Weeknotes: April 6–10, 2026
Monday, April 6
The purple house opposite mine is still for sale. Two mallards explore its front yard — please be my new neighbors, I think.
In the afternoon, Nick appears at my back door bearing the most miraculous gift. "Hello sir," he exclaims, then holds out a white Riva flute case. Inside it is a vintage Casio PT-1, a 13" wonder of monophonic 8-bit joy. Like many kids in the '80s, this was my first keyboard.
I replace its four AA batteries, locate the green demo button among its rainbow array, and press play. Listed in various Casio manuals as "German Folk Song" or sometimes "Unterlanders Heimweh," this jolly little melody is pure nostalgia. A post on the Casio forum traces it back to a German-inspired Japanese children's tune called "Yama No Ongakuka." To me, it simply sounds like Brighton, Michigan, 1985.
For the first time in almost two weeks, I run my regular route through the city and across the Spring Street bridge. A memorial has sprung up for the 13-year-old boy who drowned in the river below. The last time I was here, emergency vehicles were just arriving to search for him. Colorful bouquets are taped to the cold steel rail along with cards and messages. I pause to read some of them, then look out at a pair of mallards, wondering for a fleeting second if they are the same ones I saw this morning on my street.
Weeknotes: March 23–27, 2026
Monday, March 23
I awaken from a dream about living in a wall tent dormitory with an unexplained desire to listen to Scott Walker. I put Scott 3 into the CD player and brew coffee to the discordant strings of "It's Raining Today."
In 1996, my brother and I were obsessed with Razor & Tie's Scott Walker anthology of the same name. I remember the two of us sitting in my car outside the Fisher Building in Detroit, grooving to "The Old Man's Back Again," before taking the elevator up to the studios of WJR-AM. We were musical guests on The Mitch Albom Show, an honor that involved being completely ignored by the two co-hosts and frantically self-editing about 20 seconds of live performance into the gaps after commercial breaks. We never met Mitch, who was broadcasting from the East Coast that day. After one of the breaks he made fun of my falsetto which I admittedly overused back then. I still think of this every time I see one of his books in a grocery store checkout lane.
All day I'm beset by abstract weariness. I yawn self-consciously through my morning class and subsequent errands. At the vet I pick up a prescription for Trazodone, hoping it might curtail Islay's destructive chewing. I suspect it’s just boredom, but I haven’t ruled out seperation anxiety. Bolstered by two naps, I work steadily all afternoon and through most of the evening, eyeing bedtime as my just reward. When I finally turn in, I revive a credo from a few years ago and say out loud "my favorite part of the day is right now."