Week 19 2026
Location: The Red Sea
What I saw:
A visual metaphor.
After spending 7 days on a boat floating all around the Red Sea, mostly without cellular connectivity or wifi, the amount of beauty I have seen (sans screen) is nearly non-transferable. So much of what I saw went undocumented since I left my device in one spot and only returned to it for very brief and intermittent whispers of human to human connection with my anchor points back home. Upon my return to shore I was bid farewell by these two at the marina exit.
What I heard:
A concise reordering of my liked songs.
I remembered, totally last minute, that I needed something to listen to while sunbathing and so I quickly downloaded the entirety of my Spotify liked songs list and then somehow managed to make a pretty context appropriate playlist.
What I smelled:
Someone else’s very nicely perfumed sunblock, which ended up being Avene Sun Care Eau Thermale Lotion. A little powdery and slightly orris or violet tinged…similar to, but more elegant than, Desitin diaper cream (which used to be the go-to after-tattoo ointment so I have fond memories of the scent).
What I tasted:
Camel steak a flambé. It tasted like beef + venison, very lean.
What I touched:
Jellyfish that don’t sting.
What I wore:
Nothing but a bathing suit, a peshtemal and a tan.
What I desired:
Gills.
For the first time in as long as I can remember I didn’t have one single desire for a new material possession/object. I’m not sure if this is deeply embarrassing or a weird flex, but for a brief moment in time my accumulation fetish seemed to ebb as the flow of natural and interpersonal beauty over-inundated my capacities.
What I read:
My holy text.
Clarice Lispector is my prophetess, the patron saint of the “glittering and savage”. I have read and re-read her works more times than I can count and I will not stop. Each time I find new lifelines…old underlines that feel like messages in stereo from the past and the future.
“Of what matter am I made in which elements and foundations for a thousand other lives mingle but never merge? I go down every path and still none is mine. I have been sculpted into so many statues and haven’t frozen into place…”
What I thought:
Songs wear like clothes. There are songs that are some sort of equivalent to an antique wedding dress or a sequined costume pulled from the back of an opera house. Time has shifted the energy around them, something is a bit…off…but they still can evoke a very particular state, like an invocation of a lost memory that can be re-entered from different vantage points. Some songs become threadbare, so tattered from hard use and heavy rotation in a previous era that they can’t hold up in any functional way in a new one. Some are just garish and absurd, like fleeting trends, 80’s power ballads always wear like fast fashion caricatures of a moment. Some songs get all the color sucked out of them, they weren’t colorfast and have bled all their vibrancy, the beauty was ephemeral, you can remember the original color and tone but the sonic impression is now a neutralized substitute for its former self. And then there are songs that wear like a perfectly broken-in Margiela tabi boot…they can be slipped into and taken for a walk in almost any time, city, climate or condition.