Matt Webb writes beautifully about ASMR:

ASMR is a legit cultural phenomenon, and it is no weirder to be microdosing intimacy on YouTube than it is to get thrills out of sitting around with your friends and watching 90 minutes of people in costumes hitting each other while rousing music plays.

And:

What if there were neurodivergent-optimised versions of all media?

Not just ASMR Bee Movie but taciturn and slow-paced superhero movies, for people who are easily overwhelmed, like French New Wave meets the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or for completionists, speedrun Netflix Originals where each episode is only 3 minutes and expunges narrative irrelevant to the overall season arc, with everything fitting together neatly at the end.

On Sunday afternoon I broke down in great buckets of tears, more tears than since that cold, snowy Sunday last January I spent by myself in St. Paul’s, pouring myself out while listening to Ingrid Michaelson on repeat, on the day before we celebrated Catherine.

Last week, in the wrenching, helpful book Before and After Loss, I read this:

As we grapple with loss, let’s be thoughtful about healing, restoration, and growth. Let’s not be satisfied with healing and restoration alone, let’s strive for growth. Healing results in the survival of a coherent self after traumatic loss. Growth recasts today’s insurmountable problems as tomorrow’s opportunities.

Sunday’s volcano of tears came not from sadness, but, ultimately, from understanding the truth of that statement.

I have been healing and restoring, slowly but surely, reestablishing a firm foundation, both internally and as regards the laundry and the celebration of major holidays.

What I haven’t been doing is growing. Instead I’ve kept myself lashed to a particular version of me, a self that, in so many ways, no longer exists.

This is a stage of grief I didn’t anticipate: it’s not at all about loss or absence or death, it’s about what happens next. It’s not about anyone else but me. And that’s weird.

It never occurred to me that would be overwhelming, as overwhelming, in fact, than much of what’s come before. Fortunately, coming out the other side of the cavalcade of tears I found myself hopeful. That was nice.

And this morning I gave physical form to that need for rearrangement by recasting our living room. Like me, most of the parts are original equipment; but how they fit together is very much “you mean I could put that over there!?” Onward.

Daylight Saving Time kicked in here this morning. As my buddy Dave wrote in his newsletter this morning:

“Right,” I said to myself. “It’s the bad one.”

Setting aside the absurdity of this time prison we choose to live inside, I can report that impact on our time-keeping devices is at an all-time low.

Twenty years ago the DST switch would have consumed my day, both with household switching (clock radios, VCR, TV, watches, car, cell phone, hifi) and work tasks (manually checking myriad servers to ensure nothing was awry).

Today it was down to changing the clock on the stove, and moving the hands on two analog clocks ahead, one at home and one in the office. Everything else is connected to the Internet and figured things out automatically.

(Artwork and framing by Stephen B. Macinnis).

Danish poet Peter Laugesen on the importance of walking without purpose:

You have to leave things that you feel distract you if you want something else. And you should do that other thing no matter what the cost. Moving around in the world without any real purpose is possible for most people.

This large question of whether you can plot your next move while still shoveling coal into the engine of the last, that’s something I’ve ruminated on for years. If I were laying out Social Safety Net 2.0, we’d all receive a paid year off at ages 30, 40, 50 and 60 to rest, gather our horses, walk purposelessly, and tease out the shape of the next decade of our lives.

Fantasy Fixing, from Van Neistat, comes pretty close to describing my father’s attitude toward stuff and the fixing of stuff. I inherited the feeling, if not the entire skill set.

There hasn’t been much innovation in the toilet seat space in my lifetime: the methods for affixing the seat to the toilet have either been cheap plastic bolts that eventually give way, or solid metal bolts that, once exposed to the rigours of the toileting environment, rust, never to be loosened again.

Today I had a rare celestial event: a need to replace both of the toilet seats at 100 Prince Street, upstairs and down, and this led me to discover the “Easy Clean & Change Hinge” on Bemis-brand seats at Home Depot.

It’s an ingenious scheme that has you affix solid-seeming plastic bolts to the toilet and then simply dropping the seat into place and locking it. This upbeat video will walk you through it all.

While delays from prying off the rusted bolts of the old upstairs seat, with the attendant frustrations and swearing, caused Oliver to almost burst for lack of toilet, the new seat went on in about a minute, and the crisis was averted.

Bravo, Bemis, bravo.

Available in the shop. 

Don Jardine continues to harvest great stories from PEI’s weather history: like that time an RCAF bomber dropped depth charges on Sherwood.

You might think that alone would be the remarkable part of the story, but:

The plane eventually crashed near Shemogue Lake, New Brunswick within 100 metres of the shoreline, and the four occupants parachuted from the plane and landed on ice floes in Northumberland Strait. They were rescued after spending five days on the ice.

From the February 25, 1943 edition of The Guardian:

The first crocus of 2021. Twelve days earlier than last year.

I missed the golden hour of creativity today for making an everyday book, although, to my credit, I did use the first-hour-of-the-morning time for good, not evil. So I went at it this afternoon.

Rough and ready today. Orange cards on the inside, black card wrapped around the top, all glued together.

The 38 cent Inuit kayak stamp on the front is from 1989, with artwork by Louis-André Rivard, based on illustrations by Bernard Leduc