Do not adjust your set. I am controlling your transmission again. I control the vertical and the horizontal. I can delude you with a thousand channels or expand one single thought to crystal clarity and beyond.

I’m back, baby.

What I’m Thinking About

I like taking walks. It’s hard, because I live in the San Fernando Valley and we’re in the middle of a miserable heat and humidity wave. But those walks are mission-critical to me. They’re how I meditate.

So at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I slip quietly out of bed so as not to wake my patient wife, pull on a sun shirt and a pair of shorts, and go walking while the sun is still peeking over the horizon.

There is a long history of walking to clear the mind. Walking meditation is a common practice in all forms of Buddhism and is referred to as kinhin. It’s how I first learned to meditate when seeking to quiet and direct my endless ADHD energy. Cal Newport, a noted writer on digital tools and thinking, talks about the importance of “Productive Meditation” on walks.

Tolkien and Lewis, the two grandfathers of English fantasy, were both known walkers (although apparently they had such different styles they struggled to walk together). Tolkien wrote a whole song about walking in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings!

I love all of these, but the thing I most enjoy doing when walking is quieting my mind and opening it up to the possibilities of the world around me. Seeing the world as it is and asking “What if?” about what’s there. What Jeff VanderMeer calls “Structured creative play”.

I’ve been doing that more and actually writing the ideas I have down. Having faith that if I walk into the world, I’ll find things worth seeing. Have ideas worth writing down.

The world is on fire. But take a walk with nothing else, and you may discover that it’s also still beautiful.

What I’m Working on Now

• Kevin and I are finalizing our submission materials for Curtain Call to the Sundance episodic lab. I’ve actually enjoyed writing the artist statement for this one – it’s letting me channel my righteously angry Rod Serling.
• Dead Mall is outlined and in drafts. Now that I’ve started into it, I’m realizing this is a single, contained story, and maybe always wanted to be. It’s a fascinating way to explore nostalgia and memories of staying up late to avoid an unhappy reality.

Cool Things

• Patrick H Willems always delivers, and his latest essay on why streaming blockbusters suck is fascinating, especially because he goes deeper than “This is bad”. He identifies specific trends that drag everything down.
• The 90’s/00’s remake of The Outer Limits is available on Amazon and Freevee. My wife adored it growing up and, upon learning I hadn’t seen it, has been showing me her favorites. Season 3 ended up being so good, we’ve just been watching through it. There’s a nostalgic charm in its special effects and directing that I adore, but more importantly, the writing is actually incredibly good. Like, better than the original Outer Limits, which always felt like a Twilight Zone knock-off. If you’re in the mood for some thoughtful, if cheap, 90’s-era Sci-fi, you could do far worse.
• A gift from one of my recent walks: the coolest public guerilla art I’ve ever seen.