#17 - What's Good?
27 Baboons; Nerd Stuff; Fathers Day Photos
Hello, my friends,
Happy summer! When we were driving home from my parent’s house on Tuesday evening, I told Michael that it was the longest day of the year. He was quiet — either duly impressed or uncomprehending and it’s hard to blame him. When your sense of time is still mostly relative, daylight’s length in minutes is difficult to grasp. We’re not that different from 4-year-olds in this; our ability to contextualize large numbers is not so good either. See here: There were 49,601,000 milliseconds of daylight on June 20th, 2023. We lost a whole 4,000 milliseconds of sun on June 23rd. Shall we mourn those four minutes together?
27 Baboons
Recently, Ashley ordered a credenza for our living room and it arrived last week. I built it on the day after it arrived and packed it with records and CDs which I liberated from Sophie’s closet where they went during the move. In total honestly, I mostly stream my music these days, but going through the records and CDs was a tub full of memories! For instance, I found a mix CD I had made for Ashley for her birthday in 2009. For some reason I called it 27 Baboons(?). I’m pretty sure that the question mark indicates the title was also a non-sequitur 14 years ago.
Having no memory of what was on it, I put the CD into the player and listened to the whole thing. Here is the track list:
“The Feeling of Jazz” by Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
“Wonderful! Wonderful!” by Johnny Mathis
“Hot Thing” by Talib Kweli (feat. will.i.am)
“Julia” by the Beatles
“Los Mariachis (The Street Musicians)” by Charlie Mingus
“All the Things You Are” by Charlie Parker
“The Wonder of You” by Elvis Presley
“So Into You” by Fabolous (feat. Tamia)
“Night Watchman” by Francis and the Lights
“Me Gusta Tu” by Manu Chau
“Open Your Eyes” by Yes
“Time and a Word” by Yes
Weirdly, when I examined the hard drive with the .mp3 files which I had burned to make 27 Baboons(?), I discovered that there was apparently also a Fresh Air interview with Maurice Sendak (one of these) that I had intended to include but that didn’t make it onto the CD. Listening back, I’d still consider each individual selection a banger, but other than the song titles that reflect my feelings for Ashley, the CD has absolutely no musical cohesion. I recall that my goal was to share my “prolific” music tastes with Ashley by giving her 12 songs that I was listening to at the time. “I think I only listened to the CD once,” she said after we went through it the other day. Was I offended? Not at all! A good mix CD must have a coherent sonic trajectory and just like 27 real life baboons, 27 Baboons(?) went in every direction at once!
I suspect I haven’t learned much in a decade and a half because I now write a weekly newsletter where I share my idiosyncratic life tastes three random sections at a time. So yeah, welcome to my newsletter: 3 Wild Horses.
Nerd Stuff
High school is an odd place for determining the quality of interests. In many high schools, being very smart is considered uncool, as are Forget all that, really I just wanted to use this space to say that I think Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPG games are so cool! My feeling is a little bit theoretical because I’ve only played D & D once, but I just love the idea of collaborative world-making. It’s like an imaginative narrative orchestra with the dungeon master (DM) as the conductor, and where each player invents their own instrument. The improvisational storytelling, the group, the rules and structure, and that it’s all potentially ongoing, are aspects that have a very strong appeal for me. I don’t think that I have the time to take up a new hobby now, but someday I’m going to need to find a group of tabletop RPG enthusiasts and persuade them to adopt me into their party.
Fathers Day Photos
For Fathers Day, I requested that we go somewhere green, so we went for walk at the Descanso Gardens which included seeing a neat exhibit called “Living in a Wildlife Corridor” put together by the Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy about the ecology of the flora and fauna local to our area. Since I’m learning ecology on Kinnu (see #15), this was a little like a class field trip, as was my solo hike on Monday morning. Anyway, before we set off the kids and I took some selfies. Please indulge me as I share a few photos of two adorable kids and their shirtless dad:
