January 29, 2025 Diaries Running Diaries By Kim Beil Photograph courtesy of Kim Beil. My running diary is a stack of 8 ½ x 11” papers printed with a calendar grid. The small boxes demand brevity. Cryptic penciled notes represent dates, times, distances, elevations, routes, and sometimes strangers’ names and course records. There are codes for heart rate (HR), physical-therapy exercises (yoga and single-leg squat: YSS), and personal records (PR). There’s space for an occasional comment: “Hard!” or “OK!” I would schedule my workouts weeks in advance, only infrequently crossing them out and altering the plan. I created this calendar when I started running, and kept it through my late thirties. After a few months of exhausted frustration, I learned that I was anemic and probably had been for years. As supplements pumped iron into my blood, I found that I could run faster and farther. I felt like I was getting younger; it was like alchemy. The calendar helped me look forward to my fortieth birthday, a milestone I’d been taught to fear. The data prove that I love going over hills. A few months into 2020, half a year after my birthday, the diary changes. In place of record times and podium finishes, there are notes about pain, walks, pills. I stopped labeling the years. But somehow the diary kept going, even when I had to stop running. These excerpts map my route through pain. Initially, I liked that the codes made the diary look like a scientific dataset. Keeping track of the numbers seemed like an objective measurement of myself, a way to gain a little distance from what it feels like to run—and to be unable to run. Later, I stopped keeping the diary, in order to collapse that distance again. Read More
January 15, 2025 Diaries Spanish Journals By Catherine Lacey Photograph by Catherine Lacey. I kept this notebook during my first intensive period of studying Spanish in Oaxaca in November of 2022. I didn’t know then that this study would soon be interrupted by almost two years in New York. As I looked through it more recently, it became clear how cheerfully deranged the early days of learning a new language appear from even the slightest distance. I am, you are, he is, we are, they are. I am a student. I am a writer. He is Mexican. She is a pilot. I was stupid. She was a pilot I was a marathoner until my accident. Yesterday was Monday. I am not accustomed to it. I am tired. I am happy. I am learning Spanish. That woman is never angry. Where are your friends? The soup is very hot. They are afraid of my cat! Why? I don’t know. They have to do the shopping today. We have to go home. I have to work now. I have to see him this afternoon. Read More
December 23, 2024 Diaries Christmas Tree Diary By Jake Maynard Friday, November 29, 2024 27 degrees A twelve-hour opening shift and I dripped snot on the first customer’s debit card. But that’s Christmas tree season. Other than the barrel fire, there’s no place to get warm, so I wore fleece thermals with jeans on top, pockets full of pine needles already. Plus a hoodie and a blanket-lined denim trucker jacket that passes for hip. Ty doesn’t wear a coat, just three Carhartt hoodies on top of each other. Jack wears a knee-length puffer jacket from Goodwill. Brian wears a hoodie with the hood cinched tight around his face and his beard poking out. He looks the most like an elf. He also looks the most like Santa. Kids like to bring up one or the other. Sometimes we try to wear gloves, but they get caked in sap. People are always asking why landscapers and construction workers are selling Christmas trees. The short answer is that trees are heavy and construction workers are strong, and that winter is cold and we’re mostly cool with that. We’re set up across from a gay club in a rich part of Pittsburgh. Our boss started selling Christmas trees in this lot fifteen years ago. From that came a seasonal nursery selling flowers and shrubs in the summer, which led to a landscaping service, which became full-service contracting, which is why now you have a bunch of carpenters temporarily assigned to tree duty. We make good money in tips. I work in the nursery during the warmer months and on jobsites when the plant business slows. Even I’m surprised that it’s here, just a rickety greenhouse and a few sheds dropped onto a sloping city lot in the neighborhood where the Mellons and Carnegies once built their mansions. Now luxury apartments, dorms for adults, are encroaching. It feels like one might rocket up from the ground at any minute, launching us out into the burbs, where rent’s cheaper. The nursery’s vibe has been variously described as crunchy, folksy, chill, granola, and “aesthetic”: hand-painted signs fading in the weather, a long, rusty pergola full of wreaths made with tree trimmings and some handmade ornaments dropped off by their makers. We spread a ton of mulch, lean the trees on X-shaped racks scabbed together with scrap lumber, hang some floodlights, light a few barrel fires, and crank Casey Kasem’s Christmas Top 40. The same songs every day. Unless Brian’s working, then it’s Latin American Navidad songs or Christmas ska. It keeps him upbeat in the cold. Read More
December 11, 2024 Diaries Woodshop Diary By Kelan Nee August 12, 2024 This new project is solid wood: a conductor’s podium and music stand for the symphony orchestra in a nearby city. It’s my first day back in the shop after six weeks in New England. C. gives me a hug on the way in. He shows me what I’ll be working on that day: enormous slabs of cherrywood, rough-sawn around the edges. C.’s shop is on the smaller side: a single lot in a residential area. There’s a lot of natural light: thanks to an architect C. used to work with, the ceiling is spotted with circular skylights that magnify the sun’s light while muting its heat. Usually for carpentry jobs, I’m on a crew: between gigs as a boatbuilder and then as a house carpenter in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, I’ve worked on teams of as few as three and as many as thirty, both in shops and out on jobsites. In C.’s shop, it’s just the two of us all day between the machines, save for deliveries of wood, or C.’s wife popping in, and breaks for coffee and lunch in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston. I met C. through my sponsor, and though C. wasn’t in recovery, he’d lost his brother to drugs. It was immediately clear we’d get along. C. is smart and kind with equal intensity, dark-haired, in his mid-forties, a self-taught furniture maker, trained as a classical guitarist. He doesn’t dress like your stereotypical tradesman: he wears casual pants rather than double-kneed dungarees, prefers sneakers to boots. He has an eye for beauty and a brain for processes. He’s precise, exacting, like any good furniture maker must be. A milling day for me. Four legs made of three thirteen-by-seven-inch blocks, each two and a quarter inches thick. Taking rough-cut wood and milling it down is one of the most immediately satisfying tasks in a shop: using a jointer, a thickness planer, and various saws, you take an unwieldy, shaggy slab of wood and flatten it into squared blocks of workable beauty. In the afternoon, we draw a sketch of the rest of the stand: a roughly four-by-four-foot platform made of four legs with interior and exterior bevels, connected by four skirt pieces, and a frame-style platform for the conductor to stand on. A piece of carpeted plywood will prevent the conductor’s feet from making too much noise on the podium. We’re also building a matching music stand for the sheet music to sit on. Drawing it, we kept asking each other, Does that angle look good to you? Don’t measure: It looks good, right? Draw it and use it, C. says, with his slight Texas twang. Read More
November 5, 2024 Diaries Philadelphia Farm Diary By Joseph Earl Thomas Elana the goose. Photograph by Joseph Earl Thomas. September 1, 2024 Elana thinks the world is coming to an end, but I remind her how this is a fundamental problem of perspective. She is both right and wrong, and so am I. Elana, insofar as I can tell, contains the multitudes most other three-year-old Sebastopol geese and humans above the age of thirty lack. When I open the coop, this Amish-made shed, painted blue with little herb planters beneath the windows, she tawdles out, screaming, as geese often do. Her adopted babies (three gray “African” geese) and a duck trio waddle out after her; they test their lungs against the air, honking and such over the sounds of slow traffic on Penrose Avenue, the warblers waiting to share their food, four dogs barking on the other side of the yard, those big black vultures competing for pool water, and my neighbor’s white cat, everybody’s nemesis, lurking at the edges of our fence and licking its lips at the thought of baby birds. The nearly last living rooster is sexually tepid, but eager for food, guiding all thirteen hens to the snacks I’ve dispensed, clucking them over to what he’s “found.” Elana grooms my pants leg, then unties my retro number 8s as if desperate to return to summer, to the sandals that ferried my bright green bare toenails out to her like so many flecks of potential vegetation. Failing, she looks up at me quizzically, or, like, Where the fuck is my food, nigga? Read More
October 30, 2024 Diaries Sleep Diary By Rosa Shipley Photograph courtesy of Rosa Shipley. June 29, 2024 Bed at midnight. Awake at 3:12 A.M. Back to sleep around six, awake again at 8:39 A.M. Very hot out. June 30 Bed at one thirty. Up at six thirty. Realized these are my final hours in my apartment before I move tomorrow. Not much sleep, but for good reason. When I already know that my sleep is going to be abbreviated, it’s easier to make peace with the specter of fatigue. This apartment has a skylight, and my bed lies directly beneath. All the time, it gives the sensation of soaking in a sun shower. It is as if I am sometimes being cursed by God’s blessing. No air conditioning, so I freeze tomatoes in the icebox, as I call it to myself—I live alone—and then put them on my belly and heart to cool. The past few weeks, when I’ve been up in the night and sensed morning coming, I’ve tried to locate the darkest corner of my studio apartment. This just means I’ve moved my top mattress layer, a cotton Japanese futon, to the floor. Restless, with one pillow and one sheet, I escaped the skylight. With my body this close to the floor, I can feel the rumblings of the building below me, the deep hum of the subway underneath, and the trucks outside, all the sound so bass-tone that I forget I’m even listening. Makes me think of the way that they say mushrooms speak to one another from underground, or of the sound of a whale. July 1 Bed at midnight. Up at eight. Miraculous! Read More