When I was a kid, I remember that Paddington Bear, in my picture books, would always introduce himself as being from darkest Peru. This puzzled me a little. Was it always dark there? Did the people in Peru never get to see the sun? Was that a problem for them?
I realized later that he meant ‘dark’ in the sense of ‘unknown’ or ‘unexplored’. It implied a certain fear, maybe even menace; jungles and monsters; racist, colonial ideas about ‘uncivilized’ foreign lands.
As far as I can remember, Paddington never seemed willing to describe what his homeland was like. So it remained: darkest Peru.
Underland is a book about what lurks below the world’s surface.
It’s about the underground — digging, burying, and exploring — but it’s also about time, eternity, and death. The story it tells jumps from caves to mountains to mines to catacombs to the bottom of the ocean. A travelogue written in the present tense, it uses short, austere sentences that feel at once immediate and deeply polished. I get the sense that much of the book began as scribbles in a rain-spattered notebook. But then the scribbles were erased and rewritten, worked over again and again, perhaps, in late-night fevers, until all the facets shined.
Robert MacFarlane somehow writes nonfiction prose with the rhythm and care of poetry. Not a word out of place in 500 pages.
Really, really enjoying Stromae's new album "Multitudes." My French is absolutely awful, so I need to spend some time studying the lyrics, but the instrumentation and production are amazing.
This week I got a coat of varnish on my Measurements painting and we hung it in the kitchen.
This piece is an experiment: a mural-size diagram of US imperial measurements using typography. My old neighbor, Greg, told me that when he was a kid, his teacher showed him how to draw diagrams to remember the ratios between units. He’d draw a big G (gallon) with four Q’s inside (quart). Then inside each Q, two P’s (pints), and so on. To convert between units, you can count letters, e.g. four cups per quart. (Note: For the record, imperial units are a train wreck. They’re inconsistent, weird, and impossible to remember. Nonetheless, for some reason, America has never let go of them, and so here we are. Metric units do not require diagrams like this.)
A fog settled on the ground here on New Year’s Eve, thick enough to rate a Weather Advisory in the most concerned voice our Alexa could muster.
I could barely see the cypress trees in the back yard. Water droplets had congregated on windows, grass blades, twigs, and conifer needles like tiny blown-glass ornaments, disintegrating at the lightest touch. Light and sound were diffuse, distance was hard to determine. Everything was both close and far away.
There’s a lyric in Hamilton that’s lingered in my head ever since I first heard it: That would be enough.
It seems like a straightforward line. But it brings up questions I’ve rolled over and over in my head and, now, at the end of the year, I find myself dwelling on it again. What does “enough” look like to me? When will I know that I have it?
Some context: In a first-act song of the same name, Alexander Hamilton has been sent home from the war, fired from his post. His wife, Eliza, is about to have a baby, which she’s just revealed to him. She’s imploring him to stay with her and, by extension, to be there for his growing family.
Oh, let me be a part of the narrative In the story they will write someday Let this moment be the first chapter: Where you decide to stay And I could be enough And we could be enough That would be enough
The last line, that would be enough, is repeated a few more times in the story. It becomes something of a running theme, and a question Hamilton has to face again and again: when will he have enough? When can he stop fighting? When can he finally be at peace?
I took a trip to Denver recently to meet with a client. A few inches of snow fell the night after I arrived, and the temperature dropped somewhere below 10F. But then the sun returned, with some gusty winds, for the rest of the week.
Funny thing: in Baltimore it’s super humid, more or less all the time, thanks to the Chesapeake Bay. In Denver, it’s dry. I had to keep chapstick in my pocket and reapply it almost hourly. I used the whole tube of lotion the hotel provided, coating myself every day in protective ooze like a hibernating frog.
The upside of the dry air, though, is that the cold doesn’t bite as bad. 20F air in Denver is a different story than 20F air in Baltimore. That was, at least, one vaguely impressive claim I could make about the weather back home, while I shivered under all my layers, wheezed in the thin air, quailed at the steep cliffs, and embalmed my chapped face.
A while ago I listened to an episode of The Path Less Pedaledcalled “The sailor and the farmer.” It’s a podcast about bikepacking hosted by Russ Roca and Laura Crawford. In this episode, Russ meditates a little on their recent decision to settle down a bit. He rented an apartment with Laura. He found himself staying put in a way he’d never seen himself doing. As he tells it:
Back in 2009… I sat down with a colleague and we had coffee… He said, ‘Basically, in this world, there are two types of people. There are farmers and there are sailors. Farmers are those people that are really deeply embedded into their community. They see joy in seeing the sun rise and set over the fruits of their labor. And really, watching things that they invest in grow. Sailors, on the other hand, what brings them joy is the prospect of seeing new horizons: meeting new people, being in a different landscape. Sometimes you are the farmer, and sometimes you are the sailor.
One night, when I was in high school, I went hiking off the Blue Ridge Parkway with a few friends. It was a warm summer night. I don’t remember what prompted the expedition, exactly, but it was something to do. Something different.
In Waynesboro, Virginia, the Saturday-night choices felt limited. We could go to the movies, but we’d seen them all. We could go to the Waffle House, and maybe Ben would be working that night. He offered us more patience than we deserved. He’d let us hog a table all night for the price of a few cups of bottomless coffee. We were lucky to have a place like that, but the coffee got us wound up and we ran out of things to talk about by 1 am.
Or, we could drive over to Staunton, a neighboring town, and join the procession on the Avenue. A mating-season ritual among Valley humans, it involved driving in slow, smoky circles around the mall (Note: To my younger readers: in the dark and ancient times, a “mall” was a place that served as an IRL combination of Amazon and TikTok. Depending on the mall, some of the sketchier parts of Reddit and Tumbler could be found there too.)and hanging out in adjacent parking lots. It was a way to people-watch, to catch up, to blow off steam. You hoped to connect with someone — a new friend, a new hookup, a new partner — with your smile, your body, your truck, your hat. Whatever did the trick.
But we didn’t have trucks worth showing off — and even if we had, we’d have lacked the confidence to try. We called ourselves misfits, but, really, we hadn’t hatched from our shells yet.
