positions I am ready to fill in charming Seward, Alaska
(inspired by Nicole Chung’s “Positions I Am Ready to Fill in Your Charming Beach Town”, and a recent visit to the titular location)
The free-spirited barista who has killer bangs, dresses exclusively in linen, and wears her heart on her sleeve
The mysterious 19-year-old who rides around on the back of boys’ scooters, and only opens her mouth to say things like “There’s live music at the bar tonight” to out-of-towners
The endurance runner who pushes her toddler uphill in a stroller every night to get him to sleep
The visiting marine biology PhD student who spends the summer as a naturalist/crew member on all-day glacier & wildlife boat tours
The captain of said boat, who pines for the scholar but knows summer flings never end well, and anyways her true passion is saving the whales
The owner of the health food store who only wears wool socks with Birkenstocks or gumboots
The older woman who walks her dog at twilight and picks wildflowers and herbs along the road
The grizzled fisherman who complains constantly about the cold but secretly relishes it
The teenage boys that ride their bikes around aimlessly with nothing to do, cursing this boring town, scheming to someday leave and never come back
The reclusive painter who lives in a small cabin on the outskirts of town, and sells her art in a small gallery on main street
The national park ranger who weirdly looks fantastic in uniform, and loves ruining family vacations by telling visitors about glacial melt
Anything really, as long as I am eccentric and locally notorious for telling people (as a local said to me) “I’m obsessed with Resurrection Bay”
good things on the internet
This guy doing the Lord’s work, making sure President Lyndon B. Johnson knows about Ice Spice 🪦
I am all in on this blues clues spice cheating conspiracy 🧂
I’ve been embarrassingly possessed by Luke Comb’s cover of Fast Car, so I appreciated Emily Yahr’s reminder that this song was written by Tracy Chapman, a black queer woman, and that it is blowing up as a cover by a white dude in a genre that excludes black and queer folks 🚗
currently reading
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter: “To survive here, I have split myself in two: my true self and my false self. My fake self rises up to take over when the demands are too great. Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.”
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill: “Once, when I was very small, my mom taught me how to set my face. How to erase the mad or the sad or the disappointed. “Not too eager, not too happy, not too anything. Just pleasant. And unflappable. You can get a world of work done with a pleasant face. Nobody interrupts and nobody gets offended. Like this, darling.” And she showed me.”
Max Read on AI & The Shitposting Zone: “[The point is to] sidestep the apocalyptic-messianic framework that tends to get placed around recent advances in “generative A.I.” in favor of looking at the actually existing uses of A.I. apps that have captured the public (as opposed, to say, investor) imagination. These uses are generally not particularly lucrative, ground-breaking, or even, necessarily, impressive. They are--and we can use the proper term here on Read Max, among mature friends--shitposts.”
this week’s jam
I had completely forgotten about this week’s jam until Ashley Nerbovig featured it in a recent edition of The Stranger’s Slog AM. Within the first second, I was transported back to the first semester of college, and that weird singular high you get when you’re 18 and it’s a weekend night and you are going out with your friends. I like to think we all have a song that does that.
(I am so grateful I got to experience that then. I am so grateful I don’t have to experience that now.)
photo of my cats
