August 5, 2025 Diaries My College Diary By Tao Lin I didn’t black out my diary like this—my process involved underlining parts I wanted to keep—but this gives a sense of how much is missing. I kept a typed diary in college. It started three weeks into freshman year and ended three days into senior year. Over 1,079 days, I typed 76 entries, totaling 21,975 words. Here, I’ve edited it down to 43 entries and 2,286 words. I edited only by deleting. I retained grammatical errors, such as incorrect comma usage, but I fixed typos and standardized the word-level style—italicizing books, etc. An erasure poem is made by blacking out words in a poem. Memory is a mode of erasure that blacks out most of life. A diary is an erasure of memory—everything not written is blacked out. This post is an erasure diary where the smallest unit of erasure was the sentence. I erased 89.6 percent of the original. I feel wonder, thinking back to my college self, who did not anticipate this happening to his private diary. Read More
July 15, 2025 Diaries Driving Academy Diary By Nicolaia Rips A dog who cannot drive. Photograph by Nicolaia Rips. August 19, 2024 My twenty-sixth birthday. A sad one. My godfather, Tom Crisp, is dying in a hospital in Morningside Heights. I want to focus on anything else, so I focus on this: I do not have my driver’s license. I promised myself at sixteen that before I turned twenty-six I would get my driver’s license, vowing that I wouldn’t end up one of those cautionary New York tales of gelded thirty-year-olds crammed into the bucket on a road trip. At the time, I felt a decade was more than generous. I was so optimistic at sixteen that I was the first of my friends to get my learner’s permit, which I then renewed beyond the point of propriety. A twenty-six-year-old is a foreign agent to a sixteen-year-old: someone who bears a vague resemblance to you. It is someone to punt your problems to—someone who passed their driving test. August 26 My godfather Tom passes away. September 1 I enroll myself in a driving academy and ride an electric Citi Bike over the Brooklyn Bridge to Hasidic Williamsburg. There, I am confronted by a store that advertises tax returns, copies, faxing, and legal services. There is no mention of driving. Not one to judge a business by its sign, I double-check the address. This cannot be the right place, but somehow it is. The class costs $400. It was the cheapest class I could find that wasn’t out of the back of a van. Included in the course: three driving lessons, access to the mandatory five-hour class, and, at the end of it all, you are ferried to your road test by one of the school’s instructors. My teacher, Fernando, guides me through the wide lanes of Williamsburg, sporadically directing me to pull over, turn left, turn right, parallel park, or make a three-point turn. I keep forgetting which pedal is gas and which is the brake, so I resolve to just go really slow. Fernando’s complete lack of anxiety is bone-chilling. Read More
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