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Hello! I’m writing this letter on a Sunday summer night here in Flagstaff, Arizona. I’ve immensely enjoyed a somewhat more traditional twenty-something existence here this June. Not that I’m spending my time in such a traditional way (much of it in my bedroom trying to cull the backbone of a book from of a thousand or so index cards), but in the sense of having my own bedroom and going out and dancing to live music on the weekends and having more time to enjoy the summer than I’ve had the previous three years working overtime every week as manager of The Range Rider’s Lodge. These summer days are pretty sweet: I have a job where I basically get paid to read books by a pool, spend a plethora of each day obsessing over the things I’m obsessed with, and punctuate it all with events like “Adult Prom,” improvisational funk concerts, and weekly workouts at the “pain cave” with some ultra-marathon running buddies that leave me quasi-crippled the following few days. These islands of fun (and pain) have been a way to inject novelty and excitement throughout a body of time largely spent with my nose in books and scribbling a million little thoughts down on index cards and tiny strips of paper. I’m deeply absorbed in this act of creating what I hope will one day be a book. As open as I like to be in these letters, I feel this project is in a cocoon-like stage and hesitate to let the outside world in, at least for now, as I struggle with forming the skeleton of something I feel worth taking a couple thousand hours to flesh out. What I will say, though, is that it seems I’m trying to write the book I wished someone would have handed me when I graduated college five years ago. As I mentioned in last month’s letter, I put a down payment on flight school and plan to begin a journey skyward this September. This has resulted in me looking up a lot more often and noticing every single plane that passes by overhead. Also, my reading has turned almost exclusively to aviation. I’m currently spending my work days at the pool oscillating between reading Gleim Aviation’s Pilot Handbook, a very dry textbook to begin building my technical aviation knowledge, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Airman’s Odyssey, to cultivate a more spiritual connection with flight. Because I’m reading these books, anyone who arrives at the pool with a semblance of connection to aviation has been talking with me about it. So far I’ve met an ex-fighter pilot who flies for Southwest Airlines, a man who is apparently just shy of the “Forbes 400” and jokingly told me he’ll need a pilot for a G6 in a couple years, and a swim-instructor who survived full on commerical airline crash in the 1990’s. I’ve felt all this a particularly great example of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen” quote. For, I have made a decision and now seem to be a magnet for all things related to that decision. As the revenues and costs of running this site have been both small and more or less equal the past three and a half years, I scheme every once in a while about ways to allow people to support my work. One idea I came up with a while back was this wonder/wander shirt, because, as I’ve more or less been saying the past couple of years: the two go together like peanut butter and jelly. And the only difference in the spelling of these words is an “o” and an “a.” I thought some sort of repetitive pattern could be cool here and told penpal, artist, and WONDER WANDER 2018 particpant Siena Baldi about my idea and she ran with it, and thus, my favorite shirt in the universe was born:
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