In space, no one can hear your scream — or make the incredibly stupid decision to open the airlock for a crew member who has an unknown alien parasite attached to his face.

Protocol is there for a reason, kids.

In our 24th episode, Levi and I bring aboard two special guests to discuss Alien, Ridley Scott’s genre crossing masterpiece from 1979.

We tried to talk about the origins of Godzilla but wound up talking about eyepatches, the recursive loop of technological progress, and how or if we’ll ever come to terms with the losses of the COVID years.

This is episode #23 for us. Every time that number increments by one I feel an absurd amount pride. I feel this regardless of our subscriber stats, regardless of how I feel about the quality of a particular episode. The least celebrated benefit of podcasting is how it exemplifies the benefits of consistency, the absurd blessing of incremental progress.

Children grow up; it’s the worst thing they do. Just as you’re getting the hang of parenting a 5-year-old, she becomes a 6-year-old. Just as you’re getting the hang of parenting an 8-year-old, he becomes a 9-year-old. My favorite photos are the candid ones, the clandestine ones, when they don’t know I’m looking, because in those moments if you look long enough and carefully enough, you can see the change happening: She takes off her shoes all on her own before crossing the muddy ground, no prompting or reminding, because big girls take care of their things, and painful or not, and ready or not, she is a big girl now.

One of the mistakes I made with my since-abandoned writing career was over studying. From the time I was a kid, I read endless books about the craft of sentence making and story telling. I scoured the biographies of famous writers for their every habit and practice, as though the random minutae of a particular life were creatively meaningful, the genius transferrable. I aquired two degrees, sat through countless workshops, wrote imitations and exercises and line after line of blank verse, just for the lulz.

And in the end, the studying simply beat the love of writing out of me. All that pencil sharpening became an end unto itself. The necessary wandering one must do in the forest of creation is impossible when all you can see are the pathologies of particular trees.

When I picked up a camera again a couple of years ago, I was determined not to let the same thing happen to my relationship with photography. Some degree of study is essential, of course – my purpose here isn’t to celebrate the kind of ignorance that causes some poets to declare any 14-line poem a sonnet (for instance). But this time I intend to err on the side of enthusiasm, on the side of good enough. My purpose is to create something living, not to spend my life dissecting what others make.

This picture reminded me of that. It’s not perfect – I’m not even sure it’s a photograph in the lasting sense. It was a hip shot walking through a coffee shop; the composition is accidental, the focus is poor, the color, well, color gives me fits in general. And yet there’s something in the lady’s expression, something in the arrangment of the flat circles of light cutting across the frame. Imperfections inject life into photographs. Perhaps more than any other genre, photography is a discipline of the accidental, the happenstance.