Hi Crowd! Almost 10 years ago I began flirting with the idea of getting a PhD. A friend of mine got one and I thought, “oh that sounds cool.” This is entertaining for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m a college dropout. This was, in part, some of what I was doing while we lived in Tokyo and the idea went from crazy idea to viable reality smack into invisible wall and eventually thrown to the wayside, which is fine because it was a crazy out of nowhere idea to begin with. I stil...

Oh hello there, it's been a while. Once again when the world is chaos I end up not writing anything because I'm so busy making notes of things I want to write about and the backlog keeps getting longer because there's a new thing every 5 minutes and I can't keep up. I've noted this in the past and often tried to find a way around it but at this point I think I just need to give up. Similar to the old email-bankruptcy thing, I just need to accept that I'll never be the most up to date commenta...

Hi Crowd! I've been using AirBnB since forever. Like, almost 20 years now. Especially for cities I go to frequently with neighborhoods I like, it's often a better experience than a hotel halfway across town at twice the price. It hasn't always been perfect, there's been waves of weirdness like shady business owners renting out 300 apartments and hiring 2 people to pretend to be 50 different hosts. I rented a place in Tokyo one time and traded messages back and forth with the host for weeks wh...

Hi Crowd!Sorry it's been a while since the last note, things have been.. well yeah. Things. You already know. Especially if you already joined The Crowd Telegram group where at the very least I've been posting some links and memes and having a few discussions along the way. It's still new and the discussion side is still small but if you are hanging out in Telegram already maybe it's worth checking out too. Just to be clear it's not a change america groupchat or a war plans group chat, or...

I was in 6th grade in the 1980’s when a classmate gave me what he called “a punk mixtape.” Side A was labeled SKATE ROCK and on Side B was scrawled SUICIDAL. We had basic cable and I’d already become a devout MTV watcher which had heavily influenced my musical tastes, but this cassette rewired my brain in irreparable ways. (I consider that a good thing by the way, anytime you have the opportunity to have your worldview turned upside down I highly recommend it.) I listened to it until it broke...

Last month landing in Munich on a stopover from Paris the pilot made an announcement as we were taxing to the gate. He said if we looked out the window we’d see several emergency vehicles heading towards the plane, that there was nothing to worry about but one of the passengers was having a medical emergency and the medics needed to get on the plane and help the person off and this needed to happen before anyone else could get off the plane. He asked everyone to please be considerate and rema...

If you follow me on any number of various world wide web portals you know I turned 50 yesterday. The truth is 49 always felt like a desperate, forced age. Like "look, I'm not 50 yet!!!" so for most of the last year if someone asked how old I was I just said 50, so I sort of let the air out of that tire a while ago so to speak. But in case you had any question there's no questioning it now, I'm officially old. And don't anyone older than me reply back with some youngster comment, you are old t...

Hi Crowd! Things have been a bit scattered recently, by design or just unfortunate timing it seems like one can barely digest the chaos of the day before being presented with the next wave of complications. This manifests in many ways, doom scrolling and retreating into known comfort zones among them. I don't know that I have either a solution or a useful processing method, though certainly find myself hunting for one almost daily. My list of things I want to write to you about continues to g...

I visited Los Angeles for the first time in February of 2001. I’d passed on previous opportunities to visit because I assumed it would be a place I’d hate. The only things I knew about it was there were lots of earthquakes and fake people. I didn’t work in the movies, had no interest in plastic surgery or fancy cars and generally didn’t think there was anything I’d find interesting there, so why bother? I eventually decided to check it out not for any grand reason other than that it was reall...

Hi Crowd! [Insert obligatory "I haven't written to you since last year" joke followed by copious laughter] The most persistent new years eve memory I have pegs back to perhaps '94 in Gainesville, we'd all just gotten home from some new years eve show happening at the Hardback with which bands I've forgotten but certainly loved with all my heart at the time, and when I say home I mean the shitty 8 unit breezeway apartment complex I lived in at the time of which 6 of the 8 apartments were occup...