Category: Living

Categories
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.

Categories
Living New York City Serendipity

The Grammar of Looking Up

The apartment was across from Penn Station, which meant that for one stretch of months in the mid-1970s, the architecture of my days was decided by trains I never took. I walked east instead, every morning, toward the United Nations, where a man named Frank Smith ran a personal development course that IBM SRI had decided its young people should sit through. I don’t remember most of what Frank said in that room. I remember one thing he said about the street outside it.

He told us we should start looking up. Literally — on our walks back and forth across midtown, Penn Station to the East Side and back, twice a day, rain or not. Not all the way, usually. Mostly it was a floor or three: the window line just above the awnings, the cornice on a building you’d never once registered had a second story, let alone a sixth. The full climb to the rooflines — gargoyles, setbacks, terra cotta lions — was the occasional reward. Almost no one looks up in New York, he said, not even a little. The city trains you out of it. Too much at eye level demands your attention — the cabs, the steam, the man asking for change, the woman walking too slowly in front of you — so everything above your own eyeline disappears by consensus, not just the tops. Habits can be replaced. Look up enough times, even just a floor or three, and you’ll see a different city than the one everyone else is seeing.

I tried it. Walking up past the Pierpont Morgan stretch, or wherever the route took me, chin lifted some small number of degrees, feeling slightly foolish. Most days that was the whole of it — a window line, a row of air conditioners, a sign painted directly onto brick decades before anyone called that vintage. Every so often the chin would tip back further, and there’d be something up there worth the extra degrees. A gargoyle with its mouth open mid-roar, forty years before air conditioning made gargoyles decorative rather than necessary. But that was the rare find. The habit was the floor or three. Nobody else on the sidewalk was seeing any of it, because nobody else on the sidewalk was looking at all.

The chin came back down on its own a couple of times a week, somewhere around a street corner with a slice joint on it, because New York seems to put one on every corner whether you need it or not. You smelled it before you saw it — that specific combination of tomato, oregano, and hot grease that has no name I’ve ever found. Looking up was Frank’s discipline.

The pizza smell required none. It just reached out and took your head by the chin and turned it level again, toward the window with the steam on the glass and the guy folding a slice in half before he handed it over.

It is a small thing Frank Smith said in a room near the UN fifty years ago, and I have carried it around since the way you carry around a key to a house you no longer own. I don’t know what happened to the course, or to IBM SRI’s faith in such courses, or to Frank himself. I know what happened to the habit. It outlived the year, outlived the apartment across from Penn Station, outlived several cities I’ve lived in since that didn’t have the same vertical drama to reward the looking. I still do it. I did it last week on a walk that had nothing to do with midtown at all, tilting my head back on a street in California to find whatever was up there worth finding, and catching myself mid-gesture, thinking: that’s Frank’s, that one, still running fifty years later on the program he installed.

Most of what we’re taught to notice, we’re taught by people who wanted something from us — a sale, a vote, a grade. Frank wanted nothing, as far as I could tell, except that we see more of the city than we’d been seeing. It’s such a small ambition for a teacher to have. Look up. That’s the whole curriculum. And it’s the only thing from that course, the only thing from that whole strange year of being instructed in personal development by a man whose face I can no longer quite reconstruct, that I still do, unbidden, on every street I’ve walked since.

Categories
Aging AI Business Living

The Being Phase

There is a metric making the rounds in technology investing circles that is, on its face, about market share and revenue concentration. Alex Sacerdote of Whale Rock Capital calls it the New Rule of 40 for AI. The formula is simple: take the percentage of a company’s sales derived from AI, add its percentage market share in that AI category, and if the sum reaches 40, you have a winner. Celestica, a company most people have never heard of, scores extraordinarily well. It owns somewhere between half and sixty percent of the cloud Ethernet white-box switch market. NVIDIA doesn’t need a formula. It simply is what it is.

Sacerdote designed the metric to cut through a specific kind of noise — the companies claiming AI exposure they don’t actually have, the giants whose AI revenue hovers at one or two percent of their base while their press releases suggest otherwise. The framework is a detector. It finds the companies that have stopped becoming AI infrastructure and started simply being it.

I found myself less interested in the companies than in that distinction.

I spent years at Visa watching a network that had long since crossed that threshold. By the time I arrived, Visa wasn’t becoming the global payments infrastructure. It was the global payments infrastructure. The work was real — fraud detection, modeling, the daily labor of keeping something enormous running — but the existential question had been settled before I got there. The network existed. Merchants accepted it because cardholders carried it. Cardholders carried it because merchants accepted it. That loop had been closing for decades. We were custodians of a fait accompli.

There’s a particular feeling to working inside something that has already won. It’s not complacency exactly. The problems are genuine and the stakes are high. But the uncertainty has a different quality — it’s operational uncertainty, not existential uncertainty. You’re not asking whether the thing will survive. You’re asking how to run it well.

I didn’t have language for that distinction then. Sacerdote’s metric gives me some. The companies that score highest on his New Rule of 40 have resolved their existential question. They’re not fighting for position. They’re administering a position already held.

The question that has followed me out of that career, and out of several decades of watching technology cycles turn, is simpler and more personal than any investment framework.

When did I cross that line myself?

I have been writing at sjl.us since 2001. That’s not a boast — it’s a data point. Twenty-five years of thinking out loud, of ideas arriving rather than being argued, of the specific memory as structural anchor. The blog is not becoming anything. It is what it is: a record of a mind moving through time, accumulated into something that has its own weight and shape.

The book on payments systems exists. The career at Visa exists. The photographs exist. The train journeys exist. The years in Dayton exist, and the years on the Peninsula, and the particular way the light falls on the California coast at Pescadero in the late afternoon — when the fog is still offshore and the hills are improbably green and everything goes briefly, completely quiet, as if the world is deciding whether to continue.

These are not things I am building toward. They are things I am.

Sacerdote would say I have high market share in a specific category. The category is small — one person, one particular configuration of experience and attention and accumulated knowing — but the share is essentially total. There is no competitor for the position of having lived this particular life. The moat is absolute. The switching costs are infinite.

I used to find that thought melancholy. The narrowing as loss. The aperture closing on what remains.

I’m not sure I find it melancholy anymore.

The L-Curve, Sacerdote says, is a long flatline followed by a vertical explosion. The tinkering phase, then the moment of lift. He means it as a description of demand curves for technology infrastructure. But I recognize the shape from somewhere closer. The long middle of a life, building and becoming, and then the morning you wake up and realize the building is substantially done. What remains is the being.

That’s not an ending. It’s a different kind of beginning.

Sacerdote’s metric will eventually stop working. All frameworks do. The AI infrastructure cycle will mature, the L-Curves will flatten, and some new measure will emerge to find the next thing that is just beginning to become what it will be. That’s the nature of markets. The detector has to change as the signal changes.

But there’s a complication worth naming. Analysts at Citadel Securities published a note recently observing that even the most powerful technologies must pass through the prosaic discipline of cost curves, capacity constraints, and marginal returns. Token bills are arriving unexpectedly. Compute is scarce. The vision of AI as ubiquitous, frictionless, and immediate is colliding with physical reality. Their conclusion: asset prices will periodically be forced to reconcile ambition with physical constraint.

That’s not a refutation of Sacerdote. It’s a reminder that feeling like you’ve arrived and having actually arrived are different things. The being phase has to be load-tested. The position has to hold under pressure.

I think about the fiber optics Corning is laying into the massive data center clusters — ultra-thin, bendable, carrying more light than anything that came before. The cable doesn’t know it’s infrastructure. It just carries what it’s given, at the speed it’s capable of, across whatever distance is required. It doesn’t matter what the cable believes about itself. What matters is whether the light actually moves.

That seems right to me. You become what you are over a long time, largely without noticing. And then one day someone builds a metric that accidentally describes your life, and you recognize yourself in it, and you think: yes. That’s the shape of it. High concentration. High share. A moat that deepened while you were looking elsewhere.

But the moat still has to hold.

The being phase, it turns out, is not the end of something. It’s the proof that something was built. And the daily question — for companies, for infrastructure, for a person in his late seventies still writing, still paying attention — is whether what was built is actually load-bearing.

You don’t get to stop finding out.

Categories
Aging Living

Life Is Wide Open. And Then It’s a Pinhole.

The world is shrinking. Or so we’ve come to appreciate. Jet travel has made it possible to get almost anywhere on the planet in less than a day. And yet.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve become increasingly reluctant to do the kinds of things I wouldn’t have hesitated to do as a younger man. Travel. Driving in busy traffic. Walking the streets in a sketchy urban neighborhood. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary texture of a life lived outward, which turns out to require a kind of low-level willingness I don’t always find in myself anymore.

I’ve been trying to understand this.

When I turned 60 I did something I’d never done before. I looked up my life expectancy on a CDC table. The number that came back was 22. I sat with that for a moment. Twenty-two years. I had been alive for 60 and I had 22 more in the actuarial average, which meant I was already three-quarters of the way home. Nobody had told me this was coming. Not the number exactly, but the feeling the number produced — the sudden rearrangement of the geometry, the sense that the horizon had quietly moved while I wasn’t watching.

I’ve been watching it since.

The metaphor I keep returning to is a camera lens. When you’re young the aperture is wide open. You travel. You navigate. You walk into unfamiliar neighborhoods without thinking about it because the lens is just doing what lenses do — starving for light, taking it all in, indiscriminate in the way that only the young can afford to be indiscriminate.

Then it starts to stop down.

Not all at once. There is no morning when you wake up and find the aperture closed. It happens gradually, a slow tightening over years, and you don’t notice because you’re still inside the frame, still moving through the world. Until one day you notice you’re thinking about the trip before you book it. Weighing it. The weighing itself is new.

What I didn’t expect is that the closing doesn’t feel linear. It feels exponential. The rate accelerating in ways that keep outrunning my revised estimates. You recalibrate. Then you recalibrate again. The next recalibration comes sooner than the last.

A friend saw Paul Simon in concert last night. That sent me back to Kodachrome, one of his early hits, a young man’s song about color and vividness and the wide-open lens of youth. Everything looks worse in black and white, he sang at 31. Something about that lyric now, from this side of the aperture, makes it more true than it probably was when he wrote it.

He just thought he was writing about being young.

As a young family with two kids we toured southern England staying at farmhouse B&B’s. One of those vacation memories that linger. We visited the Cotswolds. A place where the stone is the color of late afternoon even at nine in the morning. The thing that catches you there isn’t the famous honey-colored villages but the little creeks running through them — water moving in ways you didn’t expect, off to the side of what you came to see.

I won’t go back. Not because I’ve decided not to. Simply because the aperture has moved and the Cotswolds is on the other side of it now. Still lit. Still there. The creeks still running through in their surprising way.

This is not tragedy.

It is just true.

A stopped-down lens has a property that took me a while to appreciate. The depth of field becomes enormous. Everything in the frame holds with equal sharpness — the near thing and the far thing, the room you’re sitting in and the long accumulated past the room contains. You lose the beautiful blur. You lose the selective mercy of a wide aperture that lets the background go soft and permits you to choose, by implication, what matters.

Now the background insists.

Nothing escapes attention. The specific quality of a morning. The thought that arrives before anything is being asked of you. The idea carried for years, worked through carefully, finally put into words.

Hermann Hesse understood something about this. The deepest lesson of Siddhartha isn’t something the protagonist learns from a teacher. It’s something he has to live until he knows it. Wisdom of this kind cannot pass from one person to another. It has to be earned on the inside, in real time.

Which is another way of saying it cannot be taught at all.

I can describe the aperture. I can hand you the metaphor. But you will only know what I mean when you are standing inside it yourself.

I couldn’t have written any of this at 60. Couldn’t have written it at 70. The aperture had to close this far before whatever this is came into focus — the particular clarity that arrives not despite the narrowing but because of it.

Nobody told me that was coming either.

That’s what I wanted to say.

Categories
Living Sacramento Trains Travel

The Dining Car Is Now Open

There are five words that do something to me that no other announcement in travel can match. Not the captain’s voice telling you you’ve reached cruising altitude. Not the gate agent calling your boarding group.

The dining car is now open.

I heard them on the Coast Starlight somewhere south of Portland, the train barely clear of Union Station, the Willamette still visible through the windows, and something in me that had been clenched for months — or maybe years — quietly let go.

I have been thinking about trains lately. About three particular trips, and what they add up to.

The first was the Coast Starlight south — San Jose to Santa Barbara, departing at ten in the morning, seven hours of California unspooling past the window.

There is no faster way to understand the state than from a train at that pace. The Bay gives way to the agricultural flats of the Central Coast, and then somewhere past San Luis Obispo the tracks swing toward the ocean and you are suddenly running along the edge of the continent, the Pacific filling the window, and you realize you have been holding your breath.

Near the end the train passes through Vandenberg — the base stretching out on both sides, the coastline raw and largely empty, the light in late afternoon doing what California light does. I arrived in Santa Barbara at five o’clock feeling like I had traveled through something, not just to somewhere.

That distinction matters more than it used to.

The Portland-to-Seattle leg was different. Shorter — four hours — but charged from the moment we pulled out of Union Station. Portland’s Union Station is the kind of place that makes you believe train travel is a civic act, not just a transaction. The great waiting room, the clock tower, the sense that someone once thought arrival was worth celebrating architecturally.

We were barely moving when the announcement came.

The dining car is now open.

I was traveling alone, which is the only way to truly hear those words. Alone, you are available. You have no one to talk to, which means you might talk to anyone.

I made my way to the dining car and was seated across from two strangers, the way Amtrak still does it — the old practice of filling tables, not preserving privacy. We were somewhere in Washington by the time we finished. I no longer remember their names or even what we talked about, but I remember the quality of the hour: the moving landscape, the food that was fine without being remarkable, the particular ease that comes from conversation with people you will never see again and therefore can be entirely honest with.

There is a word for what the dining car produces. Serendipity is close but not quite right. It is more like availability — the condition of being open to whatever the next hour brings. Air travel has systematically eliminated every version of this. The seat-back screen, the headphones, the tray table as personal bubble. Train travel still creates the conditions for encounter. The dining car announcement is an invitation, and what it is inviting you to is not just food.

The third trip was Richmond to Sacramento — short, almost a commuter run — with my friend Doug Kaye. Where the Coast Starlight rides were solo and expansive, this one was intimate. Two people who have known each other long enough not to need to fill the silence, watching the Bay Area give way to the Sacramento Valley, talking about whatever came up.

Sacramento’s station is the right destination for a train. Old and grand and close to things worth seeing — we walked to the California State Railroad Museum, which is the kind of place that makes train enthusiasm feel entirely reasonable. Steam locomotives the size of houses. The history of the transcontinental laid out in artifacts and photographs. I have been a train person since childhood, since the Union Station in Dayton, since riding the Spirit of St. Louis on the Pennsylvania Railroad with my sister, Mom and Dad, and the museum felt like confirmation of something I had always known but rarely said aloud.

Afterward we walked to the State Capitol. At some point in a hallway we passed Gavin Newsom, moving with purpose in the way governors do, and we nodded in that California way — the implicit acknowledgment that yes, here we are, all of us in the same building, going about our days.

Then lunch at Biba’s.

Biba Caggiano ran her restaurant on L Street for decades. The food was Bolognese in the way that actually means something — rooted in a place, in a person’s memory of that place, translated carefully onto plates in Sacramento, California. I had a tomato onion soup that afternoon that I have spent years trying to duplicate. I have come close. I make it at home now and when I do I am back at the table with Doug, the Capitol visit still warm, the museum still vivid, the train ride from Richmond already receding into the pleasant blur of a good day.

Biba’s closed during Covid. It did not reopen.

I think about what connects these three trips and keep coming back to the same thing.

Train travel insists on a kind of presence that other forms of travel have abandoned. It insists on time — you cannot compress the Coast Starlight into something efficient. It insists on landscape — you will watch California go by whether you planned to or not. And it insists, at least in the dining car, on the possibility of other people.

We have built a travel infrastructure almost perfectly optimized against encounter. Against presence. Against the accidental afternoon that becomes the one you remember.

The dining car is still open, if you know where to find it. The soup I can make at home. The rest requires a ticket and a willingness to sit across from strangers, moving through the world at a speed that still allows you to see it. And time to just talk and share.

Categories
Living Serendipity

The Infrastructure of Accident

I had a ham shack when I was in high school. A tight corner of my bedroom, a transceiver, an antenna wire running out through the window frame to somewhere up on the roof. Late nights mostly. The ritual of it: power on, headphones on, find a frequency, make sure it’s clear. Then send CQ. CQ. CQ. A call to no one in particular, to anyone, to whoever happened to be listening on that frequency at that moment anywhere on earth.

Sometimes nothing came back. Sometimes someone answered from a place I had no reason to expect — a voice, or rather a pattern of dots and dashes that resolved into a voice, from a callsign I didn’t recognize, from a grid square I’d have to look up on a map afterward. We would exchange signal reports and names and locations and often we talked longer. Our gear. What we did that day. Ordinary things, transmitted at forty words a minute across a great distance to a stranger I would never meet.

I did not know then that I was practicing something. I thought I was just playing radio.

We have decided, sometime since, that luck is a system. That serendipity is an architecture. That the people to whom good things happen have engineered the conditions for good things to happen, and that the people to whom good things do not happen have, at some level, failed to present the right surface to the world.

I am not sure when we decided this. Sometime after we stopped believing in fate and before we started believing in algorithms, in that narrow window when we still believed, provisionally, in ourselves.

The self-help literature on luck is a literature of verbs. Expand. Broadcast. Reframe. Sabotage your algorithms. The verbs are always active, always transitive, always aimed at a future in which the random becomes, retroactively, inevitable. You will look back and see the architecture. You will understand that the flight delay was an opportunity, that the canceled meeting was a gift, that the stranger in the adjacent seat was not a stranger at all but a node in a network you were already, without knowing it, building.

What the literature cannot account for is the canceled meeting that was simply a canceled meeting. The flight delay in which nothing happened except that you sat in a molded plastic chair in Terminal B and ate a sandwich that cost fourteen dollars and thought about everything you had not yet done. The stranger who remained a stranger.

I have been thinking about a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, at the corner of Dwight. Shakespeare & Co. It smelled the way all serious used bookstores smell — dust and possibility, which are not always different things. The shelves ran floor to ceiling and were not organized in any way that rewarded efficiency. You found things there the way you find things in dreams: without looking, and then suddenly they were in your hands.

I found a paperback copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem there. Someone else’s margin notes in blue ink, a handwriting I did not recognize and have never been able to stop thinking about. Whoever they were, they had underlined the same sentences I would have underlined. They had written yes in the margin next to things I did not yet know I believed.

I have no way of knowing whether that was luck or whether I had simply been the kind of person who wandered into bookstores and stayed too long. The kind of person for whom that particular door was already, structurally, open.

Buildings have architects. Someone drew the plans. But I cannot find, looking back, the moment I became that person. I can only locate the book.

The word serendipity was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, who derived it from a Persian fairy tale about three princes of Serendip who were always making discoveries by accidents and luck, of things they were not in quest of. Accidents and luck. The word has always contained both. What the contemporary literature has done is quietly eliminate the accident and keep only the luck — reframed now as preparation, as readiness, as optimized openness. The princes were not prepared. They wandered.

Anymore we are often uncomfortable with just wandering. Wandering has no metrics. A waste of time.

There is a thing that happens when you pick up a physical newspaper, one you did not choose from a menu of personalized recommendations online but simply lifted from a rack at the library because it was there. You read stories you would never have clicked on while reading on an iPhone. Not because you lacked interest but because no algorithm had yet determined that you had it. The story finds you before the system can decide whether you are the kind of person who would want to be found.

I go to the library some days for precisely this reason. It is a considered refusal — the same one the princes of Serendip were practicing, though they had no word for what they were refusing. The library does not know what I clicked on last Tuesday. It cannot optimize my morning. It can only offer everything, indiscriminately, and trust me to wander.

Life feels richer on those days. I have tried to understand why and have arrived, after some time, at this: on those days the world is larger than my prior assumptions about it. That is not a small thing. That may, in fact, be the whole thing. Here comes the sun!

Shakespeare & Co. closed in June 2015, after fifty-one years on Telegraph Avenue. The owner said the past few months had been unsupportable. He taped a note to the door and served his last customer and locked up around eight in the evening and that was that. Someone who worked there was quoted saying that the serendipity of finding a book that changes your life doesn’t happen on Amazon. Indeed. He meant it as an elegy. The infrastructure of accident had to be built by someone. It had to be maintained. It had to be, on some Tuesday evening, locked for the last time.

The owner locked up around eight. He had served his last customer. There was nothing more to do.

The margin notes are still in the book.

Categories
AI Blogs/Weblogs Living Menlo Park

The Foothills

It was later in his illness. Someone had set up a folding table in the garage and Chris was sitting at it in a folding chair, working through a stack of photographs. Signing them, one by one, telling me the story inside each one as it came up — where he’d been, what was happening just outside the frame, what he’d seen in the viewfinder that made him press the shutter at that exact moment and not a half second later. The garage was quiet. Outside, Menlo Park was doing whatever Menlo Park does on an ordinary afternoon. In here, a man was accounting for his life in pictures and I was standing there holding a camera, not quite sure what I was witnessing.

I made a photograph of him.

It’s at the top of his Wikipedia entry now. That’s how the world knows his face — a picture I made of him making sense of his pictures, in a folding chair, near the end. I don’t know what to do with that except carry it.

Chris Gulker had been a photographer long before he was anything else. Staff photographer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer. Published in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. He had the eye first. Everything else — the virtual newsrooms, the blogrolls, the hacked-together color systems that dragged newspapers into the digital age — all of it came from the same instinct: look carefully, see what’s actually there, build toward what you see.

When I first met him he had just gotten a Leica M8. He talked about it the way he talked about everything he loved, which is to say with specificity and without apology.

He had driven an Audi TT. He had a Leica M8. He was not a man who made concessions to the ordinary.

He had glioblastoma. Diagnosed in 2006. Surgery, radiation, the whole negotiation with a disease that doesn’t actually negotiate. He knew the terms and he kept going — kept shooting, kept writing at gulker.com, kept thinking out loud about what was coming next, as if the tumor were an inconvenience and the future were the point.

He walked when he could walk. He talked when he could talk.

He died in October 2010. He was fifty-nine.

Twice a week in those last two years I’d put Lily in the car and drive over to his house. Lily was small and opinionated and she understood the trip as hers. We’d pick Chris up after breakfast, when the morning was still cool, and do the loop — one mile, flat, because flat was what worked. Then we’d come back to find Linda moving through the house, Chris’s wife of nearly thirty years, the still point of everything that was happening to them. Sometimes she’d join us and the conversation would open into something more alive, the kind of talk where someone says something offhand and suddenly everyone is leaning forward.

One of those mornings the three of us decided to start a local blog for Menlo Park. Linda would write and edit. Chris would shoot. We called it InMenlo.com.

When Linda wrote Chris’s obituary, that’s where she published it.

People talk about spending time with the dying as a kind of grace extended downward. It wasn’t like that. Those mornings were a gift — the ideas, the talk, the way Chris described what was coming as if he could already see it clearly from wherever he was standing. I left those visits more alive than I arrived. That’s the debt I carry. Not grief exactly, though there’s grief. More like an obligation to keep paying attention to the future he spent his life building toward.

Last month a man named Demis Hassabis closed a two-hour technology showcase in Mountain View — twenty minutes from where Chris and I used to walk — and said seven words I haven’t been able to put down since: We are at the foothills of the singularity. The audience applauded. Then everyone went home.

I keep thinking Chris would have had something to say about that.

Not the singularity part, necessarily — that word carries a slightly rapturous charge, too certain of its own prophecy. But the foothills part. The careful humility of it. The acknowledgment that what we can see from here — AI systems autonomously building operating systems, models that predicted a hurricane’s landfall and saved lives — all of it is still just approach terrain. The mountain is what comes after.

Chris spent his whole career in the foothills of things. Slightly ahead of the moment, always building infrastructure for a future that hadn’t arrived yet, always explaining to people who weren’t sure they wanted to know. He pioneered the blogroll. Built one of the first online newspapers. Hacked color into the San Francisco Examiner with Macintoshes and ingenuity when the system said it couldn’t be done. He was the wrong man for the present tense. He belonged to the next sentence.

He had the photographer’s instinct underneath all of it — the knowledge that you have to look carefully, that the light is always changing, that if you wait too long the moment is gone. He put the Leica to his eye and he saw. He put his hands on a keyboard and he built what he saw toward.

Lily is gone now too. She outlasted Chris, which felt right — she was stubborn and she loved the route.

I still think about those mornings. The cool air, the flat mile, Lily pulling us both forward. The way the real conversation started when we got back. The way Linda might appear and the whole thing would open into something none of us had planned. The way Chris talked about what was coming — not as speculation but as something he could already see, the way a photographer sees the shot before he raises the camera.

He always knew something was coming. He had a gift for the future tense I’ve never quite encountered in anyone else — and a photographer’s understanding that the future, like light, doesn’t wait.

I wonder what he’d make of the foothills. I think he’d already have the Leica out. And I know we’d still be talking about it.

Categories
Friends Gratitude Kindness Living

The One Thing Money Doesn’t Buy

Somewhere there is a couch that launched a hedge fund.

It belonged to a man named Carter, and for the better part of a year it was where Dan Loeb slept while he figured out what came next. No office. No fund. No Third Point. Just a friend’s apartment and the specific grace of someone who didn’t need you to have already become something before they let you in the door.

When Loeb finally landed at Jefferies, Carter gave him a few hundred thousand dollars to manage. That became a million. The million became seed capital. Third Point was built on top of it — thirty years of it, billions of dollars of it — and all of it traces back, in some straight unbroken line, to a couch and a person who said yes before the evidence was in.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy asked him about it near the end of a long conversation. The kindest thing anyone has ever done for you — it’s the question O’Shaughnessy always asks, and it always cuts through. Loeb had just finished making a case for kindness as a serious value, not a soft one. Something that belongs at the top of the hierarchy, he said, next to honesty and intelligence. The mechanism that unlocks empathy. He noted, almost reluctantly, that it also compounds in business — before adding that the moment you start treating it as an investment, you’ve already lost the thread.

Then he quoted Palmer Luckey.

The one thing money doesn’t buy you is friends that believed in you when you had nothing.

Luckey built Oculus in his parents’ garage. Sold it for two billion. Founded Anduril. He has spent his adult life proving that if you are relentless and strange and right, you can make almost anything happen with money. And what he noticed, somewhere in all of that, is where money stops. Not at luxury. Not at access. It stops at loyalty that predates your success. You cannot purchase the memory of Carter’s couch. You cannot acquire, at any price, the specific knowledge that someone held you when you were nothing yet.

I have been thinking about the people in my own life who did some version of this. Not always with money. A call made on your behalf before you knew you needed it. A door held open to a room you couldn’t see. These moments are nearly invisible when they happen. They only become legible later, once the room turns out to matter — once you can look back and trace the line.

The line is always shorter than you think. And it always ends at a person.

Categories
History Living

We Remember

Memorial Day 2026 – a reminder from Andy Rooney: “If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the [American] cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach—see what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.” (Garrett M. Graff, When the Sea Came Alive)

Carl J. Loftesness (1921-2010) Master Sergeant – US Army
Curtis H. Loftesness (1923-1975) Lieutenant Colonel – US Army

Categories
Bonsai Filoli Living

The Patience of Small Things

There is a tree on a terrace at Filoli that is roughly the size of a lamp. It sits in a shallow black bowl, its trunk leaning with the easy confidence of something that has been leaning for decades, its canopy splayed against the California sky like a fist slowly opening. Behind it, the estate’s formal garden dissolves into soft focus — roses, balustrades, the suggestion of abundance. The bonsai doesn’t compete with any of it. It simply occupies its few cubic feet with a completeness that makes everything else feel approximate.

I’ve been thinking about what that completeness costs.

The tree is probably a juniper — the fibrous, spiraling bark, the dense scale-like foliage, the way the branch structure seems to remember every decision ever made about it. Bonsai practitioners talk about nebari, the visible surface roots, and movement, the quality of dynamism frozen into wood. This one has both. The trunk doesn’t just lean; it goes somewhere, pulled by some invisible argument the grower made with it over years, or decades, or longer. The moss at its base is so even and green it looks curated, because it was.

What strikes me standing in front of it is that this is a technology — not in the semiconductor sense, but in the older one. A technique for shaping time. The grower didn’t make this tree. They made conditions, and maintained them, and made them again, and the tree is what happened. The distinction matters. There’s no shortcut to the trunk diameter. There’s no prompt that produces the movement in that wood.

I work in a medium where the gap between intention and output has collapsed to nearly nothing. I describe something and it appears. There’s tremendous utility in that, and I’m not romantic enough to pretend otherwise. But Filoli’s bonsai terrace is a useful corrective — a reminder that some forms of beauty are only legible as records of duration. The lean of that trunk is not a feature. It’s an argument made slowly, over a life, against gravity.

I don’t know who grew it. I don’t know if they’re still alive. The tree, characteristically, offers no information about this. It just stands there in its bowl, complete, patient, not particularly interested in being understood.