- The smell of lumber lingering in my car.
- The guy loading five twelve-packs of Faygo into his trunk.
- Performing minimally invasive surgery on a segment of our drywall ceiling.
- The Billie Eilish documentary eliciting a full four-Tweedy cry of joy as we watched it.
- Having a diarrhea attack while, of all things, shopping for toilets at Menards.
- The little waterfalls trickling down the highway-side cliffs.
- The canes with mock pistols as handles for sale at the truck stop.
- The power of casting off the sunk cost fallacy.
- The drumming on The Band’s cover of “Third Man Theme.”
- The bass-on-the-left (organ pedals), drums-on-the-right badass mix of Dr. John’s “Mama Roux.”
- Forgetting to breathe while playing a shaker.
- Driving under the infamous 11’-8” bridge.
- MoogStar with Swamp Dogg and Guitar Shorty: “Jim Crow Gotta Go.”
- David Byrne’s American Utopia. So freaking good.
- The sound of a nearby burglar-ish alarm giving way to birds chirping in the same register.
- The holes and cracks in the vacant mid-century office building lobby window.
- My shadow walking across the four-lane highway as I crossed the bridge overhead.
- Unknowingly pressing the speakerphone button moments before my mom burped into the phone, sending it straight into my ear.
- The humongous, curly hair in my Airbnb’s medicine cabinet.
- The golden-hour sunlight pouring into the warehouse recording space.
- The stack of rubber-banded Panera gift cards on the ground, maybe fifteen of them.
- Gasper Nali’s babatoni music. (A babatoni is “a three-meter, one-stringed, home-made bass guitar.”)
- Eating Panera tomato-basil soup on the hood of my car in a strip mall parking lot in Kernersville, North Carolina.
- The runaway truck ramps in the mountains along I-74.
- The entire highway-side forests of ice-encased trees.
- This truck decal: “Stay home if you sick, come over if you thick!”
- The street lights on the hills driving into Charleston, West Virginia.
- The phrase “higher powered hands” on a religious billboard.
- Remembering the yellow banana slug squish toy I used to play with as a kid, from the Redwoods National Park gift shop.
- The snow drifts sliding off our neighbor’s roof.
- The tiny, dense, but inactive spider nests inside of my car’s tail light assembly.
- Carefully jacking up our sagging studio ceiling with a bottle jack and a floor post.
- The passing of Akron/Family’s Miles Seaton, writer of one of my favorite songs ever: “I’ll Be on the Water.”
- Basil momentarily sinking into the deep snow.
- The epidemic of frozen downspouts in Chicago. Bigger icicles than I’ve ever seen, on just about every home.
- The French-speaking Home Depot employee.
- The chalkline on a drywall sheet disappearing, vibrating away as we drilled screws into it.
- The bunnies and other wildlife that live all around Chicago — where do they go in subzero weather like this? Are they OK?
- The neighbor who told me she loves this overwhelming, daily-life-altering snow. “It reminds me of my childhood!” she said.
- Celebrating President’s Day the way the Congress intended: by buying a rug.
- A short lesson with Mom on how to use Photoshop (Pixelmator).
- The massive icicles weighing down the phone lines, bringing them almost to the ground.
- The careless-seeming, yuppie-ish people eating in a restaurant in the West Loop.
- The local flower shop employees working through pre-Valentine’s Day frenzy.
- The woman at the hardware store in a matching cheetah-print coat and face mask.
- I think a lot about avoiding future joint pain. And when I pet Basil and I feel the bones in his neck I think about whether there are ways we can help save him from future joint pain too. I think this comes from listening to all my older loved ones and friends talk about their aching bodies all the time.
- “She was an American squirrel,” sung to the tune of “American Girl.”
- The ice divots in the alley that jerked my car around like an automated car wash track.
- The flooring glue that Sheba discovered in my hair while she was cutting it.
- Jason and I building makeshift spiked sandals, for use while pouring concrete, out of plywood, nails, and duct tape.
- Unfreezing an outdoor padlock with a propane torch.
- Impossibly fluffy flakes (IFF) falling from the sky.
- The nice feel of squishing a wrapped pad of butter that’s been sitting out for a while.
- Binding a custom weekly routine tracker notebook.
- The fine art of setting the wintertime sink trickle.
- A day in battle with winter: plugging a leak caused by a frozen gutter; helping my uncle dig his car out of ice.
- The episode of Israeli Sesame Street in which a muppet, Mahboub, interprets for his Arabic-speaking human friend Omar so he and their Hebrew-speaking friends can all play together.
- Cutting steel conduit with an angle grinder, watching sparks bounce around inside the tube before petering out.
- Bobby Charles’s “I Must Be in a Good Place Now” (via my friend Gabe L). The image of fishing at sunset… means so much to me now, in winter, in pandemic, and bizarrely, even though I’m only twenty-five, at my age.
- The sparks flying off the gunpowder-dappled head of a nail as we tried to sledge it into concrete after the powder-actuated nailer failed to drive it.
View older posts in the archive →
