Four jobs

I take pictures. Portraits, the desert, and whatever’s over it after midnight. The night work means driving somewhere with no streetlights, waiting for the core to clear the horizon, and photographing whatever people left out there and walked away from. A drive-in screen still standing in Escalante. A truck rusting in Rhyolite. A stone tower in the New Mexico bootheel that nobody I’ve asked can name. It’s a lot of driving for one picture.

I play solo acoustic — singer/songwriter, americana, murder ballads. Sometimes I write the song on camera, start to finish, which is a worse idea than it sounds. I teach some of this too: Photoshop and processing, and a ten-part course on audio production that starts with the physics of sound and ends with tracking a bass guitar.

I host a late-night call-in show out of Alpine, Texas called Luke at the Roost. Every caller is a language model. It’s the most complicated thing I’ve built and it is completely unnecessary.

The day job is infrastructure, and has been for twenty years. Ten thousand servers at Salesforce, under FedRAMP. Seven and a half thousand retail systems migrated at CVS Health without taking a single store offline. There’s a patent in there too, for teaching a machine to tag photographs. I do that part by hand now.

People ask how these fit together. Mostly they don’t. I like building the rig and seeing what comes back, and that’s about as far as the theory goes.