- Watching bats fly around.
- The pale, white guy wearing a tiny, green Speedo at the beach, turning many families’ heads.
- The tiny, green frog I found in the vacation rental garage.
- Casey’s uncle Phil’s suitcase of percussion instruments.
- The humongous street-eating machine tearing up the asphalt outside the Loft.
- The young girl walking with a stuffed animal perched on her shoulder.
- The homemade pizza and super-delicious salsa served by our gracious hosts, the Knureks, in Indiana.
- Opening for Lucinda Williams and Waxahatchee at Evanston Out of Space with Liam. What felt like the hottest day of the year! Unbelievably humid.
- The Renaissance Fair goers dining in full garb at Mars Cheese Castle.
- The dad at the Milwaukee Brewers game thoroughly, completely ignoring his son’s enthusiastic interjections about baseball stats.
- The fire alarm going off mid-song during Waxahatchee’s set at The Pabst Theater.
- The difficulty and importance of distinguishing empathy from projection.
- The warehouse worker to a potentially injured coworker: “You OK, baby?”
- The auto mechanic’s daughter watching JoJo Siwa on an iPad in the shop.
- The rural gas station’s pizza oven that sounds like a jet engine and/or an earthquake.
- Day one of Avrom Farm Party. Performances by Alaina Stacey, Free Range, Andrew Sa, Wyatt Waddell, Sima Cunningham, Aux Thom, and lily.com. Mom’s birthday!
- Day two of Avrom Farm Party. Performances by Henry True, Sabine McCalla, Nathan Graham, Max Subar, Dusk, Sammy Tweedy and Jonah Wallach (Work of Art), Lake James, Elizabeth Moen, and DJ Case Oats. Tintype portraits. Deliiicious farm-raised food.
- Admiring the painting that Avrom Farm Party festivalgoers created collaboratively.
- Helping Hayden’s team harvest some tomatoes.
- Returning our tent and generator rentals.
- Powerwashing Hayden’s box truck.
- 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.
- How, after spending a week eating carefully grown heirloom vegetable varieties at Avrom Farm, most restaurant food in the city tastes bland!
- 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.
- The fancy broccolini and felafel dish rearranged to look like a wiener and balls.
- The apartment “managed by Johny Stoic.”
- The assortment of pill bottles in my neighbor’s sidewalk-facing window.
- Removing the humongous “weeds” that sprung up in our studio sidewalk grass in just a few weeks of super-humid summer weather.
- Cutting some aluminum for more custom studio parts.
- 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.
- 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.
- “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 two-inch hole in a vacant mall building’s cinderblock wall, revealing the worksite within.
- 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.