The Ends of the Earth and Back

Morning routine. Built an illustrated Andromeda newsletter. Edited the No Further casting call. Processed scouting photos. Started winterizing the deck. Solo dinner at Queen's Chopstick. Polar science and poetry at PRAx. A nightcap at The Wheel with Tim and Mary.

Polar science and poetry at PRAx, an Andromeda newsletter, and a casting call nearly ready

Events and activities that occurred on Thursday, October 29, 2026

The morning began with a bit of publishing. Wednesday evening's Andromeda Sprint Review had covered a lot of ground, and I turned the transcript into a four-page illustrated newsletter, Andromeda Dispatch: Agents With Wallets. The title captures the thread that kept resurfacing in that conversation: the scramble among Visa, Mastercard, OpenAI and Stripe to define how AI agents will actually pay for things on our behalf. It is a strange frontier. We have spent decades building payment systems around the assumption that a human is the one clicking "buy," and now the industry is quietly rewriting that assumption. I sent the Dispatch off to Steve and Mark, and it felt good to give the conversation a life beyond the call.

The middle of the day belonged to No Further, the third story in the Arrivals collection. I spent time editing the casting call, and it is now in pretty good shape. The only thing left is a note warning prospective models that the shoot involves a lot of walking, which on the Cape Blanco headland is less a detail than a condition of the work. I also worked through more of the scouting photos, which keep reminding me how much the place itself will carry the story.

After a quiet dinner of sizzling beef at Queen's Chopstick, I headed to PRAx for "The Ends of the Earth and Back," an evening that paired OSU polar research with poems written in response. The structure was simple and surprisingly powerful. Erin Pettit described the unusually loud ambient noise in tidewater glacier fjords, a sound that turns out to be a signal of the ice melting. Suzanne Winquist followed with her work on mercury contamination in Arctic seabirds and shorebirds. Ed Brook closed the science with ice and trapped air from the Allan Hills blue ice area of East Antarctica, samples of the atmosphere reaching back to the Miocene and Pliocene. With my own trip south only a few months away, the slide of an ice-core drill rig on the East Antarctic plateau landed with particular force. After each talk, poets answered the science, some recorded and some in the room, and Annie Wenstrup read last. I liked her work enough to put her collection The Museum of Unnatural Histories on my list.

Mary and Tim had joined me at PRAx, and afterward the three of us skipped Bandemonium in favor of The Wheel, where I ordered a High Kick from a menu section charmingly titled "Three Kicks & a Kiss." The conversation was easy and unremarkable in the best sense, the kind of evening that doesn't need to produce anything.

The poetry stayed with me well after the readings ended. Hearing scientists and poets take turns with the same ice made me notice how quickly I usually move on from things, at festivals, in conversations and even in my own photography. That habit served me well in a working life built on getting to the next thing, but it is less useful now. I came home with two small experiments in mind: when the urge to leave arrives, stay ten minutes longer and do one thing on purpose, and start each morning with a poem, read slowly and then read again.