Field Notes

Writing

Short pieces on the ordinary, looked at properly. Occasional, unhurried.

2 Aug 2026 Melbourne, Florida A true story from the telephone industry, composited just enough: no company, no client, no year. The arithmetic — which is the point — is exact.… 2 Aug 2026 Day 270 of No Year in Particular On the barcode of a boarding pass, which knows your frequent flyer number, your check-in habits, and precisely when it was printed — but not, strictly speaking, what year you’re flying.… 2 Aug 2026 Since the 1500s On lorem ipsum, the most-printed text nobody has ever read — and the pleasure of watching its fake provenance collapse and its real one turn out better.… 1 Aug 2026 Never Perth This week a spreadsheet arrived containing sixteen years of my own flying — every flight, one row. I opened it to defend a frequent-flyer tier. It had other ideas.… 1 Aug 2026 The Seer of Hornsby Some people are places. This is about one of them, and about going back for something thirty years too late.… 30 Jul 2026 Ink Runs in the Family The red edition’s letter from the editor contained a throwaway line to the effect that ink runs in this family. It was offered at the time as colour. It turns out to have been reporting.… 30 Jul 2026 Thank You for Holding Every trade gets the magazine it deserves, roughly twenty-five years too late. I’ve now made one for mine: QUEUES — The Workforce Planning Edition, Issue No. 1, collected 1995–2010. Fifty-three pages, printed in phosphor… 22 Jul 2026 The Sequel Is Blue Last time, I told you about the briefcase: the teenage brochure archive, filed alphabetically by marque and ascending by copies-per-minute, with a red magazine in protective plastic at the front — and how the whole colle… 20 Jul 2026 She Saw Clutter. I Saw Infrastructure. I come from a long line of printers. My grandfather set type; ink runs in the family the way land or seafaring runs in other families. So when, somewhere in my early teens, I became fascinated by photocopiers — not compu… 12 Jul 2026 The Roast Marrickville, inner west, an ordinary weekday: a bench oven alone on the nature strip — nothing else out with it — door open, one foil-covered casserole dish sitting on the rack.… 11 Jul 2026 Homewrecker A recreation, from memory, of a story I wrote by hand on a notepad at LAX sometime in the mid-2000s and then lost. This is my best attempt to make sure it exists somewhere.… 11 Jul 2026 Swings, No Roundabouts I watched a young man arrive at my local park today the way a comet arrives at a solar system: fast, silent, and slightly on fire with disaffection. He scootered in, dismounted without ceremony, and made straight for the…