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What is up y’all. I’m gonna just get right into it.

NEW FEATURE AND AN EVENT FOR THE ISSUE TONIGHT!

The other month, I was given an assignment for the Bay Area Current, to cover the landmark rent control win at the Vulcan Lofts over their corporate landlords Madison Park Financial. Check out the article here, which was published at the Current and in the most recent issue of Street Spirit.

Also, if you’re in Berkeley, come to the Yeti tonight at 6:30 to celebrate the joint Street Spirit Issue! There will be issues for the taking and a lot of great people. Come through and meet everyone making these amazing publications a reality.

I STILL NEED ONE THING FROM YOU FOR THE ZINES

Just a quick heads up that the zine is ALMOST ready and will be sent to everyone’s doorstep in early May. It’s starting off a bit smaller than I expected but I’m super excited to share it with you all. Hope you enjoy it! HOWEVER!

If you are a paid subscriber, thank you so much for helping support this little portion of my digital world. Make sure to send me your address so I can send the zines out to you! Just hit reply to this email and share your address. I’ll make sure you get one in the mail to you early next month. Also, if you’re in the Bay Area, let me know if you’d prefer to pick it up somewhere! We can work out the kinks on that together :)

If you want to get these zines, once a month, please consider becoming a paid monthly subscriber to the newsletter! If you want a one-off zine, just email me and I’ll send one to ya for $8 (the price of a monthly subscription fee!).

Thanks so much

I have more articles up in new pubs and I’ll share those links late next week.

Lake Merritt is a place, for anyone in Oakland, both at the center and periphery of our lives. It is the center of many of Oakland’s parks and is a beloved place for many in the city to spend their leisure time. And yet, the waters of the Lake, for most of us, are often neglected our more keen sight. We might spot a few birds, admiring the aimless floating of the white pelicans, but we might not think much of the lake water itself. We’ve been told it is dirty and that it stinks and that the water is to be avoided. While the caution toward the lake water might be a good practice, the world of the lake, and its inhabitants, hold within them another part of the story of Oakland, and how this city so essentially is connected to the rest of the world.

This excerpt below on the mystery of the Lake Merritt Monster, recently published in the Oakland Review of Books (ORB for short), is my small attempt and trying to honor the lake, the Jewel of Oakland. Enjoy!

From what one can gather from accounts over the years, the creature in Lake Merritt has a long protruding neck, like a brontosaurus or the Loch Ness monster. “Sooner or later every loch must have its monster,” wrote Oakland Tribune columnist Jack Burroughs in June of 1946, describing it as “serpent-like” in the earliest account of the legend that I could find. After a heavy storm, “the amphibious creature slithered along one of these water courses into San Antonio creek, waded along the creek till he came to the estuary, swam out the estuary into the Bay and thence out to sea,” Burroughs wrote. “But before he left [for the ocean] he hollowed out with a [flip] of his tail, the basin that later became Lake Merritt.” Oddly, the article leads into a story about a performance in which a group of dancers wore an old dragon costume from the San Francisco Opera in Lake Merritt to promote recreational swimming. Aside from this, the creature and its whereabouts largely remain a mystery.

The existence of aquatic “cryptids,” creatures unrecognized by mainstream science, requires a cloudy body of water to suspend our disbelief. Without this opacity, legends of these creatures would eventually go extinct. We need the surface to remain murky: a simple “yes” or “no” would rob us, the mystified public, of the excitement of uncertainty, of living in a world in which humans’ ecological knowledge and dominance are put into question. And yet, when we examine these mysteries more closely, we learn much of the history of places themselves. In the case of Loch Ness in the Scottish highlands, for example, we may never have discovered the cavernous caves deep below the waters of the loch without the tale of a creature to lure explorers below the surface with sonar. Similarly, the legend of the Lake Merritt Monster and its disappearance can only be understood through the story of the Lake Merritt’s ecology and its direct connection to the greater bay.

The story of this mysterious creature has shifted throughout the years, originating as a fun aside in the Burroughs article and later cementing as local lore, occasionally rearing its quiet head up from the depths. The green Lakeside park play structure, designed by Bob Winston in 1952, was dubbed the “Monster,” or the “Mid-Century Monster” by its fan club. Sly and the Family Stone iconically posed atop the sculpture for the cover of Dance to the Music. It was the inspiration for The Lake Merritt Monster, a 2023 short film by Benjamin MulHolland that depicts the monster as a kind of triceratops-meets-Stranger Things creature. It also persisted as an urban myth amongst Oakland schoolchildren, a fun discussion topic during recess if perhaps nothing to take seriously.

That was, however, until the Lake Merritt Monster reappeared in an Oakland North article in 2011. The feature included the testimony of the respectable scientist and then-director of the Lake Merritt Institute Dr. Richard Bailey, who claimed to have personally seen the creature in the lake: “It’s black, it’s big, it has spikes on its head and its tongue sticks out,” he said, noting its “typical round monster humps.” The Lake Merritt Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to caring for the lake—could this have been a publicity stunt on the director’s part? Or was it an earnest firsthand account? I searched for traces of Bailey online, attempting to contact him from multiple avenues, but I found only silence. In journalism, sources can be as mystifying as long ripples of water on an overcast day.

Because they are alleged to exist in the absence of concrete proof, cryptids create the ideal backdrop for projecting one’s own preconceptions and beliefs onto the world, the veil in front of them leaving gaps for narratives to filter through. “Cryptids don’t just live at the geographical margins,” as Colin Dickey writes in The Unidentified, “They exist perpetually at that margin between the scientific and fantastic.” Yet a peculiar thing about the Lake Merritt Monster, as Dr. Bailey observed, is that the “Oakness monster” was sighted in the immediate aftermath of a successful large-scale cleanup of the lake, after its murky depths were rendered suddenly transparent: “Dr. Bailey believes the creature prefers clean lakes,” as Dara Kerr wrote, for Oakland North, “so perhaps it is no coincidence that he says these appearances come with massive lake clean-ups that make it easier for lake-goers to spot monster-like objects in the water.”

Sightings are often few and far between, but some have been verifiably false. One Oakland Voices writer witnessed something monstrous at the mouth of Lake Merritt, which was ultimately identified as a sea lion (which, admittedly, is still bizarre). But this was hardly the only strange sighting in the lake: Two years ago, local outlets were stunned to find an odd “alien-like” creature in the lake—a jellyfish, as it turned out. Six years ago, a poster on Reddit claimed that their friend went fishing at Lake Merritt and caught a five-foot sturgeon, a designated threatened species by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (before you ask, yes, recreational fishing in the lake is illegal). I recently spotted a dead shark on the northwest corner of the lake, and even with the help of a local shark biologist, I am still having trouble identifying the species. While investigating the possibility that the Oakness Monster exists, I found far more bizarre things afoot in Lake Merritt.

The first oddity is the lake itself…

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Driving into Marin beside the Larkspur ferry I saw a seal. As I turned slowly up the on-ramp of highway 101 I saw, below me, between the high road over the calm estuary waters, a fully grown harbor seal, some six feet long, just floating. For a brief moment, I was mesmerized by the animal, its large soft body shining in the bright, already hot morning sun as it lazed in the still water, staring up and around at the concrete world that seemed, from my angle, to surround it. The houses beside the water to our right, the highways in front and and behind and beside it, the plantless estuary and this large animal, all converge to make this one brief scene I passed through.

This was two weeks ago, and something about the seal’s idle floating I can’t quite shake. It seemed almost bored. And if not bored, maybe it was alone, lonely even. But, as with most things, perhaps these were my projections. After all, I saw the animal for no more than five seconds. And yet, in those five seconds I created a world for the seal. A world in which it was wrapped by the trappings and demands of an industrialized people, wandering in isolation, the shimmer of the light of the sun on its head and the grey of its fur in contrast with the mucky green of the waters. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the critter, having to, like the rest of us, live with and through this world.

The stories we tell of other things are the stories we tell of ourselves to a degree. What we see in the world, and most importantly how we speak of it, is really a reflection of our own perspective on things. Try as we might to believe we have a solid and objective view of things, how we see the world is through stories, and stories always have a perspective.

The story I often tell of the world to varying degrees, is one that comes back to a simple statement: the world is made up of endless connections, of relationships. Looking for a moment at the seal down below the highway, it is not my separation from the seal that captivates my thoughts, but the very nature that this highway, and the water below it, creates this separation. It is the relationship of the water to the highway that defines our relationship; because this is the place where we pass, two creatures inevitably linked by the road, driving or swimming through it. For generations of humanity, we have brought with us a changed world, from breadfruit seeds to the water held within ships far off oceans into the bay area. This changing of the world that we made as people is often, in my story, the quietly tragic tale of our relationship with the world.

Recently, I wrote a little column that touches on all this muddying, all this connection, for the Bay Area Current on the odd world traveling critter, the lake merritt nudibranchs, and how, through the conquest of industry, they made Oakland their home. Like the seal, this creature’s day to day life is defined because and despite our presence, our impact to the land and the sea. And yet, passing along Lake Merritt, or driving on an overpass, we might meet, for a brief moment, small characters in the story of concrete, engines, and rumbling boats across on turbid waters hundreds of years ago.

Tip Jar

Last month, here on my little newsletter, I said that I was hoping for calm, for slowness. The desire to move with less urgency, and to not become consumed by the culture of lack or of want, was the wish for this coming year. And while that, still is the dream, I could not have, this past month and a half, had a busier start to the year. From wake up to bed my days are filled, with work, with obligations big and small and for which I have been mostly grateful to have. And yet, that slowness, I haven’t met yet. Hopefully I will soon.

And with that being said, this is just a short update, a little note to share with you some recent articles that I have published elsewhere and that I think y’all will enjoy.

First, my short piece on the native species, Yarrow, for the Bay Area Current’s column, “Meet the Locals.” I love my sister Cassidy’s illustration for this one.

Second, at the end of January, the Bay Area Current published a piece on the solidarity with Minneapolis Protest in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland.

And finally, just last week, my brief feature on the arrival of breeding elephant seals which is a bit more odd of a story than I expected it to be.

Also, just a note on the zine…it IS coming! I’m setting aside some time next month to start working on prints and hopefully will get the first one out next month. If you want one, consider subscribing! I’ll be reaching out to those who have already subscribed for addresses and all that soon too!

Updates!!

— FIRSTLY! I wrote a short listicle of the Best Bay Area Nature Stories for the Bay Area Current. Check it out at the link here!!

— SECONDLY! I’m planning to print Zines once a month for paid subscribers (date TBD because I still need to purchase a nice printer to do it!). The zines will be grouping of my photos, drawing, and writing picke from here and publications. I do need to make a bit more money these days, and thought it would feel like a better transaction if I were to actually share something physical with anyone who wants to pay for a subscription. So consider subscribing below!

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The more people who subscribe, the quicker I’ll be able to start making these and sending them out, so please consider subscribing! And, even if you can’t/don’t want to pay for it, please share the newsletter with your friends and fam! It really does help and I am immensely grateful when I see new people subscribing. Makes me feel like I’m doing something right (right?). Thanks!!

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The days are short. The holidays are over. Tides are high as streets flood up the coast following the rains. Nicasio reservoir overflows. The earth is wet and a sense of relievi ng saturation fills the ground. In other words, the calm days of winter in the Bay Area are here, far away from so much of the news of the world.

This is the time people set resolutions, to get fit, or financially stable, or enjoy life in some specific and distinct way. I do the same, sit at my table and drum up some aspirations for the winter — an odd time, I believe, to be thinking of renewal; feels more like a spring thing. But the obsession with progress, at least as I see it online, takes this time of year reserved for reflection and resolutions to a fever pitch that makes me question the point of it all. The cult of productivity permeates our online spaces with this new year so much so that I’d rather sit defiantly inside, doing nothing much more than rewatching the same shows I’ve already watched dozens of times, idling into nothing to spite all the productivity gurus out there.

The disdain I have for this kind of online content is only matched by my own desire to get work done, for both personal and financial reasons. I loathe much of this content for the simple fact that I am easily susceptible to it. In actuality, I want to be more productive, to be more organized, my distractable self often hoping for some sort of structure to save myself from my own meandering. And that upsets me all the more. Because I understand, as I’m sure you do, the desire of both the creators of these kinds of content, and those like myself, the viewer. We want to be better, more efficient, and inspire that in others, at least initially. We want, in this cultures’ terms, a little leg up, because any sort of edge might mean the ability to pay rent comfortably. Forget purchasing a house, stability in the renter’s market is all I really want.

Money’s tight for most of us today. We know the statistics. Wages have stagnated since Reagan took office and haven’t stayed on track with inflation since then. So our pockets are tighter, and a free liberal kind of capitalism has not trickled down to those of us lower on the rung as it was promised. If you can’t see that still, I don’t know what to tell you. And so, we need to be more productive with our time in the hopes that we can continue to live comfortably, and maybe, just maybe, one day recline on a La-Z-Boy into retirement.

The hope for resolutions, just as the goal in a good amount of online productivity content, often is just to live a good life. Right? To live a good life, one of comfort and community, of care and health. And so, in spite of the fact that I work as a barista, living near check to check, I will share the most important resolution on my list for 2026: to slow down.

I want to slow down because, at this point, I am convinced that speed and efficiency are a means to have us remain constantly on edge, unable to sit for a moment, take in the world, and then think for ourselves about the goings on around us. All these desires thrown about, from gambling ads telling us we can win big right now to the constant onslaught of dire international news, seem to beckon us not to consider, but to react. There is little room for deliberation.

As the world grows more dire, pauses will inevitably grow more vital for the preservation of our selves. We are in the slop era of the internet, a back-sliding moment for democracies, highlighted by strongmen feeding off people’s fears, anxieties, and reactivities. They stoke this, across the political spectrum, to captivate our reactions, to make us react to each moment rather than consider it, be it a TikTok, or a news story. This, largely, is why I try to write the way I do, as a reminder to myself that the content of our lives is not content to be monetized, but moments to be realized, and from those realizations, to change ourselves in the process.

And yes, the world is scary today, terrifying even. It really is. But without considering why it is scary, we’ll hardly know how best to respond, for our communities and the places that we call home. And so, as the rain stops, and the light hits brightly the greening hills across the Bay, I hope, amidst the cacophony of news that is already blaring out in 2026, that I, and possibly you, will find some slowness, and room for reflection.

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Living in California, we spend most of our time in our cars, stuck in traffic, wandering streets avoiding stalls or highways, and some of us, antsy and uneasy in the idle moments in days, just go for a drive, looking out to the roads, passersby, just letting time pass. It’s a bad habit, driving with no point but one that I do love. To watch the world move around me while I, sitting, see it quietly pass. And for the last four years, the car that has taken me around, letting me indulge in my sentimental silent drives, has been a 1997 Ford Ranger, manual, sans power steering, that was slowly falling apart.

My friend Alyssa saw it once and said my truck looked something like a mastiff puppy — blacked out wheels, sandy brown paint, black bumpers, and a black shell. It had a dent on its left side from being side swiped with the last owner. And I loved that truck. But, the other week, a car turned into me as I turned left at a traffic light, smashing the side and destroying the passenger side door. No one was hurt, but my trusty rusted-out beauty was damaged badly on its side.

The mechanic said it was likely to cost more than the truck’s value. He was right. So, now, I’ve taken off Mastiff’s shell, and the pieces I’d miss, and have had it towed away, having said goodbye to this small truck that took me across the coast, to the beach twice a week, and into that odd and nebulous, at times timeless state of presence, spacing out on the road.

I already have a new Ranger now. It’s in better condition. But I’ll miss that dinky little mastiff.

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Also! My sister, Cass, and I have a new piece out for our native species column! READ IT HERE! This one is about humpback whales :)

I went to the symphony last week. I went with my friend who had free tickets from work and we dressed up a bit playing at a leisurely life, pretending we didn’t still do check-to-check kinds of work, leaving each of us in our own way tired and desiring peace of our own kinds: peace from work, from stress, peace made made out of a knowledge that all expenses could be paid with little thought in our lives like our rent, which I often pay each month as the fear of not paying it sits as a background anxiety which cannot leave my mind for very long. And so we dressed up. I went to the symphony, not knowing much about the symphony, just that it’s a beautiful thing, live music, and dressing up and cosplaying, however briefly, as someone with a love of money, and therefore time, sounded fun.

I went to the symphony last week. As the musicians gathered on stage, tuning their instruments, having their little aside to each other, I wondered how much they get paid and thought about the show Mozart In The Jungle I watched when I moved back in with my mom in 2017 and how I learned the little I do know about classical music from that show meaning that yes, I know next to nothing except that maybe they are unionized, something I learned through a subplot in the show where a cellist, Cynthia, leads a union fight for better wages or something which pits her against her lover, the former symphony conductor, and grows into a larger strike, from what I remember. It seemed the most honest part of the story. If not honest, at the least something that seemed a conflict I could comprehend. I’ve never fought for a union but I’ve been poorly paid a lot of my life and I make even less at this, writing, the thing that I’ve somewhat confoundingly dedicated my life to doing. So I was curious, how much do they get paid? It’s a hard job, I’m sure, a hustle, that kind of creative labor, seeking gigs, and applying for what little money exists for those out there, to make ends meet. How effortlessly class will always slip in through the cracks.

I went to the symphony last week. It was a visceral, and enchanting thing. I didn’t know the stories behind the composer, or the songs, but could hear everything, feeling and story, within it — not the lived experience of the composers but the experience of living they reanimated in sound. There are better writers to describe this kind of music, so I’ll leave it at that.

I went to the symphony last week. We left early to beat the crowds out the door. As though in another time period, we passed white button-up and black apron adorned waiters, out on the sidewalk sharing a cigarette. It was an alternate life, a leisurely life, one I would have a hard time understanding, one I’m uncertain if I’d truly fundamentally want because of all these thoughts pooling in my head. It would be a life where, at the least, I wouldn’t have to wake up so early for work and get off my shift ever so slightly less broke and all the more exhausted than I had been before. We went to the symphony on a free ticket, sure, but I’m hoping to go again soon, maybe even pay and sit, well dressed, and become consumed in sounds, despite what world exists outside the symphony hall. Since, despite all these pools in my head where I swim, the music is something to experience, and to cherish.

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I’ve never known the places writing will take me. That was kind of the interest in it from the beginning. Stemming from a journal entry in high school, talking about some trip my friends and I went on, I started to see how powerfully insightful writing on my own could be, for the understanding of myself and the interpretations of the world and relationships as I saw them. While the understanding of myself and the world at large have consistently shifted, sometimes with the slowness of a mountain rising, other times like earthquakes, the love and challenge of writing has remained the same. It is a way into the world I cherish deeply. Given the freedom to write, it has and continues to bring me deeper into the world, either to share with others or to understand myself. I cannot be more grateful that I can write, that I am able to write with little blocks, and that others, however many, care to read anything I write at all. Truly, I am grateful.

I’ll leave it at that for now. I’d rather you all check out the two pieces I had published this week.

Links To New Articles:

First, for the Bay Area Current, I attended a recent Tech Week event on creating responsible tech, and was left confused.

Second, for the Oakland Review of Book, I walked down to my favorite area of Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park to talk about ladybugs and fall.

Also Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this writing, and would LOVE to hear what things you would be interested in seeing me write about in the future. And please share and comment here on these stories and the newsletter!

That’s it for now. Enjoy the rest of Sunday, wherever you are.

I surf not just to experience something so formidable as the ocean but to return to peace in a welcome kind of solitude. I step off the land that holds all my problems, and at least briefly, experience a kind of child-like joy, unadulterated by the ping of a work email, the racing anxious thoughts over some conversation I had the previous night, the din of news, the world of fears made up by considering the future. Surfing is a grounding experience, yes, but also an escape, a getaway from problems. It is for most of us who surf. That’s what I was doing in Santa Cruz visiting my brother, attempting to get further away from my daily life for a moment, to surf, seeking a time where I could slow down.

In the water with my brother, I heard someone say, oh shit as they started to talk. I thought maybe this person was starting a little argument with some other local, maybe someone getting in their way on a wave, some anger made both out of safety and ego — a typical thing in Santa Cruz, like much of California. Turning around I saw the long-boarder who I heard talking paddling toward me. As she paddled, directly beside her was a large, fully grown sea otter. Its head, silver with age and near the size of a cantaloupe. The big furry creature had popped up just beside her, and a near twenty feet away from me. This was closer than I had ever seen one. It was floating about in the canopy of the kelp forest near Pleasure Point, smashing some shell to bits on its belly with a stone whose cracks ricocheted across the water. As the session went on, I’d see it pop up in new spots but in the same general area. At one point some fifteen feet from me I watched as it munched some invertebrate.

Yes, the waves down in Santa Cruz are remarkable, something that is seldom seen on any coastline across the world—consistent point break waves along the cliff edges, full of kelp forests you navigate on the wave as you enjoy your ride. Anyone living in Santa Cruz might say the sight of a sea otter is as commonplace as a sycamore on a city street. But for me, someone who surfs a choppy beach break, seeing the otter was special.

I talked with the woman who I originally heard call out the otter in front of her. She told me that a few days before at Steamer Lane, another point break in town, an otter had attacked someone and stole their surfboard. Two years ago, something similar had happened. Scientists discovered that the otter was pregnant. She was pissed, sick of the surfers in her home.

I wasn’t worried the otter that day would take my board. I’m more nervous seeing a sea lion, fully aware of their penchant for fucking with people, rushing them, knocking them, generally harassing anyone, or anything, they choose. They like to bully people in the water. But if the otter did attack my board, in the moment I would be freaked out of course, but I’d likely understand. This is her home. I am only here for a brief moment like the rest of us, leaving the land to become a momentary disturbance to the animals that live here, as we humans seem to be wherever we newly land.

I could see her frustration—to see the ongoing fiberglass boards coasting atop her home, the knife-like fins of the board slicing through the blades of kelp. It was a nuisance on her home.

Due to fur trapping in the 1800s the southern sea otter, the ones here in California, were once on the brink of extinction, and yet today they thrive in Santa Cruz. This was largely due to the expansion of a colony of otters found off the tumultuous coast of Big Sur, whose danger made it impossible for fur trappers to kill them. From that colony, many of the historical areas are alive and well again, slowly rebounding, one otter pup at a time, in turn ensuring the stability of the kelp forests themselves and the richly diverse ecosystem that so many species rely on—some of which we eat as well. Their saving has been essential in the important ecosystem and carbon sink that is the kelp forests.

For all these years, for the horrors many of their populations have faced across the Pacific, the otters of Santa Cruz thrive, through rough storms, consuming urchin after urchin, their lives down here a marvel to much of the world, living patiently through their close encounter with an extinction entirely of our own, human, doing.

The otters, slowly, are rebounding. Patiently, they wait. They survive.

We enter the water to some degree to disembark from the mores of the land that hold us down. On the water, wealth, style, age, literacy, quality of equipment—it all means nothing. It is the quality of the self to meet the water that matters most. Status dies. And yet, we surfers are not leaving reality, no matter how much we believe this to be true at times. Maybe we leave the land, the job, the fight, the feed, but we don’t leave the world. We, on our fiberglass and foam, still encroach. We enter a new world, as a bumbling interloper, that must respect that this is not our home. This is the Pacific, that we as humans push, most especially today, to its limits of destruction. It’s justified, then, to see us be pushed around by sea lions, or have our board chomped and stolen by a sea otter. This is not our home. I see it as a reminder of this, a soft demand for respect. This is not just a play house for us. The world lives here. And it is only fair that that world, in whatever way, reminds us that we are not the only ones here. It may be our getaway, but like with anywhere else, we must respect, firstly, those that call it home.

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This morning I woke up with the certainty that the fall season is here. My head was finally cool from a cold night, and the sun was only beginning to rise after six. The days have been noticeably shorter and, finally, the cooler air of October is here. Tomorrow, in the Bay Area I hear there might be some proper rain too. And I’m here for it. While the beaches might be cloudy and cold and the nights quietly call us into our homes, I’d say the fog and rain and cool air are a welcome change from all this sunlight which, at least in spirit, seems to clash against the stressors of the news and our world today.

But more than just the cooler air and its fitting feeling to the world at large, the fall often brings with it cooler waters, upwellings as they are called, that bring with them rich nutrients from the lower depths of the ocean. The upwells help to bring important nutrients that zooplankton, a key part of ocean food webs, rely on for sustenance. This upwell brings the return of many species of whales as they pass through or stay and feed off the growing numbers of fish arriving to eat these minuscule creatures.

Last September I went out past the Farallon Islands with a team of NOAA researchers to conduct general ocean climate information. Part of that research was counting the number of whales seen, another part of it was counting and identifying small amounts of plankton the scientists caught and brought with them back to the lab on land. As we boated out from Sausalito to the open ocean, humpbacks breached left and right. It was during one of the most spectacular whale watching runs along the coast of California that I have ever seen. On the shorelines across the Bay Area, people were amazed to watch humpbacks near endlessly cresting the waters. Where I surf in Pacifica, you could see them breaching just beyond the waves. It was truly spectacular.

However, while myself and onlookers marveled at this spectacle of fall, local crabbers were concerned it may portend another late start to one of their most important catches: Dungeness crab. This late start would likely occur due to a concern from the State that there were much higher chances of crab gear tangling and killing these whales. However, with the late start, it could likely jeopardize crabbers livelihoods, along with traditional holiday practices in the Bay Area.

I recently had the chance to speak with some crabbers and state officials about this situation for the amazing agriculture publication Offrange. Below, you’ll find the link to the story, explaining the situation, and why it’s likely that the Dungeness crabbing season, once again, may start well after the holiday season has ended.

Check out my article here!

I HIGHLY recommend going through Offrange’s archive of articles as well. Seriously some really interesting work being presented there, like this great piece by Tonya Abari on the history of Black Oyster Farmers.

Also, check out the most recent article in my column “Meet the Locals” on Bay Area native specie. And while your at it, think about subscribing to the Bay Area Current! They’re doing some really great stuff right now!

That’s it for now! More updates and a lil newsletter next week :)

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The East Coast always seemed to me a place, much more than California, defined by roads, homes dotting every landscape. The East Coast is a place, only slightly more than the West, of lost stories, of dead generations in small colonial towns — a place rubber stamped firmly with the touch of European history. The beginning of conquest is there, homes dotting every area, with few trails going too far away from towns and villages. It’s because of this that whenever I find a small area that is quiet, that is calm, a place that, however false, is less peopled than the rest of it, I am drawn to a feeling in these places of resilience, of thriving lives, despite history. These are in pockets of upstate New York, Vermont, Maine.

My favorite pockets of wild are the smallest spits beside city streets and modern homes. Horseneck beach in Massachusetts or Blackstone Park in Rhode Island both come to mind. However, my favorite is the small shale rocked coves of Beaver Tail State Park on Conanicut Island. Going there in the summer feels like stepping into a small Mediterranean outcropping, something so calmly beautiful that it’s hard to even believe that it is here, in this state.

From the shoreline, choosing your own little cliff-edged cove, you can look out to beyond the mouth of Narragansett Bay to Block Island. The inlets are surrounded by pebbles. Turning and looking up to the cliffs there are shelves of plants, growing on the layers of shale, being fed by what appears to be an endless running stream of ground water. Simply put, it is a place of magic.

I only knew of it in the last couple months living in Rhode Island but I quickly became obsessed with it — how it existed on the edge this highly paved state, mostly unbothered. But for many in Rhode Island, it is already known a magical place. For the Narragansett people native to this place, many lived and found their final rest beside it. Today, it’s where people go to lay in the beach, to stand on the edge of sharp rocks and fish or, as I saw most recently, snorkel along the edge of the island. It’s a rare kind of beauty for this area, one that feels mostly wild. People know this. It’s why Mikey proposed to Rachael there.

I visited Beaver Tail the day after Rachael and Mikey’s wedding. We, Matt, Sahal, and Matt’s sister Grace, drove out there, the day warm, but the sun clear and bright. Like visiting Providence, I was worried that the beauty of this place was something that I maybe made up. But as we arrived in the parking lot, sitting in the grass to eat before heading to the water, it all was still there, the same old beauty. I kept thinking about Racheal and Mikey, how this was the place for the beginning and continuation of their love. I can’t think of a better place on this side of the country to begin a life with someone. How lucky they were, I thought, as we walked down the trail, finding our own little cove.

We sat for a while, quietly basking in the sun, wandering around, until we all got into the water. Floating in the low tide, sea lettuce between us and the shore as we were stirred around and the crab pots bobbed beyond us. From where we floated the edges of shale bedrock on the shore, jutting sharply up, looked like large teeth coming out of the ocean to bite the earth. Here, you are able to forget what world you are a part of, how close the concrete laden towns of Rhode Island are to you. In that sense it’s a place that holds hope. It’s a simple kind of magic, one that regardless is not easily found. But it can be, if one looks.

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LOOKING FOR YOUR INPUT!

Thanks so much for reading everyone! It truly means so much that y’all check in every time I write these little stories.

That being said, I was curious if anyone here has anything they’d like me to write about? I’m pretty curious what y’all might like to see me explore! It could be anything! Want me to write about Q-Tips? Want me to write about Q-Tip? Want me to write about the politics of Q-Tip? Or maybe something else completely unrelated to Q-Tips?

Please let me know! Very curious to hear your thoughts y’all. Just comment below or reply to this email.

Thanks!

There is always a lingering fear that what I remember of the past, what my memories convince myself of, do not exist. I’ve fooled myself plenty of times that the past, and even for that matter the present, cannot be seen with absolute certainty. Somewhere, back there, memories are often distorted, made into a false, and much more rosy story. Do I do this to cope with a past that in its experience was all too challenging? Or do I do this because it is so much harder to remember everything of the past and that, for some reason (likely luck) my thoughts are geared toward the warmer tones of the past? Likely the answer is both.

When I left Rhode Island in 2018 I remember telling people three things of which I was, and still am, certain — that I was glad to be back in California, that I love Providence and could see myself there again, and that my second or third favorite beach on the planet is just outside Jamestown, Rhode Island. All of these things, some eight years later, are in no doubt today true. They seem to be facts that my recollections of the past can stand on, can hold to now without fear that I made it up. But that wasn’t so until this past August, when I was back on the east coast for my friend Rachael’s wedding.

I looked forward to returning to Providence, to see the old restaurant I worked at, visit one of my most treasured used book stores, Paper Nautilus, and get a sense of the place again. Had it grown or diminished in my imagination as I had feared?

Arriving on the Amtrak train from Westerly, Rhode Island, stepping out to the already hot and humid morning air it seemed as though little had changed. I walked downtown and stopped at Bolt coffee, beside the old restaurant I used to work at, Figidini. The cafe, not Bolt coffee, was new to me, having moved from their small hotel lobby space into this old bakery spot. Sitting at the cafe in downtown, yes it felt new, but the core feeling of Providence was still present — the kind yet rough face of the city, an image built by a vital confidence of everyday working people mixed in with the academics and artistic intellectuals of Brown and RISD just up the street on the hills of the east side.

Leaving the cafe I walked over to the west side to meet up with my old roommate, Alex, at his apartment. I dropped off my things and we headed out to the city — Alex to get things to make eggplant parmesan later, and I to wander. We split ways as I crossed the river and began popping in and out of the places on the east side where I frequented for the single year I lived there. Arriving on the college thoroughfare, Thayer Street, I saw Tealuxe, where Rachael, Grace, and Ava worked until its closure years ago, the windows covered by butcher paper, still and empty.

Walking up the hill looking for something to eat, I stopped at the gyro spot, Pockets, a place I always admired for their speed of service, and the immaculate stations where they cooked and served the food, always looking as though they had just opened, not finally finished a hundred person rush. I ordered my falafel and gyro and sat down.

Sitting in the sterile air conditioned spot eating falafel, looking at the students and workers coming in for their lunch, I quietly remembered how I often felt so lost living here — how alone I believed myself to be back then, out of place in this peculiar New England city. There were moments, many really, of good times, but mostly, I remembered then, how I just wanted to be back in California. I even almost backed out of our lease entirely to go back home — but was, as I see it now, luckily convinced to stay. There was a loss, a sore and healing wound of grief I was working through at the time, and all I really wanted then was to be home, be around a long personal history and the comfort of an all too familiar world. But instead I was in a new city, with a culture I could only grasp at understanding. Returning, I was seeing that, maybe, Providence wasn’t the easiest place for me at that time in my life.

I had forgotten all of this. I had supplanted it with nothing save all the good memories. Maybe it was the taste of the dry falafel, or the sight of old restaurants and stores made for teenagers playing at adulthood on this street, but the memory of that feeling returned — the beauty of the place and the remembrance of that solitude that held me there, desperate for California. The loneliness had really been here but was not something I wanted to hold onto in my memories of my time there. I let it slip away, rewrote it to be a beautiful history as I wished I had respected it as such back then.

Today, however, as I’m more able to work with and assuage my own feelings, I do believe those happier memories of Rhode Island. Yes, it was a rough time, and the struggle with my own feelings around that time blanketed over me, but that blanket only served as a means to neglect the better aspects of my life outside, there and then. Because I did get stoned in the woods with my friends. We made music, music videos, wrote, wandered the city, explored the state. I left the restaurant and worked as a state park naturalist. I met kind people in Lincoln, Rhode Island, like my pen pal Nancy. The good was there and though I tried to convince myself at the time of how rough it was, the joy of that time couldn’t be lost through the years.

How I structured those memories before going back to Providence was really a fiction of my time there — that I was completely and totally happy, which has never been wholly true for any era of my life so far. And yet, that fiction didn’t spread to the city itself. While I neglected that sadness, that longing to be back in California and the exhaustion of that far flung feeling, returning to Providence wasn’t a shock — it just felt like returning to Providence. My love for it, and my memories of living there didn’t reshape the image of the city itself. In fact, it hadn’t changed at all. And so, maybe my memory does serve me well at times.

That day, after walking all over the city (which is totally possible in Providence), Alex, Grace, Rachael, and I hung out at Alex’s apartment. Alex shared wine, served us the eggplant parm he made, and we talked. We caught up after Rachael’s wedding, rambled, shared the gossip of our lives. I remembered the place where Rachael, Alex, Matt, Katherine, and I lived back then. How Alex loved to cook large meals for us, how he and I would go to the wine shop to try to make sense of different wines, how we’d all get stoned and watch Sailor Moon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Sitting with Alex, Grace, and Rachael that night I felt like we were back there, sitting in our strange duplex on Angell street, smoking and laughing, rambling, with nothing much to do. I could feel there, in Alex’s apartment that night sharing a rare moment together, how our lives have and haven’t changed, and how our affections and admiration seemed so unwavering. We still, after all this time passed, care so much for each other. And now, more than the last time I left Providence and my east coast homies, I miss both even more.

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Matt warned me that a storm was coming. I didn’t think much of it, mostly forgetting about thunderstorms and how dark and grey the clouds had been for the whole bus ride. I couldn’t focus on much of anything on the bus. I meant to finish some work while I was heading from Providence to New York City but the combination of the driver’s dramatic lane changes and stops paired with a seat that swung around like a piece of a pinball machine, I instead had to close my eyes and fight off the car sickness. Eventually, when the bus pulled into Port Authority, all I could feel was a great sense of relief. I could get outside. Though I was walking into the dense humid heat and the strange maze that is Port Authority Bus Terminal, the unknown stenches and thick air were more than welcome. I headed for the subway, texting Shana, who I was meeting for dinner with Matt. As I said, I already forgot Matt’s warning.

When I lived in Providence, Shana came to visit Matt and I. It was summer and the swollen hot heat of the East Coast was already brimming, too much for me and my love of the arid California heat. As Shana arrived at our house, the rain started to dump harder than it already had been, exploding quickly into thunder. Matt and I had been exploring the wood near our house and water to see the streams at the time, seeing how quickly they might overflow and flood with water. We asked if Shana wanted to go to the stream in the rain. Smiling curiously, already wet from her walk out of the car into the house, she said sure. We got some clothes on that would be easier to dry and ran out in the storm, down the street toward the Seekonk River, up the pond to the spillway. The water was already gushing over the top in a kind of fury. All I remember, drenched in rain, was my astonishment seeing so much water coming down so quickly.

In New York I met up with Shana near her work on the other side of Prospect Park from Matt. She was easy to spot, with an umbrella for the light rain that just began, her backpack, new orange glasses, and a tote full of t-shirts, an ordinary sight of her. Shana is a hard worker and someone that rarely, from the outside, has a spare lazy moment. Shana is the kind of person that emphatically and gladly says yes to most anything, even when she may not be able to make it work easily. And so, very often, you’ll see her around, hands full.

The plan was to walk through Prospect Park to the restaurant to meet Matt. We turned a corner to go into a bodega and grab a drink and an umbrella. Just as I punched the umbrella the lighting began to hit, cracking through the street so loud it must have been striking only a few blocks away.

We stared at the downpour from the overhang, in awe of the thunder and shocked at the how quickly the rain came down, laughing at the lighting strikes, smiling with the other people left stranded here in this brief moment by the rains. Deciding that the rain won’t let up and we might as well just run over to the subway two blocks away, I remember us, in Providence, nearly seven years ago, staring down at the swollen stream, in awe of the currents and of the weather.

As Shana and I made our way to the restaurant, we got soaked, but not too bad. It wasn’t cold rain so it wasn’t so frustrating. It was just a fun moment, one of many on the east coast, where the stupefying heat of summer turns into a torrent, and thunder cracks. It felt almost like a return, not just to Providence, but to another possibility or prospect, even, of a life I could have lived here, enjoying small adventures like this with the people I seldom see in this giant chaotic fun mess of a city that is New York.

Sitting at home today in Oakland, the clouds are brushing in and out of the day, and the sounds of the jets above meet the speeding cars on 15th street. The days are cool, refreshing, but hardly feel close to what most summers feel like out here. We’ll have to wait for those heatwaves in October, when the East Bay, momentarily turns to summer and we can pretend, for one or two brief weeks, that maybe summer did happen this year.

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UPDATES

This is very late notice but if you’re free tonight come to Et Al Gallery in San Francisco for the release of San Francisco Review of Whatever’s second volume. I have a little profile about the Sonoma exhibition space Escolar. It starts at 6pm. But check out their website to find where you can buy a copy. They’ve already published some amazing writing in there!

ALSO! Go check out Bay Area Current Magazine! My sister and I are doing a short “Get to Know the Locals” column about the native species in the area. Her drawings are awesome. The magazine has been doing some amazing reporting too! Check it out, there’s a lot of interesting stuff on there already.

When I have the chance, I sit in my kitchen, in the little breakfast nook beside the sink, and listen to everything outside. The other day, I heard the chipping of a California towhee outside my window amid the whir of a frantic pigeon taking flight. The sound of the highway was softened by its distance. Then quiet returned. I can’t see the sky but I know it’s cloudy, and I know that it’s as gloomy as yesterday. As the rest of this July has been in the Bay Area. The quiet breaks. A car speeds past my building, quickly leaving this corner of the street to its peace. This is the white noise of my home.

Eventually during these mornings I’ll have to leave the seat in the kitchen and move over to my desk to begin looking at emails, charts, data sets, read random yet related articles and texts, frantically returning to my calendar, calling source something, and then I’ll get out of my seat to head into work at the coffee shop or run errands, sometimes go to the beach to surf, and suddenly all the hush of the morning will have vanished into work, responsibility, the trudging of time. And with it, in the rush, the day will be done. But I’ll at least have had that quiet morning.

This practice, if I can really call it that, of lazily listening to the sounds outside, is something I’ve done, to varying degrees, since I started to enjoy the practice of writing. With a pause in thought, a blank and motionless page in front of me, I found, and still find, the joy of quiet so relieving as I start to get a hold of where it is I want to begin. It’s not explicitly a meditation, but it feels akin to it usually.

These quiet moments are necessary, even if I don’t have a free morning. At some point in the day I need to unplug, stop doing, and zone out and listen. I’ll sit down somewhere, more often than not in my car, hopefully close to water, and listen to what is going on around me: to neighbors, the calls of oystercatchers and crows, cars on streets, construction, engines revving, passing music—the world moving about with a dedicated purpose that, when listened to seems so quietly insignificant, yet unstoppable, like ants walking determinedly in their lines.

Sounds might be the most grounding part of my life. Sounds in their simplicity have a way of quickly returning me to the present. For those of us able to hear, we often take it for granted, only thinking of it when someone talks or a song is played. But sound is such a defining feature of our lives, and seems to impact so much of our moods. Sound is the texture of a city— the loud and overwhelming streets of New York do not sound like those of San Francisco or London. They are loud like a city but are not so cut and paste. And so too with wild places, the stunning quiet of dunes in Oceano is not the same as the deserts of the Inyo National Forest. The clouded mountain forests of Oregon don’t have the same birds, or tenor as the foot hills of the Sierra, though at times some could mistake the two for each other. The high alpine sierra is almost a sharper quiet than its lowland desert counterparts in the valleys below. Each place is made of the sounds of those that inhabit them, not just its topography, and to pay attention to the sounds whenever one is, regardless of knowledge, brings one into a closer understanding of a place than using just our vision.

Obviously aside from how loud something is, music, and the history of prejudice of accents and dialects (which we find plenty of bigotry within), the everyday sounds of white noise that we hear were rarely prescribed a judgement, a way in which to understand them as being good or bad, as having a value outside of just what they are. A sound, in our lives, is often just a sound, and nothing more notable than that. We can’t really put much quality to it, aside from saying something is too loud.

A crow called as I sat the other day. I know people who hate their calls, but from this distance, how it disperse into the cloudy air from many blocks over, is only an identifier to me. There is a crew here, the sound tells me. A crow call may be loud, but there are few connotations to the sound. The bird itself, for some, can have meaning and judgements, but not to the sound in and of itself. The crow, however, of course holds many meanings and connotations. Unlike our cultural view of objects as they appear, like our cultural takes on skinny jeans or baggy pants, sounds are something more easy to engage with without judgement. They exist in brief moments, vibrations passing through my auricles into my eardrums, turned into sparks of synapses and made into the experience we call sound. Sounds occur only in an instant, quickly drowned out by other noises in their wake. This is why I love a free morning when I have one. I can sit in my quiet apartment, listening to the day begin, having little more ability to get annoyed or upset as each sound enters the din of other sounds, reminding me in a simple way that other things, far beyond me, are tireless in their happening.

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I recently read Thomas Merton’s first novel, My Argument with the Gestapo. Merton, a Trappist monk, wrote the novel in 1941, just at the beginning of World War II. Exploring his imagined view of bombed-out buildings, the odd quiet in the streets of London, and the far-flung check points across countrysides in England and France, we see Merton’s eponymously named narrator explore the Europe of his childhood. It is a soft story, one filled by the narrator’s curiosity of what this war has made of his home. While Merton never fought in the war, many of the recollections of the narrator's past are based on his own childhood, creating space for Merton to wonder what might have been happening to his home during the Nazi bombings. Dream-like, he blends his imaginings of this world, and how his friends have sold themselves to the efforts of a violent war, through multiple languages and odd conversations with the people that he meets.

When the narrator meets friends in London, they ask him what he’s doing there. “I’m writing a diary,” he usually says. The officers he meets don't trust him. He clearly must be a spy, they think. And so, spies follow him. Officials in the war effort, along with police officers, ask what his nationality is and he says he has none. He shares his American passport, but still, he remains firm that this is not his nation. Everyone is suspicious of this pedantic character, unsatisfied with his disinterest in participating in the violence of the war.

Through the narrator's mundane encounters, Merton is attempting to point to the lunacy of national identity, which he saw more as a tool of wartime propaganda than any true cultural tether. It is also an expression of his own fervent aversion to violence and disdain for human pain with his care and empathy for humanity — his pacifism defining much of his writing. The book pushes us to wonder if all this bloody destruction could truly be for the better of the world?

While at the time of his writing this in 1941 the public knew little of the Holocaust in Germany, Merton’s interest in pacifism was rooted in his certainty that to kill another person is to believe they are, in some respect, inferior to you. To kill and be at war was then to delude yourself into thinking you were somehow superior to those you wanted to kill. This, ultimately, is where his push back against the destructive nature of war comes from.

Yet, is there hope in destruction? It’s easy to look at that question and, in the abstract, say yes. With destruction is the reformation of what was left over. There is hope in destruction. There will be new ways to celebrate and amend our realities, tethering them to new ideas. Out with individualism in with community? In the toppling of regimes there is the prospect of alteration — like getting a tear in your jeans, there’s the chance for a new attempt at mending. In the abstract, and in truth, it is fair to say there is hope in destruction.

However, to arrive at that hope through war is to forget to a degree the pain of that destruction. Merton, I believe and it is made clear in this book, understood how much this world needed to change in order to provide care for more people. A truly empathetic person, open to various ideas and world-views throughout his life, especially eastern philosophy, in My Argument with the Gestapo, Merton shares the beginnings of his own stand against war as a means toward a new future, perhaps tainting that future’s prospect with its own disregard for humanity with the act of mass killing.

Reading this book, it made me wonder how traumas are left over after war for the newer society to fix. Historians, writers, and artists after WWII were trying to come to an understanding of this nonsensical brutality. What was to be made of the blood, famines, sexual violence, all the horrors of war? Why did this all happen? How can anything triumph if we lead ourselves toward a new future through violence that made the past? This is a genuine question that has never been fully answered after WWII, and one that still haunts our society in many ways still. We have not fully faced this trauma, or we are beginning to try to forget it, at the least.. Maybe the truth is that those in power, almost sociopathic, believe that’s just an antiquated, narrow-minded, and unrealistic way to look at the world. That violence, to those in control, is just a necessary part of so-called civilization.

Reading this book today I was reminded that nationalism has only been around for so long. Nation-states have only been an idea since the 19th century. Through My Argument with the Gestapo, I am reminded that nationalism, the thing that follows nation-states, is just a device for control rather than something tangible. It’s one of those ideas, like individualism, that has permeated our world so thoroughly we forget that it is still just an idea.

Merton reminds us that we don't have to believe in national violence. That it's important we don’t. That borders can be one of the most dangerous ideas. He was raised in England, France, lived in Bermuda, and elsewhere, but never thought of a place as his nation. His homes, maybe, but not his nation. Just the other week, bombs were dropped on Iran by the US and Israel, as Israel continues its unrelenting bombing of thousands of people under their control in Gaza. All of this violence and unneeded destruction in a time when we are closer to climate collapse than ever before, is done under the premise of national interest. I’m unsure if citizens in any of these places would really want a war at all.

What is the place you call home? Is it a shape? Is it the land? Is it a body of water? We are tied to families, neighborhoods, towns. But we are not nations. We are communities. We make our home in cities, on mountainsides, in valleys, beside rivers, or coasts. We live in small towns where we can’t stand how we all know too much about each other. Belonging to a nation is to belong to an idea of home, but not a real home. I’ll support a national sports team, but beyond that, I’ll settle with calling my home the Bay Area. This is where I have spent most of my life. This is the place I call home.

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In the summertime we took our sleeping bags outside, laying single file with our dad in the middle. As we slowly started to doze off, he pointed out different stars and constellations that passed beyond the wide redwood tree that took over most of the night sky. One of those nights, I remember the smell of skunk, and the thrilling feeling of having to navigate it, of having to playfully escape the skunk that might stick onto us for hours or possibly days. I never found out how long the smell could last, luckily.

Sometimes we’d actually go camping, driving east to Lake Tahoe to swim in that lake's cold snowmelt waters. One summer, I remember joyously screaming on the shore as we huddled under wet towels as rains fell on us and thunder began to roar. We’d all yell at the sound of each strike of thunder, laughing at all the excitement.

When the creek was shallow in our backyard, or the stream had completely vanished in the midst of the dry summer air, my siblings and I would take our Beanie Babies or our Mutants (action figures we destroyed in order to reassemble with hot glue) to the creek to make small puppet type movies. I can't remember what they were about, but the setting, the dappled light of the giant bay tree, the short grasses beside the dry-rock stream, were a perfect background. I remember my siblings doing a lot of work with fishing wire in order to have the characters move.

All of this happened roughly between the ages of three and eleven. There are so many more memories like this, of hot days, cool nights, idle time and myself, and whoever was around, making the most of time as much as we could. And it’s easy to idealize these times. The sleepy pace of how each moment, in my memory, moves, almost like watching some faded and lovely home movie from an old miniDV cassette. As I remember it, the streets were so quiet, disturbed only by our voices as we wandered, playing ding dong ditch on friend’s houses, searching for new skate spots in our little suburban world. It was a playful time simply because there wasn’t much to do except figure out how to entertain ourselves. Maybe because these days each moment feels to some degree filled with tasks, the drudgery of just being alive today, that I think of these childhood moments, and impulsively make it into something far more ideal than it really was—to have free time. To be bored.

But that’s the power of nostalgia to bring us into a world that never really existed.

Remembering those nights we spent on the deck were lovely, but surrounding them, I remember my siblings hitting me, me hitting them. I remember the sound of my parents bickering or fighting. I remember the foreboding quiet that always seemed to surround the dining room table. The feeling that, for some reason, suddenly, the night or one of us could turn into a tirade, as if the room itself had the power to possess any of us into fear and anger. The quiet anxiety I felt in that room the way we all must have felt it. It was something that never really left that space until recently.

I remember spending so much time wandering the streets, the creek, or when we got the internet, going online to play games, in some way to get away from that dining room. I was trying to escape the quiet anxiety and trouble that seemed to emanate from home. We didn’t want to get into fights, so we found other things to do. We sought out any little space to play.

We forget these harder to admit moments because, well, they are harder to talk about, and harder to find others to hear. Without them, our pasts would be beautiful. They would be easy and simple and there would be little to worry over. Spring could just become a time full of flowers. Summer would be just long days and cool nights. The old days would become good old days. My birthday would never have had a twinge of pain. Then again, that’s the power of rumination. Childhood was a time of pain and joy. Resting too heavily on either end distorts what it maybe actually was.

And yet, those moments of joy and play were beautiful, important to look back to in order to remember what it is I might’ve lost or gained in the time since then. There were other harder to face things in my childhood but still I’m okay with who I am, because of and despite those memories. I look back at making those videos with my siblings with pride. I loved the peace and quiet we found together as we slept outside. Those trips to Lake Tahoe taught me how to truly love the burning dry heat of my home state. Those moments are right for me to look back on with joy. It only becomes nostalgia when we forget the rest of the facts, creating a story of the past through its own erasure.

More of than not, recently I have been looking back at childhood with more longing than dread, forgetting that not all of it was so pleasant. Even when I was that young, when I didn’t have the stress of paying bills, or any concept of the greater troubles of this world, many of them created or enforced by the country which I call home, nothing was really that easy. But, lately, I’ve noticed I’ve started to begin to believe that maybe it was.

I bring up all of this because, well, I’ve been experiencing a desire to neglect the whole of the past, and by doing so, a more full story of my life. Many of us do this, and you see it online a lot lately, with people worried about the death of social media and the internet through AI slop1 and then longing for a time before, when the internet wasn’t overrun by bots. I make a perfect past in my head because the present is too troubling to face. The rise of fascism in the United States and across the world is growing, companies are taking on more and more power in political spheres which is slowly eroding people’s ability to just afford the simple things in their lives while exploiting even more people in poorer countries across the world, and by extension killing the planet, while no politician is willing or able to actually change a single thing that might positively impact the planet or our lives.

So I return to nostalgia, and the freedom of being a child. It’s an easier story to fall for, one with less work, less apocalyptic fear. But I’d like to also remember my childhood dining room the same way I’d like to remember that the internet has always been a treacherous place for ideas.

The past is a story we choose to tell. Stories will leave out facts or ideas for the clarity of the narrative, to ensure that we see the throughline, whether we are telling that story to ourselves or to others willing to listen. Dwelling in a simpler past, whether that’s a past with less of an online world, or a past free from financial hardships, always feels easier than contending with the present. To not contend with this present moment and to hide away from it by longing for a past that inevitably never really existed, is to forget that the future, just as the past is made in the present. The future is inherently unknown, but it can be shifted by our actions today. We will be living in some future, though whose future is not always easy to see. Reminiscing, or ruminating, is to hide from where things are today, where they might go, and who might take us there. Things can change for the better well-being of the planet and people.

And yet, we can look to the past, with clearer eyes, and see other paths forward. The shutdown of the United States for the pandemic in 2020, as Taylor Lorenz recently said in a video essay2, gave us a glimpse at the possibility of a more equitable future. The 1960s and 70s in the United States showed us that, within educated collectives, we have the ability to experiment and play with the prospect of better futures. Looking to the past is important, but making it into something it wasn’t, that is the danger. We can use it to help create new futures, but to use it as a balm on the present is to forget that a better future can be created. I’m still trying to figure out how to help with that vision.

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This is always what spring brings—a moment when things burst to life only to return to a quiet cold or rainy day, bringing us back begrudgingly into a sense that we still haven't quite left winter. That teasing is as much a part of spring as the flowers and the sound of new songbirds in forests. The sun keeps me excited but the return to cold days like this makes me even more hopeful for spring.

Still, with or without the rain, I need to be outside. As I run around the Hugo Chavez Park, I’ve been stopping for a moment each run to see if I can spot the burrowing owls that live there. A friend showed me them a few months ago and since then, I’ve gone to see them at least once a week.

But, lately as the weather has begun to heat up, they seem to have left. I couldn't spot them anywhere. And today, on my last run, again, they were nowhere to be seen.

Burrowing owls are often migratory birds, with the East Bay the last little enclave at the southern end of their year-round range. Here, in Berkeley, they don’t stay, but would rather fly south, maybe to the prairies of the Carizzo plains, I imagine, to admire the wildflowers, or further still to some little deserts near the San Gabriels to feel the arid heat of Southern California or Mexico. They don’t stay here, for me or other urban bird nerds to admire. They leave, flying south to join in the journeys that bring about new life. The whole deal of spring, they are a part of it just as much as the flowers.

But it’s sad to see them go, flying all the way south, further away. I complain to myself that I have to stay here, that I have to work so much, that I, in order to feel sane, have to run, that I don’t have much time to take in the flowers this spring. That I, by choice or not, must stay inside more than I ever really would wish.

The burrowing owls, for the past few months, have been a bit of a balm. I go to see them, on a run or not, just to get away from the house, from my phone, from the news. I look for them, walking slowly, admiring them with so many others, because they are there, in their little haven beside the water, safe from us onlookers, ignorant of our human world just as much as we are ignorant of theirs. Coming to stare at them I always wonder if they ever hunt the ground squirrels that surround them. Do they have small neighborly disputes? Are their eyes also peeled in the day for red-tailed hawks? For great-horned owls in the evening?

Wondering about them, their little lives which no doubt are richer than I can imagine, was a way to mark my days and weeks, to neglect just for a second DOGE, the enshitification of the government, and what that might mean for my life and finding better, more stable, income in my future.

So much has changed for me since this past spring, but ever since the summer ended and my friend showed me them, the burrowing owls have been consistent, a steady presence in my life in a time when everything has seemed to shift into new journeys without much warning, leaving no time for my own reflection. The world, along with my own little life here in the Bay, has been in a constant state of whiplash. And the burrowing owls have been there, a little critter that, despite the changes in the world, despite news, despite the people that stopped to ogle them, like myself, the burrowing owls were here, content to stand on top of their rocks, surrounded by the California ground squirrels that lazed about the wet grasses.

But they have finally left, as many things here do in the middle of spring. It is what so many things do and what makes spring a joy to some, and a horror to others. It’s full of so much change. The winds shift along with the rain patterns, the temperature. The color of the ground lightens as specks of color grow from green fields. The quickening quiet of night is superseded by long drawn out clouds and shadows, marking across the fields and homes where we live. It’s the change that we love, or the change that we hate, about spring.

That sounds like a platitude, and it is. But I also think of it as the thing that is most consistently true, the thing that comforts me in the midst of all this chaos. As the days of the human world grow darker, it seems important to cling to this, this one small thing as a reminder that yes, I live in a world that is a world. I don’t just live in a world of stories, or terrors of narratives, but I live in a world that can have a months-long period devoted to flowers, to breeding animals, to growth. That I literally need this world, and because of it I can survive despite long months of winter.

Because, in that other world, the world of ideas and narratives, the world where this essay exists in your head and mine, the changes are harder to see but are no less important. The spring, the seasons’ shifts, they may look different year to year, Millenia to Millenia, but that time when things go from cooler to warmer when the angle of the sun makes days grow longer, it will return. Just as the burrowing owls will return. Just as now in the woods bordering Oakland, I’ve been hearing the sound of black-headed grosbeaks, a sign that while it's cold and is going to rain soon, spring is here.

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There's an onion growing in my kitchen. It sits just above my fridge on the shelf with some other, slowly fading vegetables. I think it’s beautiful, this still life— the onion slumps on its side and lets itself turn and rise upwards, seeking the seldom found sunlight of my apartment. Behind it is a yam starting to sprout too. The composition is nice. The reason it got there, not so much.

There are many things, many reasons that I could mention, excuses I could make as to why I let these veggies get to this point. The first and simplest is time. I don’t have much time to cook these days. Just as with the writing of this newsletter, finding choice moments to write, let alone want to share, has been just so difficult lately. I can blame work, my jobs and random assignments I’ve been getting from editors. I can blame bad time management and the distractible tendencies of my person, bouncing from thing to thing like a rubber ball on rough concrete.

I can blame a lack of imagination. I can blame that, for some reason, when I come home from a full and exhausting day the last thing I want to do is cook. I want to lie down in my bed, find some way to turn off my brain. I want to be enveloped by silence, by nothing. I want total quiet. I don’t want to cook something because I don’t know where to start. I am a good cook and love making dinner for myself, but there has been something, perhaps similar to the wall put in front of my mind when it comes to writing anything new lately, that I don’t know where the right place is to begin.

Maybe I should have just started with the onion itself, diced it up, let it cook, and have the smells lead me to the next decision. But instead, I let them sit in the basket.

I don’t have inspiration to cook, but instead a beautiful still life, an example of how frozen I have felt, returning home, unable to push myself to make a meal. I remember what my past self was really up to as the onion grew. I was working, was surfing, was resting. I was trying not to watch the news. I was trying to write a newsletter, pitch an essay, trying to see my friends. I was attempting to live his life somewhat normally. But when I went to cook, or to write, not much would move me.

I was, yes, mostly just lacking in imagination. Going online, basically anywhere, listening to the news on podcasts or the radio, reading peoples hot takes, the reality of this country has been settling into me. The horror of what this current administration is doing, what it portends for us domestically and the world at large as it co-signs even more fervently fascism across the world. Staring at all this, as a person that doesn’t have too much time to contribute to fighting back, is all so overwhelming. As a writer, I want to stay something, anything, that might in the slightest bit be helpful to anyone interested in reading this because, well, fascism is coming to America. That is no hyperbole.

But how do you fight it?

As someone deeply invested in learning about politics, but with little experience in activism, this is what has kept me, for the past thee or so months, locked in a state of stasis. I felt frozen, staring at the onions growing above my fridge.

I would go online, seeking ideas from people whose opinions I care about. I would try to find new ideas to inspire. But with each search, with each new idea found, it just became another addition to the din of the media; it was simply one more piece in the proverbial trash heap of shit political content, hot takes, and slop. In other words, it made me all the more muddled.

Still, I have no idea where to start—what it is that I can do, at least, in this very moment. I know I can write and so maybe my contribution will be in written form. Honestly, I do not know, because I am uncertain what my capacities are, and what will be the most useful way for me to push back.

So far, I have learned one thing through this frozen feeling, and that’s to listen. I’m not talking about listening to online political pundits, or the news: too much of either will leave you like me, staring at onions. To listen, I mean to keep an ear out in your community, the place where you live, and see what things there may be for you to do. To keep listening. If you are still uncertain what it is to do, I don’t think you should worry too much about it just yet. In time you’ll find your space, your capacity to contribute. Each of us has unique values, interests, and skills that are vital to political change. Finding the best way for you to use them, as we all must within these four years, is vital. But rushing yourself to take action immediately when you don’t know what that means may only leave you feeling even more uncertain, mayb deplete you before you’ve even begun.

The onion is still in the basket above my fridge, and I know I have to put it into the compost. Although I find it beautiful, it has to go, to leave room for an onion I will actually eat. So, once I write this piece, I will stand up, walk to the kitchen, bring the onion outside, with the rest of the compost, uncertain of what the next meal I cook may be, but all the more ready to receive whatever inspiration comes my way.

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If anyone has any practical tips for navigating some of these thoughts, please share below, or email me! Would really love to hear more from people more active than I am.

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I’m sitting in a library as I write this and a man sits beside me, looking at the newspaper in front of him. He is humming the words as he reads to himself, his heavy airy breath sighing out each half a word almost like he’s reciting some little piece of magic hidden in the news. Everyone else, it seems, is staring at a computer or their phone. But in the quiet accompanied by this man’s humming, there is something refreshing.

I couldn’t think for a while. Still can’t do it well. Not really. Slowly, it’s returning. The past month or so when I’ve gone to my notebook or my computer to write I just come up empty on what to say. All has already been said. Or, rather, too much is being said and not enough out in the world is really being done. At first I thought that it was just social media and the news, the cyclone of shit being thrown our direction by every outlet possible, combined with incendiary takes that read or view more as ranting gasps than they do actual thoughts. I was becoming consumed by all the overwhelm and wanted to just turn the screen off. As I’m sure a lot of us have, I just wanted to tune out, disappear from the noise. Not really hide from what’s going on, but see it at a safe distance. Be able to think about it, maybe understand why all this is happening better.

The other day I left my car to get smogged. The mechanic told me they had to fix a fuel hose and that it might take all day. By mid afternoon they said they got the wrong part, and so I had to pick it up tomorrow. I was without my car, didn’t have my headphones and had recently deleted all my social media and browsers from my phone, and was wandering around Berkeley, a near ten miles from my home.

I walked a mile or so to get a very mediocre lunch that was luckily filling. I hit up a friend to hang, and walked to their house and wandered the neighborhood. Slowly the day was starting to fade and it was time to head back home. The Ubers and Lyfts which I rarely ever take were too expensive since it was rush hour. So, I decided to just walk towards home until I grew tired.

The sun faded into a bright orange as I made my way up and then through downtown Berkeley. As the night took over and I walked through all the people going to and from work, classes, talking amongst themselves or speed walking while staring at their phones, I started to take notice of all the sounds. Water was falling in a now quiet building sight, echoing on clean concrete as cars sped by, people gossiped with friends, or just sighed as they stared at their phone, waiting for the lights to turn green.Slowly, I made my way to the border of Oakland, just watching everything moving and happening around me.

The world, like the news and social media rightly points out, is turning in a terrifying direction, and I can see it in Oakland, this fear for the world. I realized on that walk that, really, what I had been missing in all that online stress, was the world that was actually in front of me. Regardless of if that world, the one beyond the screen where I’m writing this, is doing well or not, that is my Terra Firma. Nothing else. And if there is anything to be done to help my world, it will be done there first.

As I thought about all this, free from my phone, my legs started to tire. I looked at the Uber prices and, finally, they were affordable. I got one and made it, finally, home.

It was serene to not have anything to stare at on that walk. I guess that’s something that I keep returning to in these newsletter, that I enjoy the world when I am more presently living in it, and not on some screen. I think a lot of us feel this way. Whenever I bring up issues around my phone use, most everyone I talk to seems to agree that they want to be on their phone less. There is a general longing for time away from media as it exists today. I notice it in the jokes I hear people make, the wishes people talk about. I even see it on my feeds when I check Instagram on my computer. It’s everywhere, in small cracks. A large amount of people just don’t want to be this plugged in all the time. They don’t want to be addicted to their phones, or beholden to these tech behemoths. And if these companies make their money off our attention, the less we give it to them, the more we strain their power.

We need space, especially amidst all the stress and terror of this world, especially if we want to have the energy to actually do anything about it. That’s why, turning away from your phone or social apps in general is not really tuning out, but rather a small resistance to the tech companies power while also leaving space for your own thinking, your own boredom—room for you to live your own life with your own trivial thoughts. I’m not talking about anything edgy really. I’m talking about thinking. It’s that simple.

I’m stepping, slowly but surely, further away from my phone. And with each step I feel my head, my self, coming back. I feel the world around me more as the thing that consumes me, like this man humming to himself in the library.

I hear the rifling of pages, the tapping of my keyboard, the ominous and undefined drone of something in the library and I feel that uncomfortable, sticky warmth in the room full of all the people in here, so strangely quiet, almost completely silent save me tapping, and this man’s humming breath. This is where I am.

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