Late Night Sketches

only a layabout like Huck Finn can anymore afford the luxury of “a superabundance of that sort of time that has no money.”
—Tony Waters, The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath the Level of the Marketplace


We have built a ton of low-density suburbs and now there's not enough housing for everyone who wants it at a price they can afford. It would be much too expensive to tear out the suburbs and put in larger buildings but one of the things that we've neglected is filling them in a bit.

There's around 100 feet from the front of one garage door to the opposite on the other side of the street. If a collective of homeowners agrees to release their front yards and driveways, this space could be reutilized for more buildings, communals spaces, cafes, and shops. It takes away about half the available parking places but there are reasons why this is desirable: transit instead of cars can become a main mode of transit in the neighborhood, people nearby will have a small neighborhood center to congregate instead of being siloed. Self-driving cars are coming soon and they can park themselves out of the way.

Two variations are displayed in the image. The closer shows the road splitting into single-direction lanes on each side of a set of new buildings. There is room for parallel parking on the inside of each of these lanes. The further variation pushes both lanes of traffic to one side in order to create a pedestrian-only walkway.

Comments on Reddit


Our toil makes the fiery dragon fly,
feeding its managed chambers,
propelling us violently to space

Thousands of years ago, someone noticed,
the objects in the sky at night are other places

Since then, we have celebrated movements
bringing us closer to extending our power beyond the planet

Now we know it's possible. But we've never made it happen with lots of us at once.
That's when the laws of large numbers make things interesting.


My first lucid dream came from a suggestion to look at my hands. A few nights later, I was in a dreamscape of bears and elk parading down a vibrant river. I flew from the river to a higher perspective where I could see how it fit within a giant building when, somehow, my hands came into view. Instantly, the colors became more intense than I had ever seen and I was transported to another scene where a young woman hugged me across the stomach.

The circling 42s work on their knees for their entire life, so close to the freedom that lives beyond our physical bodies.


ben@latenightsketches.com