march 25-26, 2026

 3/25 (and 26)/2026

    things that are new to annie belle:

- the city of san francisco and its surrounding areas; the humble Hill is kind of goated when going up and then back down is the vibe. my trip was largely very quiet, and i spent alot of time thinking about how i want to spend my time while traveling. this was the first trip i've taken since going on a literal pilgrimage (~20 hours after a "divorce-level breakup", to borrow a maxine-ism) and i sort of felt out of practice on it. not having a plan was in many ways really rewarding, but i think i could've done with a better outline sketch of my time there rather than winging ~80% of it. 

that said, a lot of my quiet time spent mulling/reading alone was really rewarding. San Bruno Mountain was a really fun hike - it is always a pleasure to do (more than) the entire elevation change of the state of illinois in <2 hours. i entered on an access route that was vaguely marked as possibly closed (it wasn't though?) so i was truly alone for the first hour  before i started passing people occasionally. it really reminded me just how much i like to walk and hike, and it reinvigorated my mental plans for hiking to see the John Cage note change in August. i sometimes think of myself as very inadept in the language of God. it takes me awhile, and Spirit has to speak slowly and repeat themselves, but if i'm given enough time to listen i can just about parse out what they might be saying. it is always so obvious, because the Light of God is, in many ways, uncomplicated; it is in all of us, regularly, and we need no special ritual to access it. it is always a nice message to hear again.

biking around with Helen rocked! what a privilege it is to go up a steep incline for 1 minute on a bicycle. its like eating your vegetables, and the descent is like dessert (and we all know the secret; sometimes the vegetables are the best part...). the bike is a really nifty way to get to know someone. im stoked to cook up the dream bike route to take out-of-towners on in chicago.

i was trying to look (i left this sentence to go get groceries and got a little busy and it is march 26th now. let's see if i remember what this was saying) for an audiovisual piece i saw at SFMoMA called Storm and Stress - maybe some results on youtube, but what i found while hunting for it at the airport was much cooler....

Storm & Stress are a band so cool that i could feel myself becoming a "storm&stresshead" in real time while listening to it for the first time. i never developed a sense of writing about guitar music. listening to the record(s) will serve you best, but in lieu of that; it's like a band heard Joan of Arc and Albert Ayler in the same summer (not impossible - they recorded/later were based in(?) chicago illinois the city of broad shoulders) and decided these were reconcilable conceptualizations of sound. and they were right! and yet, they form something entirely different - a really sort of serene and calm approach to free improvisation that never stumbles into ambience. a bandcamp review said it was "like surviving an earthquake only to return home to find everything in one place" which is a line that goes hard, imo.