What I did (so far) on my summer (non-)vacation

Am I using a writing prompt for second graders as fodder to justify spending money for a personal presence on the internet (please, let's not call it a "brand")?

As a matter of fact, I am.

And let me tell you, we did not know how good we had it when we were in the second grade. The titular activities leapt to mind with ease: trips to grandma's, the roller coasters, and overnight camps. The effort lay in the physical mechanics of writing and satisfying the rules of grammar.

Right now, the work is in remembering what I did just yesterday and judging it's worth for recounting.

It's fair to say that the summer of 2026 is not what my past selves would have imagined. If asked (and I'm pretty sure no one asked), second-grade me would likely have imagined a stooped, balding, and grey me being visited by grandchildren arriving in flying cars, having returned from their vacation to the Moon, and that we'd all sit down for meals of Froot Loops and bottomless Tang. More recent iterations of me saw attendance at a World Cup match and trips abroad just over the horizon.

All of these are still viable futures (Bottomless TANG!), but they're not what's right now, so we'll proceed with what is.

Turns out, there's some worthwhile stuff to report on.

Community building

I've spent a good chunk of the last year doing community organizing work out of a very basic need for connection while working to mitigate the harm being visited on our community. While I'm fortunate to have a job in the labor movement, it's not work that's necessarily targeted at or experienced where I live, and while the union networks I work in are tight and full of people I hold dear, they are geographically far-flung. Events like our biannual convention, which concluded a few weeks ago, are great places to reconnect with those friends, but I miss the camaraderie that only comes with grinding it out with people close to you every day.

I'm constitutionally built for this kind of organizing. I find it energizing and grounding. I'm making new friends, seeing new parts (to me) of the city, and finding pockets of joy while confronting some pretty grim shit. I need this web of relationships and obligations to keep me engaged with and supported in what is at times hard and scary work.

The organizing is self-consciously described as acts of caring and love within our communities, a mindset of looking out for each other that transcends organizational work into daily life. It manifests in chatting up neighbors, pleasantries in shopping aisles, friendly scritches for happy pets, and plans to get together again. It's watching different circles of friends and acquaintances begin to overlap and mesh, a big city growing into a tight community. It's delight in the company of elder neighbors and older heads, and in supporting the punk rock incubators and DIY art spaces.

I'm also reminded of the impermanence of our communities. They are bounded - sometimes with intention, like schooling, mostly not - by space and time. They fracture under internal and external pressures. We move on: to new opportunities, away from old messes, to different states of being (or not).

It will all go away; it will all be worth the effort. Find your people and build the world you want to live in.

Yard sales!

The exclamation point is for the sweet dopamine hit from yard sale scores that happened while writing this. I haven't played poker in years, but the rush of yard sale jackpots is a perfectly serviceable substitute for a winning hand on a big pot.

Our season started with the Great Brookland Yard Sale where we early stumbled upon the vinyl collections of two local music critics. I walked away with albums by Malkmus, Sun Ra, and some obscure ambient noise and psychedelic bedroom dub at the appropriate "why not?" price, among others. I have marked the address (and will be holding it close) for next year when I'll be prepared with a budget commensurate to the task. I shortly thereafter scored two Roxy Music LPs from someone's cool older sister's collection. A pretty red-letter day for my vinyl habit, second only to the haul from the Main Street Springfield crawl in April with an old friend.

The sub-titular exclamation point captures two visits this past weekend and a previous stop a few weeks earlier at the sale of neighbors who made the life choices that facilitate the ability to say "fuck all this," quit a longtime civil service job, and decamp to the Mediterranean, in the process downsizing from a two-story streetcar era "farmhouse" to a 1000 square foot apartment. We've scored: a CD/DVD player, two cameras (a digital Canon and a Pentax), a bunch of great books, a good condition mountain bike that fits me well, an air popper, some mason jars and decorative items, an AC window unit, and the full set of Foxfire folklore books for a friend.

Curating and creating

A few years ago, facing an imminent move, I decided to part with 95% of my books, collected over three decades. I decided on donating them to a local used book dealer who I though would be able to re-house some of the better gems in my collection - dense, impressive tomes that I'd read cover to cover, well worth the time, but would never pick up again. As I was unloading, I listened to his lamentations about the used book market, grousing that most titles ended up getting pulped.

The same would have happened with my compact discs, 35 years worth, if they hadn't lain in disarray, stashed in various cabinets in our Riverdale home. Out of sight, out of mind, a project for another day. Besides, I had a growing vinyl collection to enjoy, and if I wanted something beyond that, that's what the streaming service subscriptions were for.

What a difference a few years make. Books are being destroyed at a massive scale for training data and streaming services are moral black holes that make major label recording execs look like puppies. An AI-centipede of recursively churned slop has taken over the internet and is fed back into the chirpy chatbot podcasts or videos that are preferred as sources of information for a not insignificant portion of the population. Algorithms, promised as tools to customize bespoke access to information that fit our needs and interests, instead flatten our experience to what can be expressed in complex mathematics and be used as a means to extract data from us to further feed the algorithms. A handful of the richest, worst, most disconnected-from-reality people (people who believe that they've created a "super-intelligence" and who further believe that this "super-intelligence" has - shockingly! -arrived at all the same conclusions that they hold) are hoovering up the entirety of human culture, judging which bits are the ones you should have access to, and deciding how much we'll have to pay to access our shared cultures and heritage.

I've stewed about this a little.

Keeping physical copies of media, even digital files on a hard drive, seems kind of like a moral imperative right now. It adds an urgency to snagging your neighbor's cast-offs and bringing already existing collections back into service. I've been struck at the different layers of media already in the archives, a sediment of tastes, trying to remember how they came to be there and why they still are. I've found it to be worthwhile to reflect on whether a piece is worthy of the limited physical space we have for collecting art, books, and music, and what the collection as a whole says about me and to me.

With the purchase of two cameras, I'm hoping that I can reinvigorate the joy I've previously found with photography and work my way backwards to learning photo composition with film. The enshittification of Instagram put a damper on my desire to take and share photos online. Having the digital camera, without direct access to the internet, is helping me ease back in to the practice of making time to take photos, but with a higher bar of intention and with the challenges and joys of learning a new tool.

The film camera is completely new to me, and I'm going to have to spend some time reacquainting myself with film (I don't know that I've used a film camera since the late 90s). The regular use of my digital camera is still largely aspirational, hopefully just a matter of me putting my mind to it and getting out there. For now, we have highly photogenic cats who are perfect for moody portraits on the weird internet (their natural environment).

Reading

For the second summer in a row, I've decided to wile away my hours (ok, wile away mostly the 15 minutes each night between "in bed" and "just about asleep") with some dense prose that will require weeks to finish. Last summer I crossed Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow off my literary bucket list (and no, I don't tire of bringing it up). This summer I'm re-tackling Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. I previously read this... well, "read" this, back in graduate school, which is to say I skimmed most of it. I absorbed its importance, but never really grappled with its arguments. It arrived in my hands via yard sale at a time I can only describe as relevant for my engagement with it. It's slow progress, but intellectually satisfying.

Live music

This has not been a summer of music for me, not for lack of acts to choose from, just a matter of time, money, and priorities. There's two nights out of recent note. First, Eamon and I hit the final free show of the summer at Fort Reno park. The whole season of shows snuck up on me and I didn't realize they were up and running until almost too late. Anyhow, we took in the raw punk of Loose Leash and the noisy psych rock of Thunderpaw under an absolutely brilliant DC summer evening with a crowd of families from all over the city. Immaculate vibes at a venerable DC institution.

I also recently caught the Phish from Vermont for one show at Merriweather Post Pavilion, the first I'd been to in about four years. The allure of seeing Phish has diminished for me over the last few years. The hassle and cost of the shows does not entice, the hippie party/self-help Tolle vibe is discordant, given the times, and there isn't enough musical evolution at this point to keep me chasing fresh sounds. The distance also makes some of the criticism of the band ring more true: with a few exceptions, the quality of songwriting ranges from silly to embarrassing, and the less said about the fan base, the better. I stopped trying to convince people otherwise a few years back, and I guess I stopped having to convince myself as well.

All that said, sometimes you want to get a buzz on and dance, and Phish remains the Last Great Psychedelic Dance Band. I saw old friends, got stubbed into the view-obstructed dance-off spot with the other spunions, and witnessed the incomparable wizardry of four old friends leaping from questionable compositions to conjuring mind-bending improvisational beauty out of the ether. And then we zipped home and were in bed before midnight. A fantastically fun evening. It's not something I need to pursue anymore, but I'm glad it's there for me to dip into when the need arises.

World Cup

Despite the best of efforts of FIFA and the United States Government to ruin the event (starting with mid-half water breaks, ending with the half-time show, and all the ignominy in between), it was still a joy to watch - high quality football, and all the right teams lost. Personal highlights:

• Cape Verde's improbable run: every tournament needs a Cinderella, and these guys delivered gutsy, inspired soccer in spades.
• Erling Haaland: I've let my distaste for his club team, Manchester City, cloud my opinion of him since he arrived in the Premier League. My dude is goofy and lovable, seems like a genuinely good guy, looks like a Viking Shrek, and has magic feet. Send memes.

• England getting its comeuppance... again: Let's just say the writing was on the "Wonderwall". You had the entire history of English music at your disposal, and this is where you landed. Choices were made, you made yours, and now you must live with the consequences.
• The third-place game: And really, England fans, a 3rd place finish following one of the most entertaining games of footie I've ever had the privilege of enjoying is getting off easy for the crime of forcing that cringey slab of Brit-pop on us after every win.
• Argentina losing the Final: Spain's trip through the tournament was a master's class, and watching them dominate Argentina for 120 minutes was a joy rivaled only by the tears of the white supremacists who latched on to la Albiceleste. Elite sports is a poor proxy for politics, but I'll take the wins where I can get them.

Writing trivia questions

For the last several years I've developed a side hustle of producing bespoke trivia nights at our local pool, something which I'm proud to say is looked forward to by the nerds and teachers' pets in our community. Our next one is coming up this weekend, so I'm neck deep in researching, writing, and weaving a narrative for the festivities. Writing trivia questions is a great way to procrastinate on finishing a newsletter. You'll never guess how I procrastinate from finishing writing trivia questions!

Onward

My cup is full, friends. The joy and connection I've felt this summer is going to fuel me through the hard months ahead. We are marking the 1 year anniversary of the military occupation of DC over the next few days, an occupation we've now been told will last through January 2029. We face a United States Government run by men who have stated and acted upon their hostility towards democracy, made all the more dangerous by their weakness and incompetence. The light of this summer will help carry me through the tasks that face us, and I hope you're also finding whatever it is that carries you through.

Until next time.