I wish I was a stranger who wanders down the sky

Nothing about Providence with rushthatspeaks went precisely as planned and it was a lovely, lovely day.

We got a late start to begin with: Rush was broiling bluefish with spicy Japanese mayonnaise for dinner and I guess if you want an environmentally friendly alternative to asbestos, choose bluefish? Because it was impervious to the expected cooking time (although eventually, and this is important, delicious), and then there was a construction snarl around Dedham on I-95 that slowed traffic for miles in advance, and we were still glancing at one another randomly and grinning, because the weather was neither buckets of rain nor a nuclear heatwave and the sky was Platonic summer and we were driving to Rhode Island. There were detours and negotiation required when we got into Providence, because it isn't a trip to Providence unless there is a one-way street the wrong way at some point. And we did not have our dinner at Swan Point Cemetery, because there was a security guard who made sure that we said hello to Lovecraft and moved on, and we did not visit Myopic Books, because they had closed early that day, but we found a wonderful little park on Blackstone Boulevard and had our dinner open-air after all and afterward drove around the corner of South Angell Street and lost the next few hours of our lives to Books on the Square. I do not know the name of the park, but even I with no training in urban planning could see that it was working exactly as it had been meant to: it was full of people doing all sorts of different things, walking their dogs, practicing yoga, laying out a picnic with cloths, hanging out and talking. There were kids whacking around a soccer ball with tennis racquets. There was a guy teaching himself to juggle with what really looked like half-filled water bottles. There was a fountain with three different sets of children playing in it. We had our bluefish with spicy mayo and cheesecake with no structural integrity (I made it with a chocolate chip cookie crust, which worked great in terms of flavor, but had not initially baked for quite long enough to be a crust as opposed to a slightly chewy cookie; when I tried to get it out of the spring-form, spatulas became necessary) and blueberries which Rush and gaudior had picked in upstate New York over the weekend and three different kinds of seltzer, of which we did not actually have enough despite my throwing a few extra cans into the back seat when Rush picked me up, because we had somehow forgotten it was summer. In the bookstore, I stretched out between two stacks of the YA section and read half of China Miéville's Railsea (2012), which I will find in this city and finish posthaste, because it seems to be the book I didn't know I wanted him to write; it has language that is a delight to read, worldbuilding at cross angles to itself, and somewhere in the first or second chapter I looked up and said to Rush, "This is like Moby-Dick if you were reconstructing it in Minecraft," and they nodded happily: "Yes." We got completely lost trying to find our way back to I-95 from Books on the Square and wound up coming home via East Providence, Fall River, and highways we hadn't known existed. The soundtrack to Lola rennt (1998) is great driving music. Next time, we are going back for the sea.

I am off to run errands. derspatchel gave me The SCP Foundation and it is eating my life.