- The twinkling of the sailboat bells in the downtown marina at night.
- Nat Hentoff’s 1964 New Yorker profile of Bob Dylan [via Austin Kleon].
- “Sometimes I can make myself feel better with music, but other times it’s still hard to go to sleep at night.”
- Every hilarious, badass anecdote involving Tom Wilson. (‘“Man, dim the lights,” [Dylan’s] bearded friend counselled Wilson. “He’ll get more relaxed.” “Atmosphere is not what we need,” Wilson answered, without turning around. “Legibility is what we need.”’)
- Katie Crutchfield on the Listening podcast talking about eliminating the things in her life that didn’t serve songwriting.
- Jon Langford and Sally Timms at Judson & Moore.
- The man wearing a denim thobe (full-length robe) in the grocery store.
- Randy the Raccoon’s Cosmic Country Karaoke at the newly opened Color Club.
- Playing with Ripley at the Hideout.
- Moods are real. Admitting that to myself more easily lately.
- Cutting steel bolts to custom lengths and cleaning them up on the belt sander.
- Unearthing my rain-soaked festival production notes.
- The difference between deferring to others out of respect versus offloading responsibility onto them out of laziness or fear.
- The five-foot-tall duckie illuminated sign left in the alley behind the sign shop.
- Basil posing with the collection of ceramic Star Wars album cats at the Loft.
- The bunched up, dried up spray foam coiled inside a broken glass block like a snake carcass.
- The difference between deferring to others out of respect versus offloading responsibility onto them out of laziness or fear.
- The chords formed by bugs and frogs vocalizing away in the night, helping to alleviate post-show tinnitus.
- The bassist who restores Saab cars speaking passionately, sweetly about the global Saab maintenance “family.”
- Casey DJing at the Golden Dagger.
- Attending my first-ever White Sox game, with my uncle Paul.
- The beer vendor who used the condensation from a can to wet his hands and then, with his hands, his hair.
- The verdict of the “are hot dogs sandwiches?” debate, settled by an old-school White Sox concessions employee speaking to my uncle: “Sorry, honey, no hot dog sandwiches here.”
- The glowing fiber-optic rose that an Elvis personator gave to Casey.
- The reel-to-reel machine used for (and visible on the cover of) The Basement Tapes, stored in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s vault.
- The two-inch hole in a vacant mall building’s cinderblock wall, revealing the worksite within.
- “To substitute for what he described as ‘two or three hundred pounds of noisy radio equipment’, [Bernard Moitessier] had a slingshot for launching film canisters containing his messages onto the deck of passing ships.” Stewart Brand’s “The Maintenance Race.”
- Wanting to emulate Moitessier’s style of planning and maintenance in my own life and projects.
- Richard Wolff explaining interest rate hikes in terms I’ve never heard before.
- The umbrella holder a mail carrier devised for his cart.
- Dad and Nels performing with Phil Lesh and Friends at Sacred Rose Festival as PHILCO.
- Mom wearing our friend Gus’s comically large, bootleg Balenciaga sneakers.
- The auto mechanic who undercharged me and wouldn’t correct it out of a sense of honor.
- Dad’s birthday!
- The Tweedy Show shirt my friend found in a Chicago thrift store.
- Cutting some aluminum for more custom studio parts.
- Removing the humongous “weeds” that sprung up in our studio sidewalk grass in just a few weeks of super-humid summer weather.
- The assortment of pill bottles in my neighbor’s sidewalk-facing window.
- The apartment “managed by Johny Stoic.”
- The fancy broccolini and felafel dish rearranged to look like a wiener and balls.
- The construction workers eating a taco lunch together, sitting in a circle of upturned buckets.
- The footage of Larry Jon Wilson in the studio from Heartworn Highways.
- How, after spending a week eating carefully grown heirloom vegetable varieties at Avrom Farm, most restaurant food in the city tastes bland!
- The sensation of scooping pounds of ash out of a commercial-sized grill.
- Standing on the side of the highway for hours while two jolly, helpful emergency truck repair technicians replaced four tires on Hayden’s box truck.
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