Headed to Santa Rosa. Seattle’s high temp is 66F and overcast with a chance of showers today. I picked the wrong weekend to smuggle a bunch of milk chocolate bars taped to my body.
Selling some clothes on eBay this morning! Auctions end in 15 minutes! My eBay profile is MorganRidesFree so go and bid!
Hey everybody! I put some spring/summer clothes up on eBay and forgot to mention it! My eBay store is called MorganRidesFree and the auctions end tomorrow! Go get some cool clothes!
Forty years ago this parking lot on Hayden Island in the Columbia River was a landfill. At the time I was a 17 year old idiot who’d, along with my friend Kehl, hopped a freight in Tacoma and walked across the bridge from Vancouver looking for a place to sleep. In the dark we could not tell it was a landfill and we pitched our little two-man tent on a hill. It became clear in the morning when we woke up to the sound of a bulldozer plowing hot garbage that something was amiss. We poked our heads out of the tent and realized we were on a mountain of steaming trash. The bulldozer operator thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
I’m a melancholic, someone with very little sense of the future but an acute relationship with the past. The future to me is a sun-bleached expanse and the people who live there are silhouettes shimmering in the heat, but the past is an endless warren of wood-paneled rooms where everything is half-illuminated by candles and a crackling fire. I spend no time in the future, it’s an unframed and meaningless place. The present moment for me is overwhelming; all the atoms vibrating and singing, I try to listen to them all at once and feel transparent like I’m dissolving. When I’m alone, and quiet, I visit the past. It’s cozy there and a little sad.
I love the Goodwill because I can be in the present and sort through a catalog of the past, presented randomly. Touching one item to the next you feel bolts of electricity arcing back through the genealogy of the things; they all began their journeys miles and decades apart, traveled with people through time, treasured sometimes, unused others, and their only commonality is that they ended up next to one another on this rack for $5.99. Which two shirts in this store came closest to meeting one another in their previous lives? Which one of these mundane items was present for someone’s greatest triumph?
Sometimes, though, Goodwill will carelessly present a tableau of a person’s life. Here is the memory of a man—almost surely a man—who also treasured the past, also felt the surge of electricity in things and wanted to capture and preserve it. He rescued these for himself, yes, because they sang for him the music of the spheres, but he meant them for the future. He didn’t want them to be lost. He saved them for us.
At some point he knew they’d end up here. He waited for someone’s eyes to light up, his grandkids maybe, and no one’s ever did. The last typewriter repair shop on Olive Way closed in the 90s. Amanda Palmer started breaking up typewriters for jewelry in the 2000s. The last person to use a manual Underwood at work is long dead, save the anachronistic hep cat. The IBM Selectric came out in 1961.
People stop to touch them. They SEEM valuable. They all need work. They are brass cannons now. @typetownsendstudio
My mom asked me to shave my beard. If I got contact lenses I could change my name and start a new life.
I never miss a chance to see Lawrence of Arabia. Years ago we reviewed it on our late, lamented podcast Friendly Fire, an episode I recommend.
It’s a masterful film but there are plenty of good criticisms of its politics, its perspective and its historicity. You can watch it aware of those legitimate critiques and still gain valuable perspective on our present world.
This is something we’ve only recently lost as a society: the ability to hold multiple ideas in our heads simultaneously. A thing can be problematic AND thought-provoking. An idea can be troubling AND insightful. Too often people assume the harshest critique is the truest, or even that the first critique they encountered is the definitive one. Nothing is perfect, no idea or poem or work of art is all-encompassing. The purpose of an education isn’t to have an iron box of “correct” ideas. An education should prepare you to hold conflicting ideas and not collapse under their weight.
So Lawrence of Arabia was made in a different time. It’s chock full of Orientalism, patriarchal colonialism, Great-Man-Theory ahistoricism and racism. It even has Obi-wan in brown face. It is nonetheless, in addition to being a cinematic masterpiece, incredibly instructive in a summary understanding of the post-WWI layout of the Middle East. You might have to Google 10-50 things in your after-action research but set aside a weekend and you’ll have more perspective than 90% of the people spouting opinions on contemporary affairs.
History doesn’t “begin” anywhere—you can always go back further—but one can argue that the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 was a kind of Genesis Bomb of Turmoil. Lawrence of Arabia puts you on the threshold of it in Technicolor.
My Threads account is borked and I’m fine with it.
Charles De Gaulle Airport is actually five airports and maybe one of them is the “best European airport” but of the other four, one of them is like if the Spokane Airport had a million passengers a year, one of them is the original Charles De Gaulle airport with no improvements or repairs since the day it opened, one is what you’d get if Melania Trump designed an airport and one of them is like the airport on Tatooine if it got a million passengers a year. If you have to travel BETWEEN one of these airports to another airport you are required to use the Detroit public transit system as it existed in 1974 with connections through the Soviet Exhibition Hall at the World’s Fair in New Orleans in 1984.
For these reasons I feel that the “Europe’s Best Airport” award might be something invented by the marketing team at Charles De Gaulle Airport and not competitively judged.
This is an example of digital enshitification, small but pernicious. As of April the EU no longer stamps passports on entry or exit. They’ve replaced the age-old custom with encrypted notepad and photo biometric scan or whatever. I’m sure it’s very techy-cool, expensive to implement, totally bulletproof, never crashes and makes the world safer.
It’s also shitty. Crossing international borders, presenting your documents, getting scrutinized by guards and interrogated by customs is an ancient ritual, exciting, dangerous and exotic, and the reward—and it IS a reward—is a little ink stamp in your cardstock book. Your passport is more than just something you present THEM, it’s something they endorse for YOU. Even the most seasoned traveler isn’t immune to flipping through their passport like a photo album, deciphering the inscrutable glyphs and uneven numbers and connecting them to what are always life-altering events. No one crosses a border without it meaning something.
Losing that ritual is an immeasurable theft, great and small. I’m not even decrying the surveillance-state info-harvesting, which is inevitable (and proof all tech is inherently neo-fascist). It’s just that everyone in the chain of custody of this crap transition ALSO has a passport and knows in their hearts the importance of this small ritual. They know, at some level, that taking away passport stamps is dehumanizing. It’s a police-state joke to suggest it streamlines the process, and it would add exactly three seconds to also stamp the book after the photoscan’s complete.
What the Eurostate gains in data is clear: now they can track your face on CCTV as you move through the world and, who knows, maybe sell that info to Nestle or Esso or maybe shock your balls remotely when you swear. But what they’ve done is violate their half of the bargain and taken away the little prize and the memory, they’ve reduced your passport from a living thing to an inert one.
I’m owed four stamps from this trip: in and out of Poland and France, and I’ll never get them back.
You know who is GREAT at moving things along? The Poles. This airport security line is cooking like… like someone knows what they’re doing.
View from my hotel, last morning in Warsaw.
I got the middle bunk this time!
Headed to Poland.
The air raid sirens are sounding again but I’ve learned that sometimes it means Russian drones and missiles will rain from the sky for eight hours but most of the time it means play ping pong in the sunshine.
This is the first time I’ve had real-time translators for bilingual lectures and panel discussions. About 1/4 of attendees are listening in English and everyone else is Ukrainian, so the translators are working overtime translating in both directions.
Some of the very illustrious panelists at yesterday’s inaugural symposium of the new National University of Ukraine Kiev-Mohyla Research Center for Heritage Preservation and Recovery. These are real heavyweights. I’ll be chewing on these discussions for years.
I asked to take his picture because he is keeping it 100%. He obliged and we both had a good laugh because he knew exactly what I meant. #kyiv #ukraine #menswear
This is a very long escalator from a very deep metro station. #kyiv
Last night’s drone and missile attack was one of the most intense of the entire war. I don’t have a ton of drone and missile attacks to compare it to but I’ll take their word for it.
Now it can be revealed that I’m here to attend the inauguration of the Naukma Research Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. It’s a gathering of government ministers, politicians, archeologists, cultural historians and academics. Representatives from UNESCO, Nova Ukraine and Cornell are here. I’m grateful to be participating and will tell you much more about it in later posts and on my Patreon.
