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Things.

  1. The worst thing you can do in life is give up on your mojo. If you lose it, you have to work to get it back. No mojo = no hope.

  2. Piety is an overcoat for fear and shame. Whenever you encounter piety, suspect it.

  3. Photography is the most grounded form of art, and is amongst the most conceptually pure. It consists entirely of isolating truth in a world of falsehood over which you have no control. Great photographers have more experience in truth-telling than any other sort of artist, because there are no other process distractions to dilute the honing of this skill.

  4. People are rarely who or what you think they are. This is not a lesson that can be “learned,” the effect then neutralized through overcompensation. No matter how much you learn, whatever your expectations at the moment, you are likely wrong.

  5. Ink is at times amongst the most beautiful things in the world, but the conditions for the expression of this beauty are finicky.

  6. The sheer joy of the act—of action—is something that is experienced in different ways by different people, and some people don’t experience it at all.

  7. Fear is an evolutionary adaptation, but it is also a significant disease in the literal sense. Under contemporary conditions, if you beat it, you likely win. If you don’t beat it, you likely suffer.

  8. Ideologues live a drab existence. That goes double for ideologues that are critical of others. Consume life voraciously, from all quarters; don’t build walls from the limited access to experience you’ve been granted in a short life.

  9. The four basic categories of goods conveyance are bottles, boxes, pouches, and bubble packs. Almost everything in a person’s life arrived in one of these things. Bags are an adjunct to all of these; almost every transition in small goods ownership involves, at some point, a bag.

  10. Never worry if you’re awkward. Everyone is awkward. Humans are awkward. Look around. The most suave person in the room, if you look closely, is busy being awkward. It’s the underlying human condition. More to the point, every instance of awkwardness is correlated to an instance of hope.

  11. I used to wonder where the small animal figurines in elders’ china cabinets came from. Now I know. They came from parenthood.

  12. Despite the cultural resonance of snowmen, relatively few of them are made on a per-capita basis. Even people in four-seasons climes will reach the end of their lives having only made a few of them. Every snowman is precious, and marks the passing time of your life cycle.