aei.st — a visual journal of chrome and leaves

entry 001 · 11 mar 2026

on finding moss growing through a steel grate

There’s a grate behind the station — the kind of thing you’d walk across a thousand times without looking. Today the sun hit it sideways and I saw the moss. Not a lot. A streak of green, barely the width of a thumbnail, holding on in the seam where two plates of steel don’t quite meet.

I think about this all the time now: the way entropy is always busy, but it’s rarely loud. The city makes more room for the green than it admits to.

● field notes / chrome & organic

entry 002 · 13 mar 2026

a small inventory of reflective surfaces

01 the hubcap of a parked van, chrome, warped at the rim, reflecting a ginkgo in miniature
02 the standing puddle on the concrete overpass — sky, wires, a pigeon
03 a spoon left on a bench, catching a whole building in its bowl
04 the side of a kettle in a ramen shop, distorting a row of customers into a single long face
05 a skateboard truck, polished by four years of tricks, a perfect tiny horizon

● inventory / surfaces that see

entry 003 · 15 mar 2026 · no text

morning, the yard behind the laundromat

● visual field / no caption required

entry 004 · 17 mar 2026

a kind of loitering that is not loitering

I’ve been learning from skaters. Not the tricks — the waiting. The hour they spend at a spot before they ever touch the board. They walk the ledge, run a hand along the grain, lean against the wall, watch the light come and go on the paint. They’re reading the place.

My notebooks are full of this kind of loitering. It’s a practice. The city rewards you if you let it finish its sentence.

● practice / the long look

entry 005 · 20 mar 2026

notes on zines, chrome, and the refusal to be clean

A zine is not a magazine that couldn’t afford a designer. A zine is a magazine that chose not to ask permission. The photocopier artifacts, the crooked staple, the handwritten page number — these aren’t failures of polish. They’re the whole point.

I want this page to feel the same way. Labeled and unlabeled, serious and a little off. Chrome where it needs to be chrome. Moss everywhere else.

● aesthetics / the refusal to be clean

entry 006 · 22 mar 2026 · a field

under the overpass, after the rain

● visual field / wet concrete, slow drying

entry 007 · 25 mar 2026

on the timeline being the whole website

I used to build homepages with a hero section — a headline, a subheading, a button that said get started. People know the shape. You can almost feel the muscle memory of the page when you land on it.

For this one I wanted the opposite muscle memory. No door, no threshold — you arrive in the middle of the hallway and you start walking. The timeline is the navigation. The scrolling is the narrative. There is no get started because we are already underway.

● meta / on building this page

entry 008 · 27 mar 2026

four chrome things that taught me something

i. a kettle, whistling — that chrome gets hot long before it looks hot.
ii. a bumper, dented — that it’s stronger after it’s bent than before.
iii. a belt buckle, tarnished — that patina is not dirt.
iv. a railing, cold in winter — that metal keeps its own time; it was already cold before you got there, and it will be cold long after.

● notebook / chrome as teacher

entry 009 · 29 mar 2026 · field

ginkgo, iron fence, late afternoon

● visual field / yellow on gray, sun going

entry 010 · 01 apr 2026

a short list of things I am not trying to sell you

A newsletter. A course. A coaching package. A framework with five pillars. A productivity app. An NFT of anything. A lifestyle.

What I would like, if you have a minute, is for you to go outside and find a piece of chrome with something green growing near it. Stand there for longer than feels reasonable. Notice one thing you weren’t going to notice. That’s it. That’s the whole page.

● manifesto, quietly