March 8, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 10:30am

Bird Species: house finch, house sparrow, northern cardinal, American crow, common grackle, European starling, American robin, northern mockingbird, blue jay, dark-eyed junco, song sparrow, red-bellied woodpecker

Things I Thought About:

• I have to stop opening my phone and scrolling when I wake up. Especially on Sunday morning. It produces Sunday Gloomies, which are very much worse than Sunday Scaries, which are normal and to be expected under late capitalism.
• When I was a child, and I was very much a church every Sunday child, when I wanted to pray I’d go through a list in my head of people I knew, just thinking for a few seconds about all my friends and family, no particular wish, just kind of remembering them to God and letting Him do what he might with all that. Now the thing I pray for most often is death to individuals, and the complete destruction of the fortunes and forces of my enemies. As prayers go, this is biblically sound, but it feels simply awful. 
• If prayer is useless and childish and magical thinking, it for sure is not as useless as posting “Kamala and Hillary tried to warn us," which is kindergarten shit.
• I’m taking Bluesky off my phone again.
• I wouldn’t say it's sunny out, but there is light. The cloud cover is low but doesn’t seem heavy, and there's a tall expanse of blue sky at the horizon line, the way you see pink at sunset.
• When the trees around here fully bloom, I’m going to have to struggle to get photos, but in the meantime, I like how that mocker looks on that budding branch. 

• When I was in college most recently, I took a course in Historic Geology, and the professor told us, quite casually, that the odds of a tornado tearing through a neighborhood and leaving in its wake a fully assembled, working 747 were greater than the odds of Life ever happening on this planet at all. I have no idea about the math there, but I never forgot this and I think about it quite often.
• This is the first day where it is 65 degrees, and it gives me no joy to report that it is now too humid to carry your phone in your bra. Also, it may be time for insect repellant every time you leave the house.
• Ooooh, speaking of bugs! Hell yeah, my guy, eat them all. Eat the one that just bit me.

• When I was child I first thought I would die of old age, then of vampires, then disease, then in some dramatic and memorable tragedy à la Isadora Duncan or saving the life of Simon LeBon’s child so that Duran Duran would never forget about me. Then in early adulthood, due entirely to my own piss poor decisions, I was sure I would die terribly, if not at the hands of, at least by the fault of, some fairly worthless man or another. Then disease again, which is almost certain to take the pot, but recently, I feel like I might die from framing up a woodpecker with my camera, taking two steps backwards for a slightly better shot, and getting obliterated by a peloton of mountain bikers, or plummeting into a ravine and impaling myself on a branch.
• I suppose there are worse ways. Not today though. I didn’t fall down the ravine and this woodpecker doing is some of the funniest shit I have ever seen in my life.

BOTD: this red-bellied woodpecker. She was up there, fully burying herself in that hole, and pulling out huge wads of shredded pulp.

Then she shied back very suddenly, but only flew a foot away, and then gave it another try.

And that's when I saw there was a mammal in there.

My neighbors think I'm a maniac. I laughed OUT loud, very loudly and for a long time. She did this like four more times, going in, ripping this (flying?) squirrel's bedding out of the hole, and getting driven away, and going in again.

This went on for about four minutes until she went away for good. This was extremely good times. This was the kind of shit that reminds me that I always feel a million percent better after I go outside for a while.