2026-09-15 07:29:19
"Graceland" by Paul Simon
Share a song that got you through a difficult time - Graceland by Paul Simon
Losing love is like a window in your heart, everybody sees you're blown apart. - The album on repeat at the end of my first marriage.
2026-09-10 22:00:00
I entered adolescence in the disco era. I gotta admit, out of all the songs that they could play at the roller skating rink, you could do a lot worse. It was still the post-Woodstock decade and many attitudes weren't far removed from the ones that people ordinarily associate with the 60s. Cocaine was consumed openly at Studio 54 and the prevailing attitude was "rich people, what can you do?" The devil's lettuce was everywhere.
That's how, at the age of 12 I found myself all of a sudden on the way to smoke my first joint with a new, more street-wise friend from our apartment complex. We found a nearby construction site. He pulled a fat but loosely rolled joint from his sock. It was damp with sweat and hard to light. I did not catch the slightest buzz from half a doobie of sweat-soaked, low-quality, Mexican ditch weed. And that was that. I did not immediately seek out more. In fact, I waited another couple of years.
We'd moved to another city, all the way across the state. It took a while, but I eventually got invited to light up again and this time, it worked. I have a distinct memory of standing in the kitchen of my benefactor, sharing a jar of maraschino cherries and giggling. I definitely wanted more. I'm not a moocher by nature, so I asked about buying my own supply. I had no idea how that even worked. As it turned out, one could purchase individual hand-rolled joints on the junior high school market for $1.
That's how I bought my very first joint. I was so excited that I tried to light it up in the five-minute break between classes, but I only had three matches and it was a windy day. As I returned to the building, a teacher, and undercover teenage dope-fiend detector, had used the skill called "looking out the window" to see me trying to spark up my purchase. She grabbed me and asked to see what I had in my hands, whereupon I threw the barely singed joint onto the floor. She picked it up. She took me to the principal, a man who knew me very well. He sent me home with instructions not to return for two weeks.
My home life wasn't pleasant. My mom was married to an abusive (in more ways than one) narcissist who didn't like me any more as a teenager than he had as the first-grader I was when he entered our lives. Getting busted was the last straw. The way to keep the peace turned out to be me leaving home for good. I moved to my uncle's farm, where the adventure continued.
If I'd just learned to be cool with weed and rested on my laurels, my life would have been much different. Instead, I ended up wrestling with demon rum until I eventually had to turn from abstinence from everything in order to have the kind of life I wanted. That was in 2008.
Without romanticizing it, I have interesting cultural memories of the way cannabis was used in the 70s and 80s. As mentioned, you could buy single joints at school. Hell, my school still had a student's smoking area, a built-in marketplace. The nickel bag era was gone, but a dime bag, $10 worth of the green, netted you 1/4 ounce of a product that would indeed get you high, if you smoked enough of it.
Smoking it usually involved joints using the rolling paper that you thought the cool kids used. For me, that was J&B 1.5s. Not using a double wide signified that I had been rolling long enough that I didn't need all that extra paper. People these days talk about having an everyday carry pen or knife. For me in those years, it was a packet of rolling papers. We also occasionally managed to get our hands on pipes (bowls) from head shops. Most potheads of my era could make an emergency pipe with a toilet paper roll, some tinfoil and a safety pin.
Looking back now at how my fellow smoke hounds turned out reveals that no one's life was ruined by reefer madness. My fellow partakers are today a senior military leader, the head of HR at one of the county's largest employers, a physician, a retired cop and an ordained minister. I have no idea if any of them still puff, I doubt it, but I wouldn't judge them if they did.
These days we know that most of the harm attributed to cannabis is the stuff of myths, while the claimed health benefits for pain control, anxiety, nausea and appetite stimulation are true. Rather than a life-ruining addictive and noxious weed, the sticky-icky is an herb with thousands of years of medicinal use in its background.
It's not for everyone, but I am 100% certain that you know someone who would be a lot cooler if they would just burn one once in a while.
Weed never got its hooks in me. The bottle did. That's the one that almost took me down, and the one that made me give up everything as a trade for not killing me.
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2026-09-08 23:59:41
The Apple-created graphics that appear on your folders are called SF Symbols. There are thousands of them, and they're designed to stay legible in multiple sizes and weights, from tiny up to headline-sized. Apple allows you to create your own, in a process that turns out to be pretty complicated when done correctly. You're drawing potentially nine weights (Ultralight through Black) at three scales, making sure the strokes stay visually consistent at every combination, making sure the whole thing still reads as the same symbol from thin to bold, and doing it all in a way Xcode will accept without silently failing. Most people who've tried this by hand in Illustrator or Sketch will tell you it's tedious, error-prone, and genuinely difficult to keep consistent.
McKinley is a dedicated app built to solve exactly that problem. It's a vector drawing tool, but unlike a general-purpose one, it already understands the SF Symbols format: the weight system, the scale system, the export rules Xcode expects. You draw a shape once, and McKinley handles generating and keeping consistent the different weights and sizes that shape needs to become a real, working custom symbol, rather than you manually redrawing (and re-aligning) it nine times. It can start from an SVG you already have or from a blank canvas, it live-previews your symbol using Apple's actual rendering engine, so what you see is what will really show up in an app, and when you're done it exports straight into a format Xcode can use. It launched September 7, 2026, runs on macOS 15 and up, and it's made by one developer, Amy Worrall, under the name Double & Thrice Ltd.
I don't have many developer chops, so this isn't going to end up in my daily driver stack, but I was intrigued because John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, raved about McKinley as "a remarkable 1.0." Double & Thrice provided me with a reviewer's license, and I installed and tested it.
Several things were impressive. The documentation, including a list of the app's limitations, is well done. When the app encounters an issue, the error messages are descriptive and helpful. To my eyes, the symbols it creates are indistinguishable from the ones in Apple's built-in set.
The kicker is the pricing. Gruber called McKinley a serious professional tool for dev shops and graphics pros. £55 / €65 / $60, one-time. There's a 15% launch discount (down to roughly £46.75 / €55.25 / $51) through September 14, 2026, and a free 14-day trial that's described as fully functional, not a crippled demo. For a solo-developer niche tool, that's a reasonable way to let it prove itself before you pay.
Normally, I list alternatives to apps when I review them, but there doesn't seem to be anyone else making anything that does what McKinley does. That kind of original thinking is rare, so hats off to the dev.
2026-09-08 17:02:27
"Get Back" by The Beatles
Pick a song from an artist or band that’s had the biggest impact on your life. - Get Back by The Beatles
I count myself lucky that Beatles records found themselves stacked on my parents' record player during my childhood. John Lennon's death hit hard when I was in the 10th grade. I am so glad that Paul and Ringo are are in decent health,
2026-09-04 20:22:07
Moving from the only home we'd known in our married life this spring required us to downsize in ways that once would have caused me oceans of anxiety. Certain material goods were so intertwined with my self-identity.
As avid, life-long readers, our bookshelves were overflowing, although our reading has mostly been on a screen for years. We bagged up hundreds of books and spent hours driving around stocking every Little Free Library we could find.
The remnants of my passion for road cycling took up a disproportionate amount of room, an entire closet of spandex and lycra, more extra wheels than a grown man could hold in both hands. And of course, n+1 bikes that I hadn't ridden in an embarrassingly long time. My local bike shop sold everything for me inside of a week on consignment, netting me a laughably small check.
As it turns out, living without being surrounded by dead trees isn't bad. The shelves that once held every Stephen King book ever written now are filled with framed pictures of the grandkids and I think that's a better use. I read just as much as I ever have. That is to say, constantly.
Last week, Wonder Woman and I retreated to one of our favorite places, Damascus, Virginia, a town in Southwest Virginia where the Appalachian Trail follows the sidewalk down the main street and where one of the world's premier rail trails is being reconstructed after extensive damage from Hurricane Helene.
I'm aging less gracefully than my bride. She still runs ultramarathons, kayaks, paddle boards and cycles. I have two artificial knees and a long list of predictable but boring Generation X turns 60 bingo squares filled in. Still, our relationship formed out of a love of doing things together outdoors, so we are forever on the lookout for anything that can accommodate both of us.
The one luxury that she sprung for after selling our house was a new gravel bike. She brought that on our trip and rented an e-bike for me from a local shop. I'd never ridden one before and had no idea what to expect. Our test ride was a 17-mile jaunt along Laurel Creek, from town, along the Creeper Trail to the bridge over the Holston River. Instead of embarrassment or shame (screw that), I felt pure joy being back on a bike. The battery-assisted pedaling still requires one to pedal, so I couldn't just sit there. I was able to get my heart pumping without feeling like it was a near death experience.
By the time I returned the bike to the rental shop, I'd already priced one online. After a couple more days doing research, I ordered a Lectric XPress2 high step commuter with an adjustable fork. When we moved, I contemplated writing about the feeling of not owning a bike for the first time in 25 years. I'm glad I didn't. Writing this celebratory piece feels much better.
There's a certain breed of cyclist who's 100% asshole. Personally, I never got above 90% myself. I judged every bike I saw by the pedals, and on group rides, I would make fun of people who still had the store-installed reflectors stuck in their wheels. My saving grace was that I enjoyed helping new cyclists develop and dedicated a lot of time to helping people train for and complete their first 100 mile rides.
When my new bike gets here today, I will leave the stock pedals installed and I doubt I'll remove any reflectors stuck in my wheels. My yearly mileage output on my bike used to equate to nearly 4 coast to coast trips across the US. That was in another lifetime. The version of me that gets to ride my new bike is a bit heavier with whiter hair and a lot more medical bills. The only thing I can brag about these days is that I still have the ability to get on a damned bicycle, but that's OK. Period. This version of me intends to enjoy the ride, just as much as that old version ever did.
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2026-09-01 18:13:45
"Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards" by Billy Bragg
What's your favorite song about moving forward? - Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards by Billy Bragg
Bragg's version of it isn't naive optimism, it's someone clear-eyed about how slow and disappointing progress actually is, choosing to keep pushing anyway ("just because you're going forwards doesn't mean I'm going backwards"). That's a more honest read of "moving forward" than most songs manage.
