an itinerant observer

“If we are algorithms then where does free will and nuanced thinking come in?” A second message follows. “I think this concept is above my pay grade.” The lines arrive without ceremony. No preamble. No attempt to dress the question up as anything more than what it is. I am mid-scroll when I read them, the screen doing that familiar thing of flattening the room into the background. I pause longer than I expect to. You ask, then you step back. There is something about that sequence that stays. The question carries weight, though the space around it does more work than the question itself. It pulls at an older thread. Years earlier, long before our conversations existed, I had spent time with Harari’s framing. Humans as biochemical algorithms. Patterned. Conditioned. At the time, it felt like an opening. A way of seeing structure where I had previously seen randomness. I remember writing through that phase with a certain velocity, following ideas because they seemed to gener...

I had been living with the song and its images for years, long enough that they had become part of the background hum of my thinking. They never demanded attention. They simply stayed. It was only recently that they sharpened, prompted by two questions that arrived gently and without ceremony, asked by the same person who has a way of doing that. What was it like to help settle a child in college? What was it like to solemnize my child’s marriage? Ordinary questions, really, the kind people ask without realizing they are asking about time more than events. A muse, in the truest sense. Not an object of inspiration, but a presence that tilts you slightly off balance, just enough to make you look again at a room you thought you had already left. I tried to answer well. I sent voice notes that wandered, doubled back, repeated themselves. I could hear myself circling, offering coherence without quite arriving at precision. I spoke about logistics, transitions, perspective, the mecha...

“How do you possibly endure these journeys?” Family, friends and others keep circling back to the same question. Ten-hour overnight coaches across Turkey. Greyhounds on the U.S. West Coast and across Texas. And now, twenty-five hours of steel and scenery from Chicago’s Union Station to New York’s Penn Station. “I would take the train every time.” My short answer. Airports have long lost their allure. Domestic U.S. air travel is misery disguised as security: endless ID checks, fingerprint scans, facial recognition, shoes and belts stripped off, dignity reduced to whatever the conveyor belt spits out. You don’t fly, you flee. Amtrak felt different. No one asked for documents or biometrics. I could step off at Cleveland, grab a snack, stretch, and hop back on without fear of being flagged as an outsider. For once, travel felt like belonging. That sense of contrast sharpened when I thought back to Greyhound. I had done my share of long rides there too - up the West Coast and acro...