NOVEMBER 2025 UPDATE
black curtain of autumn + resounding echoes of impermanence edition
WHAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER (BROAD STROKES):
Hello my friend, reporting to you live from Portland, Oregon, where the air is crisp, the sun is ready to sleep for six months, and the locally-sourced kombucha flows like a mighty river. Let’s begin:
- I had a photograph published in The Sun, November 2025 issue (more below)
- I released the first video from my upcoming album release (more below)
- Grief Stick screened at Turn! Turn! Turn! (more below)
- nba basketball started and the trailblazers have a flicker of promise (and a new coach due to unfortunate circumstances best saved for a different time).
BEST THINGS I READ in October: Yoko by David Sheff (oh my goodness Yoko Ono is such an amazingly ignored and marginalized artist. This book was extremely inspiring and I’ve now been listening to her non-stop. highly recommended), The Doorman by Chris Pavone (won’t rock your world maybe but a quick and well-hewn narrative), Advice Not Given by Mark Epstein (still reading but chapters follow the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, which is endlessly interesting to me especially where it intersects with impermanence [everywhere].) The House on Buzzards Bay by Dwyer Murphy (took awhile for me to get into this one but i ended up liking). Flashout by Alexis Soloski (still reading but good), Acting Class by Nick Drnaso (graphic novel i literally grabbed at random at the Albina library. real good)
BEST THINGS I SAW in October: Cloud, Union, All of Us Strangers (loved), Annie Hall + Interiors (rewatch after Diane Keaton died. hadn’t seen either in 15 years at least and both I found remarkable on a couple levels, cinematic and personal. also Gordon Willis), M. Hulot’s Holiday (rewatch). Bring Her Back (bananas in a good way.) Mastermind (at Cinema 21, loved).
Therein ends the October summary sampler platter, now on to the meat and potatoes (or seitan and potatoes if you rather):
THE SUN MAGAZINE
I am honored to report that my photo below appears in the November 2025 issue of The Sun magazine. I’ve been a reader for a long time and they have a high bar of photography and writing so to be included is really wonderful. The Sun is supported 100 percent by subscription, no advertising whatsoever, which makes them a life-raft in the choppy endless ocean that is this modern age.
brief story of the photo: in March 2021 Margaret and me and the kids went to Yosemite. The trip was set up to honor my father-in-law John, who passed some months earlier. In addition to being a great and warm and hilarious man, he was an avid hiker and had an abiding love for Yosemite which he installed in his daughter and me by proxy. The four of us stayed in the valley and drove up the next morning to the high country to Tuloumne Grove. The snow on the path was roughly five feet high and made it slow-going but the light was great, sun rising behind the trees and I took this photo.
This image and others available for purchase here. No pressure though.
UPCOMING ALBUM
Super duper excited to announce my band impermanent marker is releasing a 10 song album titled EMPTY CONVERSATION later this month. Songs were written and recorded across the last 18 months or so and thematically primarily hover around depression, death, and the river of time. It’s fun! The first song released is called That Sinking Feeling, video below. Each song on EMPTY CONVERSATION has a corresponding video that I will roll out one per week or so. Stay tuned for more info about the album release and in the meantime if you are so inclined you can hear a couple of impermanent marker’s self-released EPs here. Now press the play button below. It’s on the bottom left. Come on, try it buddy.
FILM PROJECT UPDATES
Grief Stick (documentary short, 17 min)
We screened Grief Stick Sunday October 19 at Turn! Turn! Turn! It was a moving evening. Alex Behr read some poems (a couple of which are featured in the film) with the motorcycle helmet that once belonged to Chris Hartman (also featured in the film) at her feet. Mae Starr played an awesome set followed by Arch Cape (aka Rachel Blumberg) who played along to several of her films projected on a wall in the other direction.
Then the film screened. I hadn’t seen Grief Stick in its entirety since February and, even though I edited the project and watched multiple iterations across the months, I was moved by the resounding chorus of impermanence that echoes throughout as it honors Chris Hartman in life and death. A bar is arguably not the most hospitable environment for a quiet documentary about life and death but within a few minutes in everyone was paying attention. Gosh, what a night. If you couldn’t make it, there are two more Portland opportunities to see it:
Friday November 7 at Up Up Books as part of the Portland Book Festival, shown at a reading with 3 poets titled Conversing with the Dead. more here.
Sunday November 17 at Portland State University. more here
Sister/Brother (narrative feature, 75 min)- currently re-editing, a process that’s felt not unlike entering a labyrinthian series of interlocking sub-basements with no easy way out. This is due to lack of material due to global pandemic that interrupted production and I’m sure you’ve already heard a version of this story so I’ll stop myself. Hope to have a new cut of the film soon. More about the project here.
Apology Ghost (narrative short, 5 min) - out to festivals. more about Apology Ghost here.
How Do You Move in This World (narrative short, 2 min) - out to festivals. more about the project here
20 YEARS POST BOSTON
As I referenced last month, 20 years ago at this writing I was in Boston, MA getting proton beam radiation treatment on my brain tumor. We lived for 8 weeks in room 503 of the Kendall Square Residence Inn (me and M and our dog Maxwell) and 5 days a week took the T up to Mass General. I would check in, a different time every day, sit in the waiting room, get called back to the gantry, lay on the bed strapped down at the face as Ron and Jim and Tricia the techs made multiple adjustments in and out of the room, a process that could take anywhere between 10-20 minutes, and then receive the treatment itself which lasted anywhere between 90-180 seconds depending on where they were putting focus that day. Then back on the T, back to the room. Round trip to and from treatment usually took an hour or so.
Some days we’d walk over to the Kendall Square Cinema (movies I remember seeing there: shopgirl, the squid and the whale, the constant gardener, thumbsucker, keane). Most days we’d walk Maxwell around the Esplanade, over the Mass Ave Bridge, then over to the Longfellow Bridge and back. We took weekend trips to Montpelier, Western Mass, Portland, ME (above pic is from drive back from Portland ME to Boston.) We had visitors come. We saw monks make sand mandalas at Harvard. We saw the Boston Symphony. We saw some bands, we we saw films, we went to museums. Aside from the dark cloud of a brain tumor and the pulsing fear and rippling uncertainty it brought with it, it was a lovely time. At the end of the 8 weeks we got back in a rental van and drove across the country - Harrisburg, Yellow Springs, Iowa City, North Platte, Rock Springs, Boise - arriving back in Portland the day after Thanksgiving.
It’s an experience I continue to process, despite all the years since it happened. There’s profound gratitude that exists alongside a bewilderment, one that over time has moved from a individually-centric one to one more concerned about this whole enterprise of drawing breath and what it means or if it’s completely random, and if the latter then what that signifies or could or should signify. The trip to Boston exists in a bubble outside time and space for Margaret and I both, as if it happened yesterday and a century ago all at once. The below video captures the very end: a walk around the Esplanade, my parents visiting, us packing up to leave, and then us driving back across the US in late November, armed with a good prognosis, but very much impacted the events of the year prior, uncertain how things would land for us as individuals and as a couple. This, we came to learn, is extremely common after seismic events.
ETC
running not so good this month. not so good at all. I blame the hours of my day job.
fivver account! got my first client for film editing this month (thank you Corrina!) I offer film editing, screenplay proofing, voice acting, and editing your kid’s AAU basketball footage into a reel. Do you have need of any of those? Does your loved one or friend? If so please go here. I could really use the support.
IMPERMANENCE CLOCK (as of November 1, 2025)
days I’ve been alive: 19,498 | days until i turn 80: 9,720
Okay that’s it for now. Thank you for reading this and supporting me. I hope this November is joyous for you and maybe even electrifying. Why shouldn’t it be?Until we meet again.
The photo of the power lines... utterly lovely. I want to capture that one day in a painting. Maybe...