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Rest in peace little one. I never would have guessed that a 4-lb Chihuahua would come into our lives, let alone be the animal to steal my heart before Jen’s. Our previous animals — two cats and a Boxer dog — are a stark contrast to a tiny dog that we would carry around in a sling or a backpack and take practically everywhere. That was what was in store for us in May 2019 for Memorial Day weekend, when Muttville — where Jen volunteered at the time to help with the rapid succession of loss with our other animals — was encouraging employees and volunteers alike to help take an animal home for the long holiday weekend so all would have a home. There were two dogs in ISO (isolation) because of potential kennel cough. One was a miniature pinscher named Dolly Parton, and the other was a tiny white-and-tan Chihuahua named Barbara. Jen went in and scooped up a blanket that contained the Chi. I had to take a quick group selfie as we walked from Muttville to the car. We were to foster her through her initial intake: help with looking at her messed up eye, getting spayed, removing a cancerous mammary tumor, and then to bring her to adoption events. We fixed her eye with the help of the amazing Dr. Mughannum at Vet Vision, who had helped Shaun, our Boxer, with issues years prior. We got her spayed. We got her tumor removed. And then she stole our hearts. This lady cleaned up nicely. I fell in love quickly, while Jen held out a little longer. It’d only been four plus months since the last of our original trio, Loki the cat, had passed. We joined the foster fails club. Estimated at 12 years old, we had another animal living with us again. She was our first female, and true to her nature, was absolutely fierce, independent, and extremely loving. Over the next almost six years, she would fill our lives with joy, laughter, and showed us what life looked like when you could take an animal almost everywhere. One of our favorite camp spots in southwestern Utah, overlooking a valley. We're perched by this cliffside and enjoying some simple food I just cooked up. Barb went camping with us everywhere. People would take photos of her for their socials, swoon over her, give us free coffee, and even bypass hotel pet deposits, all because she was a tiny thing that fit in a sling. Sitting at Quarrelsome Coffee in St. Louis, Missouri, on our mega roadtrip to the Midwest. We were told because of her cancer and tougher life — she was a stray on the streets of Oakland — that we’d maybe have two or three years with her. With Jen making all of her food (Chihuahuas of this size do not have high caloric needs), and us taking her on adventures camping, hiking, and regularly exercising and socializing her with our friends, we believe we were able to extend her years and we hope she got to live out her retirement years with panache. After all, what 4-lb dog would go camping in a roof top tent at 11,000 feet in Colorado, but also slum it at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas? This Chihuahua. Camping in late December 2022 on a cool evening in Quartzsite, Arizona, and someone is enjoying the fancy bed at the hotel. We realized she was slowing down when we last went camping. A trip to the Sierra with Ryan, showed us that her tolerance for high altitudes and heat were becoming too much for her. August 2024 would be her last time out in the wild. 117 nights in a roof top tent. Her last phase of homebodiness began to show towards the end of last year, and in December, a rough few nights had us begin the discussion of the end. As 2025 rolled over, she began to lose her eyesight. It’d been declining due to cataracts for a while, so walks had stopped, and around February, we could no longer take her outside to potty. She couldn’t tolerate the time from our 2nd-floor apartment to the street, and we let her use the tiled floor in our bathroom. Her bowels needed frequent disposal, and pee pads in the apartment were normal in the past few months. She was still eating, she was still digging in her bed, and she was still enjoying the sun. Dementia had started and her bouts of confusion coupled with her blindness limited her autonomy. Her beds were her safe place, as well as our laps. Especially mine. We started to keep tally of the good and the bad days. For a while, the good days still outweighed the bad, and then they started to draw even. This past week, the days were all bad. And late on Thursday, May 1st, she started to wheeze and cough. “She’ll tell you when she’s ready,” was what our friend and neighbor told us a week prior. And he was right. She was telling us. We made a plan to call her vet this morning but if anything happened in the middle of the night, we’d head to the emergency vet. As we wound down for bed, she struggled with getting comfortable and ultimately snuggled up to me by my head. This was something she did regularly when she first came into our lives but hadn’t in past two years, and groggily, I took that as a further sign that she wanted to just be with us and know that we were there. Puffy face, red eyes, but cherishing this last night and then enjoying Jen's lap despite her tiredness. In the morning, Jen made the call and we made an appointment for 1:30pm. We wanted to have some time. Barb had other plans though and her weak body and labored breathing was a little worse. I canceled meetings and we left the house early. She seemed content in her blanket and Jen’s arms. We decided to drive to Bernal Heights to let her feel the sun on her skin, and the wind through her fur. We wanted to give her one last look at the city that was home for the past six years. Even if she couldn’t really see anymore. One last look at this city she's called home for almost six years. We arrived at the vet and they quickly arranged and sorted out a room for us. A new vet gently welcomed us. She wasn’t Barb’s regular vet, but was still kind and gracious as she told us the plan: a sedative, then a deeper one. They were busy, but they also wanted to give us a bit of time so we spent the twenty or so minutes snuggling her and recalling some of her best moments. She came into my arms so I could get some last snuggles in. She emitted a sleepy tiny bark and her little legs were moving. It reminded us of when she’d be dreaming and running in her sleep. She settled. Moments later, the vet walked in and asked if we’re ready. We started to adjust position a bit, and the vet asks, “Is she still with us?” We laid her down on the nearby table, and I knew. The vet confirmed it with a stethoscope, and she was gone. Barb crossed the rainbow bridge at around 10:45am, in my arms with the two people who loved her the most. We lingered saying our goodbyes, thankful that she stayed true to herself, and did it on her terms, in her way, in my arms. She is missed severely. Our little adventure buddy, and the joy of our lives will meet the rest of the gang. I hope they’re romping around together. RIP Barbara, c. 2007–May 2, 2025. See you at the rainbow bridge. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
Memories are an interesting beast. I have certain core memories that are embedded deep in my mind. The years I attended SXSW from 2007-2012 encompass some of those. In 2011, I shared a house with longtime partner-in-crime Scott Robbin, Jeff Skinner, and Sam Felder. We were off South Congress up at the top of the hill and tucked away close to Curra's Grill on Oltorf. We were in a neighborhood where all the streets were named after Robin Hood characters: Friar Tuck Lane, Little John Lane, Sherwood Lane, Long Bow Lane, and Nottingham Lane. Because we had this house, we ended up hosting two separate nights of hangs and invited a bunch of people we knew. I made a video of it using the Panasonic Lumix GF-1, the much-lauded camera that my friend Craig Mod made famous. The video isn't much — but watching it back now, some 14 years later, I'm so very glad I put it together. Many of these people are still friends to this day[1]. Perhaps, one of the most poignant memories I have is shown at the end of the video — when just us housemates went bowling during some downtime, and I put Spoon's “The Way We Get By” in the video because on the drive back from the bowling alley, that song came on the radio. I'd never heard it before, but Jeff, Sam, and Scott all sang along to it, belting out the lyrics, windows down, as we're cruising south on I-35. We lost Sam years later. Sam was a great guy, and he is missed by many. I'm very, very glad I made that video, and that I can look back on it. And remember everyone there, but especially recollect, see, and hear Sam in it. RIP Sam. SXSW brought many things, and in particular memories of some of the best people on the internet I got to know, and became friends with. Thank you, all. In order of appearance: Jeff Skinner, Scott Robbin, Dave Rupert, Nathan Peretic, Reagan Ray, Jay Fannelli, Luke Dorny, Trent Walton, Scott Boms, Sam Felder, Patrick DiMichele, Christopher Cashdollar, Kevin Hoffman, Jack Auses, Rob Weychert, Jonathan Bowden, Phil Coffman, Noah Stokes, Harold Emsheimer, Paul Armstrong, Wilson Miner, Andrew Huff. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
The third culture difference. One of the hardest aspects of being a third culture kid and eventually adult is the difficulty in the journey of your identity. When you're young, the movement and culture- and context-switching are par for the course — it comes with the literal territory. As you get older, things happen: you transform into a chameleon and adaptation is one of your greatest assets. If you're me, you are seen as, sometimes advantageously, ethnically ambiguous. You somehow are part of the local fabric, depending on where you travel. And on the other hand, depending on where you reside over time, an assimilation or assimilations begin. It becomes part of your operating mode. As you get even older however, the mish-mash of identities and going with the flow start to untether any semblance of where you belong. Is it your birth country? Is it your citizenship? Is it the place you've lived the longest? Most are not like you. They may struggle with identity in completely valid and different ways. The third culture one is a big mash-up. I haven't completely met or known anyone quite like myself. Even a good friend who shared a similar path from college to the US, only overlaps with my experience to a point. My early years began elsewhere, which is a decisive difference. I have family, loved ones, and friends, but also my chosen or proximate family. They may not completely understand or ever understand, but I am thankful for their kinship, even if there's a part of me that will never feel completely whole. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
A meditation on entering flow state. A snack beckons. I stand up and head a few feet away to the kitchen area. A hojicha latte is on my mind, and also a bite. My brain is at operational capacity, and I am in a flow state. The metabolic need feels high, and I need to keep my energy up. I make the latte, iced with almond milk. I devour an oat bar. It’s the time of year when projects are in full swing. The seasons also drive business. Today started with syncing on UK time, getting on a call with Simon and then Jeff joining. We reviewed work and made plans. I know what’s immediately ahead of me today, and I steel myself mentally. It’s funny how the pressure from a timeline and deadline can focus you. Because I am a shokunin, I have my design mise en place laid out both in the mind, and at the physical desk. The plan appears, as I percolated on it after the call. I am now executing it. Windows are open all over: a browser with a tab count I can't even see, a few design tools, two deck tools, communication tools, and note tools. I stop to consider that I'm working across multiple variants of the same core pieces of software but in different flavors and with different purposes or are inputs from others collaborating. The mise en place is multi-modal. I am traversing them, wielding a strange authority over them all. After all afternoon and as the evening beckons, I share the file, toggling on collaboration. A message goes out to all parties. Flow state will come for us all. This is just the beginning. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
More in literature
Books that generate other books, books that are first in the line, interest me. Despite little interest in mountaineering, I read Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951, tr. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith) by Maurice Herzog, the subject of the book well summarized in the title, a book that led to many other books. Annapurna was a big hit, and soon after there were books by other members of the expedition, and a parody novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle (William Ernest Bowman, 1956) and a feminist response. That response was to climb Annapurna, but also to write a book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (Arlene Blum, 1980). The book inspired a great deal of mountaineering, Himalayan and otherwise. The last line, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” (311), apparently became famously inspirational among crazy people, by which I mean mountain climbers, but I am more interested in what inspired people to write books. The story of the 1950 French and Swiss expedition in Nepal to climb whichever 8,000-meter peak was easiest, using state-of-the-art techniques, is a terrific adventure story, “terrific” in the current sense (entertaining) but also in the old sense (terrifying, these climbers are out of their minds), and it is the latter that really surprised me. Annapurna is study in the variety of human taste for risk, or to put it in Wuthering Expectations terms* the taste for the sublime. “Sublime” has softened into an inelegant variation for “very beautiful,” but I again mean the old aesthetic sense of beauty that is frightening, beauty that is trying to kill you, like the view from the top of an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak. This was quite different [from the Alps]. An enormous gulf was between me and the world. This was a different universe – withered, desert, lifeless; a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen, perhaps not desired. We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we had no fear as we continued upward. I thought of the famous ladder of St. Theresa of Avila. Something clutched at my heart. (207) Herzog does not normally write like this. He is typically a model of clarity. But atop Annapurna he goes on for three pages like this, while his companion keeps insisting they head back before the bad weather hits them. Some additional fragments: How wonderful life would now become! (208) Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure. (209) Before disappearing into the couloir I gave one last look at the summit which would henceforth be all our joy and all our consolation. (210) The latter is well into the descent which at that point has become terrible and will get much worse. But Herzog remains captured by his sublime experience, wavering between the struggle to descend and an obliterating acceptance of imminent death. Given the practicalities of the earlier part of the book, the organization of camps and supplies, the turn towards St. Theresa was fascinating. It’s those camps and supplies, along with the team doctor, that save Herzog. If you happen to have strong feelings about needles I recommend that you skip chapter 16, “The Retreat,” which is full of horrors (frostbite treatments). Perhaps skim the next couple of chapters as well, although the worst is over. The whole of this book has been dictated at the American Hospital at Neuilly where I am still having rather a difficult time. (11) I suppose another reason for the rise of the mountaineering book in the is that explorers had used up other parts of the world. The Arctic and Antarctic had been exhausted as subjects for books. I will note that while Roald Amundsen insisted on the scientific value of his pointless feats, Herzog and his team have no illusion that climbing a Himalayan mountain has any value beyond the adventure. The legendary Alpine guide Lionel Terray, one of the members of the team who got Herzog down off Annapurna, titled his 1961 memoir Conquistadors of the Useless. Useless except for generating books. Page numbers are from the first edition, which has a helpful fold-out map in the back. * See this old post about Little House on the Prairie for more on the sublime.
In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelves stubbornly remote from utility, lacking the intimacy of possession, and a third in which I had never read a key section. The first was Peter Handke's Crossing the Sierra del Gredos, a 472-page novel narrated by a writer employed by financial operative to write something about her and which I abandoned eighteen years ago retaining no memory of its content. This time, I read page after page in a reverie of detachment. 1 Then there was Geoffrey Hill's collected poems Broken Hierarchies, a book whose word choice and subject matter is fiercely English and Christian or, perhaps more accurately, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon, which despite being English and culturally Christian, remains alien to me. Why did I think a huge edition like this presented and read in chronological order would enable something previously declined? No doubt I assumed from immersion some sort of knowledge or at least familiarity was to be gained. Perhaps I might draw closer to the distinction of my ancestral lands. Reading from where I left off provoked the same cool reverie and with it the assumption of gain fell away. Thirdly, there were the pages prefacing Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation: italicised dialogue and commentary I have always skipped, or read without memory of having read, in a book otherwise opened so often it is held together by masking tape; skipped not only because of the tightly-bound typeface – why do italicised paragraphs repel our eyes? – but because they are abstract and anonymous; there is no listing in the table of contents and no names or titles cited to orientate us within a recognisable discourse, only mundane and hyperbolic expressions of weariness and what weariness means in context. If I were to insert an example quotation here it would only to betray what I began writing this to say, and indeed to name these books let alone summarise them obscures what I experienced. In this empty time such reading, hardly reading at all actually, closer to passive looking, attentive only to the space opening before my eyes in the steady progress of lines and sentences, I chanced upon what felt like the pure mode of literature, an experience apart, an effortless drift from rational comprehension into the enchantment of a pale expanse, with no wish continue and no wish to stop. Note The original title is Der Bildverlust, oder, Durch die Sierra del Gredos. Why FSG chose to exclude the first part of the title, coined it appears by this novel and which translates as The Loss of Images, is unknown, but predictable (later we saw it with Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady reduced by Jonathan Cape to Montano). Imagine a German edition of Melville's novel abridged to Der Wal.↩
The book that helped revive a genre, leading to an all-too-brief heyday The post The Great American Travel Book appeared first on The American Scholar.
As a boy I was often told I spoke too loudly. It makes sense, as I came from a family of yellers. It’s an annoying habit, usually inappropriate, one I associate with self-centeredness. I made a conscious effort to lower the volume, a rare instance of successfully stifling an obnoxious personal habit. As a reporter I learned the value of modulating speech -- when to keep it soft and intimate, when to speak louder and more forcefully, depending on your audience. The latter usually applied to people holding public office. I tried to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice. I’ve heard from several readers about the dearth of good, intelligent conversation in their lives. One woman complains of “every conversation turning into a scolding or shouting match.” I’ve seen the same thing, of course. I’ve always associated hollering and hair-trigger anger with what used to be called “poor breeding.” That is, people without elders to teach them basic etiquette. I’m not sure that’s the case any longer. Back in 2011, Commentary asked forty-one people this question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?” Among the respondents was one of my favorite poets and critics, Eric Ormsby. He chooses an appropriate passage from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and writes: “But it isn’t the obvious dangers that America faces—terrorist attack, fiscal collapse—that most get me down but something humbler, less catastrophic, and yet more insidious. I think of it as the death of discourse. Nowadays, even among friends, a dissenting opinion is met not with rebuttal or debate but with stony silence or Whitman’s ‘melodramatic screamings.’ The purpose of conversation on any serious topic is no longer a ‘mass of badinage’ but an occasion for sniffing out ‘deviant’ views and affixing labels.” Ormsby recounts that even when his family agued, “we were reconciled in mutual affection.” Wise words. A person is not his or her opinions. You don’t have to respect a stupid or offensive opinion but you do have to respect the person speaking it – at least for a little while. Good conversation is one of life's supreme pleasures. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson saying: “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”
At the ballpark on a summer night in Baltimore The post Immaculate Innings appeared first on The American Scholar.
