- Basil competing with the Dyson vacuum to suck up spilled cat food first.
- The medium-term memory of our scalps — how they can remember glasses, tiaras, yarmulkes seemingly for days after they’re no longer worn.
- Back to floor gluin’.
- A lyric by Spillage Village: “sacrificial Lamborghini.”
- The pastel pink and yellow painted debris around a sidewalk gas shutoff cap.
- Watching Mike Judge’s Tales from the Tour Bus as we ride the tour bus home.
- The wind rocking our parked bus like a cradle.
- The cliffside with little white rocks embedded in it, like the crisped rice nuggets in a Crunch bar.
- The lizards rustling the leaves along the hiking trail.
- The scaly spray paint skin on the Cadillacs at Cadillac Ranch.
- The thrift store with 28 copies of Trivial Pursuit for sale, all stacked on a high shelf.
- The cashier at that store coughing freestyle (no mask, no elbow).
- The building with a grate in the roof to allow an existing tree’s branches to grow through it.
- The trees with Seussian drooping branches.
- Shopping with Mom at a Goodwill off Route 66 in front of a hulking mountain.
- Getting spicy brown mustard in a wound in my finger.
- The friendly “hiker helper” woman, Debbie, picking us up on the road to a trailhead, telling us about how stupid and troublesome other hikers are. She reminded me of Amy Sedaris in Mandelorian. At one point she slowed the car, leaned out the window and told a confused hiker, “There! The trail’s right next to you! Go!”
- Calculating the amount of hummus in the fridge on our tour bus: about 4.5 pounds.
- Our bus exhaling like a resting horse.
- The oversized clown bowtie in the street, dirty with tire marks.
- The bush whose buds grow into beautiful fractal mini-bouquets.
- The evidence of hand-chiseled construction in the hinge pocket of the wardrobe in our hotel room, a little bit of humanity in an object that’s meant to be a perfect Platonic form.
- The tiny mouse walking around in the hotel valet area.
- The flowers in the hills in northern California.
- Sammy and me standing in a fire-hollowed redwood tree.
- The shock of coming upon the ocean just a few miles from centuries-old redwood forests, like two different biomes butting up against each other.
- The giant iron blast doors in the side of the mountain at the Riverway Bridge, and the caverns beyond them, which, Sammy read, used to store dynamite.
- The Utah sandstones with their crepe-like striations, with tiny little holes pocking all over, with patches of pale green lichen, with sheer, flat faces.
- The boulder whose silhouette, Mom noticed, looks like a massive frog with a yarmulke on.
- The young kid somersaulting down a sand hill that looked like the Sarlacc Pit.
- A Tweedy Show episode from the tour bus.
- The semi-truck cabs at eye-height with our bus windows.
- The first day of spring.
- The smell of newly assembled plywood furniture in my clothes.
- The minute variations in material and cut among the three generations of Kirkland Signature boxer briefs I own.
- One year (minus a day!) of The Tweedy Show!
- Feeling that, at least in my own life, the commonly used term “fiercely independent” could be appropriately replaced with “desperately independent,” as in “desperately trying to avoid dependence” (on caffeine, on caregivers, on dwindling resources, etcetera). More fear than fierceness.
- Assembling cheap but stylin’ Target furniture with Casey.
- The Krautrock version of Roger Miller’s “Reincarnation” we improvised on the Tweedy Show.
- The tiny but deep splinter Casey tweezed out of my palm.
- The tick of the analog clock fading in and out as the second hand revolves.
- The gym head-looking bearded bro frantically asking the grocery store cashier if they sell small propane tanks (i.e. weed dabs tanks).
- The license plate “SSSH.”
- Stubbing my toe on a gong stand.
- The laminated sheet of tie-dye-colored paper in the grass in front of our house.
- The wind blowing the bottom of a curtain out through an open window.
- The funk band playing on the street.
- The weather getting hotter and the smells already changing, indoors and outdoors.
- The man with a sheer white mullet, no hair on top, jock-style wrap-around sunglasses, and a leather vest. David Crosby-ish.
- Drum-serenading the Great Lake Jumper, Dan O’Conor, as he jumped into Lake Michigan for the 268th day in a row.
- The roiling Lake Michigan waves.
- The two gelato delivery trucks spotted in separate parts of the city, forerunners of spring.
- The smell of lumber lingering in my car.
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