Y
July Hike
Doc got lucky and got the 4th of July off, so we headed out of the triple-digit heat to the Uinta range about 60 miles away. Above 10,000 feet it’s only 75 degrees, with big patches of snow and the most perfect mountain lakes you can imagine.
I already want to go back–with a pool float and a chair and a day’s worth of snacks. We did a four-mile loop but it’s only about a mile through a magical forest wonderland (last pic) to get to the first lake where we can set up for the day. Who wants to join me?
“To love America is to love all Americans.”
I thought I had posted this in the long and awful lead up to the election last year, but a quick search doesn’t turn up anything. I know it’s a hard right from yesterday’s mob violence poem, but sometimes I remember WWTDLD (What Would the Dalai Lama Do?).
Happy Fourth. Enjoy my favorite take on patriotism:
Monday Poem
I’m off for the long weekend and thinking about America. I was going to post “I Hear America Singing” and make a bitter joke about “I hear America Tweeting [we are doomed]” but I remembered this instead. Sometimes you have to do the math: there’s a handful of shitty leaders for 321 million people. We the people. I the people.
I Am the People, the Mob
Friday Links
1. This is a masterpiece: A day on the internet in 2017: an internal transcript.
2. The New York Public Library’s summer reading list (for all ages).
3. A Business Insider writer covers her son auditioning for Julliard and breaks down the Zen of practicing:
Let’s Talk About Long Hair
I’ve been growing my hair out and so far progress is non-noticeable. (At least it’s curlier than the last time we talked about hair, but I attribute that to finding a better stylist who doesn’t hack it to death with a razor.)
Anyway, my goal was to get to a nice chin length that I could pin back, but then I saw the Wonder Woman movie and now all I want is a Connie Nielsen/Queen Hippolyta mane of loose curls:
And a sword. I think a sword is really what that hairstyle calls for. This is gonna be a good look for my 40s.
Political Wednesday Poem
Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.
I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;
I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.
With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,
my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,
because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.
You just delayed our coronation.
We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;
we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business
because it’s still nobody’s business;
there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,
and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:
we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,
the buildings here are not on your side just because
you make them spray-painted accomplices.
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
Even the earth found common cause with us
the way you trample us both,
oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,
and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them
but I won’t, because they’re my family,
in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.
If you’ve never loved someone like that
you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.
I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;
I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,
I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down
and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.
But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.
We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?
We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,
of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.
And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,
anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.
This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.
You cannot deport our minds; we won’t
hold funerals for our potential. We have always been
what makes America great.
Tuesday Project Roundup: Unicorn Shirt
After I made the Style Arc Blaire shirt and said that the new Kalle shirt pattern from Closet Case Files was “already drafted to be what I really wanted,” I wanted to try it.
Since I was spending $22 on a printed pattern and shipping and felt pretty confident about the outcome–despite never having made a Closet Case pattern before (dun dun dun)–I went with something not too nice but that would be fun and wearable: Unicorn-embroidered seersucker.
On paper–and on the hanger–this is great. But, as it turns out, I like the Blaire shirt a lot more. It’s drafted more elegantly, I think; the sleeves on this Kalle are shorter than I wanted and the collar stand is giant, which pushes the collar up higher on your neck than it should. (I’m going to do a side-by-side review next week.)
I wish I loved it more, but in the end I still have a unicorn shirt that I don’t have to be too precious about. I even walked over to downtown’s most ridiculous hotel to get a bathroom selfie there, vs. my un-gilded and un-marbled bathroom at home:
John Denver Day
We went up the Willow Heights trail Sunday straight into a John Denver paradise: blue skies, bluebells and lupins and forget-me-nots in bloom, crossing an aspen forest to a lake.
I’ve been discovering Rocky Mountain High after dismissing it for years as corny. But it’s about the perfect summation of being happy in the mountains that I’ve found:
“And oh, I love the life within me, I feel a part of everything I see.
And oh, I love the life around me, a part of everything is here in me.”
Friday Links
1. I kind of love this: Seinfeld episodes summarized from “the perspective of the normal women whom Jerry terrorized.”
2. Via Kottke, a long and saddening read on What Bullets Do to Bodies.
3. Quotes From 25 Famous Women on Their Pets. From Meghan Daum:
“In my life so far, I have never felt more in tune with another living thing. If Rex could have talked, we’d have finished each other’s sentences. Then I met my husband, and he loved Rex too. And though I stopped being that particular kind of single woman, we became a particular kind of couple: the kind for whom their dog is their child, the kind that talks about their dog in such a way that people who have actual children make fun of them in the car on the way home. But we didn’t care.”