Photoblog challenge 5/20. Beverage. On a hot day, from a glass bottle, in a pickup truck with the window rolled down. (Every beverage has its rituals.)

Photoblog challenge 5/19. Indulgence. I haven’t particularly indulged myself today, but in case of emergencies, I keep the really good beer in the basement fridge… next to the shellac flakes.

Photoblog challenge 5/18. Random.

Photoblog challenge 5/17. Hold. Wedged tenon holding a leg in a chair seat.

Sketching possible shapes for the crest directly on the dry-fit chair with a 6B pencil. In two dimensions it’s too hard to visualize what actually will look good.

Photoblog challenge 5/16. Time. I inherited this pocket watch recently and would like to make use of it, but that seems to require wearing a waistcoat… and then I’m just down the rabbit hole.

Photoblog challenge 5/15. Clouds. (You probably think this post is about you.)

Photoblog challenge 5/14. I tried growing sweet pea flowers along the fence this year, but they were too slow coming up. Also the rabbits ate my zinnias. So it is on to plan C. Update: I am actually posting the photo.

Photoblog challenge 5/13. Community. For homeschool environmental science in 2019–20 my daughter and I visited a dozen or so North Carolina state parks. This is one of nine (!) distinct coastal ecological communities at Carolina Beach State Park… but I forget which one.

Yesterday’s photoblog prompt, tranquility, nearly stumped me. Of course one can’t literally photograph tranquility but only the conditions from which (one believes) tranquility might arise, but once photographed, those conditions seemed to me no longer tranquil but merely contrived, something I was trying to sell y’all (or, worse, myself), rather like the Biblical Aromatherapy Sampler for which I received an advertising flyer in the mail yesterday. The problem, I think now, is that tranquility cannot be pursued, grasped, grabbed at; one has to let oneself be drawn into it, into a state — whereas the very act of photography is a pursuit, a grasping and grabbing, an abstraction of one moment from the flow of time, a cropping of one scene out of the world — and tranquility also involves a feeling of wholeness or oneness which is the polar opposite of such abstraction. To snap a photograph and label it “tranquility” is to make tranquility into an object to be grasped. And you can’t grasp tranquility. You have to let it grasp you.