Weeknotes: April 15-19, 2024
Monday, April 15
Easement raking and driveway-side weeding tends to my ambient anxiety. Some days only work brings peace. In the evening I go visit K and we drink negronis on the back patio, listening to Roxy Music. I bring falafels. Islay sits queenly on the grass ruling over her former kingdom.
Weeknotes: April 8-12, 2024
Midday, driving south down the backroads of Monroe County. Apparently I'm not the only one making a last ditch sojourn to Toledo to watch the solar eclipse in its totality. What should be an hour's drive takes nearly two and a half and I'm not sure if I'll even make it by the astrological deadline at 3:12 PM. In a driveway near Ida two women in lawn chairs facing a hop garden look skyward through welding masks. I listen to NPR's special coverage of the eclipse's progress across North America, feeling solidarity with all the other umbraphiles chasing this once-in-a-generation event. The sky darkens and I approach the Ohio state line with only about 20 minutes until showtime. I'm fully prepared to pull over wherever I am even if it's on the shoulder of I-75, though I'd prefer not to. Despite the eclipse traffic (a term I'd never considered until today), I'm enjoying the adventure and at 3:05 I’m racing south on Summit St., blasting Holst's "Mars: Bringer of War" at top volume, windows down, cackling like an idiot. With just minutes to spare I arrive at Cullen Park on Lake Erie's westernmost point, where a crowd of hundreds is already celebrating. Skidding into a beer & bait drive-thru, I invent a parking spot, grab my dark glasses, and hop across the street to lay in the grass, leaning my back against the park's blue boat launch sign. As the disc of the moon slots dramatically into place, erasing the final thumbnail of orange, I remove my glasses and stare bare-eyed and dumbstruck at what looks like a gaping black hole in the sky. It’s absolutely astounding. The crowd erupts in joyful applause as the temperature drops and together we share nearly two minutes of unified wonder. I can’t believe I’d considered skipping this. Despite spending most of the day in my car this is so fucking worth it!
Last Known Address
Back in Weeknotes #1, I mentioned a new song I’d written about my post office box in Ann Arbor. It’s called “Last Known Address” and will come out later this year as part of a project of the same name. As rental prices have gone up, I’ve considered abandoning my long-held, but underused mailbox. Now that I’ve sung about it and listed my address in lyric form, I guess I’ll have to keep up the rent. In that same post, I suggested that readers might “lobby for its continued existence” by sending me a hand-written letter or postcard to counterbalance the trickle of catalogs and junk mail I usually receive.
Weeknotes: April 1-5, 2024
April Fool's Day. One of those weird holidays that has never really registered with me. I love to laugh, but pranks aren’t really my brand. Instead, I'm thinking about my uncle who died on this day, four years ago. It was amid the first big wave of lockdowns and hospitals were completely shut off to all non-essentials. He'd been complaining of respiratory problems for several weeks and was admitted to his local hospital in Mississippi in late March. He never tested positive for COVID-19, but ultimately died of what the doctor claimed was double pneumonia. It was a heartbreaking, miserable mess, all dealt with from afar, like so many other deaths in 2020. I was saddest for my dad who couldn't be with his only sibling when he passed and for my cousin, locked down far away in Honolulu mourning his father. Like my dad, Uncle Dick was a woodworker. Years before when I was working at the violin shop, he gave me a brass Sweetheart block plane, a tool I used frequently and continue to treasure. The Christmas before he died, he gave my brother and me each a pair of knives he'd crafted. Thanking him over the phone that afternoon was the last time I spoke with him. After getting the dreaded call from my dad on the afternoon of April 1, I went out to the garage and spent some time sharpening all the tools Dick had given me. I couldn't even gather with my family the day he died.
Weeknotes: March 25-29, 2024
A warm spring evening invites a walk. Hands in tattered jean jacket pockets, eastward over the Forest Street Bridge, still partly under construction, but open to traffic. I wave to my neighbors who are crossing on the other side, then hop over a pile of debris where the unfinished sidewalk ends. Up the hill past the old ladder company and the brewpub. Daffodils that survived a frigid weekend skirt an old oak on the easement. A trio of kids lazily bobs on a front yard trampoline while their two dogs rush over to the fence to check me out. At first they downplay my passing, but the larger dog gives a sudden bellow and soon both are chasing me the length of their territory. I jaywalk south by the corner store where a man in a black tracksuit emerges swinging a plastic sack of beer. It's 5:00 and everyone is knocking off for the day. At a small white house a 12-foot Home Depot skeleton dominates the yard. With nowhere to store it during the non-October months, it gets dressed up in the costumes of each season like a concrete porch goose. They'd better remove its red beard and leprechaun hat. It's almost Easter. Across the street a young mom navigates her tiny, tottering daughter past the elementary school entrance that I mostly know as my polling place. The lost turtle signs are still up on several telephone poles. Ground zero for Ypsilanti's lost reptiles.
Weeknotes: March 18-22, 2024
Waiting in the line at the bank. Snow flurries outside, another winter after a confused series of false springs. There are a handful of customers ahead of me and each of the three available tellers is occupied with a time-consuming transaction. To my left a young guy is either depositing or withdrawing his savings bonds. "This is a very grandparent thing to do, especially these days" comments the manager. The guy is wearing white New Balance sneakers, the kind with giant chunky orthopedic soles. He's already dressed like his grandpa. To my right a woman pulls her brother's death certificate out of her purse, hoping to close his account and withdraw the remaining balance. It's apparently too large a sum for the bank to handle this afternoon and she'll have to come back next Wednesday. Directly in front of me a woman in a corduroy fedora is silently involved in some unknown, but laborous business with her teller. A man wearing one of those black brimmed Stevie Ray Vaughn hats with silver bangles around it is sitting masked in one of the waiting room chairs. An electronic doorbell ding-dongs every time someone walks in or out.
Weeknotes: March 11-15, 2024
"How dare you." This, grumbled to my red Newgate clock as I return home from an afternoon walk. Daylight savings and poor time management have made me irritable. It's 3:30 and what have I gotten done?
The sun glinting off an old antique gum dispenser on my living room shelf was the first thing I noticed this morning. It ignited a previously-simmering desire to install a mantle mirror behind that shelf and open the room up to more light.
Weeknotes: March 4-8, 2024
A couple hours into the workday I pause to add some synth parts to a demo I started recording over the weekend. It was a song idea I got while running and I had to keep singing it to myself until I could get home and could do something about it. This happens to me a lot and I doubt I'm alone. Many of my best creative breakthroughs have come while running or walking. Being ambulatory jiggles the mind in a helpful way and I sometimes feel like I can hold very elaborate concepts in my mind while on foot, but as soon as I'm back home amid familiar sounds, objects, and needs, they quickly dissipate. If what I'm imagining seems particularly exciting or urgent I try to condense it into bullet points as I near my house so I can quickly jot them down as soon as I get inside. It's a debrief that often usurps even the need to drink water.
Weeknotes: February 26 - March 1, 2024
Driving home through western New York. The ski trip was mostly brown and warm. The brown Allegheny River and National Forest, brown leafless trees on hills of brown earth. At the resort white strips of man-made snow rolled like avenues down the mountainside, a bright tarmac of ice, slush, and gritty false powder. I loved it anyway.
We cross the bridge over Chautauqua Lake which so enchanted me the first time I saw it back in 2000. After lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Mentor, Ohio, we detour to the Mentor Lagoons, a nature preserve bordering Lake Erie. A beaver-felled tree, its stump like a sharpened pencil, lays not ten free from our car. It's the second one I've seen on this trip.
An Anniversary
This festive, distorted video was shot exactly 20 years ago at Jacoby’s, a German bar in Detroit’s Bricktown neighborhood. Back then, in the thick of our artistic heyday, we would never have used the term "rebrand," but that's what it was. February 21, 2004 marked the first gig by Great Lakes Myth Society, the band who for seven years prior had operated as the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love (TOBASOL, colloquially).
Weeknotes: February 12-16, 2024
"I Want You To Want Me is one of my least favorite songs." Unbidden, 9:18AM.
This statement launches the liveliest of my various group chats into its morning of banter. There are certainly better Cheap Trick songs, though I find it hard to be too critical of this enduring 1977 earworm. I've always enjoyed hearing the Budokon version with its enthusiastic callback lines from the crowd. Honestly, I can think of so many other repetitive pop songs by lesser groups that stoke my ire. The other offending songs posited are Concrete Blonde's version of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" and Patience and Prudence's "Tonight You Belong To Me." I have some nostalgia for the former which reminds me of the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. The latter, while painfully precious, is so brilliantly immortalized by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk, that I can't really hate the song itself. All three strike me as odd bugbears, but then I've got plenty of my own.
Weeknotes: February 5-9, 2024
I’m new to the concept of weeknotes. Here’s how I found out. In December Field Notes, the Chicago notebook company that I use religiously, posted on their Instagram account about getting a mention in Russell Davies' book Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. I had never heard of Davies or the U.K.-based Do Books series, but I bought it and loved it. I mean, I really loved it. It inspired me to start this blog. Davies mentions weeknotes as a type of journaling meant to reflect on and break down the events of the work week. From there I found the wonderful English blog Walknotes from a South London resident who documents their daily commute. I find Walknotes deeply charming . An old school barebones Wordpress blog with no visual frills, just great writing. I’ve become a subscriber and look forward to it every Saturday morning in my inbox. Since I already journal and love capturing small details I thought I’d try my own version of the weeknotes format.
A Small Appreciation
When we are out on a walk and pass any sort of evergreen shrubbery, my dog will lean into it and enthusiastically scratch her back on its brush. She'll make a few passes, hitting both sides of her coat, occasionally getting strung up on a branch. Once she is satisfied and trots off, there will inevitably be a jaunty green sprig or two sticking out of her harness like a corsage. I love it so much I sometimes just leave it there for the rest of our walk.
Is This Something?
A few years ago I started a side project called Log Variations. It was rooted in an earlier idea involving a stage prop, one of those motorized fireplace sets with a jumble of logs surrounding a molded plastic window behind which an amber light bulb gives off a cozy fire-like glow. It's a piece of kitsch so wonderfully fake it becomes its own unique object. My original concept was to have the "logs" open for some of my solo shows. I would activate the fireplace about for about ten minutes while playing some crackling campfire sound effects interspersed with spontaneous synth stabs and abstract field recordings. In 2021 I revisited those recordings, created a few more, and released them on cassette under the title Log Variations. Then I started an Instagram account devoted to photos of fires, logs, and other log behavior. Next up was a video component of burning logs and their corresponding soundtrack.