It is the light inside of us that breathes the light in front of us

It is my birthday. I am thirty-seven years old. Last year I couldn't think of any characters my age except for Dean Priest, which was un-ideal, but this year I am as old as Waldo Butters the October he polka-puppeted a zombie tyrannosaur through the streets of Chicago:

"Screw up my life?" He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms and said, "Do your worst."

I can live with that.

I spent my erev birthday with my family, who gave me the exhibition books for the New Bedford Whaling Museum's A Spectacle in Motion: The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World (2018) and a CD of Black Belt Eagle Scout's Mother of My Children (2018). Charlotte made me a hand-drawn card in three colors. Today's actual birthday hoard includes Gemma Files' Spectral Evidence (2018), Renée Levine Melammed's An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty (2013), and the DVDs of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg that I watched on livestream at a stupidly early hour of the morning in 2011. Construction across the street at eight in the morning was not the gift I was hoping to receive from the City of Somerville, but I am pleased to see that the City of Boston is finally dredging its harbor to accommodate the larger container ships that now pass through the similarly deepened Panama Canal. I have a new review on Amazon, which makes me feel much less as though I had a book for a month and then it disappeared.

spatch is taking me to the sea.

You know it surrounds you in the day, but it finds you in the night

spatch took me to Gloucester for my birthday. It did not rain. It was as hot as the end of summer, but the sky was the clear paling blue of autumn and the sea mirrored over to match; depending on which way you stood as the sun tipped westward, the waves were gold or lavender where they came combing in. We walked the esplanade around the harbor where the bronze fisherman holds his wheel against the centuries and his bronze wife stands with her children staring down the sea; we climbed the boulders of Stage Fort Park and looked out past Ten Pound Island Light. The tide was out and the air smelled of deep salt and seaweed, the rocks uncovered with their shawls and shags of glistening dark wrack. I don't know the name for the black-and-white ducks bobbing out on the water, but cormorants kept going by in flight, long-necked as pterosaurs. I found a sculpture of a triton with a conch, chalky green with verdigris everywhere except his sun-struck shoulders. Someone had left a painted stone like an offering on his upturned flukes. We walked past salt marsh and a small independent cinema to get to dinner at the Causeway, which served me more clam chowder and fried oysters than I could actually eat in one sitting. We missed our train and spent the next hour and a half roaming Gloucester after dark, which at first felt uncanny with the wind blowing between the streetlights and so many storefronts closed until next summer, but then we stumbled onto the main drag and a second movie house and a record store that was giving vinyl away on the honor system after hours and it felt more like a place people lived in as opposed to visited and maybe not so much like John L. Russell did the cinematography after all. My wristwatch committed suicide into the street but was recovered; it just needs a band that is not literally shredding. I finished Susan Cooper's The Boggart Fights Back (2018) on the commuter train back to Boston and made notes to myself about a movie. We got home and handful_ofdust had tagged me a bunch of Sylvia Scarlett (1935). Rob took pictures of me and I post them because that's one of the ways I remember to live in my body. It was a low-key and a good birthday.