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Hello there, I think this is a personal record. Four months in a row, I’ve written this late night letter in the same place: a city park in Phoenix. It’s odd because I’m always writing somewhere else — in the passenger’s seat of a car rolling down the highway, at a desk overlooking the dark Pacific, in some twenty-four-hour cafe, next to the crackling fireplace of the Range Rider’s Lodge, or, well, you get the point. I’ve learned to love that variety. But here I am, four months straight in the amber-orange glow of the park lights in the city of Phoenix to pen another letter. Rather than noticing the details of changing places, I’m noticing the details of a changing place tonight. In my first park-penned letter, I lightly perspired as I wrote something about Phoenix summer nights feeling like “an ever-constant electric blanket.” Tonight, I’m wearing pants and a sweatshirt and feel the cold seeping from the grass into my bare feet. I’ve come to expect stillness and silence here, but a few minutes after setting my desk up in the grass, I heard the dribbling of a basketball. I wondered, “is there a basketball court in this park?” Then I heard the swish of a chain-link net, and realized there’s been a basketball court in the dark but fifty yards from me, but that the bright lights surrounding the empty playground have blinded me to the entire court. Awareness is funny like that. I then noticed the playground was no longer covered in COVID-caution-tape. Twenty minutes later, a family rolled up, parked their bicycles, and hit the swings. Then another family showed up. And all of a sudden, I felt pretty awkward sitting at a desk twenty yards from a playground with a bunch of kids running around and their parent’s probably wondering what the hell that guy’s doing sitting at a desk in the grass over there. I haven’t had this sense of change in a long time. Regardless of whether it’s from changing places or a change in this place, like a breeze through my hair, it feels fantastic after life so stagnant. In a symbolic, storytelling sort of way, I notice myself hoping this is foreshadowing larger changes to come. All good writers forecast change in the lives of their characters with events like these. I was reading A Farewell to Arms before bed just last night when Hemingway used heavy rain to imply something bad was soon to happen to Frederic Henry. Surely changing weather or the number of people in this park doesn’t imply quite as well in real life as it does in fiction, but in the life story I’m telling myself as this experience unfolds, it has me hoping things are about to pick up a bit. Since June I’ve been building a new, more functional website for my buddy and I’s real estate photography company. I expected it to be “a quick, three, maybe four week project” and created a makeshift standing desk to spare my body from sitting the long days to come by clearing out the upper-middle row of my bookshelf. After not four weeks, but four months spent staring at my computer screen in the surrounding blackness of my bookshelf, I finally finished last week. The sense of relief was palpable. So, check out the new Desert Lens Real Estate Photography website! I’ve been wondering whether or not it’s a good idea to ask thousands of people for constructive criticism and… ah, why not? If you have the time and good taste, web design, or sales experience, I am trying to dial it all in and appreciate any feedback! Lastly, these late night letters are supposed to arrive “with the things I created that month attached to them.” Those attachments have been missing for a few months now. It’s been a busy, difficult, confusing time for me since this pandemic began. I will be making some situational changes real soon and it is my great hope to be a tad more prolific in the coming months. Thanks for reading, and for sticking it out with me through this crazy time. With love & stoke, Ethan P.S. In this year’s slowness, my mind’s been running faster than usual. Pushing the “reset button” has been more important than ever before. Do you know what your reset button is? When is best to push it? How to push it? The article below has the answers. Read it and renew thyself!
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