I can't sleep…
4:00 a.m. Another restless night. Deep sleep, waits for another day.
It’s time.
I walk.
It’s been 1,902 consecutive (almost) days on this twilight walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
I’m walking at the top of the Marina, warily making my way around rocks, glistening and coated with algae.
I hear soft murmurs.
What is that? I stop, to listen.
Continue reading “Walking. Sunday Morning.”
Andrew, can you end with a family-friendly joke? This was a Louis C.K. joke that Seinfeld told when they were doing a conversation — comedians on comedians. The joke is something like: You know, going on vacation with the family, I put the kids in the car seats. I put my wife in the car. Put the coffees in the coffee holder. I put the bags in the back. I close the trunk. I close my wife’s door. I close the kids’ door. And when I’m walking from my wife’s door to my door, that’s my vacation.
I know exactly the joke you’re talking about. I think about it constantly. It’s so good, and at its core you could say quite mean. That’s the beauty of a joke. It allows us to access these darker thoughts and emotions that we have: He loves his family, but in that moment, they’re safe, and I don’t have to deal with them. We all have that feeling, and then we come back to reality. And that’s what would be awesome: If people get that these things that we’re saying — it’s just what we feel in that little moment, and then we step back.
— Andrew Schulz, “‘Podcast Bro,’ Might Be America’s Foremost Political Journalist.” Interviewed by David Marchese. (NY Times, June 21, 2025)
It was only then I could viscerally remember what faith had felt like—this bright feeling in the nerves, a sense of being porous and airy. Reality was clear.
— Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 17, 2025)
Notes:
My friend Francis couldn’t play the piano, couldn’t or simply wouldn’t, wouldn’t or just wasn’t, and whatever the reason was I didn’t like the sound of it, so we made a bargain: if he could not play for himself, I would call him every morning and he would play the piano for me. It would be my job to listen and his job to play, a mutual task, as I needed obligations, and he needed to leave his mind and return to his hands… Each of my calls with Francis began the same way—brief hellos, how are you feeling, then one of us would ask the other whether they were ready, and the reply was always the same. We were always ready. I had pictured myself writing as Francis played scales or practiced songs, but for the first few days his hands hardly remembered the keys, and I had nothing to work on, no thoughts worth keeping, hardly any thoughts at all. He played slowly, sometimes with a metronome, shards of chords or songs in parts for no more than a few minutes, but after a week he began, as if by some miracle, to sing, and I muted myself and folded onto the floor to cry, not for him and not for myself and not for anything other than the fact that any pattern can be broken, that there is no end of patterns breaking down. Weeks went by and months went by, and I called him from different cities, different rooms, and over time he could play a little longer, a little freer, songs he knew by heart and songs he was still trying to write. It was as easy as it was unusual, this distant company, this regular puncturing of our tendencies toward solitude and shut doors…
But then I thought of the mornings when Francis fumbled a note or fell short of his falsetto and how he used to shyly apologize, and how over time he stopped saying he was sorry and simply continued, allowing the errors to live.
— Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 17, 2025)
Notes:
Next morning, as the fog lifts, I have the sense I often have here, of seeing the world at the moment it comes to life. I recall looking down at the twenty-five pods gathered around the bell tower and the refectory, tiny against the hillside and the huge expanse of sea beyond; they looked so frail I wished to say a prayer for them, as for a newborn in the not always easy world. So orderly, too, in their hopeful human arrangement. Like the redwoods in the valley beside them: each with roots five feet deep, but intertwined, so the health of one depends on the health of every other.
— Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025). Written from his cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California.
Notes: