A thing I would really like to see in the world: a public library that serves craft beer.

By world I mean Howard County, Maryland.

We went to visit some old friends a couple weekends ago. We hadn’t seen them in an awfully long time. 8 years, by our reckoning.

Over glasses of wine and whiskey we traded stories that wandered back to earlier days. We were single, no kids yet. Apartments in downtown Baltimore. Meeting and dating the people who would become our partners. Getting careers off the ground, one shaky mistake (and, sometimes, lesson) at a time.

At the time I remember how uncertain and scary it all felt; how the world, for all its possibility, seemed so big and lonely. Looking back, now, our neighborhood and circle of friends strike me as an almost adorably small, connected world. Everybody lived within a few miles of one another. We knew the day-to-day, gory details of one another’s lives and hopes and tribulations, recounted over drinks at a local bar or at somebody’s kitchen table.

Now I found myself with my friends again. Their voices were familiar but everything else had changed. Our kids slept in bedrooms just down the hall. Our lives had gotten busier and infinitely more complicated and farther apart. Better, richer, yes, but also with less space.

It’s not that I’m nostalgic, exactly, for the days when I was young and unmoored. It’s just that time passes so quickly, rendering everything that came before as ghostly, translucent, immaterial. Before I can really understand it — understand, maybe, what it all meant to me — it’s reduced to a figment.

For the past month or so, I’ve caught myself wanting to kind of …drop out of the world for a little bit.

It’s an odd feeling that’s hard to articulate. It comes into my head, usually on some random Tuesday, as I’m signing out of a meeting or cooking dinner or putting my kid to bed. When I’m tired, when my mind is jogging ahead, taking inventory of one responsibility after another scribbled on my calendar.

I find myself wishing that time could stop for a little while; that the world could forget I’m here; that I could disappear like a walking-stick insect on a tree branch, or a flounder on the sandy ocean floor.

I took a weekend trip to a cabin in West Virginia a while ago. I was alone, on a 2-day ‘retreat’ my wife gave me as a birthday present. It was a really wonderful gift and I was grateful for a quiet weekend with no responsibilities. I could read, walk, ride my bike, watch the clouds, catch my breath.

This felt like the first time I’d traveled anywhere alone in an awfully long time. I’ve always been with either family or coworkers, more or less. I felt just a little disoriented as I arrived at a rental cabin near Baker, WV, hauled my bag from the car, and settled in. Toothbrush in the bathroom, backpack in the bedroom, jacket on the coat rack. Done.

The Golden Glow, by Benjamin Flouw, has become one of my all-time favorite picture books.

If I remember right, I stumbled across it in a bookstore in Vermont while on vacation one year. It was sitting there, face-out, on a shelf and the cover illustration stopped me in my tracks.

I’ve found some real gems this way, wandering through a shop in some city I’m seeing for the first time. A book I’ve found becomes part of the story of the trip — part of the flush of discovery of new scenery and sounds and smells. My feet moving over foreign sidewalks, my eyes moving over new words. A new patch of the world revealing itself. I live for that.

Maybe the experience of finding a book this way lends a gloss to my experience of it. Maybe it makes me sentimental. That’s okay. The way a book comes into my life, I think, matters as much to me as what it says inside. Or, to put it in a catchier way: the story ‘outside’ the book the matters as much to me as the story inside it.

I have been brought low by either a cold or allergies.

I’m about halfway through Ed Yong’s An Immense World and it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite nonfiction books I’ve read this year.

I love Yong’s style: a friendly, calm tone that sounds almost effortless. Short, conversational sentences. Simple words. No reaching for intricate phrasing or poetic imagery when a short explanation will do. The effect is something like having dinner with your favorite high school science teacher — a science teacher with perfect recall of an entire field’s worth of relevant knowledge. It’s a 2-inch thick, 500-page book covering a century worth of international research and it’s just so… easy to read.

A book of this breadth and complexity would be, I think, an incredible piece of work even if it was an impenetrable, academic, punctuation-averse fire swamp in the finest tradition of Das Capital. But it’s not. It’s a symphony that plays like a pop song.

I was really sad to read the other day that we lost Ahmad Jamal. A phenomenal jazz pianist, he kept playing and recording over an 80 year (!) career. He lived to 92.

I discovered his work when my wife’s coworker loaned us an album. It was Live at the Pershing Lounge 1958 — a compilation of live recordings by the Ahmad Jamal Trio. I’d never heard it before but they had me by track 3. It’s become one of my very favorite albums. I’m not a music expert — these days I think I fall somewhere between ‘basic’ and ‘enthusiast’ as a listener, at best — but there’s something about that album that just feels perfect. Some delicate, sublime balance they managed to hold for 72 minutes, and they held it so effortlessly that I don’t doubt they could have gone on forever. It sounds complex and sophisticated and deep to me, but also inviting, unpretentious, and easy to listen to.

Rest in peace, Ahmad Jamal, and thanks for everything.

I decided to try an experiment.

In my drawings, I use pigment ink in my pens and on my brush. Pigment-based inks are usually more 'archival' and permanent than dye-based inks.(Note: For more on ink and its many incarnations, check out Will J. Bailey’s wonderful, in-depth video.)Once an archival ink has dried on paper, it should be water-resistant, pH-neutral, and lightfast — it should not fade in sunlight.

But I'm curious just how true that is. I've seen some light-exposure tests here and there, but I'd like to see for myself. So I made some quick swatches of my three favorite pigment-based inks.