devin @devindminer

the past and future are both a series of hazy events undergoing continual revision. not sure time actually exists.

no business like show business...

walking to work

A week ago I was a bartender in Midtown. Today I'm packing a truck in Glendale and driving across the state. I'm an aspiring writer. Peak 2026 achieved.

one thing I've learned you can and will survive so much more than you ever thought possible

the road ends where it began

rewinding back to the other side of the country, reliving all the other times I made this trip

moving 😕

Knowing strong winds would blow me farthest, I spread my wings in a storm.

Minds race when bodies are caged.

@AgathaChocolats I moth escape the looking glath!

walking home

About thirty minutes before the big glitch I decided to spend my lunch in the park birdwatching. I'd been feeling generally like I needed to get my screen time down and learn to practice mindfulness, and I was sure this would be a great start. I left the office just before noon and found a bench right by the park's main trail. After a minute of deep breathing I opened my eyes and looked around for birds. The park was rather crowded and it was a hot day. Someone sat down on the bench beside me. I soon felt incredibly bored. The person beside me was having a conversation—the speaker was on and I could hear both sides of a discussion about the menu at Shake Shack. I longed to take out my own phone and I probably would have had a squirrel not climbed down from a nearby tree. It wasn't a bird, but for a minute or two I enjoyed watching its careful advance. Finally it determined I had no food and scurried off. My neighbor's phone conversation abruptly ended—mid-sentence in fact—which was a relief. It felt much quieter all of a sudden, and I looked around again for birds. What kind of birds even lived in the city? Had they all flown off or been exterminated? As I shifted in my seat and reached for my phone, it dawned on me that everyone around me had gone very still. I glanced over at my neighbor and saw that he was staring fixedly at his phone. His mouth was open, his eyes weren't blinking. He appeared to be breathing but was otherwise totally frozen. He wasn't the only one. Everyone else in the park, whether they were standing or sitting or lying in the grass, all looked pretty much exactly the same. It was like they'd run out of battery and needed to be plugged in and recharged. My first instinct was to reach for my phone and see what everybody was so captivated by. It had been a busy news morning. Gas prices and the stock market and the unseasonable weather had all hit highs. But now clearly something else had happened. Something worse. I was just pulling out my phone when a streak of brown feathers flashed in front of me. That was all it took—I forgot my phone, forgot everyone in the park with me, forgot about whatever had happened to stop the world dead. A miracle had just landed in front of me. A small brown bird. A brownbird? Was that a type of bird? I touched the face of my phone and nearly looked at it— The bird flew a short distance. Without thinking—and without looking at my phone—I pursued the bird. But as I approached, the bird flew off again. I chased it right to the edge of the park before it launched itself into the sky and out of sight. Saddened by its departure, my gaze wandered. I saw the street beyond the fence. There were dozens of pedestrians, hundreds of cars. It was then that I realized something serious had gone wrong. There had been some kind of... Glitch. That was the first word that occurred to me. Just like the park, it appeared that everyone in the entire city was utterly mesmerized by their phones. Cars were lined up bumper to bumper, not moving as traffic lights cycled. I peered into the windows of some of the closer vehicles and saw that motorists and passengers alike were just as entranced as those on the sidewalk. I did a slow one-eighty, trying to understand what I was seeing. My eyes landed on a woman standing about ten feet away at the entrance to the park. She was the only one not looking at her phone. The only one who, when I looked at her, looked back. Our eyes fell simultaneously. We both glanced down at what was in our hands. The small black rectangle, its face currently dim. Our eyes locked once more. In unison, we dropped our phones.

at the wedding of Swift and Kelce my left middle finger suffered injury smashed under a heavy water box my fingernail finally popped off and this NDA violation is poetry

I had been out walking for hours when I came to the well-lit movie theater on Broadway. I was amazed the small cinema was open—it was well after midnight and I hadn't passed anyone other than the homeless for what felt like a long time. I didn't care what was showing, I just wanted to warm up and get off the street. The young attendant didn't look up from her book as she took my money and tore the ticket in half. I pocketed the stub and went in. The movie had already started and I got the sense I'd missed quite a bit. It didn't matter, it was warm inside and it was a relief to be off my feet. I sat in the back row, the few other people in front of me were scattered at intervals. Anonymous, alone, united by their devotion to the flickering images onscreen. I couldn't remember the name of the film. Had it been on the marquee or printed on the stub in my pocket? Almost at once I knew I was watching something unlike anything I'd seen in a long time. It was a fantasy, a real epic blockbuster, swords and sorcery and wizards and dragons and all the rest, the sort of sweeping saga I hadn't seen since I was a kid. The story was about a young man scratching out a marginal existence in a dirty, steamy, sooty city perched high above an icy blue sea. He didn't have a family—maybe he'd been separated from them during the part I'd missed—and he seemed entirely on his own. I felt a powerful affinity with his sad plight. He was quite a bit younger than I was and obviously I had never been anywhere so majestic, but I thought I could perceive some elemental quality in him, a fundamental aspect we both shared. It wasn't long before the young man brushed paths with a young woman who was about his age. She was a dancer in a troupe that was just passing through on its way to entertain the ruler of some faraway kingdom. The dancers performed for one night on the city's largest stage, and with a bit of cunning the young man was able to sneak inside the theater to watch. A remarkable sequence followed. The young woman's phenomenal athleticism was breathtaking to behold. There was no music, only the rhythm of her powerful movements, and it made her dance all the more mesmerizing. She whirled across the stage with speed and grace, as often in the air as on the ground, and in the young man's gaze I beheld something enigmatic and unresolved. I wasn't sure if he wanted her, or wanted to be like her—or if perhaps he wanted both and his expression reflected this inner turmoil. The performance ended. The young man snuck out of the theater and returned to his perch at the top of a crumbling tower overlooking the sea. It was a rare clear night, and he beheld the stars for a long moment. The tide swelled as he came to a turning point that would alter the course of his destiny. What happened next wasn't at all what I expected. The young woman left the city, traveling overland to the north. The young man boarded a merchant ship, sailing south for some mythical realm where he intended to fight as a mercenary in a war. The film slowed considerably and became somewhat of a grueling and tragic chronicle of misadventures. I began to nod off. It was very late and I had walked a long way, after all. When I woke up I couldn't make sense of what was happening. A massive battle was unfolding, I spent several minutes trying to determine which side was which and what it was they were fighting for. I didn't even see the young man anywhere. There was an older, bearded and long-haired man who looked kind of like the protagonist, perhaps after a decade or two of hardship. Had so much time really passed? It didn't seem possible that I'd slept so long. Disturbed by the senseless onslaught onscreen, I got up and stepped out of the auditorium. There was no one in the lobby. I looked out the glass doors and saw that the box office was also empty. There looked to be no one beyond the doors at all. I glanced back at the auditorium, heard what sounded like a dragon roaring and men screaming. It was too much for me to deal with at so late an hour. I stepped out of the lobby and back onto the sidewalk. It was colder out, but I didn't mind. As I turned and resumed my aimless walk along Broadway, I found myself thinking about the young woman's dance. She had spun and swung and flung and flipped her way across the stage with exquisite control. It had been an uncanny combination of fearsome ability and astonishing beauty. As I walked alone deeper into the city at night, I began to dance.

The cry of a blue jay caused me to turn and that was the only reason I saw the bright band of scarlet and lavender above the horizon. A sliver of sunlight blazed molten gold beneath the mass of storm clouds, defiant against the advance of night. It had taken an entire day for the sky to rally these few fading rays. The jay cried again. The opening in the clouds closed and gray twilight was all that remained.

I was parked near the intersection of Sixth and Broadway when I saw the nightwalker for the first time. I had nowhere to go. I hadn't worked in days because I'd been suspended by the union. My phone was dead and I was laying on the bed I'd made for myself on the floor of my car. Doing absolutely nothing. Wishing I could fall asleep. I was too accustomed to working nights and I couldn't relax, couldn't shut off my mind. For the eighth or ninth time I considered taking a long walk, trying to tire myself out. Or maybe I'd go to a nearby park to charge my phone. There was an outlet there that wasn't locked up, though odds were good another homeless person was already using it. I didn't move. Worry and regret gnawed at me. Vague dread percolated inside me. I wondered if I'd ever fall asleep again. Something began to happen. Something unnatural, that I couldn't explain. The shadows on the ceiling were changing. But it wasn't as if they were responding to the movement of light. It was more like they were gaining dimension, revealing a truer form. The nondescript dark no longer seemed like an absence, but rather something like water, or smoke. An oily fog I was submerged in. I sat up, trying and failing to understand what was happening. Terror gripped my mind. It was impossible to think, to react. I struggled to break free and turn my head and reach for the door handle. But when I did—it took all my strength—I couldn't open the door. What was outside the car was worse than what was inside. All the shadows seemed to be in motion, flowing to the middle of the street, right to a— With a gasp I realized it was a man. A tall man cloaked in churning night. Horrible cold suffused me. I collapsed and curled into a ball, shaking, sobbing. Then I don't know what happened. I don't think I passed out. I certainly didn't fall asleep. There was a lapse in time. Hours were lost, unfilled, unrecoverable. Dawn came early, or so it seemed. All day I remained awake, unable to sleep, scarcely able to move. Around me, outside, the world went on as usual. Another busy day downtown. I was capable of thinking only about what had happened—whatever it was that had happened. I feared the return of night. Finally I gained the resolve to turn on the car and take a drive. Without realizing what I was doing, I began to search for a parking lot surrounded by streetlights. Before I found a place to spend the night, something very unlikely happened. Call it a miracle. I received a text message while I was stopped at a light. My representative at the union had just informed me that I'd been reinstated and could return to the convention center that very night. I immediately accepted the job. I didn't want to be alone. I wanted to return to the convention center, to lose myself in numbingly repetitive labor—that was what my job mostly entailed. As the sun set, I found a parking place, changed clothes, and ran twelve blocks to the employee entrance. In the days that followed I thought often about what I'd seen, the abhorrent thing I'd been so close to. I remembered how I'd almost opened the door, and I wondered, if I had stepped out, would the nightwalker—that was what I had decided its name was—would it have swallowed me up? Would I have been caught in that gyre of darkness that had been flowing to it? A week passed. And then a month. And another month. It was the busy season at the convention center and I saved a little bit of money. Enough that it seemed possible that I might be able to afford an apartment soon. For a time, I stopped thinking about the nightwalker. I could almost forget I had seen it at all. Everything changed for me in the middle of summer, and just like every other time my life had been upended I felt as if I were at the mercy of some cruel, invisible arbiter. My car and most of my belongings were stolen while I was at work. I had no choice but to sleep on the street that night huddled beneath my coat. The next day I got in trouble for using a bathroom at the convention center to wash myself. A complaint was filed and the union suspended me for the second time a few days later. In less than a week I had gone from dreaming of a safe and stable life to being completely desolated. I had no car, no work, I was really and truly homeless and I knew that if I wasn't arrested for vagrancy or attacked or worse I was going to start using again, and if I did that would be the end. That would be the end of everything. The nightwalker crept back into my thoughts. It was a measure of how desperate I was, how utterly lost. I couldn't have said why exactly, but I started wishing it would pay me another visit. Sitting at the intersection of Sixth and Broadway, I waited. I waited and I waited—it wasn't like I had anywhere else to go. I gazed into the dark and I tried to call the nightwalker back to me. I don't know how long it took, it felt like both a long time and not very long at all. At last a terrible chill jacketed me. The empty street's shadows rippled the way water does when a leviathan swims near. The nightwalker appeared. It was a block away, not as close as it had been the last time, and it was moving away from me, dragging a wake of darkness along with it. I was suddenly so cold it was like I was frozen solid, too chilled even to shake with fear. But as terrified as I was, I was also enamored, enchanted. Possessed by a mad, reckless impulse. I wanted to become a creature like this living shadow, a thing that could cloak itself in the cloth of night. If I could commune with this devil, I thought I could survive. Survive anything. It seemed, at that moment, that the nightwalker was the only force in all the world that I could petition for aid. All rational thought fled my mind. No longer frozen, shaking violently now, I stood on legs that barely worked. I stumbled ahead, right down the middle of the street. Quickly it seemed less like I was the one pushing myself onward and more like the nightwalker was pulling me into its grasp. I don't know what happened next. I didn't lose consciousness. I don't think I did. Time somersaulted. I was sitting on the curb. It was day. The sun was up, high in the sky, it was the middle of another busy day. Tourists and businessmen were out walking, none of them paid me any mind. Cars crawled past, only a few feet from where I sat, I could smell the mix of exhaust and sewage. As I sat there trying to regain my sense of time and place, I became aware of how uncomfortably exposed to the sun I was. I felt very warm, I realized I was drenched in sweat. And I was thirsty, unbearably dehydrated. I needed water. Just as I was checking my pockets for loose change, my phone made a sound. I took it out of my pocket and looked at it. The last time I'd checked it—unless my memory was playing tricks on me—it had been totally out of charge. I'd received a message. It was from my boss at work. It was a short text, but I read it carefully just to make sure I understood. I was being offered a job. A day position at the convention center. The rate of pay was considerably higher than what I'd been making during the night shift. I put down my phone. I raised my head and gazed around in wonder. No one acknowledged my presence, I don't think a single person even knew I was there. I looked up, into the cloudless sky. I could feel the midsummer sun beginning to burn my flesh.

I've never stopped where roads crossed and known the way until today