I used to do it in the old-fashioned way. I carried a pen at all times. When the muse struck—on the subway, in the woods, at the bar—I’d scribble on the nearest available surface: electric bill, cocktail napkin, matchbook, tangerine rind. Admittedly not the most efficient system for organizing random thoughts, as my desk resembled a compost heap at times, but it did cage a spark of spontaneity in the assorted ephemera.
Now I use the Notes app on my phone. It’s still a chaotic embarrassment in there, with grocery lists and workout routines and book and movie recommendations and gnomic utterances like, “Believe everything you read: just don’t think it’s true.” Or this: “Poetry is the open mike night of the soul.” Or this morbid curiosity: “My own death is hard to imagine but easy to picture.”
I was originally going to write, “I use the Notes field on my phone like everyone,” but that’s surely false. There are specialized apps for tracking groceries and workout erg expenditure and the proper sorting of odd aphorisms. (Actually, I searched on the App Store and nothing comes up for “Gnomic Utterances.” Any developers out there want to partner on this? I’m smelling opportunity. Or that might be a tangerine rind.)
The upshot of this haphazard accounting was that I needed to clear my desk of debris from time to time, and as tangerine rinds are notoriously hard to file away, my “notes” would need to be transfigured from fragment into a villanelle or essay or jeremiad or be discarded. And now, at the end of the year—I write to you on December 17—I’m bringing that kind of rigor to my Notes app and will be attempting to make sense of those febrile jottings now. What follows are actual notes I left myself in the past few months that never amounted to a full thing on their own. Strap in.
“The Romans Called It Dying”
One of the pleasures of living in a house for a long time is that you learn its quirks and eccentricities. You’ve fixed nearly everything twice so you know its vulnerabilities and where it’ll never go wrong on you. Like a lover, you know what it takes to keep it satisfied.
And then you get a letter from the city water department informing you that the house you’ve lived in for 21 years has a “lead service line.” The word lead is a homograph so at first it’s tricky to parse, but it turns out the city didn’t mean lead as in “lead on, MacDuff” but as in: the extensive use of lead pipes caused widespread lead poisoning among the Roman elite and could have contributed significantly to the decline of the Roman Empire. (Historians debate this point. And don’t come at me about the whole men constantly thinking about the Roman Empire trope. When did it become a crime to have read all six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?)
The city was kind enough to inform the 2,700 affected households that the service line, which connects the house to the municipal water system, is owned by the homeowner. And that you should run your tap before you drink it—lead pools in sitting water. And children should be tested to determine lead levels in their blood. The headline in the paper the next day: “Mayor Urges Residents Not to Be Alarmed.”
“Yacht Rock Christmas”
My dearly departed brother Paddy was a yacht rock aficionado. Whether this had to do with his work in the maritime industry or just a sincere love of smooth melodies and crisp production values, I don’t know. But when I’m thinking of my little brother, I’ll often throw on some ’70s AM gold in his honor.
And then I heard Michael McDonald singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” while out Christmas shopping and I realized I could go full sail through the holidays. Amongst the Kenny Loggins and Dan Fogelberg of it all, my favorite find was “December” by Earth, Wind & Fire. If that sounds eerily similar to the 1978 hit “September” by the funk legends, that’s because it is. They recorded “December” for their 2014 album Holiday, changing only the dates in the lyrics. Gotta love creatives who know how to squeeze more juice out of an old lemon.
“Flognarde and Clafoutis“
In its weekly “Eats” column, the New York Times magazine recently included a recipe for clafoutis, a crustless cherry tart from France. As someone who rarely bakes—or eats dessert—I’d never heard of this dish. Nor of its cousin, flognarde, which replaces cherries with a different stone fruit. You string those two words together with a conjunction—Flognarde and Clafoutis—you’ve got the title of a French police procedural starring Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel as a couple of mismatched detectives. Or, Flognarde & Clafoutis, an upscale boutique selling $180 sweatshirts reading “L’Upstate et Froid.”
“Sidewalk Zucchini”
Everyone is pretty lax about yard maintenance on Jarrold Street. It’s like the before photo in an ad for a landscaping company. There’s a foreclosed house up the street that’s been abandoned since 2010 and is entering its tear-down phase. Squatters were living there briefly until a neighbor saw them getting Door Dash delivered and the cops rousted them. I trim the hedges in front of the house when I get annoyed enough about having to walk out into the road because they’re blocking the sidewalk. A full-grown Rose of Sharon rises up out of a sewer grate.
Adding to the general unkemptness, last August a four-foot long zucchini tendril was growing out of a crack in the sidewalk in front of my neighbor’s house. I watered it for a couple of weeks until it died.
“Pocket Protector”
What I wouldn’t give to have a pen explode in my pocket. It seemed like I ruined a dress shirt every other week in high school with an exploding pen, but I haven’t suffered such a calamity in decades. (Besides, who even wears dress shirts anymore?) Has pen technology improved so much in recent years? Did the pocket protector manufacturers all go broke?
“Sororicide”
Reading Daniel Mason’s magisterial novel North Woods—set on one farmstead in the Berkshires over several centuries—all manner of human behavior is depicted, from tender love to incredible cruelty. In a particularly dark scene (spoiler alert!) one spinster sister murders another with an axe. Which gave me pause: what is sister killing called? Killing your brother is fratricide, everybody knows that. It’s one of the opening scenes of the Bible. Cain kills Abel. In Egyptian mythology Osiris is cut down by Set. There’s a whole subcategory on Wikipedia about it. But sororicide? No one talks about it.”
“Buy Tangerines”
Just in case I lose my phone and need something to write on.
This article appears in January 2025.
