These are actually from the night before the previous post. I’m trying to get ahead of the trend and give up entirely on linearity. I had looked at flights and arriving one day earlier plus a hotel was quite a bit cheaper, so I went for it. I feel like at the time I might’ve also been scheduling with the possibility that Sophie would come along. I don’t remember, it was last year and a while ago.
Downtown minneapolis was very strange. The 10 story condo seemed to have taken over from all other life forms, and they were all shiny and neat, except where a few of them were still under construction. I wonder how many winters all these new transplants will face before they give up and move somewhere warmer? When I lived there, we didn’t stay through a whole one. Moved in the late spring to West St. Paul, started the third grade, learned my times tables up to I think 6’s, had more than one recess cancelled because it was too cold (less than 10ºF), and moved to Oklahoma in December. The wind was cold inside the dang truck. Terrible cold. You’ve heard of lake effects? This is a place that is swiss-cheesed with lakes. Anyway, I digress.
In the middle of summer, that is to say June, it was passing fair and nice. The Football stadium, as I said, looked like an incursion from an alternate reality, or an alien spaceship had landed and the aliens had decided, on balance, to decamp for somewhere warmer. If they’d waited a bit I’m sure they could have bought a nice condo.
Other than the odd stadium, the downtown was quiet on a Friday evening. I walked around for maybe an hour, then the rain started coming down, and I went back into my motel to watch the first presidential debates. Talk about things going non-linear on us, huh?
Posted on 2025-02-07T09:38:31Z GMT
Finally getting to these (checks notes) about six months after I meant to. This was a killer party, lots of good food and music. I kind of wasn’t on my game that night? I’d gotten a bad haircut and had a weird day wandering around Minneapolis. It didn’t matter that much, there was also a real wedding photographer there, so I was able to mostly relax and enjoy. I think this was the trip I really started to notice my like, normal energy levels starting to flag also? Like normally I would have been going to the after party and staying out all night with everyone but I just couldn’t, this time.
I have a shit ton of stuff in the backlog like this, just waiting to be posted (more than a year’s worth at this point). I also have two book projects in full swing, both the San Pablo book and the Big Empty work. Need to get a bunch of it out the door soon, as I feel like a lot of things are just going to keep happening and it’s going to be all I can do to keep up.
Love this kid’s energy. Just like, no rules, this is the best seat in the house right in the middle of the dance floor, and I’m gonna sit here and eat my dinner.
I also haven’t posted the really strange architecture from this trip, wandering around the city near my hotel the night before (maybe I’ll do those next? who knows). The big football stadium that resembled nothing so much as a crashed spaceship or an intrusion from a neighboring dimension. Anyway, I digress.
The aunties and the uncles were also a riot. What a great crowd.
Posted on 2025-02-06T07:51:10Z GMT
I remember this drive across the bridge; it was cloudy in the east bay, and then after Yerba Buena island, the fog closed in around me and all I could see were the cars around me and the structure of the bridge. I thought about ‘casual domain shear’, which was an idea from the last half-good Neal Stephenson book, Anathem. Basically, if you’re sufficiently isolated from some part of physical reality, time runs differently; in the book there are monks that use this phenomenon (and other monks that talk about it ad nauseam, I said it was half-good).
Of course, we all know when you’re stuck in traffic, time is very plastic. It seems to take forever to get nowhere at all, and once you’ve arrived something about the experience makes all that time sort of vanish from your memory, as if the whole thing was an illusion. I certainly don’t remember anything else about this traffic jam; looking at my calendar for that day, I was going to the mission to get a haircut.
Anyway. It’s winter again, and even if the weather is bad it’s still beautiful. Many times the light is flat and the pictures are bad. I promise not to share those.
Posted on 2024-11-21T08:18:11Z GMT
