Iron Brew Works

The foam on the walls is the color of a storm cloud – gray-charcoal, rough-textured where it cured against the studs. Run a finger across it and it doesn't give. That's the point.

Closed-cell spray polyurethane goes on as a liquid: two chemicals that hit the air together, expand fast, and lock hard in under a minute. At full cure it runs about two pounds per cubic foot. Not fluffy. Not spongy. Rigid, like something that grew into the cavity and filled every corner, every fastener hole, every gap the framing left behind.

The R-value is around six to six-and-a-half per inch – roughly double what open-cell foam or fiberglass batts give you at the same thickness. In a shop with shallow stud bays, that matters. You can't keep adding…

I am, at my core, a keyboard person. I have opinions about keyboards. I have multiple keyboards. I have a post drafted in my head, probably for this journal someday, about my entire typing journey, from the Underwood Pica to an IBM Selectric to the mechanical boards I currently obsess over. This is not that post.

This post is about the year I stopped typing. Mostly.

About a year ago I made a deliberate switch: when working with AI tools, I would dictate instead of type. That decision ran against every instinct I had. I am the person who believes that good thinking lives in the fingers. Typing feels like thinking to me. The rhythm of it, the resistance of the keys, the particular satisfaction of a sentence clicking into…

Part One of Two on Building a Second Brain That Doesn't Feel Like a Second Job

I have killed three Notions, two Obsidians, a Roam Research account, and something called Mem that I've already forgotten. The problem was never the apps.

The problem was the assumption underneath all of them: that there's one right place for information to live, and if I could just find it, I'd finally feel organized. This assumption is so seductive and so wrong that the productivity-app industry has built a billion-dollar business on it. Buy the right app. Develop the right habit. Capture everything in one place. Build your second brain.

YouTube stopped teaching me things at some point. I still find the videos. I just don't sit there watching them anymore.

This is how it works now: I'm researching something, I find a video that explains exactly what I need, and I drop the URL into Claude Code. A tool called Supadata pulls the transcript. Once Claude has the transcript, it has enough to build a skill – a reusable capability I can call on again. No more re-watching the same tutorial six months later wondering why none of it stuck. The video becomes a tool.

I've done this enough times that the overhead started to tick me off. So I had Claude build a skill whose only job is making more YouTube-sourced skills. A tool that makes tools.

A number sits in the window of my old HP calculator, right where I left it.

I found the calculator while packing the studio for the move to Creek Street. It was buried in a box I hadn't opened in years. HP, scientific, RPN layout – one of those calculators you learn to think with rather than just operate. I picked it up mostly to see if it still worked, which I figured it probably didn't. Instead it woke right up. No charging cable, no dead battery drama. I typed in a few numbers using that old reverse-polish logic – enter the values, then the operator – and it answered me without ceremony.

I don't use a dedicated calculator anymore. Like most people, I just type math into my laptop…

I've always written best when I can type fast. Think, type, watch the words appear — that's my most productive state. I've always been a fast typist, fast enough to keep up with my own thoughts. (Not sure that says much about either.)

But there's another side to it: not editing while you write. That one's harder for me, especially around grammar and spelling. Lately I've been working to effectively remove the DELETE key from my keyboard. I do rewrite sections — don't get me wrong — but constantly backspacing to fix a misspelled word, even mid-thought, is a distraction.

When you strip away all of that, you just type. No worrying about grammar, spelling, sentence structure — words go on the page and that's it. It's freeing. I was…

A typed recipe is a finished object. This isn't that.

My mom gave me her peanut patty recipe years ago, May I think, written in cursive ballpoint on a small sheet of notebook paper torn at the top. Peanut patties are a Texas thing: peanuts and sugar cooked into something creamy and slightly sandy, soft enough to yield without shattering like brittle. The recipe fits on one page. Everything else is also on that page.

The margin note reads "Maybe 12 min." That word, maybe, is doing a lot of work. It's not a typo. It means she watched the pot. It means time was a variable she was still sorting out, or one that shifted depending on the day, the heat, the humidity. A cleaned-up typed version would drop…

I have a problem with technology in that I genuinely love it. I follow processor announcements. I've run betas on production machines because I couldn't wait. My workbench is covered in machines that didn't exist a decade ago, and I still have strong opinions about which CAD software handles fillet transitions best.

The calculator story should embarrass me a little. It doesn't, and I love that about it.

Sitting on my bench right now, next to a sheet of paper where I'm working out the inner diameter for a silver ring, is a dual-powered handheld calculator. Solar cell on the front, battery backup inside. Probably cost me five dollars. It came from some office supply impulse buy I no longer remember, and it has lived on that bench ever since.

I have a confession: I collect information the way some people collect junk mail. I don't do it on purpose. I just see something interesting and think, I'll need this later, and then it disappears into a folder or a doc or a tab I never close, never to surface again.

I used to do this with physical stuff. Newspaper clippings, printouts, torn magazine pages. Eventually I had a tub of them. The tub didn't contain information – it contained the ghost of information I once thought was important.

The digital version is harder to see, which makes it easier to accumulate. Google Docs is the primary offender. I have hundreds of them. Some have titles. Most don't. A document called "Notes – Research – Q3" tells you nothing six…

Four oyster knives. I live in the Texas Hill Country, and I found four oyster knives in one tub last night. We don't even have oysters here.

That's what disorganization costs you. Over the last decade I've char-broiled oysters in the wood-fired oven at Morris Ranch, and every time I went looking for the small oyster knife and couldn't find it, I bought another one. Four times. It's funny now. It wasn't funny when it was happening, because it was invisible – just a small, unnamed tax on not knowing what you own.

That's the whole story of where I am right now.

A Morris Ranch ribeye was not what most people picture when they hear the word ribeye.

The steaks we cooked out on the Pedernales River were large – classically cut, porterhouse-thick, often tomahawk-bone-on. The kind of cut that announces itself when you set it down. Over the years, we cooked hundreds of them over charcoal and open fire. Not dozens. Hundreds. They became the signature of the place, the thing people talked about on the drive home, the thing they called about when they wanted to come back.

I've been thinking about those steaks lately, trying to pin down what made them work. Part of it was the fire – real hardwood charcoal, river air, time. Part of it was patience: after you pull a large ribeye off the heat…

I’ve kept blogs before. Chef Dano ran for years — food, the ranch, French technique with a Texas accent. It was good. But a blog asks you to finish before you publish, and finishing is where most things go to die.

So this is a stream instead. Some posts will be a single line. Some a photograph with three words under it. Some a full essay like this one, and some a film. They all live in the same place, in the order they happened, because that’s how a life actually unfolds — not in tidy categories, but as one thing after another.

Austin Kleon calls this showing your work. You don’t wait until you’re an expert. You post the process, and the process is the point. If you start writing the story, sometimes the story starts writing you.

That’s the bet here. Build in public. Make often. Own the words.