News about birch plywood from the DNA Lounge:

Birch is normally one of the more expensive woods, but as it turns out there’s some kind of supply-chain fuckery going on affecting most of the softer woods, so this is currently the least expensive plywood available, because the price of the lower quality stuff has gone through the ceiling!

Saturday and Sunday nights have always been my favourite ones to do the grocery shopping: whatever you give up in selection, you gain in store-emptiness and calm.

‘Twas not meant to be this week, however: at some point the grocery barons conspired, without telling me, to close at 8:00 p.m. on Sundays (where they once closed at 10:00 p.m.). I presume this started some time ago under the COVID-19 “we need time to do the extreme deep cleaning” and has remained, vestigially, even now that aerosols have won out over surfaces as The Vector.

“No matter,” I thought, “I’ll just go to Brighton Clover Farm.”

Nope. Also closed.

I can’t help but think this is karmic payback for my longtime anti-Sunday-shopping stance.

One of the things I’ve learned from my trans friends is that we who aren’t trans place an inordinate amount of effort on trying to anchor things to the past rather than the present—“Erica, who used to be called Eric, until…” and so on. We can tie ourselves up in knots.

So, to avoid that, I will simply introduce Olivia, who identifies as female, and uses she/her pronouns. And is my daughter. Who I love.

The process of becoming our true selves is something we all struggle with; there are a lot of feelings bundled up inside me that surface as a result of Olivia’s transition, many of them uncomfortable, and things I must reckon with. But overlaid is a tremendous sense of pride that she has found her way to this, and, in so doing, is a model for me as I struggle to find my own ways forward.

 Beau Miles in The Backyard Adventurer:

My Africa trip encouraged me to unlearn the habits of information overload. Two years of preparations went mostly out the door as soon as I landed on the giant continent. It turns out the key was sponging up the intricacies of a place with an entirely different set of rules instigated by people with an entirely similar set of humanisms. While catching a bus might be different in the way you get on, pay for and get off, the bus driver has a distinctly similar set of attributes to her Manhattan counterpart. In the same way you can read people with some time and attention, you can read the landscape. Heading in as many different directions as I needed to and trusting the first, second or third person I asked about any given thing was the main way that information flowed into the life force of that long expedition. People trumped maps, guidebooks and the internet, allowing me to be informed, just enough. A lack of knowledge loads up the venture with even doses of the unknown, which works well for me, and anxiety, which seems bad but is actually useful to an adventurer.

I have been thinking and talking a lot about risk, anxiety, growth, and travel lately, and this passage sums up a lot of it quite nicely: we need doses of the unknown to grow and thrive, and COVID, in eliminating travel, has robbed us of a significant wellspring.

When I think of the really great travel memories I carry with me, they are all the result of the happenstancery Miles writes about: looking for a movie theatre in South Korea, trying to find the circus in Munich, searching for long-lost relatives in Croatia, getting lost in Osaka.

Recent times have served to recast “doses of the unknown” as bogeymen: bone fractures, tumour growth, bad scans, death, emptiness. No wonder I’m emerging confused and anxious.

Clearly I need to fall in love with the unknown again.

My Tradescantia Alba, purchased on my birthday in early April, seems to be doing well in the front window at 100 Prince Street. It’s about to bloom.

The new retail packaging for Lil’ Darlings vegan sausages hit the shelves this week. I’ve been assured it will be possible to buy them at locations other than Founders’ Hall in the days and weeks to come.

I Was a Teenage Communist, a 1982 sketch from SCTV, is from an era of the show when it was firing on all cylinders: terrific attention to detail, fine writing, brilliant makeup and costuming, and pitch-perfect satire.

Although it’s a send-up of 1950s American paranoia, it’s remarkable how the broad strokes of the sketch mirror my own experiences as a rebellious student just a few years after it aired: I clearly remember a night in a smoky rock ‘n’ roll bar where I was befriended by a transcendent agitator who later went on to work as a translator for Granma in Cuba. She was full of infectious revolutionary fervour, and I was buying what she was selling.

If I’m any guide, winning young hearts and minds is surprisingly easy.

Spotted in the back of a 1983 oven placed at the curb on Prince Street for next week’s large garbage removal.

While trying to help Oliver find new shoes, I came across a pair for myself. Bucketfeet Save the Bees shoes, by artist Laurel54. They arrived this morning.