Here’s a painting I did after the election.

2021 Edit: With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think I’d call this freefall into oblivion the world experienced “exciting”. Maybe “terrifying”

This was the first thing I’ve painted in years, and it’s hard to paint tiny letters. But people really seem to like this thing.

Sleeping on this flight seems completely unchallenging. I prefer mentally trying to get as small as possible, blocking out the world with a sleep mask and earplugs, and trying my best to hibernate for the majority of the flight. Then I wake up feeling wrecked and ready to hit it hard in the destination city.

One of these days I’m going to share my hand selected, locally sourced, fair trade, 100% organic small batch collection of gifs with you.

But until then, here’s my most recent addition.

Can’t get enough of this guy.

I mean, maybe you won’t. But this opinion piece in the Times is pretty spot-fucking-on according to my life research. The title might be designed to pique your interest, but the content is a pretty good combo of common sense, therapy, and life experience.

Here’s a couple of home run points:

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Mother of god, yes. Lord knows I hit the accelerator on the bullet train to marriage-town back when I was a twenty-nothing, and my logic of “gotta lock this down”, “gonna feel like this forever” felt like indisputable facts at the time.

I regret nothing, though. I wouldn’t be me without those experiences, and besides the ending it was a pretty dang good time. And now that I’ve seen behind the curtain of marriage I’ll be better prepared come the next round.

“Sometimes painful things can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know.” —Amy Poehler

Making future plans is an effort for me usually, and I can often get wrapped in the days so much that I miss the weeks and months flying by.

Since I quit the 9-5 thing and started playing the self-employment game I’ve been able to work from anywhere, but for a while I didn’t really take advantage of it like I wanted to. So somewhere around the beginning of this year I decided to try and travel somewhere every month in 2016.

A modest goal. And it’s a goal I stuck to.

In January I was in San Francisco to visit my friend Stephen, and then we went to Tahoe to go skiing. Also went camping in Colorado bend State park.

In February I went to New Orleans for a bachelor party, and I was in Houston at a client onsite meeting for a week.

In March I was in Portland for a conference and for fun.

In April I had a magical long weekend in New York City.

In May I had no plans and the month slipped right by. And then on the 28th, realizing if I didn’t act fast I would have failed, I looked for last minute flights to anywhere to keep up this goal. Flights to Denver are always cheap, so I called up my friend Knox to see if he was available.

Read the rest of this