Because news is newsier if you have five copies. (Civic Center in San Francisco yesterday. )

Telegraph Hill’s big on birds. It’s not every day you get divebombed by a flock of parrots, put it that way.

I’d never seen a hummingbird in action. They’re almost too fast to see, but I got lucky, I guess. They’re amazing little creatures.

So this was from the Caltrain the other day, riding into Mountain View. On the way back into San Francisco, I was listening to the Hold Steady’s new record. The Hold Steady are a really hypertexty band. If you’re the kind of person who likes to unpick things, and I am, there’s a lot of thread for you to pull on. Craig Finn’s the kind of lyricist who comes with a concordance. If you’re the kind of person who nicks quotes to say what you mean, because you never have the words unless someone else has uttered them first, then you’ll really, really like them. I’m a big fan.

Anyway, their most recent one, Heaven is Whenever, pivots round a track called “We Can Get Together”; Heaven is whenever we can get together, sit down on your floor and listen to your records.. Every indie geek gets that one. For some reason, though — well, I’ve been busy — I’d only skimmed the most recent album, I hadn’t really listened to it. I hadn’t clocked the references to Heavenly, an eighties Oxford indie band. They were twee, and romantic, and joyful. And the drummer took his own life, and as Craig Finn sings: he wasn’t just the drummer, he was the singer’s younger brother; now, I still play that single, but that song don’t sound so simple any more.

I listened to that song on loop for the rest of the journey.

When I was trying to stay sane at the end of my PhD, I’d write music. Sad little electronic ditties. That’s where most of Symbolic comes from. And I’d listen to records, and like I said earlier, I’d pick away at the threads. The personal histories. Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and the accidents; Jeff Buckley, Jimi Hendrix. Even long after I’d submitted, I kept seeing it: Charles Cooper of Telefon Tel Aviv. And while I was writing the thesis, and the record, my friends and I lost someone. Not a musician, but he was a son, and I’m sure he’d have been a great younger brother.

And here’s what I can’t get past: by applauding all this pain, am I culpable?

Symbolic is dedicated to absent friends, but I’d trade that record and all the others for people still being in their friends’ lives. No song is worth that.

Still in San Francisco.

I’ve been meaning to write about a bunch of different things. Inception and suspension of disbelief; The Hold Steady, hypertextuality and culpability; mass customization and deeply personal contexts.

Then I remember that you could just read Snarkmarket, or Robin Sloan (one of the contributors)’s short stories, and you’d get most of what I’ve been trying to say.

You should read Snarkmarket. It’s very good indeed.

Sixteen hours of planes and trains, but dreich is dreich everywhere.

I don’t really expect anyone to agree with me on this, but San Francisco feels a bit like Edinburgh would if the Edinburgh Festival went all year. It’s the port city thing, I reckon: the microclimate.