Notes Round-Up, July & August, 2025

Kinda sorta getting it back

What follows are sporadic observations made between July 14^th, 2025 and August 25^th. Not quite nailing the monthly thing, nor am I consistently engaging in this habit. Frankly, teaching high school the past two weeks has worn me the hell out!

But, bits and pieces are finding their way through. Hope you enjoy the little window into what catches my eyes and mind.

July 14^th:

· Two Arctic foxes sitting motionless on a white background on the corner TV in a sausage and cocktail bar in Carytown. A friend works here, and he’s designed a pop-up menu for the day. One of his friends, from Kansas, has designed mocktails to accompany.

July 19^th:

· A young man sits at a table in Riverbend Café in Church Hill, sketching faces in blue colored pencil.

· I ordered a Coca-Cola espresso drink, like this iced, cherry-flavored monstrosity. It’s very weird, and kind of bad. I will not be experimenting with that kind of beverage again, methinks.

· A really cut shirtless dude out walking his dog. I’m pretty straight, but he was outrageously hot.

· A very friendly and very cute little gray and white dog with a scrunch face. Friggin’ adorable.

· Andi Zeigler, author of “We Were Feminists Once,” a nonfiction fave of mine from a while back, is still slinging good work over at Salon.com.

July 21st:

· Observations at the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art:

o I obviously had a lot to learn about her as a person and artist. I didn’t know she suffered from such intense chronic pain. Spinal illness. An amputated leg. Polio. Jesus Christ. Impaled by a railing during an accident. How did I not know any of this? How did she even function, let alone become one of the great creatives of the 20^th century???

o Concept of “selective artifice.” Wish I could remember what this means. Next to it, I wrote “Trotsky” and “Breton.” So, something to do with those dudes.

o “Urban Landscape,” 1925. Red phone pole like a cross over gray-yellow buildings. Pallid. There are six blue dots. Are they birds?

o OMG, there’s examples of exquisite corpse played by legendary surrealists. So cool.

o Last words: “I hope the leaving is joyful, and I hope to never return.”

§ Which, fuck.

§ Translated from original Spanish: “Espero alegre la salida, y Espero no volver jamas.”

July 23^rd:

· On page 144 of You Dreamed of Empires, which I wrote about in the last one of these, the novel, which heretofore has offered only minor glimpses of a present-day narrator with knowledge of modernity, suddenly and utterly fractures the story world ontology with the mind-melting sentence of “If Jazmin Caldera had existed, if he had crossed the threshold into the throne room of Axayactl’s Old House at almost five in the afternoon on November 8, 1519, he would have seen before him…”

o Fully invented characters in historical fiction are not uncommon. What is uncommon is for the author to note this explicitly in the text AND have that character play a pivotal role in an actual historical incident, thus blurring the lines between history and invention ever more than they are already blurred (and they are hella blurry, in my view).

· Several small sparrows dig in the dry soil of a sidewalk green space under a short but sturdy tree. The birds beak the dust and flutter themselves in it. Are they dislodging bugs to eat? Taking dust baths? Searching for seeds in the soil?

August 2^nd:

· The following are observations and names of pieces from the art museum at Penn State. We went on an outing there during Barrelhouse Writer Camp.

o “Safety pins, Bibles, spun yellow cotton candy”

o An egg with a nose but no other facial features

o “Lake George” by Georgia O’Keeffe

o “Winter on the Schuylkill” by Fern Coppedge

o An empty alcove behind an Impressionist exhibit. It’s cut into the wall, facing a big class window covered by curtains, that, were the drapes open, would look out into a field.

o “Sabine” by John Gadsby Chapman

o “The Greek Girl” by William Morris Hunt

o A sculpture made from women’s shoes

o A ball of text wound up like yarn by Anne Hamilton

· What follows are plant names noted in the arboretum behind the museum at Penn State:

o Nodding Onion

o Barren Strawberry

o Tufted Hair Grass

o Allegheny Serviceberry

o Purple Love Grass

o Foxglove Beardtongue

o Self-Heal

o Creepy Thyme

August 12^th:

· In front of me at the grocery store is a bald man wearing a black tee-shirt with a logo for the African American Museum of Folklore just below the nape of his neck. He has a thick but strong torso and thin ankles.

· A woman crossing 25^th Street at the corner of Main in Shockoe Bottom, clad in revealing black workout gear. She is heavily tanned and sunglassed, and her head is tilted to the side to hold a small orange and black kitten tucked over her right shoulder. She holds her phone out, corded headphones in her ears. The kitten clings for dear life.

August 23^rd:

· At the Bellwether Session summer concert series in Church Hill, the cicadas scream over the slide guitar sounds of a man playing a four-string box guitar with a Colorado license plate cut to fit around the pickups. He’s quite good, though I have reservations about white dudes singing “When the Levee Breaks,” but I guess Zeppelin already did it, and this guy kept it short and sweet.

· A Puma brand soft lunchbox, no doubt filled with cold cans of beer.

I’ll leave it there. Thanks for reading, friends! Appreciate you.