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In six weeks on the road I collected a book full of notes and a few dramatic photos, I ate, drank, visited, toured, drove, rode, flew, hiked, canoed, dreamed, pondered, wondered, felt elation, disappointment, numbness, and unfathomably intense stimulation. I’ve been to cities and towns and deserts and lakes and rivers and oceans and islands… Read more

Salvation

One of my earliest memories is of my father storming into the downstairs playroom with a stack of records that I loved listening to and snapping them into shards while I cried. As I recall, one of his records had been scratched. I’m not sure if the scratch had been my fault, but that was… Read more

Outsiders

Seems that everybody wants to be at the mercy of something. Whether rules, or limits, or comfort in standards and certainty, I never feel quite right in the company of constraint. Of course I realize that you’ve got to know the rules before you break them — get them in your bones then let them go snap.… Read more

I’m Looking At The Millennial In The Mirror

Millennials are shape shifters, hard to draw lines around in ways that their critics find familiar. The generation who raised them barely recognizes their children’s and grandchildren’s dreams, desires, and motivations — an irony not lost on Millennials, if even celebrated in their willful mis-appropriation of decades-old fashions, minus their retro-decadent mores. This isn’t anything new under… Read more

Being There

I realized one morning last week, in a way that I’ve never realized it before, that I am smack dab in the middle of my run. This year I turn 40. I like being in the second half now, as the first was a bear-wrestle from time to time, and I’m the kind of guy… Read more

A Little Peace & Loud

This post is composed of three scenes from around Auckland. The thought that motivated the project is as follows: “For as complex as these descriptions might be, they make me consider Noodle’s complexity as well. I create my own space from time to time and reorient myself in it; am I giving him the space… Read more

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Day one, I started Noodle on a sonic diet of Motörhead. In the time leading up to his birth, I learned quickly that jingle-jangly kids’ music drives me nuts. We’ll compromise, I figured: I choose the tunes, he chooses when to pee on me. Turns out that in the throes of pure exhaustion, fuzz-tone and… Read more

The Notebook

Hey Noodle, let’s go on an adventure. My notebook is nearly full again. It’s tattered, worn, scribbled in and on, the corners are turned up, folded over, and the whole thing looks like it’s been soaked in coffee and done double duty as a cookie sheet. It’s time for a new one. You know better… Read more

Winter Rain & Cookies

In the southern hemisphere, May means Winter’s settling in, and it’s starting to shape up like last year, which by all accounts was like any year. When winter hits in Auckland, it rains. And it keeps raining, and when it isn’t raining, it’s just damp. That’s the way the climate goes, but it’s all building… Read more

Kids These Days

Let’s face it: kids these days have it easy. School used to be harder, we didn’t have big screen televisions and video games, we hunted our own food, cultivated our own crops, wore fig leaves for clothes. Parents sometimes love to compete back and forth in a hyperbolic holier-than-thou tailspin, seemingly unable to recover a… Read more