- Having a piano in the house again.
- Seeing my kids’ drawings published in the New York Times.
- Recording an audiobook during a pandemic in my bedroom closet.
- The magic of solvable problems when life seems impossible. Learning to solve a Rubik’s Cube. All the things you can tighten with a $10 socket set from Home Depot. Fixing things with the screwdriver somebody used to steal my car a decade ago. Sashiko. Modding my date stamp so it can live another decade.
- Abandoning the notion of linear progress for circular time.
- The hawk that hung out in our yard for nine hours.
- Getting into zines again by making them for my son’s school lunch, then later staying home and making a whole flock of zines.
- Getting interested in quilting. Making tape quilts and letting them take me where they want to go.
- The calm of collage. Sticky note collages. Making houses for Meg. Making collages based on my sons’ mispronunciation, “Chronovirus.” Turning scraps into poetry. The person who mailed me extra UHU sticks. Remixing Peanuts. Thinking on the page.
- Blind contour drawings. Learning to spot false lines.
- The joy of blackout poetry.
- The comfort of a pencil. Buying pencil extenders and a pencil sharpener named Carl. Writing with a Mitsubishi 9852EW. (Even though “HBs are for architects.”)
- Having great books to read. (So many they get their own list.) Mercifully short books for when reading is hard. Books with unusual structures. Turning books into time capsules. Reading like Rossellini. Reading promiscuously. Practicing bibliomancy.
- Making bad art. Making ugly art.
- Not doomscrolling. Airplane mode.
- Finding nourishment instead of identifying poison. Thinking about mental gumbo and how ideas spread like the plague.
- Filling notebooks. Having a diary to scream into, instead of the void of social media. Reading about Mass Observation. Keeping records so you can check them later and assure yourself you’re not crazy, the culture is. When my plague journal got too dark, turning to cheerful retrospection.
- Schedule send.
- Pedernales Falls. How bright the stars are in Dripping Springs.
- Long date walks and lunches with my wife for the two months the kids were in school. Van’s Bahn Mi trailer. Subs at Homeslice. Sushi at Komé. Little Deli. Taco Deli. Bagels at Nervous Charlie’s. Bubble tea and Kinokuniya. Enchiladas at Mother’s (RIP). Walking to the nursery and drawing plants and pansies.
- Watching my kids make Valentines for their classmates.
- A calendar I saw in a school office captioned, “Weekly Breakdown,” and thinking, “Yeah, I should schedule mine.”
- School pickups and talking in the car. How my son would pick a new song for us listen to on the way home and how he’d discover B-sides I didn’t know about by artists I love, like “Nannou” off Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker and “Watchlar” on Cocteau Twins’ Iceblink Luck. Listening to the new Four Tet and Autechre albums together.
- How much I miss being out in the world with the kids. Dart Bowl. Reading the graffiti and eating enchiladas in the cafe. (RIP.) Drawing at The Blanton. Hot dogs at Costco. Having a milkshake at In-and-Out and watching Owen make music in Garageband before Stuttering Institute. Going to the Ransom Center during his sessions.
- Drawing in the dark at Pop-Up Magazine. Meeting Esther Pearl Watson and hanging out with Liana Finck.
- Old friends. Dinner at Manuel’s with Edward Tufte. Tacos outside with Julien. Visiting Ryan Holiday’s new bookstore in Bastrop. (Picking up gummy worms on the way home from Bucee’s.)
- Our last weekend in the world before lockdown: a date day viewing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire at the Alamo Drafthouse, a dinner party at Steven and Eugene’s, and Jules’ 5th birthday party with tacos and donuts in Ramsey Park. (A lady saw the party balloons — a “5” and an “0”-shaped donut — and asked if it was my 50th birthday.)
- Writing a whole book proposal to Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” on an endless loop. (Then throwing it out.)
- Music, music, music. My 2020 playlist. Cymatics! Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Deerfhoof’s “35-minute live-in-the-studio medley of covers,” Love-Lore. Perfume Genius’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. Yaz, Upstairs at Eric’s. Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yasuaki Shimizu’s Kakashi. Robert Wyatt’s Shleep. Billy Nomates. The Dirty Projectors’ 5 EPs. Daniel Lopatin’s soundtrack for Uncut Gems. Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies. Ethiopiques. The new Nine Inch Nails ambient albums. Barker’s Utility. The piano of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. Duke Ellington’s Piano Reflections. The epic yearly surveys by Fluxblog. Aphex Twin’s piano works. Cardi B’s “WAP.” David Wise’s “Aquatic Ambience.” Christmas music on KUTX. Miumiu’s cover of “I Wish You Love.” Harry Styles’ cover of “Sledgehammer.” Owen Kleon’s single “Emoji,” and his album, Personality.
- The comedy of survival. How every age needs a Diogenes. Marc Maron’s standup special, End Times Fun.
- Lowering my expectations. Not thinking about much after dinnertime. Trying to stick to what I know works.
- Eating so much Cap’n Crunch I sent away for free figurines.
- Talking on the phone instead of Zoom.
- Watching skate videos as a way to travel to cities I miss.
- Spring. Watching our cacti blossom. Red admiral butterflies.
- Discovering the word “estivate.” Getting in the pool with the kids every day of summer. Listening to the “Poolside ’86” mix one the Wonderboom that Meg got me for Valentine’s Day. Floating on this dorky pizza raft like the one Andy Samberg has in Palm Springs, writing in my Rite in The Rain waterproof notebooks.
- Good newsletters. Sasha Frere-Jones. Laura Olin’s lists of ten.
- Ted Gioia and Dust-to-Digital on Twitter.
- Sturgill Simpson, who gave me my quarantine mantra: “Think I’m gonna just say home and make art, not friends!”)
- My quarantine queen and king: Mary Ruefle & David Hockney.
- Quarantine Book Club! Mike Monteiro’s #perfect31 record challenge on Instagram.
- Totally watching television: Ted Lasso. Better Things. What We Do In The Shadows. Sex Education. How To With John Wilson. Ghosts. Cobra Kai. Deutschland ’83. Teenage Bounty Hunters. Toast of London. The Great. Normal People.
- Good movies: Tampopo. Dolemite Is My Name. Master and Commander. My Octopus Teacher. Dick Johnson Is Dead. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart. 24 Hour Party People. The Grand Budapest Hotel. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Wild Nights With Emily. The Old Guard. John Was Trying to Contact Aliens. Mission Impossible: 1-6. The Speed Cubers. The Nice Guys. Marshawn Lynch: A History. Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins. Lured. I Married A Witch. Arsenic and Old Lace. Kind Hearts and Coronets. Dial M For Murder. The original 1940 version of Gaslight. Apollo 11. The Life Aquatic. The Matrix. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. That Thing You Do! What About Bob?
- Watching old favorites in black and white.
- Opting out of Zoom school. Letting the kids go feral instead. (You could count the days they were fully dressed on one hand.) The Idle Parent Manifesto. Dreaming up a new curriculum. Reading old issues of John Holt’s homeschooling newsletter, Growing Without Schooling. Remembering that boredom is a pit stop. Thinking about how not all screen time is equal. Looking up stuff in the dictionary. (“How do I spell….”) Watching them read in patches of sunlight on the floor — the best distance learning.
- Getting rid of the day the best that we could. Building a climbing dome and a rope swing in the back yard. Drawing together. Making comics together. Finishing or collaging their abandoned drawings. Finishing each other’s Garageband tracks. Owen making beats out of rain drops and thunder. Each one clacking away on his own typewriter. (“I’m going to be an author like you, papa.”) Drawing them while they play. Making noise tracks on our four-track. Printmaking with vegetables. Playing Scrabble and exploring inappropriate language with Bananagrams. Watching Spongebob Squarepants. Harry Potter. Exquisite Corpse. Having a new Wayside School to read. Issues of OKIDO. Painting blocks of the Three Little Pigs. Putting a multi-colored wifi light up the noise nook. Dusting off the Wii and playing Dr. Mario and Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong Country. (Huge mistake! They are now video game junkies.) Keeping conversation cards on the kitchen table. Floor Is Lava. What’s On My Butt? Those Usborne “See Inside” books. Sticking to the best parenting advice I’ve ever heard. The Portal. Playing hide-and-seek. Fights with fake snowballs. A parent who said to me, about lockdown, “We are learning things about them that we didn’t know.”
- How caring leads to loving. A heart-shaped love. The brief period in which my youngest wanted to give us “100 kisses” before bed.
- Acknowledging the grief of it all.
- Giving each other haircuts.
- Breakfast in bed.
- The $3 box of spaghetti actually tasting 3x better than the $1 box.
- Chicken parm sandwiches.
- Banana bread. (Owen: “It’s amazing how something rotten can become delicious!”)
- Our Bill Rebholz San Marzano tomato print.
- An alarm clock with big blue letters so I don’t have to reach for my phone.
- Watching Meg’s citrus trees grow fruit.
- Breaking in Sharpies.
- Running the numbers. Rearranging the furniture.
- Quarantine uppers and downers: Vitamin D in the morning and magnesium at night. Getting a coffee subscription in the mail. Gin and tonics in a pint glass full of ice. Drops from Milk Barn Farm.
- Simple questions for better decisions: Instead of asking, “Will this make me happy?” asking, “Will this enlarge me or diminish me?” Instead of giving feedback, simply asking, “What did you really want to say?” Instead of asking, “Can I finish?” asking, “Can I keep going?” Instead of asking, “What can I know?” asking, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” (That last one’s W.H. Auden.)
- Neil Postman’s advice for how to live the rest of your life. Emerson’s advice: “Work and learn in evil days.” Thomas Merton’s advice: “Learn to Be Alone.” Alasdair Gray’s advice to stay in touch with who you wanted to be when you were little.
- The poem, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.” How poetry changes over time.
- Having something to do. Doing what you know how to do. Doing the work that’s in front of you. How every time we make something, it’s a tiny triumph. How quantity leads to quality.
- Knowing that not everything will be okay, but some things will.
- Accepting that nobody knows anything. (Eric Seidel, quoted in The Biggest Bluff: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”) Wondering over knowing. Hitting pause.
- Praying, whether I believe or not.
- Voting.
- How I searched in the street for my lost wedding ring, was totally distraught, and then it turned up in the washing machine.
- Breaking bread with the dead. Picturing history.
- Writing about lost loved ones. Jason Polan. Charles Portis. Bill Withers. Jan Steward. Milton Glaser. John Baldessari. Aunt Becky.
- Listening to music with the volume turned down low.
- Listening to the brush. Listening to the fog horns. Listening for hawks on our walks. Listening for another world.
- Pen pals. Answering letters. Addressing an envelope as a reminder to write a letter. Sending mail via USPS. Ruth Asawa stamps. Making collages out of mail.
- My trusty Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.
- The Tile thingie my wife bought me to stick in the back of my pocket notebook so I can find it when I lose it.
- Reading a Ray Bradbury short story every night of October.
- Drew Dernavich’s rejection pile. Thinking about how every piece of art I love exists because someone didn’t throw it in the fire or somebody pulled it out of the flames.
- Willem Defoe’s “You don’t like me cooking?!?” monologue in The Lighthouse.
- Learning how the days of the week got their names.
- Learning how to play Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” on piano. Getting the Phantom Thread soundtrack on vinyl and discovering it included sheet music.
- Learning from non-fiction books for kids. Drawing to remember what I’ve learned.
- How my local grocery store was more prepared for the pandemic than the federal government.
- How the pandemic led to experimenting with online events. Making a good Zoom rig out of stuff I already had, plus adding the Camo app, a decent ring light, and a document camera.
- Signing books outside Bookpeople on their picnic tables.
- Books I wrote that I can’t read. Seeing my books with music gear. Figuring Keep Going would be the book of mine people turned to during quarantine, and being surprised that it was actually Show Your Work! (“Nothing matters and nothing works.”)
- Calvin’s chickens. Bird feeders for humans.
- Scheduling time to make a collage so I can listen to a podcast, like Between the Covers or Recording Artists or Broken Record.
- Edward Carey’s daily quarantine drawings.
- Thor Harris starting a band with his next door neighbor Antonio.
- The work of Amos Kennedy, Jr. Watching him build his “pile of bricks” printmaking studio in Detroit. (And his hilarious fundraising video.)
- Talking about how much artist Corita Kent has influenced my work.
- 15 years of blogging. 14 years of marriage.
- Rituals, no matter how silly. Morning walks, no matter what. Morning pages, no matter what. Pizza-and-a-movie night. Spaghetti night. Starting a notebook with a weigh-in. Notebook affirmations.
- Every day, giving yourself a little present.
- Moonlight on the bedsheets. Keeping track of the moon. Seeing the Great Conjunction. My wife’s reaction to seeing the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
- Coconut the Owl.
- Having an office to retreat to. (My dad, talking about his contractor: “He got a lot done, but nothing’s finished.”)
- Breathing through the nose. Doing nothing for as long as possible. (Owen: “I exist just as well as you do!”) Taking naps.
- Doctors who make house calls.
- Stayin’ alive.
Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.