A Note For Posterity

As one gets on in years, their thoughts turn somewhat naturally to whatever bits of wisdom they might want to document and leave behind for the edification of future generations: you know, so that all these years of living and reading and pondering might not have been in vain.

Welcome!

I write as The Practical Utopian because my twin desires are to be:
• Down-to-earth — I try to write short pieces explaining big ideas that will be broadly useful;
• Idealistic — I write with the goal of helping all of us achieve better outcomes, both for ourselves and for those around us.

I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out. But this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich – small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

— Raymond Chandler, 1953

Desperados Under the Eaves

I’ve been wondering lately why I’ve never written an appreciation for any of Warren Zevon’s songs. It’s certainly not that he didn’t give us many great tracks to choose from. Upon reflection, perhaps it’s because he wrote so many compact little gems that it’s hard to pick just one. Whatever the reason, this song of his has been haunting me lately, so it’s time to correct the omission.

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Available from the Mac App Store, Notenik can be used for taking, organizing, formatting and publishing notes, with each note consisting of multiple fields, as well as chunks of text of any length. This latest version of The Practical Utopian website has been built using Notenik.