Silvery light this morning at play on the east wall of Átl’ka7tsem this morning
A Pineapple Express swooped in yesterday and doused our area with more than 66mm of rain, setting a new record for the rainiest August 16th in history. That’s basically a month’s worth of August rain in 24 hours. Coming home down tha Sunshine Coast and across Howe Sound the air was foggy and grey with high winds on the exposed parts of the inlet. Our ferry back to Bowen was stopped for two humpbacks who swam by. They out in an appearance along the shore at a small music festival we have going to is weekend – Music By The Sea.
My friends Ted and Dyan Spear have been hosting this gathering for a few years now. Very small and mostly local and intimate held on their property beneath tents and tarps this year!
I was able to unpack and head over there for the last set of the concert (a lovely set from Kip Johnson, including some very nice originals and The Witch of the Westmereland by Archie Fisher, a favourite of mine). The concert was followed by a contra dance called by my friend Becky Liddle and then we got stuck in for a couple of hours of jigs and reels. It’s been a long time since I played Irish music in a good free flowing session and playing with Neil and Keona Hammond is always good for the soul.
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi’s short story “The Archive” published at The Hinternet is a moving piece about the way subtleties of meaning slowly drift away:
I slipped solastalgia into an acid-free envelope and filed it under “Algorithmic Casualties”, between beefbrain and paracosm. I logged its last known public appearance: a blog post from seven years ago, archived only in fragments, the photographs long replaced by blank gray squares. The author, anonymous, had written about watching their childhood valley transform into a mining pit. Without the word, their grief became harder to name. And without a name, grief becomes harder to notice at all.
Tom Atlee reports on a citizen-led assembly in Norway which discussed the future of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.
Crossing Jervis Inlet on my way to the Tla’Amin lands.
The weekly summary of notes, links and thoughts that passed through my world.
- August 4, 2025: tests and seasons: things change in the world of sport, planetary science and community.
- August 5, 2025: surviving enshittification: becasue when people are making good things and then wrecking them, we need to know if we can make it through.
- August 6, 2025: magic and the rain returns: internet-famous magicians, and the return of my pluviophilia.
- August 8: you are not as old as you seem to be: age is relative and also it isn’t.
Also I wrote some longer pieces this week including a review of some friends’ play, an invitation to improve your out of office messages, and some thoughts on how building resource megaprojects is not the same thing as strengthening a country and looking after people.
I’ve always thought that my internal age was 23, which puts me younger in my own mind than both of my children are now. Which is a very odd sensation now. At any rate, I haven’t seen such a good set of thoughts on aging as these 27 Notes on Growing Older(er) from Ian Leslie. The sensation of time stopping inside while it continues on elsewhere is almost impossible to capture. Leslie does it.
Lately, becasue I notice these things, I’ve seen different articles about the inner core of the Earth and its interaction with the surface of our planet. This article in Quanta today summarizes the research and the findings from the smart people working on all of this.
Last night we watch Bob Trevino Likes It, a touching film (and a bit of a tear jerker, I’m not afraid to admit) about a woman who is becoming estranged from her father and finds another man with the same name and befriends him. It’s worth watching, and through the film I found myself going down the rabbit hole of facts about co-star John Leguizamo, who I know nothing about. He starred in the 1990s drag film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar where he looked substantial young than 30 or 24 years old. He has a fascinating bio, as an actor, playwright and activist, and to my eye seems to be one of the really good ones in the world.
One advantage to being actually 57 is that I got to see The Shuffle Demons in their heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Toronto. I’m glad to know that there are still folks out there having maximum fun with energetic jazz traditions in an ensemble context. Go into your weekend grooving along with Dirty Catfish Brass Band.
Anyone who knows the Salish Sea in the summertime will recognize this image of still, flat water at slack tide reflecting every imaginable colour at sunset.
This week we were travelling by sailboat through the Hul’q’umi’num speaking territories of the Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. The posts this week reflect both my usual monkey-mind reading habit and some travel notes from the trip.
- July 27, 2025: systems and cycles: economics and other system
- July 28, 2025: quiet, prayers, and landscapes of war and peace: some theology, a book to read and blessed quiet
- July 29, 2025: place noting and place making: noticing place, making notes and making trade.
- July 30, 2025: connected through tsunamis, contentment, austerity and football: we weather a tsunami advisory, and I think about the good life, suffering and how football advocates.
- July 31,2025: a miscellany of things about time and pay warm water begs us to stay at anchor, and so I read about time and getting paid.
- August 1, 2025: leaving Hul’q’umi’num territories and good questions to ask: a really cute seal to wake up to, humpbacks in the Strait and some questions worth asking.
We’re on the ferry home from Departure Bay to Horseshoe Bay and then from Horseshoe Bay back to our own home island, where a weekend of fun is about to unfold featuring the annual Firefighters’ Dock Dance, and a remounting of the classic Bowen Island play The View, in which every possible island archetype is skewered by the ingenious satire of David Cameron and Jackie Minns. It’s a long weekend in British Columbia and the beginning of Lughnasa, the Celtic season of harvest and generosity.
I hope you enjoy reading these posts.
We stayed another night at Ruxton Island. The day was hot and still and quiet in our little bay. Oystercatchers and heron raised the occasional fuss. A baby crow complained all afternoon and in the water fried egg jellyfish and otters slid by. The sea is warm here – more than 23 degrees and only the slightest breeze riffles the water. We are sleeping and reading and some of us writing a little and that is the story of summer on the coast.
So many links and thoughts today, scoured from a day of mammoth reading yesterday. Thank my ADHD brain for all this fun. I do.
If you thought enshittification was just your favourite apps jumping the shark, then you aren’t seeing what Cory Doctorow is seeing. Here is a grand chronicle of current surveillance and gouging practices used by big retailers to make everyone more poor.
A short story about an uploaded consciousness and its desire to be deleted. Being able to do all the things that can be done seems to be no substitute for being stuck with an unstructured memory. Petition to a Council by Justin Smith-Ruiu
I loved reading collections of letters when I first got into literature. They were right sized chunks of text for my brain, and thoughtful letters penned by authors lie somewhere between poetry, travelogues and aphorism. And I loved reading epistolary novels for the same reason. One of my favourite books of all time, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate by Nathaniel Mackey is a masterful epistolary about jazz, and West African mysticism and friendship and art. The Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock (birthed on Bowen Island, where he lived at the time) is an incredible work of art that has to be held in one’s hands to be fully appreciated. This form, whether actual or fictional is probably why I enjoy blogging so much, especially now that I’m writer here again regularly instead of on social media. I was reminded of all this when I came across this selection of letters from the exiled Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay published in the Paris Review. Letters written in the 1920s to Langston Hughs, Louise Bryant and others written from France and Spain and Morocco.
My friends in Turkey who run the ATÖLYE design studio are doing some really interesting thinking about how to work with AI while still using the inefficient and trust-based mechanisms of community:
“In a world increasingly driven by acceleration, where machine learning predicts behaviors and algorithms shape what we see, hear, and value — communities still resist the fast lane. Why? Because communities, unlike networks or audiences, are not transactional. They are deeply relational, slow-growing organisms — woven together through shared purpose, mutual recognition, and collective, compounding trust.”
I don’t follow the WNBA, but I do have a stake in women’s football in Canada, and this analysis of the current WNBA labour negotiations is an interesting path forward for leagues like the Northern Super League and the Professional Women’s Hockey League. In essence, the strategy focuses on growing the pie rather than reducing the costs, and I would even add, giving players (and supporters too, why not?) direct financial stakes in increasing revenues.
In my area, the saying goes, if you can’t afford to tip your server well, you shouldn’t go out to eat. Tipping culture has been a subject of discussion recently in Canada. In Europe, wages are built into the price of food and tipping is uncommon. There is a move to do this in North America too, but predictably, the restaurant industry isn’t having it. Let’s push for fair wages, and in the meantime, tip your server.
It is said that time slips away here in the languid BC coastal summer, but on parts of our coast, time sometimes speeds up.
If you love David Mitchell (I do) and also struggle with eggs Benedict (I do) then you will appreciate this piece of whimsical Masto-art.