Nobody reads this blog. I say that with real affection, the way you'd say it about a bar you love that is always empty. my most devoted player on my flagship game is a small robot i built myself to keep the database from falling asleep (true story, he checks in every day, never misses), so I hold no illusions about audience. but that's sorta the secret that makes the whole thing go: an empty church is still a church. you can confess in it. you might confess in it better.

So this is the confession. ten chapters, the whole run, red clay to richardson bay. And why would a grown man sit on an old houseboat at dawn talking his life into a microphone while a german shepherd sleeps on his feet? (Lady has heard all of these stories already and was not impressed.) i'll give you the reasons in the order I believe them.

The first reason is professional. I trained as a geologist, and the one commandment of that whole science is that the earth writes everything down. every flood, every drought, every bad eon, it lays them in layers and keeps them, so that anyone who learned the alphabet can kneel down at a roadcut and read the diary. I learned the alphabet. and it started to feel negligent, frankly unbecoming of the damn degree, to stand on four and a half billion years of meticulous record keeping while leaving my own layers unlabeled. So this is the core sample. oldest at the bottom, the way it actually laid down: clay, then rock, then parks, then code, then voice, then love, then water, then machines, then cows, then horizon. pressure and time. same as everything.

The second reason is the tide. The house I live in rises and falls twice a day, and it has taught me that nothing holds position without a line on it. memory is the worst boat in the marina. ten years from now i will swear the snowstorm lasted a week and the trench was forty feet deep and the dog never once stole bread (she stole the bread). so: dates where I have them, weather where i don't, and where the record has gone silent i kept it silent. no fabricated street signs. a story is only worth telling if you tie it off honest.

And the third reason, the true one. Al and I are learning to sail. really sail! classes and knots and charts of far shallow water spread out under the coffee. and there's an old habit sailors have before any long passage: you go through the whole boat, every locker, every line, you touch each thing and say what it is and whether it's sound. that's this..... ten lockers, opened. not leaving anything behind, understand, just wanting to know what's aboard (ofc Lady is coming).

and if you're wondering who all this is for, the honest answer is me, mostly. maybe the robot. maybe you, whoever you are, if you exist, which the analytics suggest is an open question. that's fine. i didn't make the hot dog pie for the reviews either.

one housekeeping note before the map. the chapters run oldest to newest, like any honest column of rock, and i wrote them in whatever order the tide handed them to me. some run short, some go long, and i have made no attempt to even them out, bc a layer is as thick as the year that made it. that is not poetry, that is just how deposition works.

Here's the map. one line per chapter. read them in order or don't (i'm not your boss).

part 1: carolina clay - red clay, thunderstorms that commit part 2: deep time - the earth means no harm part 3: the parks years - broke, tan, happy, then itchy part 4: the leap - a park ranger learns javascript part 5: say the magic word - making living rooms talk back part 6: al - snow day, bean bag, forever part 7: the houseboat - an old boat named blissful part 8: the agent years - briefing robot fleets at dawn part 9: houseboat studios - cows go to sea, seriously part 10: the horizon - the water is looking back

start where the ground starts. it starts red.