I’ve been thinking about my 2nd and 3rd grade teachers lately, Mrs. U— and Mrs. B—. I loved them deeply, and still do. I was dead set on becoming a novelist back then, you see. Whenever I brought n...

PREFACE (January 2, 2022): My thoughts on some of these things have evolved since the time of writing. For one thing, I want to be clear that I have eaten sugar since then, though on much healthier...

PREFACE. I wrote the bulk of this piece one morning as a part of my regular writing practice, and because I needed something to put out in a blog. The great irony of what I describe in this post is...

I started reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Art of Communicating this week, and something he says early on struck me. He says that whenever you find yourself in the midst of toxic conversation, “y...

I remember visiting a Renaissance Faire with friends once, where one of the performers was a Master of Insults. His insults, he said, were the most brutal and searing we’d ever hear, and for a fee,...

My first trumpet teacher at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was David Burkhart. There are so many things he told me that were formative of my musical personality, but one in particular come...

When I left off in the last blog post, I was on my way to Houston to pursue my master’s degree at Rice University. My new trumpet teacher, Charlie Geyer, would have many pieces of wisdom to share o...

It’s no secret to my friends, colleagues and mentors that I like to think, ask questions and learn about weird or obscure things—occasionally to a fault. When I arrived in Miami Beach in the fall o...

Over the past five years or so, I spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn’t creative enough, or that the ways in which I was trying to express my creativity were inadequate, misguided, too safe, o...

I grew up on science fiction. During my childhood, our family would spend Sunday afternoons at Grandma’s house watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. I owe as much...