Also pedestrian, quite literally, and also delightful, are the utility access panels embedded in every urban street, over which people walk and drive every day. They’re like utility access panels anywhere, except surprisingly diverse in style, embracing a wide range of patterns, symbols, and typefaces. I love a beautifully designed utilitarian object, so I photographed dozens of them, mostly in the cities of Garachico, La Laguna, and Santa Cruz. Here are a few favorites.

No, yeah, no, I don’t think so, no

He was texting somebody from bed. Trying to hide it from her—it wasn’t clear who it was.

We’ve lost something, though: the particular look of particular writers’ work. One could tell, in the old days, who wrote what at merely a glance. So-and-so favored narrow margins and monospaced fonts. Such-and-such laid his stories out like book pages, with wide margins, Garamond variants, and page headings. When we read these manuscripts, we read them the way their writers intended. The emailing of word processor files, however, has left manuscripts open to changes—substituted fonts, altered formatting. And certain shortcomings that were once made manifest by printing now go unnoticed by writers, and only appear when classmates print.

This paper, made by Japan’s Tomoegawa Co., Ltd., is indisputably, unapologetically the shit. It is very thin, yet quite tough (I haven’t accidentally torn a page yet) and mind-bogglingly smooth. Its cream color is easy on the eye. It is most commonly found in the form of loose sheets and pads, and is great for letter writing. But Nanami has bound it into these journals, and they are amazing.

Are Professors Nelson and Underbridge playing footsie? They are sitting 14 feet apart. And yet it seems to be so.

Professor Gutierrez is delivering his remarks in French and everyone is pretending to understand.

Professor Van der Hoet keeps flickering in and out of view, like a distant rare deer seen through trees.

Marty, the guy you have to like because he’s always at the bar and is super friendly but you hate him, everyone does, he’s insufferable, but you can’t not like Marty, it’s a prerequisite for drinking here, but you want to kill him, we all do

You encounter your crush in a bar. She’s with friends. We were just talking about you, she says, and the friends laugh.

She orders salad. A few bites in, she thinks, why always salad? Fuck salad!

She is walking over the bridge between the north and south ends of town. Beneath her the creek rages and roils with spring runoff.

In this town, there are people who like deer and people who dislike deer. The people who like deer dislike the people who dislike deer, and the people who dislike deer also dislike the people who like deer.

When I arrived at Pohatcong Package Place, I would reach into my pocket and pull out my allowance money. Then I’d open the door and step into the air-conditioned, busy closeness of the place. Pohatcong Package Place was a liquor store. It’s gone now. It couldn’t have occupied more than 500 square feet, despite clearly having been originally designed as a residence—a little brick bungalow, probably of 1930’s design. What was once probably a sharply sloped front hard had been dug down to street level to create a small parking lot, surrounded by grassy embankments. Behind the counter stood Nick Varhal, the owner of Pohatcong Package Place.

Which is where she should have thought to look for the notebook: beneath the radiator she had set it down upon when the phone rang.

She sits up in bed and she says, “I’m going to make some toast. I’m going to eat it in bed.”

She and he are talking loudly, to be heard over the noise of the machines outside.

The Ahab smells like a radio manufactured in the nineteen-seventies that is about to, but has not quite yet, burst into flames. It smells like dog shoes the dog refused to wear that have since fallen into a box of moth flakes. It smells like a copyright-violating bootleg action figure lying at the bottom of last year’s school backpack. It smells like a roll of orthodontist’s x-ray film shoved into the back of a drawer full of old lollipops. It smells like the inside of a skateboard helmet just removed from the head of a child who earlier the same day swam in a heavily algal lake or stream. It smells like expired antidepressants. It smells like a pile of slightly moldy megachurch hymnals. It smells like a sterile bandage designed exclusively for use on eels. It smells like a nursing home on a fishing boat.

A good generic title is a vessel into which meaning can be poured, by both the writer and reader. (My favorite of my own titles—by a wide margin—is Familiar, because it connotes so much that that novel attempts to address: the family, of course; the uncanny; the notion of a magical companion, a familiar.) Away from its antecedent, the generic title goes unnoticed; it’s something anyone might say, at any time. But once it is in place on the book cover, gravitational lines bend towards it. The generic title doesn’t try to impress you—it tries to indicate that the book itself will impress you.

Because everyone had said not to. Because the sunshine. Because the solitude. Because he felt invincible.

Her phone is ringing. She’s awakened by the ringing of her phone. But that’s not right, because she turns her phone off at night.

She is in the stationery store to buy her daughter a birthday card, as she does every year, and happens across the section marked SYMPATHY.