Summer Dispatch One

The Gun Store Across the Street Closed Down

Welcome to Summer

The Lede

It is officially the time of year where the day is largely offensively warm. However it is bookended with the kind of unfathomable pleasantness that makes you want to drink on a patio and read the same three paragraphs of Infinite Jest over and over again as you get distracted and day dream and look at your phone.

It is the time of year when a few times a week I stuff the kids into a wagon to wander the frigid aisles of the wholesale grocery store across the street until we buy a bulk box of minion popsicles that we have to Tetris into our little freezer at home.

It is on these walks that we pass the gun store.

I don’t know how long the gun store has been here. The website states it was taken under new ownership in 2012, however her age shows through whatever cosmetic procedures she’s done to slow the hands of time. You can see it in the stained glass windows that read “GUNS” like those old Pizza Hut lamps from the 90s that people pay $1600 for now on eBay. And you can see it in the brick artifice that adorns her edges the way decades of eyeliner frame the shape of your grandmother’s eyes

.

I know she has been here longer than we have. I know that she has some polarized Yelp reviews, averaging 3.6 stars, which seems like what you’d expect from a store that sells and repairs stuff designed to shoot people with. I know that just about once a month while we are outside playing keepy-uppy on our front lawn the neighborhood is tie-dyed in the red and blue light of cop cars responding to an incident at the gun store. Someone usually leaves in handcuffs and the gun store employees smoke on the sidewalk while they try to down regulate. I don’t know how often this should happen, but when you live well within the range of a stray, just once feels like a lot.

I don’t like living next to the gun store, but I feel weird about her leaving.

For what it’s worth, she served a community for decades. I think of my sister-in-law whose engagement announcement was an instagram post of her diamond-adorned hand holding a hunting rifle and over the head of a deer she’d just shot with her fiance. Someone had to service that weapon, and I’m sure there is a warm memory in there somewhere of a store like the one that just closed.

The gun store is now adorned in a fresh face of millennial white and gray paint - the shade of gentrification. The bellwether of rent increases and $8 matcha lattes in this largely immigrant community. On the one hand I feel better about our short-term physical safety, on the other hand I feel uncomfortable about our long-term viability here.

If nothing else, it makes the walk to get popsicles a little less gnarly, and I suppose I’ll take that for now.

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The Music:

It should surprise no one that I’m listening to a lot of Never Enough by Turnstile, however it may surprise you that it is largely by the request of my 5 year old when we are playing in the inflatable kiddy pool on our back porch. Kids love this band, and I very much love that fact.

Our neighbor heard that our 5 year old was into Turnstile so he snagged this poster for him and the Never Enough move premier.

Notable mentions:

I’ve been listening to Saro by The Westerlies on repeat while I write lately - it’s a damn near perfect track for locking in in front of an oscillating fan when it’s north of 90 degrees outside.

The Media:

The big screen:

Like most folks we are pretty sucked into Love Island right now - it asks little of you while giving itself to you completely - truthfully it gives you more than you should ever take in, so we often watch it while also watching our other two screens

The medium screen:

My buddy Kyle (kylemakesshortfilms everywhere) is a creator’s creator, he articulates the unique mix of joy and despair that comes with making stuff on the internet, and his recent YouTube videos about filmmaking, AI and art really scratch an itch for me

The small screen:I have been sucked into the world of Jay Renshaw and his character Chit - if you were a fan of The Office, this is going to feel like absolute millennial comedy catnip:

@renshawjayIs this a thing?? w/ @kielkennedy and @Lyric Lewis #chit #doitlady #birthday #theoffice #sketchcomedy

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Other stuff:

This is going to sound like a plug but it’s not. Earlier this year I did a brand deal for Kodiak Pancakes - truthfully we’d been eating them for years, but they saw their product in one of my videos so they reached out to see if I’d be interested in a sponsored post. It was a natural fit and the partnership went well - awesome. However, my two year old has become legitimately obsessed with their pancakes, we sometimes have them twice a day and this is how he eats them and it’s hilarious:

What are you listening to, watching, eating and everything else this summer?