2026-06-19 02:04:47
In March of 2007, I went with my friend Rain to the San Francisco ASPCA. I was in a transition period in a lot of ways; for the first time since I’d graduated college, I suddenly found myself without a full-time job or contract. The loss of a social circle from work, big changes in my personal life, and uncertainty about what I was going to do next meant that I was lonely and had too much time with my own thoughts. This was an exploratory trip to maybe consider someday getting a pet cat.
Going through the facility past all the cages was almost too much for me, and I almost had to leave. Even knowing the SF ASPCA’s outstanding reputation, and knowing that everyone inside was extremely well taken care of, it was overwhelming to see so many animals that needed my attention and needed me, specifically, to take them home with me. Except for one.
One cage had a beautiful gray and brown cat, with an immaculate coat and big fluffy ear tufts. According to the post-it on his cage, he was about one year old. He calmly came to the front of the cage to check me out, not particularly eagerly, just with a kind of mildly intrigued curiosity. “Huh, a new guy.”
I’m likely mis-remembering or over-romanticizing the day, but I recall that the facility had a play room that let the humans and the animals give each other a test drive before committing to adoption. He was playing with one of the workers, who had a cat dancer that he was happily chasing around. The other cats in the room were all being as manic as you’d expect cats in a wide open space to be, but this one gave off a strong vibe of being calm and content. With some minimal prompting, he came back over to check me out — “Hey, you’re that guy from before. Sup.” — and I immediately knew I had to take him home with me.
I remember driving home and asking Rain, “I got the best one, right?” And she agreed that I absolutely did. She got him a little green catnip-filled guy, and it became his favorite toy.
That probably didn’t all happen on the same day. I think I remember it as one just because I knew pretty much immediately that I’d be taking him home. I wrote about it on here, after I’d had him home for a few days. I don’t know if the subtext of that post is as clear to everybody else as it is to me, but I was already desperately trying to set boundaries and establish a respectful emotional distance. To make sure that he remained “my pet cat,” even though I was already completely in love with him.
I named him Pazuzu, both after the demon from The Exorcist, and more directly from the gargoyle in Futurama. It seemed appropriate as the name of a force of chaos who was also really cute. There would be many, many times over the years that I would call out to him in Professor Farnsworth’s voice, sometimes worried, more often just for fun. I don’t think he ever watched the show, but I’m pretty sure he would’ve appreciated the reference.
My husband and I had to say goodbye to Pazuzu on June 11, 2026. He was my best buddy for 20 years. And every single day for 20 years, I’ve said good morning to him, and hugged him, and wished him good night. And on the days when I couldn’t do it in person — which I’m now realizing were far too many — I was always thinking about him. I love him and I miss him so much.
If I had my preference, I’d leave it there. Over the years, I’ve seen many friends, family members, and even strangers say that they’d lost their beloved pet, and my heart breaks every time, and every time I’ve thought “I can imagine how they feel.” But of course I can’t.1 So I always offer my condolences with the same reminder, which sounds trite but which I am certain is true: “The more it hurts to lose them, the more you know that they were loved.” I know it’s true because it’s deeply unfair, the way that all the truest things in the universe are.
But I feel like I owe it to Pazuzu to make a public record of just how special he was. There’s only one other human being who knows him as well, and I have the advantage of having known Paz a few years longer. He never learned to blog or even write (he never seemed particularly interested, and honestly, good for him), so it’s up to me. People need to know that he was, objectively, the best.
Because I can already feel my brain going into self-defense mode, re-contextualizing and even outright re-writing memories to try and turn him back into “a very, very good cat.” I suppose that’s easier than coming to terms with losing my best friend.
Years ago, when he was much younger, and I was basically a different person, and the idea of not having him around was so completely implausible that even I didn’t think to worry about it, I described myself as a dog person who’d accidentally gotten the world’s best cat. I said that it was so painful when I lost my dog that I never wanted to get so attached to any animal that I’d have to go through that again, so I got a cat hoping for some emotional distance. That backfired spectacularly.
And I’ve already lied in this post. I said that I thought about Paz every single day, but I didn’t. Any more than I think about gravity, or oxygen, or my pancreas. They’re just constants. I don’t know how I’d live without them. I’d been thinking that he was with me through three different homes, but that’s not accurate, either: I’ve had one home in all the years since 2007, and it was “wherever Pazuzu lives.”
I was surprised by how rarely I’ve mentioned him on here, until I realized that of course he’s been present in everything I’ve written since 2007. When the universe has gifted you with a magical, immortal friend, you don’t think to write about how he makes everything about your day-to-day experience better, any more than you’d think to write about your personal connection to gravity, or oxygen, or your pancreas.
My original plan was to write a very, very long blog post about my life with Pazuzu, my favorite moments, all of the things that made him special. Once I was ready, I’d share it. And by the end, it’d be incontrovertible, objective proof that he was the best cat. Even the people most skeptical that you can ever have a genuine connection with an animal as independent and inscrutable as a cat — the kind of person I used to be, before I met him — would go away understanding that this wasn’t just a story about a sentimental man who’d developed a co-dependent relationship with his pet. And the people who didn’t need convincing could at least enjoy some cute pictures.
But then I went and sat outside on the balcony. And I didn’t hear him scampering across the living room to race me out the door, or looking at me through the dog door or the window to signal he wanted me to let him outside. And he didn’t trot over to his favorite place on the balcony and sit with his eyes closed, being blasted by the full warmth of a sunbeam. And I didn’t have to coax him back into the house, eventually giving up and just picking him up to force him to come inside (or in his later years, help him up the step). And I didn’t say “I love you, buddy” and then set him back down on the floor so he could trot off to do whatever was next on his agenda.
Which is weird, because all of that stuff happened multiple times a day, pretty much every day, for years. So often that it became routine, and when I thought of it at all, I thought of it as an unremarkable part of my life, instead of thinking of every single damn time being a special gift.
I realized that I couldn’t possibly sum up everything that made him special in one go, and that I don’t want to. I don’t even want to get to the point where I’ve got a healthy sense of distance and can reduce twenty years to a respectful and heartfelt summary.
I’d rather keep being reminded of little memories, indefinitely. And really think about how significant they are, instead of taking them for granted. After all, I may have loved him immediately, but that’s true of me with many cats and dogs. It took a long time for me to realize that whatever it means for anyone to have a soul, Pazuzu has one, and mine is connected to it.
So this is at least partly a cat blog now. I used to imagine Paz as being too cool to have any patience for twee cat influencers on the internet, but it’s silly to think he had no patience for sentimentality, considering how devoted he was to snuggling. Of course, I don’t owe it to anyone to convince them that I had a special bond with Paz, but I do owe it to him and to myself to keep remembering how it was built over years full of dozens of special moments. And again, worst case: everyone can enjoy some cute photos.
I love you, Pazuzu, and I always will.
2026-06-18 13:28:57
At the start of Exhuma, we see a young woman and man sitting next to each other on a first-class flight. Both of them go beyond movie-star beautiful into model or pop star beautiful, and they’re both fashionably dressed. The man is more casually dressed, and he’s resting while listening to headphones. His arms and chest are covered in tattoos of Chinese characters. The woman is more serious, looking out the window and thinking. A flight attendant comes up and asks, in Japanese I believe, whether the woman needs anything else before landing. The woman says no and then politely but firmly points out that she’s Korean, not Japanese. The flight attendant apologizes in Korean and moves on.
There’s a ton that’s packed into that short moment. It’s the modern day. They’re at the end of a long flight. They’re affluent, or at least stylish, and they seem to be effortlessly so, instead of keeping up a show of style and sophistication. He gives off the vibe of an up-and-coming pop star. She’s more unreadable: serious, thoughtful, composed, and cool. She feels strongly enough about her Korean identity to make a point of it, even though she’s multilingual, and even in situations where it wouldn’t seem to matter to anyone else.
Almost all of Exhuma has that same feeling of density, of having so much packed into each scene. The movie itself seems to have at least five movies packed into it, the way that it’s relentlessly building, twisting, and expanding. Incorporating contemporary horror, folklore, history, and suspense thriller while never feeling overstuffed, ponderous, or disjointed.
And like that scene, there’s the definite sense that there’s more going on than I have context for. I have a very simplified and high-level idea of the contentious relationship between Korea and Japan, and almost no knowledge of Korean folklore. But I never felt excluded, only intrigued. So many moments had implications that I suspected would be more impactful if I were Korean, but it wasn’t necessary. Everything crucial to the story was explained, and everything else felt like discovering an entirely new magical world I’d been completely unaware of.
We learn that the woman on the plane is named Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun), an experienced shaman who’s been hired by an extremely wealthy family of second-generation Korean Americans to find out what’s troubling their newborn son. The young man with her is her protege, Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun). Hwa-rim quickly figures out that the baby is being cursed by the vengeful ghost of an ancestor. The client, the baby’s father, refuses to tell them too much, but concedes that he’s also been cursed by dreams of his grandfather, dreams where he feels like he’s being choked to death.
Hwa-rim decides they need to exhume the grandfather’s grave and either relocate the body or have it cremated. To do this, she calls on our other two main characters: older men named Mr Kim (Choi Min-sik), a geomancer; and Mr Go (Yoo Hae-jin), a mortician. Kim uses his gift for reading the land and the five elements to charge wealthy families to find the best burial sites for their deceased family members. Go is a devout Christian but is also familiar with all of the traditional Korean burial rites, so he helps make sure that funerals and exhumations are handled correctly. They both lament that their income is dwindling, as all the best locations for burial in South Korea have already been taken. Kim is extremely respectful to the families and the dead, but also isn’t above telling a family that a site is 100% perfect when it’s truthfully only 60% perfect.
All of that is still just the initial setup. We get four expert paranormal-ish investigators of varying ages, backgrounds, and areas of expertise. They all have their own histories, back-stories, and relationships, and it all becomes clear via casting, demeanor, and sparing use of dialogue.
Even cooler is that they’re operating in a version of modern-day Korea where their talents and expertise aren’t immediately met with suspicion. The only character who’s dismissive of them is the baby’s mother, who we can infer was probably born in America, since she speaks English and is wary of what she calls “superstition.”
It created this neat dynamic where I, as an American with almost no familiarity with Korean culture, was always wondering how many of the rituals and beliefs were unique to the team, unique to people of certain faiths, unique to Korea, or made up for this movie. It felt like a story about present-day Seoul where magic exists and everyone knows it.
There are several different rituals performed throughout Exhuma, including a spectacular one that Hwa-rim leads while the grandfather’s coffin is exhumed. And it’s another example of how the movie establishes character: Hwa-rim is cool, stoic, and completely professional through just about everything, so it’s a dramatic contrast against the passionate energy she demonstrates as part of the ritual.
The movie is divided into titled chapters. It was a little jarring at first because the chapter headings often appear after a scene has already started, instead of being a clear break in the action. There’s nothing episodic or disjointed in the story, once the events start. I eventually realized that the chapters are really signaling that the movie is about to subtly change genres. It’s a story of family intrigue, and then about Korean religious practices1, and then an extended ghost story, and then straight-up horror, and so on.
Each chapter has a stand-out sequence, each of which would be the highlight of a different movie. That first ritual during the exhumation makes the movie worth seeing on its own, since it’s as powerful as a taiko performance and beautiful as a dance performance, and also filled with tension as we anticipate what is going to happen that will set the movie’s events in motion.
Fairly late in the story, a couple of new characters are introduced, who were quietly foreshadowed earlier with a phone call. They seamlessly segue into a scene with a new ritual, and it was then that I realized, “this movie has everything!”
My main criticism — really, my only criticism — of Exhuma is that its admirable sense of confident restraint often goes a little bit too far. Our first sign of the supernatural is only shown in a glimpse, and the movie brilliantly cuts away at exactly the right moment. But it was still such a surprise that I wanted to get a better look at it. Later, there’s a long sequence that depends on seeing things that are only visible in reflections, but I could never quite make out what I was looking at.
It was frustrating, because as much as I admired the movie for showing just enough and never being too on-the-nose, I still found myself wanting it to be a little clumsier and more obvious.
Apparently, Exhuma was a huge hit in Korea, and it’s become one of the highest-grossing Korean movies of all time. Based on that and on its premise (I’d been spoiled for some of the later reveals before seeing it), I’d expected it to be somewhat impenetrable for me.
But I never felt like I was watching a movie that was lost on me, as someone who couldn’t fully appreciate what it says about Korean patriotism or cultural heritage. It’s just a really solid, accessible, relentlessly expanding story that transcends language and even transcends genre. It feels both restrained and maximalist, modern and old-fashioned. And especially when compared to the state of American movies, it’s a valuable reminder of how you can make a movie feel big without its feeling excessive, saving the moments of spectacle for when they have the most impact.
2026-06-14 06:29:18
I didn’t have a lot to say about Episode 9 of Widow’s Bay, titled “Emergency Shelter,” because it felt like a filler episode designed to set up the finale. It didn’t feel nearly as eventful as the rest of the season’s episodes, more like a showcase for a few funny scenes, slowing down the pace to build up to the big finish.
Which made the key question: the big finish of what? Widow’s Bay the series, or just season one?
We got the answer to that, at least, with the announcement that the series is getting a second season. Knowing that makes me appreciate the episode a little more. It would’ve felt anticlimactic as part of the end of the entire series, but it works pretty well as a build-up for the story going off in a new direction.
Devoting half of the episode’s run time to Rosemary presenting 300 years of Warren family history via transparencies on an overhead projector seems simultaneously like something Widow’s Bay wouldn’t do, but also exactly like the kind of thing that only Widow’s Bay would do. On the one hand, the series doesn’t usually go so far in making a scene that’s mostly comedic; the pacing is just too tight for that, and they usually prefer to have the comedy running underneath or alongside everything else. But on the other hand: making fun of the idea of treating this as a puzzle box series, by making the big reveal as mundane and excruciatingly drawn out as they possibly can, is extremely funny and on brand.
I’d already gotten the impression that the YouTubers and Redditors were setting themselves up for disappointment by looking through freeze-frames for clues and concocting elaborate theories about the full story of the island and the Warren bloodline. Even in series that do lean into that — I’m thinking of WandaVision in particular — it’s rarely satisfying. Either the references are so obscure, and the theories so wildly off-base, that they’re completely irrelevant; or they figure out everything before the series is halfway done, so getting the reveals at the end feel like a let-down. Very few shows are designed to work like ARGs, but the internet treats everything like one.
So my take on Widow’s Bay is that they’ve been reminding us that it’s supposed to be fun, and that it’s all about the characters, and the story would most likely turn out to be one that normal viewers could process by casually watching the show, without having to turn to internet sleuths. I think that’s turned out to be the case, since the “did you notice…?” paintings weren’t just shown briefly in the background for eagle eyes to catch, but timed out to be emphasized exactly when story developments wanted you to notice them.
And the reveal of Warren’s surviving heir(s) could only have gone in a couple of ways and been satisfying. Evan via his mother was the most obvious one, but I also couldn’t think of a resolution for that which would fit into the tone of the series. (Of course, the series is being helmed by outstanding writers, who have already demonstrated that they’re more clever than I am). It would have to be a character that you’d recognize but hadn’t thought that much about, so Ruth was the right level of flying under the radar.
I realized that the funniest possible choice would’ve been Kathy the waitress. It would’ve made the episode’s final scenes a lot funnier, anyway, to hear the main characters, especially Tom, try to come up with justifications not to just kill her and be done with it.
It does make me wonder whether Widow’s Bay has been hiding an ace up their sleeve the whole season, because K Callan is a very funny actor, and she’s seemed charming but under-utilized the entire time. I just assumed — as I might have been supposed to — that her age required her to be funny but more subdued in this series. Now I’m wondering if maybe Ruth is entirely aware of the curse and her part in the blood line, and she’s been the one keeping the demonic forces at bay for so many years. Maybe she’s got surprises in store for Tom, who’s going to show up expecting a frail old woman.
I’m back to my original thought when I first recognized Callan1: you don’t cast her unless you’ve got plans for her.
Keeping to the idea that the series is character-based that happens to have a horror-mystery plot: after all the developments of the season, it did feel like the episode was returning to the equilibrium established in the beginning of the season. Tom Loftis being perpetually frustrated by an island full of stubborn weirdos who insist on doing things their own way. I liked the shaman being swept away by a tornado because he insisted on bringing his tube socks, and especially that he ran up to Tom yelling, “Wyck!” But my favorite was the return of lighthouse keeper Garrett. Having their roles reversed, and Garrett waving to him from the city hall window, was a fantastic payoff.
I haven’t been going too far into the speculative with Widow’s Bay, but I have been hearing many of the fan theories just by virtue of being on the internet. It is, after all, a little frustrating to be watching a series that seems to be saying “just relax and have fun with it,” but you’re enjoying it so much that you need to be engaging with other fans during the waits for the next episode. Even the less outlandish and complicated fan theories have always seemed a couple of steps ahead of my reading of the series, since they latch onto details that I’d just assumed were meant to be noticed only subconsciously to make more sense later.
(For instance: the painting of a child lost at sea, a comically dark image of the kind that’s everywhere on the island, which others noticed was actually a painting of a child being rescued while lost at sea).
But there’s one aspect of the island’s lore that nobody in the show seems to have considered, and none of the fan theories or podcasts or YouTube videos I’ve heard have mentioned. Everybody’s focused on the Warren family line, with the implied assumption that that was the origin of the curse on the island, and once Warren’s pact is broken, everything will return to some level of normal.
Which might just be a mis-read on my part, since it seems abundantly obvious that whatever evil entity is on the island, speaking to people through mushroom trips, was there before Warren arrived. The pact didn’t summon a demon; it was supposed to appease a demon. So the plan to end Warren’s bloodline and end the pact should make living on Widow’s Bay worse, not better. Not to mention setting up the premise of an indefinitely ongoing series.
Even assuming that the main plot idea of season one is that people born on the island can’t leave, there still seem to be dangling threads that don’t seem to have simple resolutions. The deaths that we’ve heard of happened soon after a person reached the mainline, and seemed to die of natural causes. The ones that we’ve been shown happened immediately on crossing into the “dead zone” around the island. Warren’s children lose their eyesight and develop black spots on their palms and faces. Evan’s mother suddenly realized she couldn’t see, forcing Tom to send the ferry back to the island in a panic.
So what are the “rules” of the pact, and the curse? Is it only Warren’s descendants who are immediately struck by it, not everyone born there who tries to leave, lending credence to the theory that Evan is actually the youngest and last member of Warren’s bloodline? Were the incidents that the reporter asked Tom about in the first episode even verified, or just rumors?
I saw an interview with Hiro Murai, Matthew Rhys, and Katie Dippold that took place around the broadcast of episode 4, but mentioned a few interesting things. One was the foreshadowing that Tom Loftis’s character takes a dark turn at the end of the season, and is changed afterwards. I’m happy to let the series surprise me, since they’ve proven that any direction they take it will be some of the best television, but I’m skeptical that they’ll take it too dark.
My prediction is pretty straightforward, and now that we finally know it’s an ongoing series, it seems heavily-to-the-point-of-obviously suggested throughout the entire season: Tom has been set up to be the next Richard Warren. He’s going to have to make a new pact with whatever entity is on the island, living up to his formerly-honorary title of Lord Protector.
He saw the office of mayor as a figurative curse, not believing in any of the local superstitions and trying to bring the island into the 21st century in order to make life better for people who didn’t like him very much (and vice versa). He was challenged by a local who accused him of being a coward unable to do what needs to be done. He gradually saw enough to convince him that the evils of Widow’s Bay were more than just superstition. He accidentally became one of the few people who have communicated with the evil. He met the first Lord Protector of the island, and he finally took an active role in trying to end the curse while still protecting someone he still didn’t like very much. It sure seems like his character has been set up as the unwilling hero — or at least anti-hero — of the island.
The other interesting quote from that interview was from Dippold, who said that season one of Widow’s Bay felt like a prologue for the rest of the series. It’s exciting to think of everything that could entail, a story that breaks out of a limited-series mindset and can go practically anywhere (as long as it doesn’t leave Widow’s Bay, presumably). And it’ll be difficult to wait patiently and let the brilliant people making this series keep delivering great stuff, without my wanting to second-guess or skip ahead.
2026-06-11 08:53:32
At the beginning of May, I wrote a post about how I was reconsidering my multi-decade-long goal of finding the perfect digital notebook, in favor of switching to good old-fashioned pen and paper. I still had an empty Field Notes memo book that I’d picked up during a trip to Chicago, and I resolved to use that as a test case for a journal.
As you can see from the above picture, things got a little out of hand. Even before I’d filled up the first one, I fell under the thrall of Field Notes’s marketing, and I figured if I’m going to do this, I’d better commit to it. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, right?
I got a couple of larger (A5) books with the idea that I could use them as “master” journals, for anything that needs more long-form writing or a deeper dive. They’re approximately the same size as the iPad mini and the older Moleskine I’d dug up, the only two notebooks that I’ve gotten any traction in as an adult. I have yet to use them, though, and am currently having trouble seeing a good use for them yet. A side effect of having this blog is that any long-form ideas bouncing around in my head usually go directly here without having a notebook as an intermediary.
I also got a couple of the same size with blank pages1, with the goal of using those purely as sketch books to practice drawing. Those I can at least see myself using, even though I haven’t yet. They could ideally be a replacement for how I typically use Procreate — start a drawing, get frustrated that I’m not better at drawing, have it annoy me every time I see it in the Procreate library, delete it so I don’t have to look at it.
But for me, the size that’s “stuck” is the memo book (A6, the size you most likely think of if you’re familiar with Field Notes at all). I’ve been using that Chicago one as a daily tracker for the past month. Not really a diary, since I don’t go into much depth. Not a planner, since I tend to write stuff down after the fact — so far, the trend has been that writing down what I plan to do that day all but guarantees that I’ll end up not doing it. So it’s just a list of what I did each day, even if that turns out to be almost nothing.
There is a whole sub-genre of YouTube videos about the life-changing magic of journaling and bullet journaling and organizing and planning, with tons of people eager to share their perfect system. For me, it hasn’t been “life-changing,” at least not yet, but I’m definitely into it. I’ve filled up my first memo book and already started on a second.
At that rate, I should exhaust my current supply of memo books as early as… 2029. In addition to all the ones visible in the above picture, I might have splurged on a box set of all of the National Parks editions. Who’s to say? What even is money to the unemployed man, when you get right down to it?
You could argue that this is far too many notebooks, especially for a man of my age, who should’ve started doing this 20 years ago if at all. You could point out that Field Notes are a bit overpriced for what they are. The aura comes from effectively marketing to hipsters and collectors. The paper isn’t that great. There are much more cost-effective options from competitors, much less no-name brands you can get anywhere.
To that, I say:
That’s why these hit the sweet spot for me, in ways that were unexpected enough to be counter-intuitive.
My old Moleskine makes the most sense, practically. Plenty of pages with lots of space on each page. A place for everything: I’ve got notes from a decade ago intermingled with stray game ideas from the last couple of weeks. It’s basic black and perfectly utilitarian, so I shouldn’t have any hesitation opening it up and using up the pages. That’s what it’s for.
Meanwhile, the memo books seem like a nightmare for actually finding anything once I’ve written it down. They’re hostile to doing a deep dive on anything, since you quickly run out of space on a page. A book you use daily might only last a month or so. And the covers are so pretty — and they’ve got this aura of “collectibility” around them now — that it seems like wasting one to fill it up with something as mundane as “Wednesday: I had a ham sandwich for lunch.”
In practice, for how I use them at least, all of those turn into positives. The smaller size encourages me to use it for whatever, without being intimidated by a larger blank page. Having several of them means I don’t need to be that precious about each one. Being limited to 48 pages means I’ve got enough space for a month’s worth of stray nonsense, but I also get the sense of completion that comes from finishing one.2
And last month, every day when I opened my journal, I saw the plain cover with the stars from the Chicago flag, and I remembered going on that trip with my fiance. Every day this month, I get a look at that fantastic painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, and invariably remember my time living in San Francisco.
And each of them, I’ll associate with memories of the month I spent using them. It’s a neat and for me unexpected combination of being pretty enough to enjoy using them, but not so precious that I don’t want to sully them. The size becomes a feature, too — instead of being A Big Book of Everything, the limited life span of a memo book means it’ll forever be associated with a very specific time.
Last month, I went to see a production of my friend’s play at CalArts, and I wrote some notes about it on one page, and stapled my copy of the program to the other. That’s now a permanent part of that specific notebook, waiting for whenever I choose to dig back through the completed and archived books.
It gives everything the feeling of semi-permanence, which I like a lot. I already realized that I’ve been drawn to digital ever since I was an adolescent, to the point of feeling low-grade anxiety any time I’m doing something without undo and delete. It always seemed obvious that digital notebooks and, especially, the iPad mini, would be the best of all worlds, since you have infinite space, infinite tools, and the easy ability to correct mistakes.
But in practice, that appeal turns out to be false. As I mentioned with Procreate earlier, I hate having bad drawings around, so I delete them. I hate having dumb ideas lying around, so I erase them. I don’t take advantage of near-infinite storage, because the mistakes disappear. It’s a fixation on perfectionism that doesn’t result in my gradually getting perfect, but just stagnating. Having to start over from scratch each time, essentially, because I’ve gotten rid of all the various imperfect, amateurish, ugly attempts that I should be keeping around so that I can build on them.
It would’ve been a hugely valuable lesson years ago, to realize that it’s not simply that my journals and sketchpads don’t need to be perfect. It’s best when they’re not! You want to hide the process from whoever’s going to be seeing the end result; for myself, the process is the whole point. And it’s silly to be uptight about messing up a page and not being able to undo, since there are several more pages that are chances to get it right.
I was fully aware that getting into notebooks brought with it the danger of getting really into pens. I couldn’t help but dip my toe into it, but at least as of right now, it sure feels like I’ve gotten it out of my system. It’s a whole sub-culture for some people, but I don’t feel that same “oh hang on, this could get dangerous and expensive” pull as I do for other burgeoning hobbies.
I did buy exactly one fountain pen, out of curiosity. It’s a Pilot Metropolitan “Retro Pop,” which I think is mid-range as far as fountain pens go, but is the most I’ve ever spent or plan to spend on a writing implement.3
I’ve never owned one, and the closest I’ve come is having some dip pens with nibs back when I was a teenager. I hated them, hated the mess, hated the feel of the nib on the paper, quickly decided it wasn’t for me. This is entirely different. About as easy to use as a roller ball or gel pen, and using it just feels like it’s naturally improving my handwriting.
They’re not suited to Field Notes paper, though, so I don’t see its becoming a daily-use thing. I did also get a couple of gel pens that have regularly been mentioned by the same type of people who tend to talk about Field Notes — the Uniball Zento pens — and while they’re nice, especially the “Flow” model with its part-metal body, I’m still drawn to the old dependable Pilot G-2. (The Uniballs dry faster and aren’t as prone to smearing, but the Pilot just feels smoother and seems to last longer).
And as long as this is turning into a product round-up, I got a “Mini Field Journal” from Lochby, which is the brand that gets most often recommended on YouTube. I like it so far, and am glad I chose it instead of the alternate smaller version that zips closed instead of using a clasp. It does defeat part of the main purpose of Field Notes, which is that they’re small enough to fit in a pocket. But it can carry multiple at a time, and for me, it’s especially useful for always having a pen handy.
The other journaling-adjacent sub-culture that frightens me is scrapbooking. I’ve accumulated years and years of ephemera — pamphlets, theme park tickets, concert tickets, stickers, brochures, zines — that is currently scattered in various containers all over the house. Not enough sentimental value for me to do something with them, but too much sentimental value for me to just throw away. I liked the idea of just stapling stuff into my daily tracker memo book, but a lot of the stuff is just too big.
Mead is hitting me right in the Gen X nostalgia by re-releasing the Trapper Keeper. Although my much-beloved Empire Strikes Back one from middle school disappeared long, long ago, I kind of like the idea of having a shamelessly garish retro one full of stuff from mostly-forgotten vacations past.
I’ve never felt drawn to washi tape or metallic colored markers, and I honestly don’t see that changing now that I’m in my 50s. But I do have, for instance, a brochure from the tram tour we took in Hong Kong, and it’d be nice to have a place for it that isn’t “crumpled up in a box somewhere.” Watch this space for updates!
I get the impression that anyone who talks about Field Notes as much as I’ve been doing here is obliged to share with you the system they’ve devised for using them. How to set up a new one with numbered pages and an index and post-it notes and customized pockets, or how to arrange each page with the week’s to-do list as well as a habit planner.
Unfortunately, I’m nowhere near that organized, and I suspect that if I’d try to put so much process into the process, I would’ve abandoned it already. But the current version of my non-process:
That journal holds two (or more) pocket-sized notebooks, so I have one as my daily tracker, and one that’s just an unorganized “everything you need to write down in a notebook.”
In the main book, I just use the right page of each two-page spread to make a list of whatever I did that day. Disappointingly often, there’s not even enough to fill a page, so I’ll put two days on the same page. The left page I turn sideways and use for any miscellaneous stuff from the day that didn’t fit into a list. Quotes or memorable details from whatever movie or TV show I’m watching, a health update for my senior cat, more detailed notes on a play, whatever.
I’m not even sure that writing everything down has helped with my memory retention. But I have noticed that it’s nice simply as a slow-down ritual. Purposefully doing something that’s not strictly necessary, and doing it in the slowest and most methodical way possible. I’ve had journaling apps for years, after all, and I could’ve been typing all kinds of rambling paragraphs and lengthy tangents, but I haven’t. Even — especially? — when the subject is my own life, I just want to see a bullet-point list of the key things.
And another advantage of small memo books is that you don’t have to be tied to a system, and you can figure it all out as you go. You can have special-purpose books, unorganized catch-all books, project-specific books, whatever. The initial draw for me had nothing to do with journaling, and was just me looking for a way to brainstorm and think through a game idea. Having a small, 48-page memo book completely devoted to a single game seems like the perfect scheme4, and a perfect document to archive afterwards.
Of course, the key to that is having enough memo books that it never feels like an overwhelming number of blank pages, but also never feels like you’re in danger of running out. So clearly, obviously, there’s only one correct next step for me: to sign up for the quarterly Field Notes subscription boxes.
2026-06-10 01:00:00
One of the things that surprised me the most about The Wicker Man was that it seemed to be almost a musical. There were entire scenes devoted to a song, often pivotal to revealing something about the island or its plot.
My favorite is “Willow’s Song,” which the lovely young innkeeper’s daughter sings to herself to help fall asleep and for no other reason. I love it for many reasons, including how her movements emphasize the pounding of the drum beat. But mostly for the lyrics, which have the quality of the best folk songs — so abstract or metaphorical that it would take a historian to explain how they were unspeakably provocative for the time — until the last couplet, which could hardly be any more direct.1
(I usually try to keep a strict rule that the two-fer should never become a three-some, but I really like a cover of “Willow’s Song” titled “How Do” by Sneaker Pimps. It’s pretty faithful, but fills out the arrangement with the late 90s stuff you’d expect from the Sneaker Pimps, and really drives home the drum beat, which makes it as sinister as it is lovely).
The Wicker Man is so musical, in fact, that at times it felt a bit like a pagan Godspell. The films came out in the same year, and I admit I like the image of the two of them battling it out in the box office for the souls of the youth.
I deeply, deeply love Godspell, and I have ever since I first saw a high school production of it as a teenager. I vaguely remember a mild controversy over the choice to use it in my small home town deep in the Bible Belt, since the costumes, and the whole Hair-meets-the-gospel-of-Matthew concept could be assumed to be mockery. Not to mention setting everything to popular music!
It’s funny to think now, seeing as how the play is so earnest and so reverent. And especially that one of the most wholesome and reverential musicals based on Biblical material was written and performed by so many people who are ethnically Jewish and presumably non-Christian. (Not to mention that several people key to the production are gay or bisexual, which at the time was mostly considered to be completely incompatible with Christianity).
It’s a perfect illustration of how a faith that’s driven by dogma and ritual is a faith unchallenged. Beliefs that can’t tolerate differing interpretations and differing representations are weak and brittle, depending only on tradition and blind acceptance, instead of examining what the words mean and how they have value. Which actually makes it an excellent companion to many of the ideas in The Wicker Man.
My favorite song in Godspell is… well, it’s “Day by Day.” But that’s kind of like choosing “Stairway to Heaven” as your favorite Led Zeppelin song — it’s not wrong, it’s just basic. I think the most powerful song in Godspell is “By My Side”. Even as a cynical middle-aged man, decades removed from having any patience for musical theater that doesn’t deal in ironic detachment, hearing the entire ensemble join in for “I can walk” still gives me goosebumps.
2026-06-09 06:03:04
When a movie has been on my to-watch backlog for as long as The Wicker Man, I go into it with a lot of assumptions based on stuff that’s been outright spoiled, or stuff I knew from general cultural diffusion.
And from watching the inexcusably awful remake. I hadn’t thought it was possible for me to hate that movie even worse, but finally seeing the original transformed my take on the remake from “offensively unnecessary” to “thoroughly offensive.”1
So after watching the original The Wicker Man, I can’t remember ever seeing a movie and so thoroughly wishing I could’ve seen it in its original context. Watching it in 2026, it feels bold and transgressive and completely unique. How much of that is the result of my formative years being in the height of an American conservative movement? My impression of the early 1970s in the UK is mostly formed from Led Zeppelin album covers; maybe pagan imagery wasn’t as immediately shocking.2
In any case, I don’t want to give the impression that The Wicker Man is one of those movies that can only be appreciated in its original context. It does a great job establishing its contrasts right from the start. We see immediately that the protagonist Sergeant Howie, played by Edward Woodward, is kind of a weirdo even by contemporary Scottish standards. His first line is a comically by-the-book “get a haircut” to a younger officer. Immediately after, he sees some graffiti reading “Jesus saves,” and although he agrees with the sentiment, there is a time and place.
While the younger officers are gossiping about how he’s so devout that he’s even saving himself for marriage, we see essential cutaways to Sgt Howie singing hymns with his bride to be, and then taking communion. We hear the entire ritual in voice-over, as the principle of transubstantiation is described from scripture. It’s immediately clear that for the Sergeant, it’s not just a familiar ritual; he believes in it with the true conviction of the faithful.
It’s the key idea that drives most of the movie, and it’s so effectively established from the start. When he goes to the island of Summerisle to investigate an anonymous report of a missing girl, he’s there not just with the authority of the police, but with the even higher authority of acting on behalf of a Christian nation. So when he encounters the obstruction of the older men at the harbor, and then the increasing raunchiness of the locals in and around the pub, you can practically feel his irritation building. They don’t respect the police, they don’t respect the mainland, they don’t respect the Crown, they don’t respect common decency, and they don’t even respect (his) God.
And it was fascinating to see how the movie put such a wholesome spin on heresy and debauchery. Or at least, what our protagonist considered heresy and debauchery. Everyone is perfectly polite and seemingly respectful to Sgt Howie, even as it becomes increasingly clear that they’re obstructing justice.
And I wasn’t prepared for how much of The Wicker Man plays almost like a musical. There always seems to be at least a violinist and guitarist somewhere nearby, waiting to turn the scene into an early 1970s music video. After he meets the innkeeper’s daughter, played by Britt Ekland, everyone in the bar, young and old, male and female, sings a lengthy song about wanting to have sex with the innkeeper’s daughter, to her delight. The song, and even the orgy happening outside, in and around the cemetery, are presented so joyfully that it makes Howie’s disdain and disgust for it seem uptight and rude.
As Howie’s investigation continues, he sees more and more signs that the islanders are lying to him and worse, that they’ve rejected God and are corrupting the children. The thing I love about the first half of The Wicker Man is that it presents all of this as innocuous at worst. Because so much of it is set to music, it often suggests that it’s the residents of Summerisle who are living in happiness and harmony.
It’s easy to imagine a lesser version of this movie, where the idyllic small town gradually reveals increasingly sinister signs of wickedness and blasphemy. Each with a tense musical stinger, instead of a lovely acoustic folk song. Here, it’s all open and in the daylight, and the camera dispassionately treats most of it as it would any quaint old village that has its own traditions. Of course the local pharmacy would have a jar full of foreskins; isn’t that charming?
Because we’ve already seen that Sgt Howie is out of place even on the mainland, and we’ve been reminded of one of the oddest and most symbolic rituals in mainstream Christianity, it adds a powerful subversion on the expected dynamic. Howie often reads not as the “fish out of water” so much as the judgmental invader. Never the villain, since you’re always reminded that he’s on a quest to find a missing child, and it becomes increasingly evident that the residents are hiding something. But the story refuses to give you a protagonist that you can relate to entirely, so for most of the movie, it maintains a sense of your being a dispassionate third party.
Which makes me think that much of the power and the timelessness of The Wicker Man is that your interpretation inevitably brings in so much of yourself and your own experiences and prejudices. I grew up in an environment where until the time I was a teenager, just the suggestion of teaching Christianity as a “comparative religion” would’ve seemed dangerously heretical. How does the tension of the movie play to audiences who grew up in secular households, and how does that differ from audiences who grew up in faithful households with non-Christian religions?
I’ve learned that Christopher Lee not only plays Lord Summerisle, but spearheaded the entire project, acting as more or less an uncredited producer. He also claimed that it was the film and the performance that he was most proud of. The movie isn’t the showcase for him that I’d been expecting, but it absolutely does not work without him. There’s such a strong association with his persona as an intelligent, literate, cultured, and impeccably genteel villain, and that’s crucial to making the core tension of the story work.
We begin to hear mention of him from the moment Sgt Howie arrives at Summerisle, with all of the residents deferring to him as the absolute, unquestioned authority of the island. The connotations of Count Dracula are unavoidable, and the movie takes full advantage of that, foreshadowing a climactic showdown with the blasphemous monster who’s bent an entire town to his will.
So their meeting is a fantastic subversion of that. Summerisle immediately reads as a direct contrast to Sgt Howie: tall, shaggy-haired, jovial, and worldly. He asserts that the community are “deeply religious people,” and that their practices are different from the mainland but equally valid. As Howie insists that they’ve rejected the “true God,” it flips the way paganism is typically presented in Western media. Summerisle is contemporary and enlightened, and Howie is the one who’s clinging to the superstitious old ways. Of course the women are dancing about the fire naked; doing it with clothes on would be far too dangerous!
Watching The Wicker Man in 2026, it’s impossible for me not to see comparisons between Lord Summerisle and a current-day hoodie-wearing tech billionaire. Casually describing a history of social engineering as a grand experiment, where fealty to gods of nature has resulted in greater productivity. His education, wealth, and rank demand a level of deference from a representative of The Crown, even as he’s matter-of-factly describing how they’re not subject to the rules of The Crown. You can imagine a current-day journalist calling it “disruption.”
While the movie’s not a showcase for Christopher Lee, despite his being essential to making it work, it absolutely is a showcase for Edward Woodward. His performance is phenomenal. I kept seeing scene after scene where taking it even a tiny bit too far in any direction would’ve undermined the entire film. As it is, he reads as a man whose self-righteousness is absolute, without ever turning into desperation or defensiveness. The island is constantly and increasingly challenging his baseline understanding of what’s “normal,” but it’s not breaking him, and it’s not making him lose his cool.
Except for the best scene in the entire movie, which is a scene of seduction presented as a musical number.
The innkeeper’s daughter Willow is lying nude on her bed in the next room, slapping her hand against an adjoining wall to the beat of the music, singing to the accompaniment of a guitarist and drum player downstairs. As the song continues, she dances around the room, pressing herself against the furniture, the window, and the walls, like a siren calling out to the Christian policeman next door.
And again, the song is presented as more lovely than sinister. If you’re watching a full edit of the movie3, you saw an earlier scene where a young man from the village was presented to Willow, she called him up to her room, and everyone in the pub sang a song celebrating the two of them having sex upstairs. Here, her dancing is shown as beautiful and natural, her singing as more of a willing invitation than a seduction or temptation.
In the next room, we see Sgt Howie losing control for the first time. He’s sleepless, sweaty, and mad horny, pressing himself against the wall, almost physically restraining himself from running out of the room and into the bed next door. The premise clearly suggests the story of Sir Galahad: a virtuous knight and servant of the King, victorious over wicked temptation and maintaining his chastity. But with the music, and with the way it’s shot — cutting between the brightly-lit dance in Willow’s room, with the dark, shadowy, sweaty desperation in Howie’s — it forces you to consider how much of that torment is purely of Howie’s own making.
We saw so little of Howie’s fiancee that there’s little sense of infidelity; she’s practically a non-character. There’s not even the usual sense of the uneven power dynamic, especially if we saw the earlier “Gently Johnny” scene. It makes you realize that even the notion of a woman having bodily autonomy is considered a threat to a puritanical society. Which of these two characters is really the more “wicked?”
Obviously, I don’t want to suggest that the key takeaway of The Wicker Man is “honestly, there are no bad guys here.” As the story advances towards its conclusion, it becomes increasingly clear what’s going on, even if you hadn’t already been spoiled for the ending. And that, ultimately, is my main criticism of the movie, the thing that keeps it from being unique and perfect.
For all of the interesting and transgressive things it does purely with imagery and music, it still has several scenes of clunky exposition. Most of the initial conversation between Lord Summerisle and Sgt Howie is telling the history of the island outright. As Howie’s focus returns to the police procedural portion of the story, we get several scenes of his thoughts in voice-over, or even saying out loud, his theory on exactly what happened. He finds a book describing the May Day ritual, which lays out step by step what the different roles are, and exactly what happens. And the end of the movie is a character explicitly spelling out exactly what was going on all along.
Of course, what was going on all along is interesting and tragic and horrific, so the movie’s iconic finale still totally works. Especially since Woodward’s portrayal of Sgt Howie remains phenomenal to the end. He’s not simply a fool, and he doesn’t act purely out of self-righteous conviction. His appeal to the people of the island is one of reason, trying to explain the futility of what they’re doing. And the only time in the entire movie that we see a crack in Lord Summerisle’s confidence, a moment of hesitation while considering he hasn’t achieved a flawless victory, is when Howie points out that he’ll be the target the next time the crops inevitably fail. Raising the question of whether Summerisle was ever a true believer, or simply manipulating it for his own benefit.
Even at the end, Howie remains steadfast in his faith, and there’s even a sense that he’s “won” in the sense that’s most meaningful to him. He resisted temptation, and he stayed true to fulfilling his quest, the only person on the entire island who wasn’t being deceitful. Woodward plays him as a man who didn’t succumb to fear or desperation, and stayed true to his beliefs when a more contemporary man wouldn’t have.
The biggest criticism I have of The Wicker Man is that the scenes of explicit exposition are disappointing in a movie that’s so effective at suggestion. And its folk horror/thriller4 resolution does pretty definitively turn it into a story about a Christian martyr remaining steadfast against the evils of paganism. Plus, when you go back and consider it just in terms of plot, a lot of the moments don’t make that much sense as part of a grand scheme.
But those just keep the movie from being perfect. They don’t change the fact that The Wicker Man is a transgressive and timeless examination of belief, ritual, religious imperialism, comparative religion vs dogma, unchallenged cultural assumptions, and the role that faith plays in our natural lives. It’s so much better than the movie I’d expected it to be, and it absolutely deserves its status as a classic.