Newspaper Blackout and kept it on the Poetry Foundation’s Best Seller list for 16 weeks straight.

I had a professor in college who told me, “the only reward you get from being an artist is that you get to make art.”

No matter what, it always comes back to the work.

In progress:

Check out my tweaks to the Newspaper Blackout book page.