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Currently listening to Transatlanticism 🐦
by Death Cab for Cutie.
One of my best friends from college just invited me to the Death Cab + Postal Service 20th anniversary gig at Madison Square Garden on the 20th. I am SO pumped.
Listening to Transatlanticism is giving me major high school flashbacks. Driving home past curfew on cool East Bay summer nights and knowing that I couldn’t possibly want, need, feel, any more than I did.
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I’m so tired of anxiety dreams.
I only remember the end of the one last night.
I was walking down to a cove and spotted a little brown butterfly with a faint checkerboard pattern. It started basking, opening and closing in the sun, revealing that its wings were semi-translucent. They were slidesheets, each square held an image of an acquaintance that I wish I had gotten to know better. People I forgot I knew.
My field of vision zoomed in to each one Powers of Ten-style. When I was fully “in” the image it turned in to something like a home movie. I couldn’t influence anything going on and they didn’t know I was there. Usually the people in the image were older than when I had met them. (How could I possibly know what they actually look like now?) Identical twin boys I knew as a kid in southern California, a friend of a friend from Glasgow.
It was incredibly sad.
A Green Hairstreak butterfly on the moors in West Yorkshire in spring 2020. I need to get a better camera.
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Remember those free trial CD-ROMs you’d get in the mail or with a magazine? It started with AOL Online and then tons of other software providers caught on. Instead of tossing them away, my mom collected them. Around Christmas time, she’d drill holes in the top and hang them outside on the bare tree near the mailbox. I’m sure I gave her a hard time about it as a teen, but they made me smile when I got back home from school each day.
At the end of the holidays, she’d get rid of the discs that were too banged up and would keep the ornaments that still had their rainbow surface for the next season. The tree got fuller every year until the mid-2000s when they stopped arriving. Eventually the lacquer and aluminum flaked away from the remaining discs, and then the CD-ROM tree was no more.
The Internet Archive has an AOL CD-ROM collection online for anyone that wants to browse this slice of tech history.
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light blue stucco
navy blue shutters
kitchen window like a fishbowl, or a porthole
one floor, mostly
mom splitting her knee open on the brick stairs up to the front door
pots & pans band
dad’s lime green motorcycle, briefly
agapanthus & jade plants
bougainvillea
the scariest palm tree
garage always full, but never the car
where did mom keep her drawing board?
huge glass sliding door at the back
games through the wicker rocking chair
cinder blocks and chain link
ice plant covering the hill to the creek behind the house
sliding closet doors, the paint would stick
neighbors with the scary Halloween ghost
Zeke & Aileen, and the toys they made for us
white painted brick surrounding the fireplace that we rarely used
– – –
blue stucco and blue shutters again,
but this time with white wrought iron
two floors now
wisteria taking over at the back
parents’ brass bed frame, with ceramic decorations on the spindles
mom and her study, wooden artboard and captain’s chair
endless stacks of continuous form paper
tins of colored pencils, meticulously organized by hue
AOL and computer games
the oven that went baroom
Sega Genesis behind the couch
Brett was way better
possom in the wood pile under the lemon and lime trees
the water main broke, water gushing down the street
jumping over the water to get to school
Mr. and Mrs. Redlitz next door
the not-so-nice lady on the other side
Teddy & Dmitri
games barefoot on the berm
until I stepped on a bee, and dog poo
Cassiopeia, Pleiades, Big & Little Dippers
Pleiades was mine, my little tornado
people jumped off that cliff sometimes, but we didn’t hear much about it; probably on purpose
falling about 5 feet on to my back on the rocks after trying to climb the cliff instead of using the path
I was lucky, it was one of the first times I really felt lucky
it could have been so much further
the grass at the top felt incredible
there’s an edible plant that grows on the cliffs and tastes sour, dewy and pink
and mustard, and fennel
owls, sometimes; gulls, always
still dream about walking down the storm drain, through the rocks and down to the bay
not sure it’s possible
we were always told to keep well back from the cliff edge, it could be soft even when it’s been dry
it was usually dry
the road leading to a friend’s house near the school fell in to the sea not long before we moved away
the rollercoaster road near the best tidepools was always changing
we didn’t go there often
countless tadpoles in the storm drain
one day we weren’t allowed to play in the storm drain
it didn’t seem like anything had changed in the little tadpole pools
never once saw the green flash
running my fingers through the sand just after the wave recedes, feeling millions of sandcrabs
mile swims around the buoys
mile runs in blistering, soft sand
Neil, a first crush
his real name is Donald
he was the only faster swimmer
a ray in the shallow water, briefly, before I can show anyone
a vivid purple jellyfish
dolphins in the bay, rarely
don’t dive in head first, always wade out and check the levels first
how to brace someone’s neck if you’re waiting for first aid
don’t touch a seal, it’s probably sick
don’t step on kelp bulbs barefoot, there might be something sharp inside
don’t step on the black “rocks”, they’re chunks of hot tar
cold water didn’t hurt my ears