1. Watching the owls in our back yard raise two owlets.
2. Riding bikes with my friends.
3. Sending out the newsletter. The Guardian naming it one of the best. How nice our community is to each other in the comments.
4. Steal Like an Artist going into its 30th printing with over a million copies in print.
5. Making stamps.
6. Making volvelles!
7. Discovering Roget’s thesaurus.
8. Shelling out the dough for an Apple Studio Display, which has truly made my working life way more pleasant.
9. Burning candles and incense in the studio.
10. Chopping wood for a fire. Building a fire. Sitting around the fire.
11. Pizza night and a movie every Friday. Bag salads and the occasional mozzarella stick.
12. An afternoon on Huntington Beach, eating Dairy Queen by the ocean and petting other people’s dogs.
13. Reading to the boys before bed, even though they’re plenty old enough to read by themselves. Grimm Fairy Tales to Jules while he soaked in the tub. Matilda. Harry Potter.
14. Funny things the kids said. “People say life is short… did they not go to school?” “The IRS should have an anthem.” “I feel like the teacher should be famous instead of Helen Keller.” Owen’s Acronym for the STAAR test: “Stupid Torture and Absolute Regret.” Jules, reading some junk mail from AAA: “Time to renew your AAAAAAAAH! membership.” Jules, being introduced to deodorant: “It’s like a glue stick for your armpit!” Owen: “Remember that time you pooped your pants?” Jules: “STOP LIVING IN THE PAST!” Jules on predicting the future: “Maybe the past will come back… but with better choices.” Owen, overheard from another room: “Your tongue has splinters! It hurts really bad.” Jules’ one-word reply to being asked why he “eloped” from the classroom: “Ennui.”
15. The way the boys repeat dialogue from movies and TV they watch. “Oh for ten toes!” (Treasure Island.) “Ay, carumba!” (The Simpsons.)
16. Setting the boys up with iCloud accounts and iMessage on their computers so we can text each other. Sending each other links and songs and memes.
17. Being a curious elder. Learning slang from my kids, most of it from YouTube: “Cursed,” “Sus,” “Toxic,” “Cringe,” “Savage,” “Rizz,” etc.
18. How Owen reads the monthly NYTimes for Kids section religiously.
19. Radishes (with salt and bread and butter) and lettuce and fresh basil for pizza from Meg’s garden.
20. How plants know how to grow not based on how long it’s light out, but how long it’s dark out.
21. How prickly pear cacti show you exponential growth in slow time. (“Sleep, creep, leap.”)
22. The compost pile signs in the community garden, how they could work for a book manuscript: “ADD HERE.” “DO NOT ADD HERE.” “NOT FINISHED YET.”
23. How, if you’re lonely, all you have to do is run an errand unwashed in your grubbiest clothes — when you’re out in the world at your least presentable, you’re sure to run into someone you know.
24. How if you stand out in the street talking to a neighbor, you attract other neighbors.
25. Watching the annual solar eclipse. Not driving somewhere for the optimal viewing, but staying close to home and watching with neighbors on our street.
26. A tiny cup of cereal and a movie no one else will watch with me when I can’t sleep at 3AM.
27. Doing a “weekly review,” going back through my notebooks, making a map of where I’ve been, planning for the next week.
28. H-E-B as a corner bodega. Walking with Jules to get donuts.
29. Buying a St. Francis statue from HEB and carrying it home so it might bless the animals in the back yard.
30. Watching the adventures of Flaco the Owl, who escaped and learned to live in the wild. How, in all his majesty, he has the same goofy moves as the little screech owls in our back yard. Just bigger.
31. Meeting Thurston the screech owl at Austin Wildlife Rescue. (Their photo of an owlet release.)
32. How the awful mobbing blue jays alert you that there’s something worth paying attention to nearby.
33. Trying to live peacefully with the squirrels, even though, in my heart, I still despise them. Watching a mama squirrel re-home her babies.
34. Pulling the 90s Pure Moods compilation out of a free box at End of an Ear and playing the original infomercial for the kids and laughing. How Owen made a parody of it out of meme songs called Cringe Moods. Thinking about how I prefer my moods to be impure, and my feelings to be mixed.
35. The few restaurants where the whole family will eat a meal. RIP BBQ Ramen Tatsuya. Thank you, Kerbey Lane. (Showing the boys how you can hold your finger over your straw and pull it out of your drink and it holds the liquid.)
36. Date walks on the hike and bike trail with Meghan. Lunch dates. Franklin Brisket croissants from Epicerie. Burgers at Clark’s. Eating Golden Chick in the Natural Gardener parking lot.
37. Not knowing the answers. Asking better questions. From Jamie: “You’re someone who’s so curious about so many things — why aren’t you curious about this?” From the work of Jungian analyst James Hollis: “What is wanting expression through me?” “Does this choice enlarge or diminish me?” “Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?”
38. Two visits to Detroit in one year. Mudgie’s pastrami with John. Apple cider and sugar cinnamon donuts and fall foliage. Window shopping in Ann Arbor. Ordering Detroit-style pizza from 313 after getting home.
39. Seeing my oldest, dearest friends. Breakfast with Corey and Kristen in Columbus. Beers with Brandon in Cleveland. Seeing all my college pals at John’s wedding and a few people I literally hadn’t seen in 20 years.
40. Telling your friends you love them.
41. Talking on the phone.
42. How you’ll be out and about and hear someone yell something at you from a car, and you’ll think, “Oh great, now I have to fight somebody with my bare hands,” and you turn and it’s one of your friends.
43. Surviving bike accidents. How turtles help each other in times of need. Tortuga extra-vehicular activities: Honk Fest with Hank. Deerhoof with Gerren. FC game with Marty and Wild Bill.
44. Thinking about hanging a “WALK-INS WELCOME” sign in the window of my studio. Jules coming out to the studio to draw. Studio visits from friends.
45. How often people visit Austin. BBQ with Maria. Brunch with Wendy at Counter Cafe. A bike ride with Kevin. A riverfront stroll with Bill. Walking to Epicerie and record shopping with Alan. Rooftop drinks with John and Liz. Taking Michael to see Being Dead at End of an Ear. Going to the skate park with Rumaan and his boys.
46. Walking around Onion Creek with Brian and him pointing out how a fence post full of ancient nails is like a history museum.
47. Seeing The Smile with Art. How Johnny Greenwood brings a tiny harp on tour with him just for one song.
48. Volunteering at my kids’ school. Talking to other parents at drop-off and pickup. Chaperoning a school field trip to the nature center.
49. Good teachers. How it all comes down to the bodies in the room. How Jules’ art teacher held a drawing contest for the school t-shirt and then collaged all the submitted drawings into one image.
50. How all this work and money goes into official remixes of Beatles albums when you can just stand at the ice cream stand that has one speaker that only plays the left channel and “Hello Goodbye” sounds like a totally different song.
51. How AI is making us re-think what’s actually worthwhile about making art and being human. How it can’t kill anything worth keeping around. Reading about animals and plants and other intelligences. How no software is as impressive as a sunflower growing in the crack of a sidewalk.
52. Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification,” which explains so much.
53. Getting one of those carbon copy pads that waiters use and typing out favorite poems on it, saving the Kitchen Check for me, and sending the Guest Check for somebody else.
54. A kids and dads Nerf gun battle at a birthday party.
55. Shooting my BB gun at beer cans with mom.
56. Not knowing what wine to pick at the grocery, stepping back and waiting for a sign from somebody who looks like they know what they’re doing. (How I discovered a decent $8 bottle of Chianti thanks to an elderly woman.)
57. The checks that are easy to write.
58. Roughhousing and wrestling with Jules to Black Sabbath. Letting him punch me in the stomach as hard as he can, knowing I won’t be able to do that much longer. (“These are the good old days.”)
59. Playing way, way too much The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
60. Doing yard work and listening to audiobooks.
61. Blasting down the highway in a rented Dodge Charger, listening to Miles Davis’s Milestones.
62. Taking slow walks and pulling out a notepad to scribble down ideas.
63. Pool parties and snow cones. Swimming with the boys. Long chats with Meg, our feet in the pool. Playing music by the pool — this year mostly cumbia, a mix of songs they play at the Disney Polynesian hotel, and Donovan. Reading big fat books in the pool. A little toy basketball hoop by the pool. Falling asleep in the pool. Going for a walk in my wet swim suit and how it’s dry by the time I get back home.
64. Sitting on the porch during a storm and listening to the frogs chirp.
65. Shooting pool with dad.
66. Playing Scrabble with mom.
67. Spaghetti night!
68. Going to the movies at the Alamo Drafthouse. Asteroid City and A Haunting in Venice with Meg. TMNT: Mutant Mayhem with the boys. Popcorn and fried pickles!
69. Having machines to play all kinds of different media. Buying $1 CDs at Recycled Reads. Finding a bunch of melted 45s on the sidewalk. Taking a morning walk and meeting neighbors having a big record sale. Mom mailing Jules a VCR so he could watch VHS tapes. Buying a nice cassette deck and listening to old tapes of the college radio show I had with my friend and laughing about how we’d be canceled now within 10 minutes.
70. Applying ass to chair: How Owen sat at his computer desk so long one day he left a blue buttprint from his pajamas on his bench.
71. Jules drawing in his sketchbook every day, and they boys writing in their one line a day diaries every night.
72. Hanif’s idea of “joyful extraction.”
73. The boys teaching each other songs on the piano.
74. The boys singing Christmas carols.
75. Introducing the boys to mechanical pencils.
76. Taking Owen to a modular synth workshop at the library, how he didn’t want to go and how he asked to come back.
77. The Pricemaster. “Everything is for sale! Make me an offer!”
78. Downloading an ebook of somebody’s complete works and typing things into the search box and seeing what comes up.
79. Jules discovering post-it notes and leaving notes to himself around the house.
80. Trader Joe’s harvest blend tea. Taking a thermos of hot water out to the studio. Having a commuter bag just for walking out to the studio with my notebooks.
81. Tortellini soup.
82. Paper planes: equal parts bourbon, amaro, aperol, and lemon juice.
83. Holiday rituals to get into the spirit. Crawfish and king cake at Mardi Gras. Corned beef and soda bread at St. Patrick’s Day. Carving pumpkins and roasting pumpkin seeds at Halloween. Making a gingerbread house and doing the feast of the seven fishes at Christmas.
84. Ignoring baseball all year and then watching the playoffs every night.
85. Pelikan’s fluorescent yellow highlighter ink.
86. Putting little library pockets in the back of my diary.
87. Hoodies with a kangaroo pouch.
88. Playing music at dinner, how it keeps everyone mellow.
89. The boys being old enough to get up on their own and watch TV so Meg and I can sleep in on the weekends.
90. Thinking about how the pictures in our heads can blind us to what’s actually in front of us. How you don’t really need a vision.
91. Going into things with no expectations. (Remembering the Zen master’s words: “We’ll see.”)
92. How on the cover of the Arabic translation of my book Keep Going, the arrows point right to left.
93. Sam Lipsyte’s advice: “Don’t think about a career…. Just think about the next sentence.”
94. This lesson from Inside Taco Bell’s Innovation Kitchen: “You can change either the taste or the form… but you can’t change the taste and the form.”
95. Being a congregant in “The Church Of Minding One’s Own Business.”
96. Turning 40. Hypertension meds. Reading Don Quixote. Buying a new bike for my birthday and naming it “Rocinante.” Collecting bike proverbs like Sancho Panza. (“Where you look is where you go,” “better a hill than wind,” “enjoy every coast,” “there is no flat.”) Resolving not to waste my mid-life crisis.
97. Losing 20 pounds. Drinking a glass of water before morning coffee. Lots of oatmeal. Fitting into old jeans and zipping up old hills.
98. Buying a new suit for the first time in a decade.
99. Trying to age like a plant in the garden center: “Natural beauty. Low maintenance.”
100. Living for dinnertime.

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Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.

1. Having a piano in the house again.
2. Seeing my kids’ drawings published in the New York Times.
3. Recording an audiobook during a pandemic in my bedroom closet.
4. 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.
5. Abandoning the notion of linear progress for circular time.
6. The hawk that hung out in our yard for nine hours.
7. Getting into zines again by making them for my son’s school lunch, then later staying home and making a whole flock of zines.
8. Getting interested in quilting. Making tape quilts and letting them take me where they want to go.
9. 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.
10. Blind contour drawings. Learning to spot false lines.
11. The joy of blackout poetry.
12. 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.”)
13. 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.
14. Making bad art. Making ugly art.
15. Not doomscrolling. Airplane mode.
16. Finding nourishment instead of identifying poison. Thinking about mental gumbo and how ideas spread like the plague.
17. 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.
18. Schedule send.
19. Pedernales Falls. How bright the stars are in Dripping Springs.
20. 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.
21. Watching my kids make Valentines for their classmates.
22. A calendar I saw in a school office captioned, “Weekly Breakdown,” and thinking, “Yeah, I should schedule mine.”
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. Drawing in the dark at Pop-Up Magazine. Meeting Esther Pearl Watson and hanging out with Liana Finck.
26. 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.)
27. 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.)
28. Writing a whole book proposal to Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” on an endless loop. (Then throwing it out.)
29. 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.
30. The comedy of survival. How every age needs a Diogenes. Marc Maron’s standup special, End Times Fun.
31. Lowering my expectations. Not thinking about much after dinnertime. Trying to stick to what I know works.
32. Eating so much Cap’n Crunch I sent away for free figurines.
33. Talking on the phone instead of Zoom.
34. Watching skate videos as a way to travel to cities I miss.
35. Spring. Watching our cacti blossom. Red admiral butterflies.
36. 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.
37. Good newsletters. Sasha Frere-Jones. Laura Olin’s lists of ten.
38. Ted Gioia and Dust-to-Digital on Twitter.
39. Sturgill Simpson, who gave me my quarantine mantra: “Think I’m gonna just say home and make art, not friends!”)
40. My quarantine queen and king: Mary Ruefle & David Hockney.
41. Quarantine Book Club! Mike Monteiro’s #perfect31 record challenge on Instagram.
42. 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.
43. 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? 
44. Watching old favorites in black and white.
45. 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.
46. 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.”
47. How caring leads to loving. A heart-shaped love. The brief period in which my youngest wanted to give us “100 kisses” before bed.
48. Acknowledging the grief of it all.
49. Giving each other haircuts.
50. Breakfast in bed.
51. The $3 box of spaghetti actually tasting 3x better than the $1 box.
52. Chicken parm sandwiches.
53. Banana bread. (Owen: “It’s amazing how something rotten can become delicious!”)
54. Our Bill Rebholz San Marzano tomato print.
55. An alarm clock with big blue letters so I don’t have to reach for my phone.
56. Watching Meg’s citrus trees grow fruit.
57. Breaking in Sharpies.
58. Running the numbers. Rearranging the furniture.
59. 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.
60. 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.)
61. 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.
62. The poem, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.” How poetry changes over time.
63. 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.
64. Knowing that not everything will be okay, but some things will.
65. Accepting that nobody knows anything. (Eric Seidel, quoted in The Biggest Bluff: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”) Wondering over knowing. Hitting pause.
66. Praying, whether I believe or not.
67. Voting.
68. How I searched in the street for my lost wedding ring, was totally distraught, and then it turned up in the washing machine.
69. Breaking bread with the dead. Picturing history.
70. Writing about lost loved ones. Jason Polan. Charles Portis. Bill Withers. Jan Steward. Milton Glaser. John Baldessari. Aunt Becky.
71. Listening to music with the volume turned down low.
72. Listening to the brush. Listening to the fog horns. Listening for hawks on our walks. Listening for another world.
73. 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.
74. My trusty Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.
75. 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.
76. Reading a Ray Bradbury short story every night of October.
77. 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.
78. Willem Defoe’s “You don’t like me cooking?!?” monologue in The Lighthouse.
79. Learning how the days of the week got their names.
80. Learning how to play Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” on piano. Getting the Phantom Thread soundtrack on vinyl and discovering it included sheet music.
81. Learning from non-fiction books for kids. Drawing to remember what I’ve learned.
82. How my local grocery store was more prepared for the pandemic than the federal government.
83. 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.
84. Signing books outside Bookpeople on their picnic tables.
85. 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.”)
86. Calvin’s chickens. Bird feeders for humans.
87. Scheduling time to make a collage so I can listen to a podcast, like Between the Covers or Recording Artists or Broken Record.
88. Edward Carey’s daily quarantine drawings.
89. Thor Harris starting a band with his next door neighbor Antonio.
90. The work of Amos Kennedy, Jr. Watching him build his “pile of bricks” printmaking studio in Detroit. (And his hilarious fundraising video.)
91. Talking about how much artist Corita Kent has influenced my work.
92. 15 years of blogging. 14 years of marriage.
93. 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.
94. Every day, giving yourself a little present.
95. 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.
96. Coconut the Owl.
97. Having an office to retreat to. (My dad, talking about his contractor: “He got a lot done, but nothing’s finished.”)
98. Breathing through the nose. Doing nothing for as long as possible. (Owen: “I exist just as well as you do!”) Taking naps.
99. Doctors who make house calls.
100. Stayin’ alive.

1. Moving back to Texas.
2. Publishing a book that genuinely felt like the best I could do.
3. Surviving book tour. Filling seats. Meeting so many lovely people at readings. How many people brought their kids—or their parents! Having a portable routine. Sending the kids postcards. Writing in diners. Art at the airport. My Yeti Rambler. Noise-cancelling headphones. A Tupperware for Tacodeli. Ziplocs for a pastrami from Katz’s Deli. The hearse I spotted in Portland, Oregon. Walking Lake Michigan in Chicago. Watching dudes surf Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. Amtrak! (The Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Francisco — snow in the mountains, meeting kooky people in the dining car and on the observation deck!) Listening to the Magnetic Fields’ Charm of the Highway Strip and watching the Maysles Brothers’ documentary about Bible salesmen for moral support. The Jonas Wood show at the DMA. Walking to an open mic night at a comedy club after my talk in Atlanta. Finding out the Mississippi starts in Minnesota. Dairy Queen with Matt and Jennifer in Iowa after a tornado. The sad gallery of photos I took of my hotel room number. Getting picked up from the airport by the whole family.
4. Walker Percy’s “problems of re-entry.”
5. How cheap wine tastes better if you drink it out of a juice glass.
6. Pansy Luchadores!
7. My Gritty mug.
8. Living down the street from a great thrift store.
9. Buying used CDs until hipsters like me make them expensive again.
10. $5 crave boxes from Taco Bell and $5 sushi from the grocery store.
11. Suppressing the internal voices of our Midwestern upbringing and learning to accept hospitality from others.
12. Playing Gerren’s Wurlitzer while watching the inflatable T-Rex float around his pool.
13. Gas fireplaces that ignite with the flip of a switch.
14. All the members of our household being potty-trained!
15. The color of the sky in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
16. Driving through the desert from LA to Las Vegas. A tour of The Neon Museum boneyard with Steve Siwinski. The Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas.
17. The smell of my wife baking sourdough bread. Watching the kids devour it.
18. Loving what we do in front of the kids. Showing them an alternate world. Giving them the time, space, and materials to make their own. Trying not to give them too much advice. Trying to help them understand we don’t know everything, we just usually know where to look for it.
19. Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers. Edward Gorey’s The West Wing.
20. Owls. Goats. Chickens. Big wolf energy.
21. Vitamin D.
22. My new office. Keeping sketchbooks in drawers. My old trusty brush pen.
23. Backing up.
24. Getting in bed at 9PM.
25. The Kids section of The New York Times.
26. Watching Phantom Thread for the sixth time. (And chasing it with Hitchcock’s Rebecca.)
27. Sandy Cheeks singing about Texas. Buying my wife so many stocking stuffers from Texas Humor.
28. Watching Gourmet Makes on YouTube with Meg. Getting drunk and making fun of old clips of Jacques Pépin and Julia Child on PBS.
29. The Red Hand Files. The return of POME. The “Just trust me” links in Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter.
30. Our trip to upstate New York. Visiting John Unger’s studio. (Keeping a notebook handy when he’s talking.) The drive from Hudson to Manhattan. How good New York City can be with kids. Sitting in a hotel room in with Meg, drinking, eating pizza, and watching a crane in the street lift gigantic concrete blocks up 50 stories. Seeing Joe Brainard’s collages in person at Tibor de Nagy.
31. The kids slurping ramen noodles.
32. California. Driving the outskirts of San Francisco with Ted in the purple limousine. Sunsets over the ocean. Waking up in the Presido. The smell of Eucalyptus. Rodeo beach. Sushi Ran in Sausalito. Mission burritos. Purisma Creek preserve. Grace Cathedral. The moon over the Sutro tower. Los Angeles. Shenkrila. Finding Christoph Niemann’s Hopes and Dreams on my sister-in-law’s coffee table. Watching a seagull on a beach playground in Encinitas pick up a whole In-N-Out drink carrier in its beak and fly away. (And assuming this happens every day.)
33. Driving the length of Kentucky with my mom. Stopping at Keeneland for BLTs. Seeing a handprinted sign that read: “INDOOR YARD SALE.”
34. Buc-ees!!!
35. Remembering that everybody just got here. Remembering that you do not have to be good, you just have to be kind.
36. A cherry coke and loaded fries at the Alamo Drafthouse.
37. Taking my pocket notebook to the playground and doodling while my kids play.
38. Watching two of my favorite writers share their drawings on Twitter: @marykarrlit and @nicholsonbaker8.
39. Giving up on pourover and just buying a freaking coffeemaker. (My favorite coffee drink: Discovering there’s still coffee in the carafe 3 hours later and adding ice cubes and a splash of Oatly!)
40. Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” in Severance Hall.
41. Owen’s first concert: Carly Rae Jepsen from the opera box at the House of Blues in Cleveland.
42. Nachos for dinner.
43. Talking on the phone.
44. Cherishing every one of your old friends because you’re now at the age when it’s really hard to make new ones.
45. Bill Callahan at Scholz Garden with Christy.
46. The monarch butterflies making their way through Austin.
47. Input and output. Eno’s idea of “import and export.”
48. Edinburgh, Scotland. Walking the Water of Leith path. Climbing to Arthur’s Seat. The collage show at the Modern. Discovering the work of Eduardo Paolozzi.
49. Joni Mitchell singing “Coyote” in Rolling Thunder Review.
50. Walking along the water in Vancouver.
51. Making a collage or drawing in my diary before I write in it.
52. Finally understanding the moon phases.
53. Worrying about lineage instead of legacy.
54. Thinking about two homeschooled kids named Billie and Finneas making the most-streamed album of the year in their bedrooms.
55. Prismacolor Ebony pencils and Art Gum erasers.
56. Watching California Typewriter and later finding a 1980s Smith-Corona at Goodwill for $14.
57. The week after we moved, when we didn’t have furniture or internet, but we were so happy to be back home we didn’t care. Sleeping on air mattresses. Typing on the typewriter. Sitting on milk crates and playing Uno and checkers. Drinking beer. (The closest these indoorspeople will probably get to camping.)
58. Bunk beds!
59. Date days while the boys are at school. Clam chowder at Clarks. Van’s Bahn Mi trailer. Bubble tea and shopping at Kinokuniya.
60. Getting beyond survival mode.
61. Staying married for 13 years.
62. Picking Owen up from school and letting him DJ on the ride home.
63. Going to the movies when everybody else is at work. (Highlights: riding the #5 bus to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, a 10 a.m. showing of Knives Out with Meg followed by a sushi lunch, and John Wick 3 with Meg in an old school sticky floor Cleveland suburbs movie theater with popcorn and a Dr. Pepper.)
64. Going to see movies I don’t even care about just for the company. (Terminator: Dark Fate with Gerren. Star Wars with Hawk. Downton Abbey at the Drafthouse with my mom.)
65. Good movies at home. Booksmart. Sorcerer. The Favourite. The Worricker Trilogy. Destination Wedding. Herzog’s Nosferatu. The Andy Goldsworthy documentaries, Rivers and Tides and Leaning Into The Wind. Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization. John Wick 2 in Spanish on Telemundo.
66. Taking a chance because you’re stuck on an airplane and the movies turning out to be really good: Free Solo. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. 
67. Ignoring baseball all year but watching the World Series, no matter who is playing. (Is that like only going to church on Christmas?)
68. Overnight road trip to Detroit without the kids. A stop for window shopping and lunch at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. Bill Callahan at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Saying hi to Brian Beattie and hoping the next time I said hi to him it would be back in Austin. (It was.) Champagne sent up from the front desk. Hearing “Sticky” in the elevator. Actually sleeping in together.
69. Downloading MIDI files of symphonies and dumping them into Garageband so Owen can make electronic versions.
70. Moonlight on my bedsheets.
71. “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
72. Practicing the religion of walking. Walking to Friendsgiving. Walking in cemeteries. Believing that “everything is within walking distance… if you have the time.”
73. Spending October evenings reading Japanese Ghost Stories and watching spooky old school black and white movies, like The Black Cat and The Old Dark House and stuff from the Universal Monsters set.
74. Thinking about grace. The Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace. Jeffrey Gibson’s “Amazing Grace.” Leonard Cohen’s state of grace.
75. Not hoarding art supplies. Filling a notebook or using up a glue stick and going to the store and buying a new one.
76. Bagels from Nervous Charlie’s.
77. The opening line of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk: “I was a wonderful parent before I had children.”
78. Hanging out with the boys. Taking them to good museums. The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The Blanton. Griffith Observatory in LA. Drawing in our sketchbooks. Watching Roadrunner and Spongebob. Laughing at Cinderblock. Running outside to check out the morning moon. Making marble runs. Kicking the soccer ball. Knocking down dominos while filming in slow-motion. Shooting stomp rockets. Wishing on stars. Swim lessons. Listening patiently to my stuttering son while talks about Minecraft because I’m trying to be a good listener and a curious elder. The kids getting into poetry. Making art together. Having Owen letter my book trailer. How mad Jules got when I added the wrong words to his drawings. Block prints. Wearing masks. Making zines. Comics jams. Putting scabs on a banana. (Shudders.) Recording on my old 4-track. Owen naming our band “Song Disease.” His Soundcloud. Trick or treating. (It was actually fun?) Watching Jules draw. Jules singing “Away in a Manger” in the sweetest voice you ever heard. Teaching him how to play the first four notes of the 5th symphony. Jules teaching himself to read. How they get me unstuck.
79. Screen Time. Kanopy kids.
80. Having an active library card from 3 different library systems.
81. Drawing plants.
82. Leftover Torchy’s queso on a baked potato.
83. Looking around and asking myself, “Who’s having fun?”
84. Recording another KUTX DJ set with Art Levy.
85. Great books. Reading what I want to read. Re-reading all of Charles Portis’s novels. Trusting the simple act of turning pages. Keeping my phone off and reading books we’ve bought for the kids at the breakfast table. Falling asleep to library ebooks on my Kindle Paperwhite.
86. Keeping a Peanuts desk calendar on the kitchen table for us all to read.
87. Songs that got me through bad days: Lizzo’s “Juice.” Robyn’s “Honey.” Kacey Musgraves’ “Neon Moon.” New Order’s “Your Silent Face.” The Animals’ “It’s My Life.” Brittany Howard’s “Stay High.” Prince’s “Erotic City.” Prince’s “Xtralovable” in the car.
88. Less feed, more search.
89. Good albums. Bill and Billie. Purple Mountains. Working to Neu! ’75 and Cate le Bon’s Reward. Plane rides with Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, Harald Grosskopf’s Synthesist, and Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? as the soundtrack. Walking around in the frozen winter to Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Jonathan Richman’s I, Jonathan in the car. Stomping around to Idles’ Joy as an Act of Resistance. The 1999 super deluxe box set.
90. Being cool with being known for writing about making art more than my actual art.
91. Mechanics who hate cars.
92. Kintsugi. Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture.”
93. David Shrigley’s Instagram narrating my life.
94. Good poems. Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning.” “Poem” by Joe Brainard. “Berryman” by W.S. Merwin. “Haiku” by Ron Padgett. “The Best of It” by Kay Ryan. A haiku by Mizuta Masahide. Faith Shearin’s “Scurvy.” Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, 4.” Jane Kenyon’s “Taking Down The Tree.” Owen reciting Philip Larkin’s “Next, Please.”
95. Reading about my father-in-law in The New Yorker.
96. Lynda Barry finally getting a MacArthur.
97. Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker. Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Sam Anderson’s profile of Rick Steves. Jody Rosen on the Universal fire. Emma Hunsinger’s “How to draw a horse.” Sean T. Collins’ 365 days of Road House. Malaka Gharib’s mini zines. Tim Kreider’s pieces on Medium. “The Miracle of the Mundane” and “A Scourge of Gurus” from Heather Havrilesky’s What If This Were Enough?
98. Watching too much TV. The perfect second season of Fleabag. The “Juan Loves Chicken and Rice” episode of Documentary Now! Catastrophe. Derry Girls. Billions. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Sex Education. What We Do in the Shadows. Letterkenny. The Righteous Gemstones. Schitt’s Creek. The Crown. Tuca & Bertie. Barry. Rick and Morty.
99. Adopting a mantra for travel and creative work: “Who cares if I get anywhere?” Accepting that the toughest route is often the best route, that utopia is not a destination, it’s a direction, and that if you’re facing the wrong way, you can always turn around.
100. These words from Naguib Mahfouz: “Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.