That’s my girl in there. She’s in the bottom-right quadrant of the image, looking over her shoulder. Hi, Laura! I took this photo the day after I moved back to Vegas; someone invited me to one of Downtown Project’s let’s-communicate-our-ideas-through-Post-Its parties, to which I contributed no Post-Its whatsoever. Laura and I had met several times before this, but I didn’t recognize her on this day, because A) I had some personal shit going on and B) I’ve always been terrible with names and faces. (I have little doubt that Laura recognized me, because I’ve rarely known Laura to forget anyone’s name or face. It’s a legitimate superpower.)

Spoiler alert: We fell in loooooove, in spite of the fact that we were at this dumb meetup together and I didn’t say hi. Later that summer, she began giving me Wednesday night rides to Leavitt/Jaycee Park to play bocce with Ginger Bruner, Lissa Townsend Rodgers, Kristen Peterson and a bunch of folks from the Italian American Club. And even though I was a hot mess, Laura kept on inviting me out on adventures–to a New Year’s Eve party at Downtown Cocktail Room, to a zombie invasion at Absinthe, to this and that and the other. Aventura! It took until September 2013 for us to click, but click we did.

I didn’t expect to be here this long, you know. This May marks 10 years in Vegas for me–equal to the time I lived in Seattle, and only two years short of how long I lived in Vegas the first time. When I returned here in 2012, a big part of me believed that it was temporary; after all, I’d already left Vegas once before and lived through it. I figured I’d give Vegas a year, make some money and move on–to Portland, perhaps, or to LA. I’m glad I didn’t do that, because Laura was there in the crowd, was always there somewhere … and now, she’s here. Like, in the same room with me, right now, this second. That’s, just, wow. I could probably come up with prettier words to describe this feeling, but they’d be clumsily piled on top of this elemental, indelible wow. I’m here, and Laura’s here. I’m goddamned lucky I came back.

We have too much booze in the refrigerator. Craft beers, alcoholic seltzers, pre-made cocktails. We buy them whenever we visit a locally-owned bar or bottle shop (both here in Las Vegas and in Joshua Tree, CA., which we’ve visited twice in the past six months), because we like craft booze and times have been tough for bars and bottle shops.

Laura rarely drinks, and we haven’t done much entertaining these past two years, which means it’s on me to drink up the overflow. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’d like to trim down, which is antithetical to everything that craft beer, alcoholic seltzer and pre-made cocktails stand for. (And nine times out of ten I’d rather get stoned, even though we’re not particularly worried about local dispensaries going out of business.) But the fridge must be cleared. This is work.

To be perfectly candid, most everything feels like work nowadays. My day job is repetitive, and I’m burning out in it. (It’s not the Weekly’s fault. I’ve been working the same gig, with lightly differing variations, since 1996.) The side projects that formerly kept me usefully occupied–the novel, the movie tour–are stuck in places where I can’t do anything with them with the spare time I have.

My frustrations on the home front: The house is in disarray and has been for several months. My blood goes cold whenever family members call, because it’s oftentimes they’re calling with worrying news. I have hypertension, high cholesterol, elevated blood sugar–the whole middle-age variety pack. And you get to hear about it, you lucky ducky, because my therapist dropped out of my insurance plan, which no means more bi-weekly appointments. We’re now on a monthly schedule that better works with my budget, and kind of a lot of shitty, shitty shit can happen in a month.

I’m sorry. I know you’ve got your own stuff to deal with, and I hope you’re doing OK with it. We are all of us striving to function in a place beyond what we thought our limits were two years ago. We’ve all needed to add more red to our redline. (It’s like that time Tr*mp expanded the path of that hurricane with a Sharpie, once again unaware he’d made himself into a living, breathing, big yellow metaphor.) I don’t wanna sound like I’m indifferent to the hard time nearly everybody is having; I’m not. But I can’t deny that I’m struggling with my own stuff, and I don’t know what to with it.

Last week was lovely, though. We spent a few days in SoCal, visiting with friends in Topanga Canyon. Standing outside their house late at night, looking up at the stars and listening to coyotes howl from nearby hills, I felt several competing emotions at once–calm, contentment, dread. I had Joni Mitchell on one shoulder and Sharon Tate on the other. If Laura had all this wacky shit going on when she walked the dog, she never let on.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to dwell on that stuff, because we were in town to see Sparks perform at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was the second show of their 50th anniversary tour, and the prevailing mood was anything but valedictory. We could have been teenagers, all of us, with a healthy surfeit of delicious angst in our pants.

Laura spent a small fortune to put us in the fifth row, along with our friends Jim and Melinda. It was easily one of the best concerts I’ve seen, both in terms of it being really fucking fun and in terms of feeling like I was watching some history being made. Ron and Russell Mael’s songbook is comprised of some 50 years’ worth of material, and their outstanding set drew from the entirety of it, nimbly jumping between years and genres. It made my heart light to watch them enjoying themselves in front of their hometown audience, two overnight successes at the ages of 73 and 76.

I’ve been thinking about that lately–where I’ll stand in relation to my own modest body of work in 15-20 years’ time. Like the Maels, I hope to still be in it. There are many things I’d like to create, to conceive, to collaborate on, to remake, to fuck up with panache. It would be all the sweeter if I was making this jazzy shit in a community that supports and inspires me, wherever that may be or whatever shape that sort of thing might take. And I’ll invite the members of that gold-plated community into my home to check out my latest whatever, seducing them with the promise of a fridge full of cold drinks.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I wrote this on February 8, 2021, a bit longer than a year ago, . I left it unpublished because I disliked it–thought it was moistened garbage. Still don’t love it, but I gotta stop being fussy. If I went to the trouble of writing it, it should be read. I’ll simply strive to write something better next time.

I have entered the terminal stage of nostalgia while in COVID lockdown. From this point forward, it’s 25 to 30 years (one hopes) of slow-rolling, smiling-through-tears melancholia—choking up at selfless gestures, weeping through pitbull rescue videos and Ted Lasso, tightly hugging old friends until they chuckle “ohhhhhkay!” and wriggle out. At least once a day my gaze softens and drifts into the middle distance, and I wistfully shake my head even if no one’s there to see it. I can’t help myself.

This is, as you’d expect, a product of mellowed age. In a little more than a week now I’ll be 54 years old. It’s beginning to show on me in ways I never expected. There’s something to be said for the day you discover gray hair in your eyebrows. It’s not a good something. And a still, small voice inside of me insists that those grays wouldn’t be there, that my eyebrows would be as uniformly dark and authoritative and oh-so-sexy as they were when I was in my 20s, if I wasn’t digesting the anxiety and grief that quite naturally comes with being confined to your home by a death-dealing pandemic.

Part of me will always wonder how much these two loser years have aged us all. But at the same time, I knew I was going to get old someday, and I feel fortunate to be doing so, even confined to quarters like this. These bouts of sentimentality and nostalgia—what amounts to whole-body emotions for the middle-aged—are probably my body’s way of saying “You dumb fuck, keep wearing your mask–and someday you can be nostalgic for these lockdown years, too.”

Anyway, let’s talk about Al Stewart. He’s a Scottish singer-songwriter, ostensibly a folkie (I’ve heard no evidence to support that), with a singing voice so adenoidal that it’s hard to believe he’s not pinching his nose shut through “Year of the Cat” (1976) and “Time Passages” (1978). I always imagined him as a bearded, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam type, so you can imagine my surprise when I Googled him and discovered he had a whole Dudley Moore thing going on.

I wish I could tell you that I researched him for an assignment, but the truth is that “Year of the Cat” popped up in a friend’s Spotify mix, and as it sometimes happens with songs I’ve known for decades, I heard it with both ears for the first time. Nostalgia, you see. An old song reminds you of a feeling, and if it’s a good feeling you’re inclined to ride it for as long as you can. The first time it happened to me was in Seattle, maybe 14 or 15 years ago now, when Madonna’s “Crazy for You” came up in shuffle as I took the bus home from work; by the time we crossed the Fremont Bridge I was in tears. What it brought back wasn’t a memory of an event or a person, but the memory of a feeling I used to have. I remembered what it felt like to fall in love as a teenager, before my heart was made suspicious and obstinate. I remembered the contours of ecstatic, heedless, dumb love, and it felt so dreamy and tremendous that I had to weep it out.

I didn’t get that feeling from “Year of the Cat.” In researching the soft-rock stalwart I learned that it’s a gauzy, obliquely racist accounting of an vacation hookup. (I also learned that Al Parsons produced it, a scant three years after he put his stamp on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Funny old world.) I won’t quote the lyrics here, because I kinda hate them, but I will give Stewart credit for name-checking Peter Lorre in a song people probably fucked to in hot tubs.

Having said all that, I have to say that the song’s instrumental break is lovely, incorporating lush strings, liquid guitar and the second-best sax solo of its era, behind Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.” It took me back to my childhood bedroom, circa winter 1979, when I first got into a habit of falling asleep to the radio. (These days, it’s podcasts.) I must have heard “Year of the Cat” a couple dozen times while in that hypnagogic state, stripping the lyrics and meaning from the song and assigning it colors, shapes and emotions. Whenever I was awake enough to process what I was hearing, I would imagine how good it would feel to be an adult—to live in a big city, maybe even hold hands with a girl as we walked together on wet streets against a backdrop of cinematic bokeh.

In that my heart has not changed, and I dearly wish I could I could reach out to my younger self in those half-awake moments and tell him that he’s gonna be just fine. Eventually, he’ll live in not one, but two big cities, walk on rainswept streets, have all the freedom he could ever want and meet a strong, clever girl with a lovely face, whip-smart sense of humor and décolletage that just won’t quit.

I get paid to write about music sometimes, which stresses me out because I firmly believe that I’m fucking terrible at it. I have very little practical education in music and can’t read a note of the stuff. (Truly, you’d be shocked how many professional music writers can scarcely sing in the shower, let alone play a single chord on the guitar.) I was years late in arriving at punk rock, only jumping into the pit after its first adherents had had children and grandchildren; and I’m both ashamed and happy to say that I’m still parsing Bowie’s catalog years after his death. Perhaps other music writers have noticed how bad I am, but they’re not about to say jack shit to me about it now that I’m an assignment editor.

I never wanted to write about music in the first place, at least in any way that involved qualitative judgements. I get that now. I now understand that the music pieces I’ve always wanted to write are about how music makes me feel. The music I fall in love with gets into me and unlocks boxes, compartments and oubliettes, releasing this and that. Some of the truest, most honestly emotional writing I’ve done usually begins with me listening to a song. It just happens that way, even if it’s a crappy song like “Year of the Cat.”

I’d like to talk about my photographic method. Oh, I can feel you turning away from me; that’s perfectly OK. There’s no need for you to read this essay unless you’d like to know why I’m posting all those photos of neon signs to my Instagram feed (@mostlyelectric), or to learn how my shooting style has changed over the years, from half-baked abstraction to something more closely akin to visual storytelling. You probably won’t care about this shit unless you’re Bryan McCormick, and he might only be pretending to.

I’ve been shooting photos as a matter of daily habit since 1999, when digital cameras became cheap enough to own and good enough to shoot print-quality images. Before that, from early 1993 to late 1995, I used a Magnavox video camera, which is why–allowing myself a modest cough here–the upcoming Pj Perez documentary Parkway of Broken Dreams will have so heckin’ much 1990s Las Vegas period footage. But when I watch it, I’ll be struck by the same annoyance I feel when I look at my early photos: Back then, I edited while I shot, cropping out elements that I’d later wish I’d kept in the frame.

Most of the older photos of signs you’ve seen on my Instagram feed these past few weeks—everything shot before 2008, I should think—were the product of pure dumb luck. Back then I didn’t give much thought to the story a photo needed to tell (which is not a requirement for good photography, but the giants who inspired me—your Dorothea Langes, your Garry Winogrands, your Walker Evans-es—were all about it). I deliberately attempted to produce “arty” photos, because in those days (and in these days, as well), I felt tremendously insecure in making art of any kind. I often tried too hard, telegraphed my intent. I didn’t shoot signs with an eye towards capturing their stories, the artistry of their making; instead, I’d shoot portions of the signs, out-of-context details (like the “emo” at the top of this entry), in an attempt to foist my own vision on someone else’s work. That works for the Avalanches and Jerry Misko, but I don’t possess a fraction of their talent for remixing existing works into something new. All the proper photos of signs I’ve posted recently? They were safety shots I took of the signs to remind myself where I’d grabbed all those detail shots, all those little “emos.” They’re the visual equivalent of Post-it notes.

Since I’ve become an editor I’ve learned how to better stay out of somebody’s way. Scott Dickensheets once told me that he once struggled not to “rewrite someone’s work to square with the voice in my head” (apologies, Scott, for slightly rewording YOUR work). I have come to a similar place in my photos of signs; my photos need to reveal the entire story that the sign was designed to telling. (The three stages in the life of a motel sign: “Get off the highway, weary traveler,” then “Welcome, cheating spouses,” and finally “Somebody call an ambulance.”)

I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll never be more than a merely competent photographer. At my last gallery show (In Third Place, at the late, lamented Emergency Arts) I read aloud from an “artist’s statement.” After I read it, Anthony Bondi said something important to me: “That was better than the photos on the walls.” He meant to commend me on the strength of the written piece—and it is pretty darn good; you can read it here if you like—but he inadvertently clarified my thinking about something that had been rattling around my head for a while: Photography is, and always has been, a subset of my storytelling. It never belonged at the top of my CV. Realizing that will enable me to take even better photos in the future … and relatedly, I find I’m eager to do it again.

Now, about the string of photos of neon signs in my Instagram feed. P Moss once told me that he sometimes thinks in neon signs (well, one sign, which someone actually made for him, albeit with chaser bulbs instead of neon: BACON). And this fucking virus and related shutdown has instilled in me an overpowering desire for simplicity, for clarity, which takes the shape of angular, spiky and/or curvy neon messages appearing in my head to speak out my desires, like “EAT,” “HEATED POOL” and “COCKTAILS.”

I read five brutally frank newspapers a day. I listen to demoralizing political and true crime podcasts as a matter of habit. And television has become something that happens to me, not necessarily something that I enjoy. (However, I often return to Community, Letterkenny and especially Ted Lasso for comfort.) My relationship with both words and images has been affected by this long, bleak year. It’s only natural that the part of me that needs to feel healthy is drawn to simplicity—a return to basic human wants and emotions, expressed as voluptuously-curved phrases that glow in the dark.

Google Photos allows me to search 20 years’ worth of images by “neon” and “signs.” (Also “neon signs,” but that returns roughly the same results as just “neon.” Leafing through, I’m struck by how many memories are baked into these photos of neon signs, and not just my own. Thousands, even millions of people have looked up at these signs, stayed in the hotels and motels behind them, had memorable nights in the bars underneath them. If I’m to consider myself a storyteller and appreciator of stories others tell, it’s time I quit trying to edit those signs to look like the one that’s in my head. That’s some basic, dopey emo shit, right there.

I apologize sincerely if you expected me to do something interesting in this space–or, at a minimum, something passable but consistent. I won’t proffer excuses; while I’m still working full-time (and immensely grateful to be so), that doesn’t account for the long nights and weekends when I could have, should have been putting my thoughts down on the page, for my own benefit if no one else’s. My Brooklyn-dwelling professor friend wakes up every day and posts a poem/progress report to Facebook, and while it’s often one of the most bleak and heart-wrenching things you’ll ever read before coffee (he does live near the epicenter of America’s worst outbreak; also, as I said before, he is a poet), at least he’s doing the fucking work. He has a Castalian Spring of black ink pooling in his soul, sure, but he’s putting it to sound artistic and even therapeutic use. Meanwhile, I have played Animal Crossing a whole lot.

It’s a matter of what I can bring myself to do. I can always sit down and write: I have supported myself as a working writer for nearly 25 years, and while I don’t have any novels, nonfiction volumes or even an appreciable number of short stories to show for that quarter-century of solitary commitment—nor the small, but intensely-focused celebrity that follows that kind of work—I would favorably compare my seesaw ego and worrisome consumer debt to the authors of such material. No, the reasons I haven’t written you a document of My Life in the Lockdown are two: I’ve been too depressed to write anything beyond what I need to write to earn a paycheck, and because there’s a small, but insistent part of me that wants to simply give up.

This is a hard time to be in the world. Just to be here. No one is in a place of equilibrium: not me, not you, not even the roly-poly armed shitheads protesting for “liberty and the pursuit” outside the closed Dave & Buster’s. I feel beaten down and exhausted ten minutes after waking. Reading the newspapers makes me want to cry; seeing clips from CNN or Fox makes me want to throw hands; looking at Twitter makes me want to jump into a jet engine. There are many things I could be writing about this world we live in, but it’s a big goddamn connected world, and statistically, I know that there’s a strong chance that whatever I want to say has been expressed by someone else, with more clarity of thought or in a more florid prose, a full day before I even thought to say it. Sometimes I even find that writing and say to myself, “Well, that’s three hours I can give back to Animal Crossing. Excelsior.”

Who knows what to do, now. I’m not about to run out and hit half-capacity Restaurant Row; I’m close to too many immunocompromised folk, including myself. Life is losing its flavor by the day. Television and movies just happen in front of me, oblivious and glib. Books are painful reminders of a living world. And the living world is slowly becoming an abstraction, something viewed through car windows between masked retail escapades and curbside pickups.

I can write about this stuff, but that writing won’t have a lick of substance to it; it won’t be “art,” if I’ve ever come close to such a thing. So I don’t do it. I’m glad others do it—mostly glad, anyway; I thought that “The bread is over” essay was overwrought and too precious by half—and goddamn if some of my favorite artists aren’t doing unexpectedly great work under lockdown. (Who knew the Rolling Stones had one left in them?) But I can’t join them, or feel buoyed by their good work, because the part of me that is satisfied by the creation and consumption of art is slowly falling asleep, like a pinned leg.

A few weeks ago I began reading from my journals, aloud, on Facebook Live. A devoted handful of good friends tune in week after week to watch me cringe at the ignorance and misogyny of G. Carter 1994. Back then, I could scarcely have imagined a world that is willingly setting itself on fire and blaming the third-degree burns on scientists, teachers, gays, immigrants and kids who like a nice piece of avocado toast. Back then, in my selfishness, I thought that the world was as cruel as it would ever get. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to get perspective on these times, and what I’ll make of all this whiny, self-defeating shit I just wrote.

“The universe converts us, noise into music.”

That phrase floated through my head a few minutes ago as I fell asleep for a moment. I work with so much language in the course of my job–hookin’ up words and phrases and clauses, y’know–that it’s not at all unusual or unprecedented for some of that raw language to rearrange itself into something that seems meaningful, depending on the depth of one’s relationship to the bong.

Look, before you run out and get that phrase tattooed somewhere ticklish, please know that it’s a fat stack of bullshit, my mind’s equivalent of Mad Libs. The universe serves us exactly three solid favors: It constructs us from atoms, it allows us to occupy it for a fraction of a Carl Sagan cosmic calendar second, and when we die, it reabsorbs those atoms and makes them into something else, like a rainstorm or a mountain lion or a Lindsay Lohan. We are not noise or music, and those distinctions are subjective anyway.

Stupid. Just plain stupid. That’ll teach me to fall asleep.

Hey, listen: There was this other occasion when I dreamt up the lunch-sized word salad “Exploding in rabumous phrase,” and as a pure fuck-you to my waking mind, my subconscious or whatever actually assigned meaning to it. I saw it as a Mardi Gras-style party held in celebration of somebody who had been undervalued for too long. Peppy music, confetti, cheering throngs, some surprised-looking guy being hoisted aloft on a chair. My dream even gave me an abbreviated version to use: “He’s in phrase,” an onlooker shouted in response to my repeated questions.

I don’t know where “rabumous” came from; it sounds like jam-band mouthwash. But I do like “exploding in phrase,” because that’s what I aspire to do every ding-dang day; that’s me working at my peak. And I like the idea of somebody being feted just because every one of us fucking deserves to be feted, unless we are the current President of these United States or a member of his administration. Everybody deserves to be exploded (though not literally) in phrase (totes rabumous, man!). And with your kind indulgence, I’d like to close this embarrassingly dumb blog post by exploding a few friends, right here in public.

Carmen Cano did the above illustration of me above. Carmen is a fine artist, a nimble thinker and a creative swashbuckler. I first worked with her at the Seattle Times— sadly, not long enough— and again when she took over the web division of another newspaper. She once came into a management position and made three sweeping changes at the outset: She took all the chairs out of the conference room, set the maximum length of all staff meetings at five minutes and decreed that all those meetings would end with a decision. If Carmen got a damn bodega job in Iceland and told me there was an opportunity there for me, I would pack up tomorrow and leave. That’s the kind of pirate loyalty she inspires.

Bryan McCormick did me a universe-sized solid favor today. He’s back in Canada now—stuck there until we’re immune, or close enough to it—so I can’t buy him the beer and give him the hug he deserves. But I think he knows he’s got them on account. Stay safe, old bean.

And Krystal Ramirez, sweet and tender hooligan that she is, gets the full parade, streets shut down from one end of the country to the other, riding a Rose Parade float the size of Honolulu. I’ll let her tell you why, if you don’t know. I’ve had the honor of working with Krystal, drinking with Krystal, talking vast amounts of shit with Krystal … and I prize every moment of it, because she’s a good soul and an artistic genius and she is in phrase. And not a minute too soon.

OK. Ok, we’ll see how this goes. So many of my friends, acquaintances and colleagues are out there (safely inside!) making the most of this forced interval–creating art, making podcasts, dancing to snake jazz on the tiky-tok. I have devoted the first week of my coronavirus lockdown to doing my job–very grateful to have it, for however long–playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Switch and not-so-quietly freaking the fuck out. I have some legal marijuana and enough gin for a few weeks’ worth of specialty cocktails; once that’s gone, it’s just me against the void. Don’t tell me about your deep-breathing exercises; I’ve tried them and they don’t work.

I don’t do well with uncertainty, and that’s all this is: a perfect, one-hundred-percent communicable strain of mortal uncertainty. So much about our adversary is unknown–not just scientifically, but morally. There are scientists, pragmatic and experienced observers of viruses such as this one, telling us to stay underground for at least another month or a whole lot of people are going to die; I believe them. And there are economists, who I respect half as much as the scientists but fear twice as much, saying that if we don’t get our businesses open, we’re going to suffer terribly; I believe them, too.

(This paragraph was going to be all about my sadness, my anger, my fears. I’ve decided not to go into it, because I don’t know what good it would do. It won’t make me feel better, venting about this shit; I’ve a suspicion it won’t make you feel better, either. Tabling it for another day, when that pressure has no option but to blow out.)

I am trying, though. I shower, I shave, I set deadlines and try to hit them. I’m trying to tidy up this stucco biosphere so that Laura, Gigi and I can live in it until, like, Exodus 12:31. (I think that happens about two hours into The Ten Commandments? It’s the shit with the sheep’s blood and the doors. Been so long since I touched a bible that I had to Google it.) Maybe, in a week from now, I’ll have the urge to pick up the revisions on my novel, unless K.K. Slider shows up in Animal Crossing. Really looking forward to that.

I don’t know what else to say here. It’s been a long while since I’ve written anything like this. Last time was way, way before LiveJournal was owned by Russian oligarchs. But I told myself that I would do this, that I needed to do this, and here we are, today, tomorrow and until the end of the world, which may or may not happen shortly after Easter, depending on the vagaries of the Trump Administration. Maybe I should pick up that bible again just to get a sense of the playbook America’s working from.

I miss you. I wish I could hug you and tell you “It’s good to see you,” or “It’s been too fucking long” or “I’m tempted to go for the reacharound.” All of these things are true.

This is the artist’s statement from my September 14 show of coffeehouse portraits at Emergency Arts. It’s more of a confessional, really, but if you give me too many words that’s what you end up with. The first reading went great; during the second I had a coughing jag that almost caused me to pass out.

***

This gallery show began in spring 2009, when I offered to take free headshots of my Seattle friends and acquaintances if they’d agree to meet me for coffee. I needed the human contact. I felt terrifically isolated in Seattle for most of the ten years I lived there. I was in an unhealthy relationship that served to isolate me, though I didn’t realize it at the time. It only got worse after I was laid off from the Seattle Times in late 2008, and I began working out of my apartment. It’s all too easy to close yourself off from the outside world in a town where sunshine is only implied. 

So, yeah, coffee and headshots. It was a no-brainer. Seattle is liberally peppered with coffeehouses, so I could meet people most anywhere, and I tend to move in social circles that are in constant need of fresh headshots. Hence, my “Coffee and an Extra Shot” photo series was born: We’d have coffee, talk about whatever, then go outside and take a nice, professionalish headshot (weather permitting). Then, we’d take an “extra shot,” usually something fun. I got off about five of those before Seattle spit me out.

But here’s the thing: That’s not where it began at all. It began in 1993, here in Las Vegas, shortly after a breakup that, several heartbreaks along, still ranks in my top five. So I ventured out into the world, 26 years old, hippie-haired and overwrought. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s exactly what our nation’s volunteer coffeehouse poets look for in fresh meat, and I was recruited. For too many years, I read my shitty, non-rhyming, unmetered verse–which, by the way, wasn’t all the different in tone from what you’re listening to right now–to coffeehouse audiences comprised of fellow dilettantes, pretty girls in black leggings and, to my everlasting shame, actual poets.

But let’s back out of that room slowly, and talk venues instead. I frequented four coffeehouses between 1994 and 1996.  Cafe Copioh was the first one I discovered; it was located across the street from UNLV and run by an expatriate Israeli named Mike. He decorated the place in thrift-store rococo, stayed open late and made a coffee slush that was really a milkshake, but that’s OK. I logged enough hours there with my notebook and video camera for James Reza to make Scope Magazine and for Pj Perez to make a Maryland Parkway documentary.

The legendary Enigma Garden Cafe–today an empty lot about five blocks that way–was my favorite, a trio of railway section houses with a courtyard in the center. Made the best lattes and mochas in this town. I’d spend entire weekends there sometimes, enjoying proto-jam bands and talking nonsense. Eventually, its proprietor, Julie would become one of my closest friends, shortly after I got coffeehouse poetry out of my system. 

There was also Java Hut, on Sahara–barely remember it now; we went just because my friend Gregory had set up a weekly poetry reading there. Later, I took over the poetry reading at Enigma and, Jesus Christ, I’m really sorry. You have no idea how much. And Cafe Espresso Roma, where I rarely went because a rotating cast of druggy blowhards hung out on their couch–the kind of dudes (it was always dudes) who would tell me, to my face, that my writing was sentimental crap. That bit of “just calling it as I see it, bruh” was only helpful the first dozen times I heard it. 

But I’d go to Roma now, if it still existed. I miss it. Even though this town now boasts at least twice as many places where I’m likely to settle in with a cup of coffee–that’s Grouchy John’s, La Postte, Makers & Finders, Mothership, PublicUs, Sambalatte, Sunrise, Vesta, Writer’s Block and a bunch of places I haven’t even been to yet, including that one Harry Potter-themed coffeehouse that only exists because its owners apparently didn’t know that copyright infringement is a thing… 

Look, it’s not the same, because I’m not the same. And the world isn’t the same, either.

In 1989, four years before I wrote my first crappy haiku, a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg coined the phrase “third place.” A third place exists outside of first place (that’s home) and second place (that’s work) as a host for “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” (Sorry, I copied that last bit from Wikipedia.) Third places, Oldenburg says, are where communities are made. It’s a neutral ground where you can relax, engage in conversation and enjoy the feel of the room. He further suggests that parks, clubs, churches, restaurants, public libraries and–omigod–cafes and coffeehouses could all serve as third places. (And there’s this economist, Arnault Morrison, who suggests that a fourth place is an inevitability–a thing that combines work/home or coffeehouse/work into some ghastly hybrid that’s a little too close to all that “collision” bullshit we had to swallow a few years ago in order to get a Downtown music festival. We’ll just bury that one in the yard.)

I sincerely hope you remember how wonderful it was, or that you know how wonderful it still is–to walk into a place knowing that you’re going to see some of your friends. That they’re going to call you over, hug you/fistbump you/fondle you or whatever, make room for your cup of coffee and leach the poison from your day. That you can talk about your relationship or your job or your family or appointment television, and you’ll get something back in return. An idea, a commiseration, an argument. Whatever it is, it’ll be something that gets you out of your own head. Within weeks of my first visit to Cafe Copioh, I had made at least two dozen good friends, some of which are in this room right now.

Now, you may remember that about 45 minutes ago I indicated that I stopped going to Las Vegas coffeehouses in 1996. That’s not exactly what happened. What did happen was that I got an Internet job.

I could branch off here. There are those who say that the internet is another kind of third place–though the kind of people who say that tend to profit from the internet. Still, I could talk about early blogging and social media platform LiveJournal, which consumed my life for longer than it should have. It was too easy, much easier than going out for coffee. My friends were always there. I could put ideas, prose or–whaddya know?–amateur photos out there and receive instant feedback on a scale I’d never imagined. LiveJournal changed the course of my life, a third place with no dimensions, no gravity. 

I will footnote Facebook, Instagram, texting and the like here, because they’re not worth talking about. They’re what I was trying to get away from when I began pimping myself out for Seattle headshots. In zero gravity, everything goes soft. After several years of online life I felt so isolated and lonely and broken that I believed I needed another coffeehouse gimmick to get people to respond to me. Which, of course, wasn’t true; friends, real friends, are just happy to get the call. And acquaintances want to roll the dice, to see if a deeper friendship is possible. (Then, when you’re tight, that’s when they can hit you up for headshots, and doggo-sitting, and rides to the airport.) I’d spent too long floating in the ethernet to know that sometimes, it’s just good to see you and good to be seen, even with empty hands.

When I returned to Las Vegas in 2012 I continued taking pictures of friends over coffee, but the tone of the photos was completely different. I was grateful just to see all the friendly faces I’d left behind a decade before. These days I don’t bother with the headshots, or even some kind of formalized “goofy” photo; I just raise the camera to my eye while my friends are drinking coffee and talking and begin snapping away. I do this in hopes of capturing our friendship unaware. I try to get a shot of the two of us grounded in our third place. Getting a photo of a friendship in the wild isn’t easy, when the mere act of pointing a camera at anybody usually makes everyone’s butt clench up tight. The secret is, of course, to keep talking; to keep being friends even as this intruder tries to break in. Also, it doesn’t hurt to take, like, a whole shitload of pictures, because at least one of them will be good. 

I am not a professional photographer. The professionals among you tonight will look at these photos and see immediately where I fucked up the composition and the lighting. And those among you who aren’t professional photographers: Please don’t ask me what settings I used or what kind of lens mount I have, because I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s probably for the best if the camera and I don’t know too much about each other. I am, by temperament, an observer; by craft, a storyteller; and in aspiration, a giver and receiver. That’s the lens through which I’d like you to consider this, my first photo show in nine years. I did this show on the advice of my accountant and my therapist. The former tells me I need deductions; the latter tells me I need friends. 

By the way, I don’t mean to make you feel bad for having a smartphone. I use the shit out of mine; it’s an amazing tool. Delivers food, news and pictures of boobies with an alacrity I could never have dreamed of. But this tool is making adjustments to me that I don’t care for. Even though we’re all in here–our photos, our stories, our likes and dislikes–we ourselves are not in here, not in the way that counts. We are losing our gravity, and with it our ability to understand what’s natural and what’s only pretending to be natural for the sake of our followers. What’s breaking will stay broken if we don’t get together, in third place, and forge our treaties. Reaffirm our followers as our friends.

Those means I’m not done taking these photos. I’m going to keep adding to this series until me-in-third-place becomes a default state. I’m tired of jockeying for likes and retweets, tired of driving myself into email bankruptcy again and again and again. I want eye contact and embraces and fistbumps. Gravity. If you’re pissed off with your workplace, proud of your kids or unable to process today’s headlines, I want us to grab a table and two hot drinks and talk about it. 

I can’t change this world in any way that will last. The more time I spend online, the sadder that realization makes me. But I can sit across a table from you in third place and tell you that I hear you what you’re saying, and I want to understand it, to receive it. That you are seen, as they say. You are seen. I submit that the proof is on these walls, and there will be still more evidence of it as soon as you’re free for coffee.

• 

The restive mind that brought you The Spellout, Your Souvenir Guide, Knife on Camera, Parenthetical Element and at least a half-dozen other failed blogs with dumb titles now presents Concealed Karaoke, another slop bucket for my creative overspill. (Those other blogs still exist, technically; it’s only that, technically, I don’t know how to put them back online.) Basically, if I can’t make money with it or read it aloud at a literary event in some kinda pretentious mid-Atlantic accent, it goes here.

That’s my dog, by the by. Her name is Gigi and she probably likes you.