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Hello! It is once again the last night of the month, and just like last month, and the month before that, I find myself in Phoenix in a park penning a late night letter. The park lights still burn amber-orange, the playground is still covered in covid caution tape, and other than the occasional passing car, I still seem to be the only one who spends time in the parks near my parent’s place at this time of night. However, one aspect of this repeated late night letter experience has changed: instead of my tall-self hunched over a too-small picnic table, I’m sitting at this amply-sized, worn-smooth, hundred-forty-year-old folding desk. I realized a few weeks ago that it had been six months since I last sat down to write in a coffee shop. For me to be in a city and not in a coffee shop with each day is like a pirate sailing the ocean without a boat — it’s just not how things work. It had become very clear that I needed to find a less spirit-dampened solution than writing at my parent’s house, in which I feel very fortunate and at home, but can never quite shake feeling like a full-grown bear that rather than fending for itself, is still following its mother (of course, I know this isn’t the case and that a series of highly unusual events have temporarily lead me back to my parent’s place, yet, I still feel it). One morning, I woke up with the brilliant idea to type up and print off half a dozen letters asking owners of houses with great views if I could sit on their porch and write in the morning. I drove around neighborhoods at the base of mountains looking for houses with a view, leaving these letters in mailboxes sure that I had finally found a solution to my problem, but never received one response. After a luckless porch search, the idea then became to buy a portable table and just look for good places to set up and write. After five days of scouring OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace, this 1800’s hand-built-in-Wisconsin folding desk popped up. Small enough to easily fit laying atop the bed in my Honda Element, and radiating this artifact-like, antique quality feeling, it was a fantastic find. I bought a used wooden folding chair as well to pair with it and can set up to write just about anywhere now. I hope to make good use of it over the coming months. With many of the usual routes to community, adventure, accomplishment, happiness, financial well-being, and other goodness hindered with the whole covid situation, this is a time where we are challenged to think differently. What you’re about to read might sound ridiculous, but every day I thought about my coffee shop predicament, and yet, it took me six months to actually begin wondering how I could solve the problem. The whole time, I wasn’t so much asking myself, “How can I create a good writing environment outside of a coffee shop?” Rather, I was over-and-over thinking, “Dammit, I miss coffee shops! When will life return to the way it was?” I had to let go of the frustration and emotional weight for a moment and to open my mind to a solution I’d never found before. I went back through my past articles this morning and included three below that, in various ways, shift thinking. The first is about deliberately breaking routine. The second was written in the early days of this project, in the wake of a remarkable friend’s death. I’ve been thinking about him a lot today, how fortunate I am to be alive at this moment, and have found it a lot easier to live his last words to me with them fresh in mind. The third is about finding the right perspective of the things we take for granted. This letter is simply an attempt to free your mind from its well-trod routes for a bit. The folding desk, my little late night attempt to create a symbol to stick in your head as a reminder to think laterally — is there a folding desk to whatever problem you’re playing with? Til next month! With love & stoke, Ethan
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