Two kites: one stuck in a tree, another (a red squid) tied to a beach info sign, flying there in the sky all day with no one tending to it.
E. B. White in “Freedom,” an essay about the gross, allegedly good-natured acceptance of Fascism he heard brewing on the street in New York in 1940: “I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom … and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.”
How looking into any body of water — even a Great Lake — is freaky, evokes Jaws-style fears, because every shadow of every wave seems like the silhouette of a just-about-to-breach creature.
From far away on the water, watching a kid run down a large dune, like an ant on a sand pile.
The clouds moving slowly behind the dunes, at their same level, giving the impression they were a great white glacier moving along.
How I’ve always wanted a small boat, but after this great inflatable paddleboard excursion, maybe a paddleboard would be enough?
How being at the beach, more than any other physical activity, makes me feel grateful for my health. It’s the sunny, lake-soaked, totally active feeling of being on the beach that I remember when I’m sick or freezing…
E. B. White in his essay “My Day”: “A man sometimes gets homesick for the loneliness that he has at one time or another experienced in his life and that is a part of all life in some degree, and sometimes a secluded and half-mournful yet beautiful place will suddenly revive the sensation of pain and melancholy and unfulfillment that are associated with that loneliness, and will make him want to seize it and recapture it; but I know with me it is a passing want and not to be compared with my taste for domesticity, which is most of the time so strong as to be overpowering.”
In another essay, E. B. White accounting for the true cost of an egg produced on his farm, just as Noah Kalina did for his own chickens in his newsletter a few months ago.
Opening the 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die book and immediately wanting to cry from the beauty and the scale and the widespreadness of the beauty.
Running into Lake Michigan with Casey, and Basil valiantly running in after us, so heartbreaking.
Basil munching bugs out of the air with the precision of a frog.
How Casey’s mom and aunt can send photos to their dad’s home via a wifi-enabled digital picture frame. Imagining the sweet Black Mirror-esqueness of that: your children are on vacation, and their vacation photos magically show up on your mantle every day.
Tamar Manasseh’s excellent essays about being a Jew of African descent.
Near Casey’s family’s vacation rental house, a guy mowing his lawn looking exactly like Dale Gribble, beer in-hand, riding mower, American flag draped on garage.
R.A.P. Ferreira in his zine imagine thinking this was that: “it occurred to me around 2013 that Black philosophers in America, by and large, are referred to as rappers. that was when i quit college.”
Driving into Chicago from the Skyway tollroad at dusk and from that high vantage point, watching fireworks spring up from different parts of the city like brief, glowing flowers.
The beautiful essay about “crip time” by Ellen Samuels (via my friend Jason): “When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time.… Other times … we mean, as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a ‘flexible approach to normative time frames’ like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping. … I have embraced this beautiful notion for many years, living within the embrace of a crip time that lets me define my own ‘normal.’ And yet recently I have found myself thinking about the less appealing aspects of crip time, that are harder to see as liberatory, more challenging to find a way to celebrate.”
At the bar, dumping out dozens of years-old Coke and Sprite cans, most of which had, by some bizarre alchemy, emptied themselves. Pouring the brown, Chicago River foam-esque sludge of whatever remained down the sewer drain.
Finding a legal pad with divider lines of just the right brightness.
Becoming a member of Joyful Noise’s Church of Noise, “a non-profit community [meant to] financially support adventurous music … that might not otherwise exist in a purely capitalist system.”
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s great Washington Post op-ed from 2010, “What will future generations condemn us for?”
The photos of rosaries, wallets, and shoes taken from people detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, saved by a photographer working as janitor at a “processing center” in Ajo, Arizona, horrifyingly similar to the piles of shoes and shaving brushes at Holocaust memorial museums. (The photos are worth seeing.)
The couple having a wine night behind the cracked curtain of a very well-lit salon, takeout food on the waiting area coffee table, reality show on the TV.
The pile of empty Gatorade bottles beneath the asphalt paving machine’s driver seat.
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” played on the neighborhood church bells, making the already beautiful song even more ethereal.
The plastic toy police badge shining in the grass outside the elementary school playground.
Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua Farms, a Black-indigenous-American farmer, talking about his vision for a co-owned farming collective that can compete at scale with today’s industrial farms, reminding me of what Bookshop.org is doing for bookshops (against Amazon), and what Basecamp is doing for email (against Google). We can only take power away from monolithic power hoarders when we’re able to provide something as convenient, as useful, as reliable as the service those monoliths provide.
