2.27.2026 - Weekly Digest

All, it's been one whole year of Without a Gun. I could try to summarize that experience and fall short, or share with you the very first posts I posted here.

There's a new series in the works and I'll be rolling that out next week. Very much looking forward to it and I have to believe some of you will even enjoy it.

So, here's that first weekly digest, followed by a piece I'm particularly fond of from later in the year. Montreal did a lot of things for me personally and I'm grateful for the time I spent there. That qualifier out of the way, reading this over and recalling what all of that felt like, I'm even more grateful to be on a walk through Golden Gate Park while you read this.

Cheers, salud, merci, and thanks for keeping me motivated.

Love,
JA

Weekly Digest 2.28.2025

M 2.24.2025

In this one I'm in Montreal.

I am interested in the science around staring furiously at snow through a window willing it to melt.

Can read and understand the language pretty well but still timid about speaking. I fear the consequences. I fear if I ask where the hardware store is I will tell someone to fart on me.

Hard up for companionship I crumbled up some old crackers I think were exposed to ants and tossed them out the backdoor onto the snow drift that covers what the pictures tell me is a little yard out there. Then I watched, like a hunter waiting for prey to spring his trap. A pair of sparrows flew down, pecked at the crumbs, conversed about which ones they wanted, and took off. They still haven't come back and I am hurt and offended. Come get your crackeures you ingrates.

Plane on a southward trajectory toward the States. Don't do it! I shout. You all ignore me at your peril.

T 2.25.2025

Sweet gods the wind blowing sideways parallel to the street. Gotta be 80 kph and it's visible and white like in cartoons. Snow on everything piles up everywhere past windowsills and covers top floor landings and some of these folks have been shoveling out cars for days like it's what they're paid to do.

Would bring the birds in if I could. Tough resilient little bastards. Taking refuge on the trellis pecking at frozen berries on the vine grouped together and nipping away at the frozen glaze on their feathers and the wind gusts from every side and they just wait it out and don't seem all that alarmed.

In times of distress some animals give up territorial disputes and cooperate for communal survival. They share resources. Squash their beefs. Good luck with that dorks.

If this was Chicago there would be gunfights over dibs. The whole ass dentist’s chair on my street in Logan Square was my favorite. Spoils go to the most obnoxious players. You can’t just set a plate in a shoveled out space and expect someone to notice or not run over it or steal it or throw it against the bricks.

W 2.26.2025

The absolute bliss of a planetarium. Spent a day on Mars with a dozen strangers. We tasted dust and felt the cold and learned to differentiate shades of orange in the dirt. Then I wandered out into the exhibit area where I learned about the Rovers and the little helicopter and I remembered the Seven Minutes of Terror every time they drop one of those on the planet and I'm tired of everything feeling like a metaphor for my own anxiety. I would like some science fiction please.

Next door they've repurposed the old velodrome from the '76 Olympics and converted it into climate controlled sectors to mimic conditions in different regions. Carol Marcus takes Kirk into the Genesis cave. 'Let me show you something that will make you feel young, as when the world was new.' In the subtropical room I'm greeted by red and blue macaws. Reminds me of my neighbor in Traverse City. Why that guy had a tropical bird at 44.7 degrees north I don't know and it's my loss. Warmest I've been since I came to Canada. Could nap in here with the capybaras and wake up on the straw and eat from an auto-filled tin and never complain again.

Couple two three penguin species. They repurpose wet suits to make little boots for them. I guess their feet wear out and I wonder if that happens in Patagonia or just artificial environments. Atlantic sturgeon glide along the glass looking bored. All fish look bored when they're not eating or being fed on or caught by humans. Takes a lot of energy to be frantic and worried. There's wisdom in being fish. The sugar kelp looks tasty. Have to remember to remind myself to eat.

Th 2.27.2025

Monsters attacking Dad's cabin. Oh no the dogs are out. Is that a bear? Simian, long arms like a baboon. Noisy attacker. Seems counterproductive. I can get behind this door but it's just a few strips of wood and glass panels between us. Now the ape-bear is attacking one of the other monsters so that's good, let's keep 'em busy.

There's a plane to catch, a mysterious benefactor, we're in a hurry but no one will tell us where we're going. They're all like this now. My recently married friends are trying on outfits. Neil settles on this short fuzzy crop top thing and mom jeans, Whit is fashionable in a shiny dress.

I’m at an altar and everyone is trying to get a seat in the pews. Pink and green phone cases on the arm rests as dibs. There’s chatter and anticipation, like we’re here to check out the buzz on a movie the critics are horny about. I don’t want to take anyone else’s seat – they paid to be here, after all, and I’m just a volunteer or something – so I find a place over on the side, careful not to have my view blocked by a column. Nothing happens, no one arrives. Someone needs to make a sacrifice but who will it be.

A gas station with a deli kitchen in back. Day old breaded chicken pieces on a heating element on the counter. A women works back there, she’s kinda goth, just sitting there with no pants on, as you do when your job sucks. We become friendly. Later I come back with this notion I need to make something, a short film or a music video, about a guy who thinks it’s romantic to bother his girlfriend at work. Maybe it’s a satirical country song, I say, and sing some. She agrees to let me do that and she asks if something is wrong and I say no I’m just reading your tattoos. She gets flustered. Sorry, I know you’re shy, I say.

Adjacent to all of this I’m trying to establish citizenry in my own country for some reason. The TSA folks or consulate or whoever I’m dealing with don’t believe me, don’t think my passport and my driver’s license have enough information on them. There’s some elaborate set of tasks I have to perform involving ordering clothing from a limited selection – like a Sears or Kmart catalog from the 80s – and having it sent to my mom’s house in Ann Arbor to prove I exist.

Neil shows up again and we’re involved in something important but he can’t tell me what it is, I’m just supposed to follow him, and I’m in a new apartment but there’s trash everywhere and a gallon jug of cleaning solution and a coffee maker which is my only present concern. Then the news: Mike Drew had a little side project, a software company or an app. It was called Jub. None of us know what it does, but he just sold it for 12 billion dollars. He’s in obvious shock and doesn’t seem to be fully aware of what’s happened. It’s a scramble to do what we can to protect him and also make sure he remembers us and what we're doing for him. Maybe not all billionaires have to be bad, we say.


Unreasonable Cuts
(from 5.19.2025)

we should all be in the sun

Among my neuroses is this sense that I should be able to squeeze gold out of any detail, like if I can’t make up a story about the furniture I’m sitting on I’ve already failed and should give up on everything. Besides I’d rather talk about the seat across from me, this yellow mustard colored sofa-like seat, not quite a canape but softer and deeper than any kind of regular chair, specifically designed for mobile workers with Macbooks sewn to the fronts of their jeans to lean back in as they type, and the fabric I don’t have a word for is sturdy but soft – I want to say plush – and the color was inspired by the designer’s trip to Dijon, where she took a walk through the mustard fields and knelt down and felt the dirt in her palms and pressed her hands into it so the soil pushed up through the spaces between her fingers and she recited a kind of prayer of devotion to the earth and to the fragrance of the yellow flowers around her and swore that if she ever got the opportunity she would learn to cut and dye fabrics and she would design furniture in this color and only this color, and she would fill the world and the spaces people lived in with this shade of yellow. Why should only the past be sepia toned, she said, and her companions who didn’t understand and really didn’t have any interest in kneeling down in a farmer’s field were convinced that she’d been affected by the sun, and they told her as much and she said, yes, that’s just it, we should all be in the sun, we should feel like we’re in the sun, and the one guy who didn’t usually talk that much but was studying cosmology and astronomy and things like that, so he knew about the physicality of stars, said quietly that’s not what you would see if you were in the heliosphere itself, that in fact it would look rather different which is all academic, if you will, as without stating what kind of instrumentation we’re talking about, we can assume that the extreme heat of being close enough to the sun to be enveloped in its light emissions would, if not completely melting or possibly even disintegrating us, almost certainly have rendered us blind and incapable of appreciating it. At which point the future designer stood up and looked wildly around her, arms up as if beseeching the support of an invisible crowd, and she threw her head back and shouted to the sky, I NEVER LIKED ANY OF YOU. This led to an awkward walk back toward the car they’d rented and were sharing and it was the astronomy nerd’s turn to drive them back to town where the four of them were also sharing a single room in a hostel with four beds. On the country highway back to Dijon they had to wait in line with about thirty other cars. The gendarme who came to the window, which they all agreed was exceedingly polite and friendly behavior for a cop, explained that there had been a motorcycle accident and it would be some time. Person number three (that’s me) had been drinking wine in the back seat the whole trip and got out to pee behind a French maple and have a cigarette. The last person we haven’t met yet told a story: she had a great uncle who’d been in the War, the second world one, had met his wife, her great aunt, here in Dijon and brought her back to the States to live with him and raise a family. Her family’s house here had been mostly destroyed but the cellar was still intact and before they left with the Army he stashed four cases of local wine that had been bottled in the 30s, before or after the phylloxera rot she wasn’t sure, but either way it was valuable stuff for collectors and after her great aunt died in the 1980s he was sick with a few different kinds of cancer and he took a plane over here under the auspices of coming along for one of the annual Normandy celebrations or somesuch, and he took a taxi all the way from Paris back to Dijon and found the address where a new house had been built in the ‘50s over the foundation. He befriended the people who lived there, a younger couple with a child and a cocker spaniel, and told them the story about his wife but not about the wine. They offered to let him sleep on a twin bed in the laundry room, as he hoped they would, and when they were asleep that night he went down to the basement and found that there was just about a meter of drywall over the spot where he’d hidden the wine. He'd been prepared for this and told the taxi driver to wait for him down the street at midnight. He went back up the basement stairs and found the cocker spaniel waiting for him at the threshold of the kitchen and the living room. He jabbed at it with his boot, then a little harder, then it started yapping and running around and he opened the front door and it ran out into the yard, standing and facing the door and yapping at him, and he went back downstairs as he heard the yelling in French from the bedrooms and he used the sledge hammer the owners kept down there for some reason to break through the drywall and in the hole behind there he reached through the brick and he took out one bottle at a time until his sack was full and he went back up and out the back door and crossed the neighbors’ yards until he got to where the taxi was supposed to be.