[Title needed]

I search for “Will Sharpe” and images of Shannon Sharpe fill the screen. It’s been decades since I’ve watched American football, but I recognize that the person Google is providing me as an answer is not the man I was looking for.

There is not one second of peace out there. Windows, despite the midday warm temperatures, must constantly stay closed. It’s autumn and I should be able to say that “autumn is my favourite season” only . . . gas-powered leaf blowers are polluting both air and sound everywhere at this time. Day after day. It’s relentless. It’s a special kind of grind on the psyche—where the thunderous, constant auditory assault is accompanied by the smell of exhaust, for a one-two punch into insanity. A particularly obsessed neighbor down the street not only blows his own giant property every few days, but he also goes into the forest behind his house and works there hours upon hours, apparently clearing the ground for animals or for mushrooms to spring up. And on top of that, he extends his services (pro bono?) to other properties, one of them a commercial apartment complex with its own team of landscapers armed with blowers, in effect a redundancy in work. A redundancy of dunces. In my dreams, I am dismembering this particular neighbor with my Chinese cleaver, and then I blow the fleshy bits all around his back yard with his blower, after which I set it on fire and walk back home.

Do electric sheep dream of analog grass?

A text comes from a friend bearing bad news. Three days later, after the biopsy, I check in with him and he describes one of the most shuddering-inducing, painful medical procedures I can ever imagine. “It’s something we’ll all probably have to contend with,” he ends the text thread. I cannot help but question what sort of anesthesia he had been given. If any at all. And I cannot help to think: maybe not all of us are that unlucky.

When David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest arrives at the mailbox, I unwrap it and run inside the house giddy as a toddler. It weighs a number of pounds, and I drop it on the floor to make the case to anyone left listening. The vibration nearly knocks over a small vase of orange roses I got for my wife. Who comes out of the other room bewildered and angry at the disturbance. “Look, it has footnotes and errata,” is all I can apologize with. And then I realize that maybe DFW has explicitly written the errata information as part of the fiction. And it’s not corrections for publishing mistakes, after all. Clever.

Why does “W” start with “D”?

A weekend spent watching all 8 hours of The Beatles new documentary sends me down an informational rabbit hole about how John Lennon was murdered. I’ve always known when and where, but not how and why. (Yet again, another reason that Salinger should have never written The Catcher in the Rye.)

A long run through the woods behind where I live takes me around the perimeter of a park with a baseball field. I come upon a red-shouldered hawk who lets me come close enough to snap a photograph. He looks at me briefly and then, with that intense hawk stare, spots something up above in the trees. But he doesn’t move. He just watches whatever is up there.

The book I have been reading was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. It’s a fine book that comes in at just slightly over 800 pages written by a Japanese-American woman who is also an editor of some famous Conde-Nast-type magazine, it says in the bio. But what bothers me the most about the novel is that it often switches tenses for no reason. Even in the middle of a scene. I could not find the purpose. Surely there must have been one. (Like that.) No editor would let that slide. And so I must think that it’s on purpose. But what purpose?

The “Succession” finale of season 3 is quite good. Very much like The Lion in Winter, although in the play the kids come for their father bearing actual knives and swords. In any case, if anyone has ever wondered how the 1% thinks and treats the rest of humanity, this is a good source. I imagine that, at one point, it will become unbearable to watch. As with most things.

Is it safe?