Dolphins

A moment of magic at the beach, plus my weekly shareables: An unsettling chatbot, lifting heavy weight, and new music from Ben Folds

We didn’t see them quite this close up. (Photo by Jonas Von Werne on Unsplash)

As I mentioned the other day, we’re at the beach this week. We lucked out and got warm weather, so my mother-in-law has been spending a lot of time on the balcony of our rental condo. On Tuesday, for the first time in her life, she saw dolphins.

There were four of them, swimming parallel to the beach, a couple hundred yards out. They were in pairs. Two would surface in a lazy arc, and then a few seconds later here would come the other two. They didn’t seem to be feeding, and dolphins don’t migrate in any specific pattern. They could have just been out for their version of a stroll.

My close-up vision has eroded over the years—I’m wearing reading glasses to write this—but my distance vision is still really good. I tracked the dolphins and pointed them out whenever they came up to breathe. My mother-in-law had a look of wonder I’ve seen many times. I probably looked that way myself. Dolphins have never ceased being magic to me.

I’ve spent so much of my life looking out at the ocean. It reveals itself in endless variations but sometimes it can feel like a relentless gray skin stretching out into nowhere. I always wonder what it must have felt like for the first humans who found it. Or the first ones who made homes there and looked up one day to see ships on the horizon.

This week we’ve seen pelicans and gulls and a few little shorebirds, but not much else, and not many people either. If we stand on the balcony, with modern life at our backs—the wi-fi, the big-screen TV, the dishwasher—we can sort of pretend to be like those first settlers who crowned the dunes and felt something close to literal awe.

Who was the first one to see a dolphin? How amazing must that have been?

Maybe not too much more amazing than it is now.

We know so much about everything. I could take a few minutes now and look up a thousand facts about dolphins, watch videos of them, unravel the mysteries. But none of that would replace the feeling of seeing those black backs rise and fall, taking those long slow breaths, until they swim into the gray and out of sight.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. This week’s episode of SouthBound is with Nic Brown—if you remember the ‘90s alt-rock band Athenaeum, he was its co-founder and drummer. But he quit the band right at its commercial peak because he had become bored with the music. He’s still coming to terms with that time, and he has written a great memoir about it called BANG BANG CRASH. He’s got so many stories.

2. In case you don’t quite recall Athenaeum, here’s their biggest hit, “What I Didn’t Know”:
   

3. My weekly for WFAE was about naming rights—for a new Charlotte “entertainment district,” and also for our cat.

4. I really wanted this Kevin Roose interview with Microsoft’s new AI chatbot to be dumb and boring. It’s not. It’s fascinating and a little terrifying. The chatbot comes off as a cross between a lovestruck teenager and Drew Barrymore in FIRESTARTER.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: Another French bulldog breeder is killed in a dognapping. You’ll be reading more about this in the book, I promise.

6. I don’t deadlift much more than a Costco box of kitty litter, but this David Dennis Jr. piece on lifting heavy weight—physically and psychologically—really hit home with me.

7. John Jaso gave up pro baseball for life on a sailboat. It feels like he’s got things figured out.

8. One of my favorite writers, Latria Graham, on the black roots of barbecue.

9. The Michigan State student who survived the shooting there—after already surviving one at her high school.

10. Ben Folds has a new single out. It’s called “Winslow Gardens” and it’s beautiful.
    

    
    

    
    See y’all next week, everybody.