Each 1/24th of a second is a place we’ve never been.⠀

And suddenly his cigarette sends up a puff of smoke. I’m riveted. Aren’t you? Look at her mouth today. She’s got plans. Her eyes are going to meet his, and she knows perfectly well that across the nation a thousand…

Now his eyes are on her face, and Virginia Woolf’s got the right attitude as she waits with us for him to speak: “What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to…

Bogart’s eyes open, his mouth too, face softening, as if finally prepared to address her beauty, though perhaps what he’s really seeing is the nebulous woman now made of smoke between them, sharp nose, hand on her chin, gazing at…

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) love at first sight takes years in the Lonely Place. You eventually need eyeglasses to see it through.

Imagine if they’d had smartphones, subtle apps greedy for the continued commodification of individual selves. Our corporate reality sanctions romance, which can be packaged and sold like scented candles, but as corporations endlessly optimize efficiencies, seeking to colonize any remaining…

Yep, Bogart. That’s a cigarette. You’ve seen one before. So maybe look at her instead. But then I guess the most incandescent love stories tend to be born from states of extreme boredom.

The Lonely Place imposes a scale within which I cannot abdicate responsibility by passively raging against distant autocrats and far-flung horrors, but by seeing the world I experience daily and transforming it by taking some small action. The world may…

Gloria’s smoke today is a jellyfish beneath a single bright star, drawn by a child who’s proudly mastered the five points.