7/29

i'm thankful that d lost her keys when she was on her business trip, even though that sucked, because it meant we got to use the key copying machine in the entryway of the door at walmart, which was fascinating to observe. i'm thankful for my amusement and d's frustration when i realized i had a mystery key on my keychain which i didn't know what it did and i'm thankful we copied it for her anyway, just in case. i'm thankful for the stupid thing i impulse bought at walmart (we are rarely at walmart, which is on the other side of the highway from town), which is thumbchucks, which are two glowing plastic balls on opposite ends of a lanyard, like if a fidget spinner was inspired by testicles. i'm thankful also for the display of sneakers with built-in bluetooth speakers.

i'm thankful, given this horrifying op-ed about 'motherhood in the age of fear,' for the uncountable number of times in my childhood my mother was able to leave me in the car reading a book for long periods of time while she went to walmart or ran errands somewhere else i had no interest in. i'm thankful that this never provoked the attention of a cop or nosy-ass piece of shit "concerned citizen" (i.e. a cop by another name). i'm thankful that in my understanding, my childhood was incredibly tame compared to my father's late 60s/early 70s childhood, which involved many stories of gruesome injury and stupidity that my father would relate with joy but also warning, but i'm thankful that i had freedom compared to today  i'm thankful to have a really good relationship with my parents today and i'm thankful to wonder if i would have a really good relationship with them if we had been expected to spend every waking minute of our fucking lives together (or if had been forced to spend some of the time with adult authority figures outside of our home, which honestly even worse) with no time to ourselves until i was an adult and to expect that i would not. i'm thankful to hope that writing like that op-ed helps to push back against that tendency in our society. i'm thankful for this marie howe poem about motherhood.

i'm thankful that i spent several hours making this erasure of a domino's pizza box. i'm thankful that it was a fond echo of the time i used to spend working on my old blog, except, 8 years after that, with technology that made it more comfortable; instead of being unergonomically hunched over a laptop using a mini travel mouse to painstakingly erase the edges around a scan of an object, i was able to work relaxed and reclined on my ipad, using the apple pencil to work through the contours smoothly, using two fingers to pan and zoom. i'm thankful for what chalk looks like under a microscope. i'm thankful for the latest in the videos of big boi training his pet owl hootie. i'm thankful that we watched a quiet place last night, even though that movie was pretty stupid, since it was fun for us to talk over it.

i'm thankful for the song "trader joe" by junglepussy, which is so strummingly summery. i'm thankful for the new tony molina album, which if you like to be guided by voices softly is something you will like (i'm thankful still for his album dissed and dismissed, which is power pop prose poems). i'm thankful for the tight production of "small foreign faction" by haley blais and for the vapor trails of the feedback solo at the end. i'm thankful for the vocals in the chorus of "i don't blame you" by cat power. i'm thankful, when i played it in the car yesterday, to have learned when i'm out of town, d uses the song "i don't want to live forever" by zayn and taylor swift as her alarm clock, which i found very cute. i'm thankful that i am not out of town now, but we can still listen to that song and sing it together, since it is very fun to sing. i'm thankful for the joy of clumsy falsetto sung in the car with someone you love.