(Founded in the early 2000s, Lake Times is my ongoing yet previously unpublished newsletter written at a half-submerged picnic table at one of various regional lakes, rivers, ponds, etc. New editions will be published sporadically and mostly out of season. Annual print subscriptions or an electronic newsletter may be available in the future. More to come soon.)
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The dead garfish in Toronto Lake, longer and more sinister looking than anything you’d expect to see in Kansas. How did this prehistoric monster arrive in a lake that’s only 60 years old?
It’s nice to get away from the city, a place no one cares about who isn’t there.
Imagining a post-Spotify era, a new way of communicating through music without depending on streaming services. What will that look like?
The problem with chasing something that doesn’t exist is that you’ll never catch it. Or maybe that was the appeal. There’s no statute of limitations on something that doesn’t exist, that never existed.
For a fleeting moment today I think I might have finally understood the word “phenomenology.” We were by one of the channels of the Verdigris River, sitting on a massive slab of granite and thinking how nice it would be to have one of them in our backyard. Watching a deer in the distance, I was keenly aware of my senses, the echo of our voices in this particular moment in time, how years from now we’ll wish we could peek back in or revisit these specific ages, the pitch of the kids’ voices, what we were wearing, but time will obscure and distort what in that moment was incredibly clear, and even though the deer could definitely hear us, probably even hear us thinking, it didn’t feel threatened enough to run.
In the kayak, without a boat or car or person in sight, I pulled up the Disintegration Loops on my phone and just drifted.
Coffee on the rocks, a cool breeze, the morning sun warm on the sandstone bluffs, the sunlight hitting the ripples on the lake like snow on an old-fashioned antennae television, like flashes popping in a crowded ice skating arena in the 1980s, and all the other now-outdated technological similes for the interplay of water and light.
The paradox of abundance — if I keep wanting more, I will never have enough. If I stop wanting, I will have all I need.
Historians agree. 2023 has been the most beautiful spring on record. Maybe two unpleasant days in a row at most. “Paradisiacal,” Red says. Up until now I had never heard anyone say that word out loud.
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lucas wetzel 