• Getting my usual Jagger/Faces haircut: Summer Edition (slightly shorter). From Sheba.

• Practicing for our drive-in show this Friday.

• Sammy’s last Tweedy Show for a while (he’s going away to work at a summer camp!).

• Playing a drive-in show in Bridgeview, Illinois, while the sun set behind the car-audience, a plane flew by in the cloudless sky, and a freight train accompanied us during “Love Is The King.”

• Slathering my arms in glitter-infused sunscreen.

• This Annie Dillard quote, via Craig Mod. Oof!

  One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

• The contractors shaking their heads at the lumber prices at Menards.

• The kid with tzi-tzi riding a Segway.

• The sensation of déjà vu, recurring multiple times throughout the day.

• The five sewer maintenance workers standing on, kneading, a big vacuum-sealed sac of cleaning goop, pattering around in little circles, bumping into each other like a low-energy rave.

• The sawdust on the floor at the mouth of the saw’s dust control tube, like a stream of vomit.

• Dad serenading the Great Lake Jumper on his 365th consecutive jump into Lake Michigan.
• The Isfahan pop-up at Sleeping Village.
• The hip-high Barbie doll military boot on the ground.

• The artisanal pesto and salsa maker from Florida who, after spilling a jar of salsa on the ground, “simply could not recover” (Casey’s words).

• Mom’s collection of colorful Trimline telephones laid out next to each other, organized by cord length.

• The cute graphic on the back of a sandpaper pad, illustrating proper PPE.

• Mat Dryhurst in The Creative Independent:

  I think one thing we could jettison is this concept of independence. It’s not that helpful. In many ways, the meme of independence won. Now everyone is individuated, and independently free to compete with one another to sell their time and wares on the platforms, and the reality of that is a pretty precarious and unfulfilling existence for most. When everyone is independent, it turns out that we don’t have much collective bargaining power to influence anything all, or at least those with the most wealth or resources will dominate.

Mat and musician Holly Herndon have a podcast called Interdependence. (There is also a section about independence versus interdependence in my book, Mirror Sound!)

• A day of chasing wires around in conduit, trying to figure out where they go.

• The landscape worker maneuvering a tall-ish tree into a hole by himself.
• The mom cooking stovetop popcorn with her daughter and her nephew live, on TikTok, while Casey and I and a couple hundred other people looked on at their joy.
• The mass ocean baptism, conducted by a youth pastor, also on TikTok live.
• The stream of slightly iridescent algae dots flowing in the harbor.

• My weekend beach read… The Palestinian–Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction.

• The skinny tree with a bulging pearish base.

• The slightly provocative, sly expression on Jesus’s face in a painting in a Catholic church’s banquet hall.

• Another installment of Casey’s Instagram Story series Casey’s Casseroles.

• Worm word: ech mezeg avir? (Hebrew for “How is the weather?”)

• Reading Too Loud a Solitude and loving it, but having to return it to the library before I finished it.
• Revisiting our performance of “World Away” on Conan.

• “Krishna Krishna,” a newly released track by Alice Coltrane.

• Worm word: ensorcellment.
• The hopeful suspicion that there is eloquence and ingenuity hiding beneath so many rocks, in quiet folks’ private ideas.

• “Ponta de Areia” by Wayne Shorter. Wow.

• The Italian term “umarell”: “men of retirement age who pass the time watching construction sites … stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice.” (Via The Prepared newsletter.)
• Almost shooing a fly into the house.

• A fantastic, heaping lox bagel from New York Bagel & Bialy.

• Glenn’s new gigantic novelty drum sticks.