Dead Letter Department #116

Summer feels like it’s flying away. I am indulging, still, in stone fruit, going usually twice a week to procure a big pile of it for the wooden bowl on my counter: today’s has white nectarines, two kinds of peaches, and an auxiliary, smaller bowl of Italian plums, which are just beginning to ripen. It is all usually so sumptuous that I have to drape a napkin over myself before taking a bite or risk making it a multi-shirt day, & I eat them with two meals a day, only because allowing fruit to enter the austere world of breakfast will make for sorry, sad breakfasts later on when they are gone. Also probably there is only so much fruit one man should really eat & I am bumped right up against that limit at the moment.

Yesterday I woke up early & drove out along the lake road, which passes the big city swimming spot, and the little gravelly one a bit farther along that I have never figured out where you park for, past the old summer houses, now insulated and occupied year round, and the private beaches with their locked gates, and then the rows and rows of mansions (although I suspect the people who live there don’t call them mansions & there is nothing funnier than listening to someone explain why their house could not possibly be a mansion, usually because their neighbor’s is bigger). There’s a restaurant at the fork that I’ve always meant to try, the only commerce for miles in either direction, and then the turning to the park, a winding road that takes the speed down to 5 miles an hour after the big field, and the sudden presence of the heavy trees all around, making everything feel dark and cool.

I was lucky; only a few of us had decided to get up so early, and the spot at the end of the ramp where the pier used to be was completely empty, so I shucked off everything except for my bathing suit & waded slowly in, slipping on the enormous buried log, little drifts of leaf mould swirling around my legs until I got out into the sandy, clear parts and worked my up to diving in.

The rule is I have to at least gain complete immersion, even if the water is freezing, because I have driven all that way, and the summer is so short. Most of the time, once I’ve crossed that threshold, it’s lovely, and yesterday was no exception, everything feeling lighter and clearer almost immediately as I bobbed along like an only vaguely sentient buoy, eyes at approximately the level of the water, which was glassy and shining all the way to the opposite shore. Occasionally a fish jumped, with a little plashing noise, not too far off, and on the other end of the lake the first motor boat was roaring to life, but it stayed off in the distance, sending polite little ripples my way.

By the time I left, damp but enthusiastic, the empty parking lot was filling up, and I crossed paths with a guy on his way to stake out my exact spot with a easy up and a whole wagon full of supplies; presumably the advance scout for a much larger party on their way to spend their day. People were filing into the private beaches with their arms full of bright pool noodles as I retreated back to town, and the sun was already starting to bear down, the beginnings of the heat warning visible in that blazing, cloudless sky.

I’ve watered the garden more this summer, with the almost complete absence of rain, including a few good soaks for one of the trees that is starting to look ragged and worn, dusty-leaved, when it still should be mostly green and glossy. Today’s supposed to be hot too, but the windows are already closed up in my apartment, and the air conditioning, bless it, will keep things more than tolerable, unlike past years when I would be sitting here, almost perfectly still, sweating as I wrote to you.

reading room

I started Careless People, well after the media fuss around it died down, since I had to wait my turn in the queue at the library. It’s by one of the early policy creators at Facebook, and starts with her young and optimistic & frantic to go to work for Facebook, because she’s absolutely certain that Facebook is going to change the world. She was right, of course, and we all know how that story—not ends, but where it brought us to today, here in the swamp of election interference and AI psychosis and wildly seductive TikTok algorithms.

The writing is not at all bad, but it has the feeling of something that was probably told to a ghost writer in sessions and then combed and braided into a narrative, instead of being all of one piece, to the point where I keep thinking the tense has suddenly switched, and then I realize it was just an odd sentence fragment, or a stray little tonal inconsistency.

I do like what I think of as industry memoirs, in-depth, often gossipy tales about the interior of a closed world, and the book definitely delivers on that front. It’s a portrait of time, too, an era I’ve been thinking about a lot, as I watch the democrats flailing and choking in real time. I remember when Facebook was just beginning; I remember thinking, genuinely, that things would continue to improve, curving more and more towards justice for more and more people.

Now–well, you know what it’s like now.

one good thing

Lavender ice latte with P, & a little wander at Barnes & Noble, which inexplicably did not yet have the Vogue September issue, but still did wonders for my Sunday afternoon.

As always, you can write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com, if you'd like to announce a particularly successful stone fruit encounter, or tell me something else. More soon, and in the meantime, may you gain full immersion in something of your choosing, for at least long enough to take the edge off.