Memo

Well, pantry moths, it's been a long winter and spring for us.

Since Christmas, you've been appearing in my kitchen almost every afternoon, rubbing your tiny feet together, distressing friends and lady friends alike, pasting your hideous young along the edges of my ceiling, scumming the walls with your smeared guts.

I've come to understand that this is how things have always been for you.

We like the same foods, you and I. We both enjoy croutons, walnuts, unbleached flour, powdered sugar and the spices of India. And though I have, during our acquaintance, regularly supplied our household with all these things -- at the value, in my world, of many hours of labor -- I observe that you have not.

This is why I'm writing, pantry moths.

Effective immediately, I'm changing the terms of our partnership. You haven't yet interfered with my enjoyment of the cupboard we share, and I see no reason why you will in the time that we have remaining. But I will no longer restock our mutual supply of dry goods. And though your nutritional requirements are minimal, they are real. Starting today, every meal either one of us consumes brings us closer to a final reckoning.

And I will survive, pantry moths. For I am larger than you, and far crueler.

I don't relish the weeks and months to come. But nor, in truth, have I enjoyed our time together. And so I will not mourn the departure, one by one, of each of your skinny, black little asses.

How to make money in America

Step 1: Coil the odds as short as you can.
Step 2: Roll the dice.

The masses

It's natural to assume that a crowd of people will behave like water or an amoeba or a nest of ants, creeping and probing until it discovers a path. But a human crowd isn't focused on discovery; it's focused on desire. It's goal-oriented, like a lightning bolt or a cobra. When an event occurs -- a spreading rumor, an opened gate, a shouted order -- each individual calculates what effect it will have on his or her immediate personal objectives and the crowd reacts suddenly and unpredictably.

The best way to control a crowd of humans is therefore to never present it with new information.

Immortal beloved

I just can't get over this slightly autistic Photoshop experiment and its promise of a new, strange universe beyond our own. (With more lens flare.)

The laws of motion

These days I'm a machine, obediently crunching through deductions while I spin off into space in the last direction I was pushed. A closed system.

Gimme fiction

For a while tonight, I watched home videos from the early to mid 1990s that my parents got somebody to burn onto a DVD.

Unlike my sister, who was all ham, I carefully avoided acknowledging the camera, ever. I think this has been my Personal Moral Code of the Camera: it is your duty to ignore them. They are documentary devices.

But here's the thing, Aiken: 15 years later, watching all these disembodied memories, I enjoyed watching my sister lope around for the lens. And it didn't take long for me to become utterly bored by my somber, quiet self. Fifteen years out, it's not actually accuracy that's revealing. It's performance.

Our first WBEZ-listening president

"But here's the thing, Aiken."