These days, all I talk about and think about is the cognitive dissonance required to move through the world. Increasingly, I struggle to disentangle my many selves, to get on with the day. All my selves weep often. I try to have grace. I tell my friends that I’m no longer sure how anyone just drifts through the days, the months, without acknowledging the horrors. I imagine what it must be like to be able to turn off the parts of the world that unsettle you. It must feel like existing in an animated universe that adheres to cartoon physics: you fall from an inconceivable height and, landing, a cloud of dust billows up from the ground, but then you shake yourself off and keep moving. —Hanif Abdurraqib, from Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil are in on the Joke (The New Yorker, July 13, 2025
“And the part about light as a living creature,” he said. “What a beautiful thought. I hadn’t really heard that idea before…It really got me for a second,” he said. “I had to think about it. Is light alive? I mean, it doesn’t excrete anything. It doesn’t reproduce. And yet it gives life, so it must have some kind of life to give…” He’d isolated the ultimate kernel…the very idea that I’d fallen in love with, the idea of light as a kind of amniotic fluid flooding the cosmos.
DK Photo @ 5:23 am this morning. Nobadeer Beach. 57° F. Nantucket, MA. More photos from this morning’s glorious walk here.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
[…] I’m old but not when I go for a swim. A transformation takes place. In fact, it’s surprising how much younger the body feels in water.
What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You’re trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you’ve become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water.
As soon as your body feels the cool liquid element around you, you’re ageless. Memory takes you back to childhood, and you swim just as you did in your 20s, though this time you have brains.
And that’s the beauty of it. Age has endowed you with knowledge and experience. Now, in water, you have achieved the impossible. You’re young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray. […}
Obviously I feel none of that. I’m just an old man enjoying the water and the quiet, feeling peaceful if a bit tired, almost but not quite like an Irish selkie, who lives on land only temporarily, and whose true home is the sea.
It’s 6:15 a.m, 61° F with light rain, on a dreary Friday morning.
61° F (!) in August, after several weeks of blistering heat, imagine that. I lift my face to the sky, and let the cool morning breeze and light rain work themselves into my bones.
I cracked open a new book last night, Linn Ullmann’s “Girl, 1983.” Hypnotic scenes drift in and out as I walk.
But sometimes there’s a blessed respite – like a sudden breath of cool wind from an open window…I shook the duvets and smoothed the sheets, tidied the bedside table, opened the window wide and flung the curtains apart. I wanted air and light to stream in to where I lay in the white linen – and sounds that told of a city that was awake. (Linn Ullmann)
It’s been 1,914 consecutive (almost) days on this morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
And even though I’ve been walking in this same park, on the same track for 1,914 consecutive days (like 5.25 years now), I’ve stepped foot in the Cove Island Park Wildlife Sanctuary, maybe 10x. This small refuge is less than 1000 feet from where I park my car at the entrance of Cove Island Park.
There was a time when I believed that the two most powerful sentences in the English language were “I love you” and “I’m sorry.” I now know that those words can wound, deeply, when they’re contradicted by our actions. “I’m sorry” can even insult our intelligence if regret never leads to repentance. […]
That’s what “The Bear” is really about: How do we live together when someone always seems to be going too far? The answer we ultimately get is that we can’t. We can’t sustain a community when the pain grows too great. […]
In Season 3, we can clearly see the damage Carmy has done. He has made something great, but each person in the restaurant — each person in his family — is still under terrible strain. Something has to give.
No, more precisely, someone has to give, and that someone is Carmy.
This terrible tension and pain can make “The Bear” difficult to watch. Relationships are splintering across America. It’s hard enough to live in a community — we are all inherently flawed, after all. Normal human failings create persistent frictions, and unless we learn to deal with and ameliorate that friction, even the best of friendships can sometimes fade.
But we’re living through something else, a furious anger in which it seems people actually want to end friendships, where they want to inflict pain with their words. It’s one way to demonstrate your commitment, your great and high ideological or religious or political calling. The cause demands it, and you serve the cause. […]
I’m such a fallen person that when I saw that scene, I admit that my first thought was of the people who needed to repent to me. But thankfully that moment passed. Instead, I came to feel a profound sense of conviction. I asked myself, “Who have I harmed?” and — more important — “How can I change?”
At a time of extraordinary fury, we all live in a degree of pain. We all live with regrets. But hope can come from unexpected places — and perhaps a show that features scallops, pastries and Chicago beef can also teach us that only repentance can heal our broken hearts.
