You Can’t Have It All

Mountains in Ladakh. Click to embiggen And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this. ...

September 1, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Wade in the …

on a canal outside Keukenhof. click to embiggen If you get there before I do Wade in the Water Tell all of my friends I’m coming too God’s gonna trouble the water Wade in the water Wade in the water, children … 🎵 ...

August 29, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

45

goofing off near a canal, somewhere outside Keukenhof, in the Netherlands The last five years have been, to put it mildly, a bit trying. I lost my father, my brother, my clients1, and quite a bit of my sanity. I lost a lot of weight and then gained it all again. The career pivot is going slower than expected. I feel pettily jealous of the bright young minds I mentor, when they go on to accomplish great new things, while I am here, clawing the mud. There are days, I don’t want to get out of bed at all. ...

August 26, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

81

Dad “He’s dead?” said Princess. […] “Who told you that?” said Grandad. “We keep that name moving in the Overhead,” he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly […] His name is in the code, in the wind, in the rigging, and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ...

August 25, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

A New Hole Hawg, the Kobo Elipsa 2e

Update, 2024-02-16: Six months later … A couple of years ago, around this time, I upgraded to the best reading experience I could afford at the time. I got me a Kindle Oasis. I called it my Hole Hawg. And boy, has it served me like one. And while it has done, everything it promised it would do, I found myself outgrowing it and needing something more powerful. ...

July 10, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Mandy Brown Celebrates Fifteen Years of Her Blog

This was a thread on my fediverse account, that grew too long. Posting it here, all together, the way my thoughts spilled out. All I knew about Mandy Brown when I began following her a year ago is she has a doggie called Furiosa she thinks about books the way I do she reads books and then writes about reading them, the way I always dreamed I could she’s a prominent member of my circle of the Eminent Dead Today, as she celebrates the quinceanera of her blog, I realised that she also: ...

June 15, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza