• The outside smell and feel at 6AM reminding me of biking to high school in the mornings.
  • Accompanying my grandpa to a civilian national security meeting.
    • The county government official who used the word “preponderance” five or six times in thirty minutes.
    • The prospect of DNA as a digital storage medium.
    • The FBI SWAT agent, who walked and talked kinda like Colonel Erran Morad, describing a people-sniffing dog as a “full-time dog” (in contrast to part-time human SWAT agents), claiming gangs protect Chicago from MS-13 and crystal meth, talking about blowing shit up and about finding Fentanyl laced in weed.
  • The super nice parking garage attendant lady.
  • The day’s lessons from my grandpa “Zaid”:
    • about the sheriff who, while evicting Zaid and his mom from their apartment when he was four years old, noticed that he had no toys, and gave him a nickel to buy himself one;
    • about walking into a bar that served free hot dogs to customers instead of the usual nuts and pretzels, and the bartender who let them stay and even gave them cash when he noticed they were homeless;
    • that “some people are just good… not everyone is a bastard.”
  • The cigar shop with a poster in its window, “15 BADASSES WHO SMOKE CIGARS.”
  • Rehearsing in a dark bar and watching a little sliver of light come in through the door’s skinny window and dance on the walls.
  • Mark Borchardt’s North of the Internet interview: “I don’t waste too much time thinking about the abstract, because then, all of a sudden, what is tangible will get swept out from underneath your feet.”