1. Charlie Hustle 2.0.
2. Which is to say: Bryce Harper.
3. Which is to say: It’s never too early (or too late) to find your life’s work and pursue it with vocational intensity.
4. Vocational intensity.
5. Which is to say: effort.
6. Also: baseball.
7. My father, who watched a lot of televised baseball games. With the sound blaring, for some reason. He was old but he wasn’t hard of hearing. I don’t know. Maybe it was some sort of act of defiance, some sort of raging against the dying of the light, in the pixelated age. “This is the sound my world makes and, oh, you will listen.” (“Play it f*-ing loud!” — B. Dylan) Or. Um. Something?
8. Clearing the decks.
9. Tools.
10. My tools, effete and writerly though they may be.
11. Which is to say: my notebook, the mess of it (also that there’s five more left in the fancy-pants pack of notebooks I bought in Portland, Oregon [sigh], two months ago)…
12. …also those great pens I bought in Portland [sigh] two months ago…
13. …and my $100 guitar. Which I bought (not from an old catalogue but) in Alabama (nigh [nigh rhymes with sigh!  -- I'm a poet and don't...oh. Wait...] on) two years ago…
14. …and lists (lists!) on scraps of paper (receipts, unopened junk mail, bureaucratic forms you forgot to fill out and turn in to, uh, somebody [?], etc.)…
15. …plus that little laser thing Daniel let me borrow, the one you afix to the butt-end of a golf club and it makes you swing right (also: just how different swinging right feels from swinging the way I’ve been swinging for the last thirty-two years)…
16. …(which is to say: my wrists!)…
17. …and my cast iron skillet…
18. …hell, even my salad-spinner…
19. …plus that big glass bowl I use to mix stuff and/or marinate stuff…
20. …and my good knife…
21. …etc…
22. Typographical prerogative.
23. Which is to say: how sometimes for etc. they (“they”) put &tc.
24. Writing what my mind is saying.
25. When two of your favorite people finally figure out they should be dating. (Or actually: that they already were dating.)
26. Pint of Blood by Jolie Holland. Still.
27. Passenger by Lisa Hannigan. Still. (If you happen to be at the Sixth & I Synagogue in the Most Important City in the World on June 17: Yes. That’ll be me in the front row, blushing, grinning stupidly, and staring down at my shoes. Just, you know. In my own little imaginary universe. [Wait. Is this like those sweet, soft-spoken, still-waters-run-deep young men of the late 20th century who used to walk around sporting their Natalie Merchant t-shirts? Jesus. It is like that, isn't it?])
28. Self-awareness, fleeting and elusive as it so often proves to be.
29. The adventurous summer. Laying before me. So unconcernedly silent. And vast.
30. Oh: and fabric softener. (Who knew?!)