Photograph by Alexander Fleming. Courtesy of Natasha Stagg.

In 2008, I graduated from the University of Michigan and went on a North American tour as the merch girl for my boyfriend at the time, a drummer some fourteen years older than me in an indie band. I didn’t have a smartphone or laptop and perhaps couldn’t find the privacy to write in a notebook from the van, so I typed a “tour diary” in the days after we returned, on a platform that I had until recently assumed was deleted.

By 2008, the band had gone through several lineup changes since its start. The men—my boyfriend and the lead singer—were the only remaining original members. The women—a bassist and a second guitarist, also backup singers—had been hired to replace other women, whom I had already gotten to know and like. I mention this as context because my connection to a previous iteration may have been subtly felt. Either way, I’m sure my boyfriend had to defend the decision to take me along. Everyone else was older and treated the band as a job, because it was. I had been hired to sell T-shirts but treated the tour as a vacation from my day job (selling groceries).

I’ve changed the names of band members because I’m not in touch with any of them and can’t ask their permission to publish this. I’ve also obscured or deleted the names of other bands, because mostly I wrote about how bad they were and how, in one case, I broke their merch intentionally. Accidentally rediscovering these notes, I am mostly struck by my own immaturity, although perhaps I shouldn’t be. It’s clear to me now that I was trying to convince myself of some intolerable situation, something that was worse than (or larger than?) leaving college and entering so-called real life.

May 15, 2008

Subterranean – Chicago, Illinois

Wake up around 11 A.M. to Andy’s mother in his house [in Ann Arbor, Michigan].

Have breakfast nervously, making sure I have everything.

Ride in the back seat (because I’m told to) while Andy drops off his mother at a dumpster so she can dive in it.

Go back to Andy’s house.

Ben [the singer/guitarist], Carly [the second guitarist], and Daria [the bassist] arrive, having driven a rented van and trailer from the band’s practice space outside of Detroit.

They help us load our suitcases into the trailer, which already has Andy’s drums in it.

Ben drives us to Chicago.

Early show, 7:30 P.M., not many people because of a false advertisement, bad opening band (lead singer steals all our free PBR tallboys and chugs them) but good show from [the touring opener].

Meet Ernest, our tour manager, who flew in from El Paso, I think.

Pack up, check into the hotel (six of us in one room), and go across the street to a diner.

Eat, then go back to the hotel to watch TV and go to sleep.

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Photograph by Grace Byron.

July 6, 2024

My obsession with horseshoe crabs started small. D. and I went to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge on a bird walk. The two women next to us turned out to work at an independent competitor to the massive plushie company Squishmallow, and I listened to them talk about the qualities of superior felt as D. watched an egret scarf down an eel across the marsh. Both of us grew up in the Midwest, but it’s D. who loves birding and camping. I enjoy nature as much as the next woman, but I love the feeling of returning to a solid bed surrounded by four sturdy walls. It wasn’t until we walked back to the nature center, stocked with stuffed animals both real and fake, that I came alive. Eagles, hummingbirds, owls, and mice, all lined up in glass cages and offered as stuffies, intended for kids below the age of ten. I idly wound up a small, plastic horseshoe crab and watched it race along the linoleum. Then we turned the corner into a boardroom and discovered a small exhibit on the crabs, a series of nightscape photographs depicting hordes of the ancient critters scampering under streetlights on the beach. The four-hundred-million-year-old hard-shell survivors mating, spawning, and molting on the beach at night under the streetlights, unbothered by the dawn of new technology.

The strange, spiderlike crabs looked uncanny, with shells like the backs of stingrays. Their barnacles and the years of life they’d spent living underwater, chowing down on tiny fish and algae, lent them a gray-green hue. Like Paleozoic monsters, alien crustaceans knocked out of time and space. They inspired the same fear and delight that walking in the woods once did when I was a child: the fear and delight of discovery.

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Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

Friday, May 2, 4 P.M.

It’s been a while since I visited the household that my Sim shares with Rian, the Sim I made for my partner, Ryan. In the game we live with our two youngest kids, two dogs, a cat, a cow, and a number of chickens. I’ve been nervous: even though she’s on the Long setting for lifespan, it seems like she’s heading toward death. To keep her alive, I’ve been playing with our older kids and grandkids. They moved out as Young Adults to live on separate lots nearby. Sometimes I get them to invite me over for dinner.

But everything at our house seems to be as I left it. I’m holding Fiona, the cat, and our son Fielding is holding Rye, the puppy. There’s a purple onion on the grass. Rian’s Chatting on the computer in our bedroom. I direct him to work on the garden, where some of the plants need to be Watered and Sprayed for Bugs. In this world he’s a stay-at-home dad. I work two days a week as a Creator of Worlds, the highest tier in the Author track of the Writer career. Would I have chosen a different career if my real job had been an option? Luckily it’s impossible to say. My Sim Goes to work two days a week and spends the rest of the time hanging out with her family and Writing on her computer. She’s very good at Writing—she’s already Published a Bestseller. I love whoever maintains the game’s patterns of capitalization; their work is imperfect and I imagine a series of interns, each of whom thought their summer job in tech would be something else. Maybe like the person assigned to fact-check my last piece about The Sims: “okay, i’m seeing this character referred to as the Grim Reaper more frequently than Death but both seem fine. also, i can’t confirm that in Sims 2 he can show up at Sims’ houses and eat a sandwich.”

Billie, the adult dog, is sick. I don’t have work for a few days, so I take her to the vet. I make enough money between my job and the royalties from all the books I’ve Published that I don’t think twice when I Spare No Expense at the clinic. Billie is instantly better and we Go home. Read More

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.

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