- Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories
- The optics of Japanese cooking
- The sounds of Japanese eating
- The start of the school year
- My beard
- Particularly the gray patches
- My shoulders
- My biceps
- My calves
- The song my son listens to that goes, “I love my body the way it is!”
- “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones
- “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins
- That YouTube clip with the twenty-something twin brothers hearing #12 for the first time and flipping out in delight when it gets to the signature drum part towards the end
- How that changed my own perception of the song, helped me see (hear) what I took for granted about it
- How songs are more than a part of the soundtrack of an individual’s (or collective demographic’s) life and times, more than nostalgia or mnemonic devices
- When the aforementioned twin brothers heard Dolly Parton, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Johnny Cash, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin (et al) for the first time too
- How all culture gets buried in time
- How the best of us meet what we don’t know with curiosity, empathy, delight
- Stew beans for lunch
- Stew beans for dinner
- #17 + #18 on the very same day
- When, for no particular reason, my son said, “Thank you very much,” taking pains to articulate each syllable
- That thing I just wrote about my mom and me and the ants
- County Road 26 between Columbiana and Alabaster in Shelby County, Alabama
- My given first name
- The prospect of grilling hot dogs this Saturday
- “Lake Marie” by John Prine
- Particularly the line about how the Italian sausages were sizzlin’ on the grill
- How weird a song “Lake Marie” is, how boldly, radically, confidently weird it is — how comfortable in its own skin that song is
- Getting a little more comfortable in my own skin
