Soon I plan to do a whole post on my bedroom here in The People’s Republic of Austin, but for now I will show you where I work. This is my “office”, which is approximately five feet away from my bed.

• My desk used to be a dining room table, but I haven’t had a reason to use it as such in many years. It’s a bit larger than a regular desk, so I prefer it this way.
• Above my desk is a 2013 calendar sent to me by Field Notes, makers of wonderful little notebooks I order every now and then.
• Above that is a picture of my cousins Ned and Jack (with me somewhere between them) last Christmas. Sometimes, when I’m feeling uninspired, I just look at that picture and instantly Get Creative.
• That little white lantern usually has a lit, fruit-scented tealight candle in it, but I recently ran out of them. I’ll have to get some more soon.
• See that Paris Review mug? It’s huge. They sent it to me when I subscribed last fall. I have probably drunk hundreds and hundreds of cups of tea out of that beautiful thing since then.
• On the little bookshelf to the left I usually burn incense non-stop. If you look closely, you can actually see a vertical green stick burning in this picture. I have a huge supply of Nag Champa and Mainichikoh stocked up so that I never run out.
• As for the bookshelf itself: It’s filled with guitar tuners, ancient Japanese video games, old journals, and unused train tickets for the BART in San Francisco.
• Tacked to the little cork board above the bookshelf is a ticket to a Deer Tick show on October 16th, 2011 at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. It was the first one I ever went to! I have been to about thirty since then.
• Above that is a Delta Spirit triangle advertising their self-titled album. I got that at Waterloo Records on the day it was released, which was during SXSW last year. I also watched them perform half the songs from the album an hour later in the very same store. That was pretty cool!
• On the cork board to the right is a heartfelt letter from my spirit-brother, Alex H., who lives in Los Angeles. He sent me Halcyon Digest and OK Computer on vinyl for Christmas two years ago. I hadn’t even met him at that point! We knew each other through words alone. What a cool dude.
• To the left of that is a pedal wrench given to me by a guy named Joe of Joe’s Bike Shop in Mt. Washington, which is pretty much the only part of Baltimore that isn’t scary. (I actually worked in the area for a few months.) Joe told me I would be able to put my whole bike back together using just a hex key—except the pedals. He loaned me that pedal wrench so I wouldn’t have to buy one. I still need to send it back to him. Sorry, Joe. I’ll do it soon!
• At the bottom of the board are two business cards. One is a prototype of my own VIII Nothing card, and the other is from a lovely young artist named Samantha Fried, whom I met on mountain trail overlooking Lake Tahoe—right on the border of California and Nevada. Really!
• And of course Sir Patrick Stewart watches over me while I work. My ex-wife painted that for me when I was a young Starsailor.

It’s a pretty OK place to sit down and write stuff that no one will read, if you ask me.