An embarrassingly short time ago, I realized that the band I’d been calling ‘Hauling Oats’ was actually named ‘Hall & Oates’.

In my defense, I grew up in a rural place and it made perfect sense to me that you’d name your band in honor of your farm truck.

Someone should absolutely start a band called Hauling Oates which exclusively plays super-fast, yodel-y bluegrass covers of Hall & Oates songs.

A lovely moment this morning:

I’m out on a run, heading home. The heat and humidity today are pretty brutal, all the worse because we had a cool June and I’m not acclimated. The back half of the loop I’m running is mostly uphill — not steep but endless and slow. I’m trudging along, sweating buckets, draining glucose, and wondering why I don’t choose hobbies that include air conditioning.

Up ahead I hear a whoop. A little caravan approaches. A barely post-toddler kid (maybe 4) on a scooter tearing down the hill. Just behind him follows his older brother (maybe 6?) on a bike. Both are yelling and pedaling/pushing for all they’re worth. Big smiles, squinting eyes, blowing hair. Wooooooooo!! FASTER!

Mom (I assume?) brings up the rear on her sensible adult bike, shouting warnings that — she’s pretty sure — are futile. ‘Be careful on the bridge! Watch the bumps! It’s slippery!’ She winces as I pass and I see her pray that her band of pirates doesn’t run me over. There’s a lot I can hear in her voice — maybe feeling the same things I do when I follow my kid on her bike. She’s slightly terrified, slightly out of control, feeling all of the responsibility at once, but also laughing.

In that picture, I’ve been the kid, discovering how great it feels to go super fast with the wind in your face. I’ve also been the parent, barely keeping it together but also, maybe, enjoying the chaos just a little.

A thing I would really like to see in the world: a public library that serves craft beer.

By world I mean Howard County, Maryland.

We went to visit some old friends a couple weekends ago. We hadn’t seen them in an awfully long time. 8 years, by our reckoning.

Over glasses of wine and whiskey we traded stories that wandered back to earlier days. We were single, no kids yet. Apartments in downtown Baltimore. Meeting and dating the people who would become our partners. Getting careers off the ground, one shaky mistake (and, sometimes, lesson) at a time.

At the time I remember how uncertain and scary it all felt; how the world, for all its possibility, seemed so big and lonely. Looking back, now, our neighborhood and circle of friends strike me as an almost adorably small, connected world. Everybody lived within a few miles of one another. We knew the day-to-day, gory details of one another’s lives and hopes and tribulations, recounted over drinks at a local bar or at somebody’s kitchen table.

Now I found myself with my friends again. Their voices were familiar but everything else had changed. Our kids slept in bedrooms just down the hall. Our lives had gotten busier and infinitely more complicated and farther apart. Better, richer, yes, but also with less space.

It’s not that I’m nostalgic, exactly, for the days when I was young and unmoored. It’s just that time passes so quickly, rendering everything that came before as ghostly, translucent, immaterial. Before I can really understand it — understand, maybe, what it all meant to me — it’s reduced to a figment.

For the past month or so, I’ve caught myself wanting to kind of …drop out of the world for a little bit.

It’s an odd feeling that’s hard to articulate. It comes into my head, usually on some random Tuesday, as I’m signing out of a meeting or cooking dinner or putting my kid to bed. When I’m tired, when my mind is jogging ahead, taking inventory of one responsibility after another scribbled on my calendar.

I find myself wishing that time could stop for a little while; that the world could forget I’m here; that I could disappear like a walking-stick insect on a tree branch, or a flounder on the sandy ocean floor.

I took a weekend trip to a cabin in West Virginia a while ago. I was alone, on a 2-day ‘retreat’ my wife gave me as a birthday present. It was a really wonderful gift and I was grateful for a quiet weekend with no responsibilities. I could read, walk, ride my bike, watch the clouds, catch my breath.

This felt like the first time I’d traveled anywhere alone in an awfully long time. I’ve always been with either family or coworkers, more or less. I felt just a little disoriented as I arrived at a rental cabin near Baker, WV, hauled my bag from the car, and settled in. Toothbrush in the bathroom, backpack in the bedroom, jacket on the coat rack. Done.

The Golden Glow, by Benjamin Flouw, has become one of my all-time favorite picture books.

If I remember right, I stumbled across it in a bookstore in Vermont while on vacation one year. It was sitting there, face-out, on a shelf and the cover illustration stopped me in my tracks.

I’ve found some real gems this way, wandering through a shop in some city I’m seeing for the first time. A book I’ve found becomes part of the story of the trip — part of the flush of discovery of new scenery and sounds and smells. My feet moving over foreign sidewalks, my eyes moving over new words. A new patch of the world revealing itself. I live for that.

Maybe the experience of finding a book this way lends a gloss to my experience of it. Maybe it makes me sentimental. That’s okay. The way a book comes into my life, I think, matters as much to me as what it says inside. Or, to put it in a catchier way: the story ‘outside’ the book the matters as much to me as the story inside it.

I have been brought low by either a cold or allergies.

I’m about halfway through Ed Yong’s An Immense World and it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite nonfiction books I’ve read this year.

I love Yong’s style: a friendly, calm tone that sounds almost effortless. Short, conversational sentences. Simple words. No reaching for intricate phrasing or poetic imagery when a short explanation will do. The effect is something like having dinner with your favorite high school science teacher — a science teacher with perfect recall of an entire field’s worth of relevant knowledge. It’s a 2-inch thick, 500-page book covering a century worth of international research and it’s just so… easy to read.

A book of this breadth and complexity would be, I think, an incredible piece of work even if it was an impenetrable, academic, punctuation-averse fire swamp in the finest tradition of Das Capital. But it’s not. It’s a symphony that plays like a pop song.