What comes to mind when you hear “JULY 2024!”?

This?

Or, if you’re from the USA, this?

Ok. But nope.

July 2024! was the temporal equivalent of the playground merry-go-round. Dizzying, uncomfortable, and with an unshakeable sense that some punk ran up, grabbed one of the bars, and whipped this fun/hell contraption into a breakneck speed. Some people flew off, some clung with all their might to the hot metal. Almost all of us wanted to puke.

Torque. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Neither was JULY 2024! if you’ve paid attention to anything at all. It’s been a fire hose of information, no matter where your radar dish is pointed. That’s the wonderful horror of being a writer. Like it or not, we pay attention. Perhaps we write because we pay attention, or perhaps we pay attention because we write. Either way, the writing-attention bond is embedded in the very grooves of our ink-smudged fingerprints.

Things seep in. It’s spectacular. It’s a lot. We write to figure out how we think and feel about these things. When we’ve been at it awhile, we learn what to pay attention to and how to hold the attention-prism up to the light.

But oof. JULY. Basta.

I spent almost half of July sick, as I do every year. Something low-grade, with unearned exhaustion and a sense of being perpetually stuck in finals week, leaving me just enough energy to get through the day but not enough to conjure up my own special brand of goddamned delightfulness.

The two weeks of corporeal slowdown triggered or at least coincided with something excellent — my brain seems to have returned from whatever hiatus it’s been on for the last couple years. Writing no longer feels like trying to breathe while encased in a giant Jell-O mold. Whatever Roto-Rootered my noodle, I’m grateful and am scraping out remaining sludge while putting this refreshing spray of thoughts into words.

But next time my brain takes a sabbatical, I’d like to hitch along for the ride.

In times like JULY 2024!, you twerpy month, all we can do is either hold on for dear life or tuck and roll off, then stare at the sky until the wooziness passes and we recalibrate.

Mostly I clung to small comforts in JULY 2024!, especially those in carb form. (Confession: I am also in carb form.)

And also screamed JULY like this:

Here are some splashes of marvelous from July 2024

• Someone I love dearly sent FOUR PINTS of Jeni’s ice cream and also some dog ice cream (for the dog, not dog-flavored). They are now my favorite person. (All apologies to my husband, but he had a good run.)
• I’ve hit that age where I understand the technology but am tired of keeping up with it like I’m the third dog in the sled team. My kids run my tech now. Despite their help, I still can’t get the Target app to work at the checkout line. My offspring are polite enough to keep from howling with laughter until I’m out of earshot, but that’s because they see how devastated I get catching a glimpse of myself in the checkout camera. Despite that, this Target commercial shows they (generally) understand their customers, even if they overestimate our enjoyment of the checkout camera.

• Sometimes you dream of going to a certain place. A dream you’ve dreamed for, oh, your entire marriage. SOMETIMES DREAMS COME TRUE!. Ladies and gentlemen, the Mars Cheese Castle. Squeaky Curds! Whey (probably, and if not, there should be!) T-shirts! Kringle! Pickled mushrooms! Pants! Cheese hats that we refused on principle! Beer! What more could you want?
• OMG when is the last time you heard this? Too long, I’d guess.
• Talk about honesty and balance. 
• This reaches far beyond writing. We only have each other: 
• Perhaps July was just an illusion, but a necessary one as Oliver Sacks points out in this passage. 
• I came across this as I sorted through papers in my office. It’s one of those pieces that, like the merry-go-round, is dizzying and thrilling. 

• Writers (and some normal people, probably,) form nearly-unholy-yet-mutable bonds with writing instruments and notebooks. I use Sharpie S-gels and 5-Star notebooks for novel writing, glitter gel pens and fun notebooks for journaling, colored pencils for planning, and whatever pen is on hand to put stuff in my second brain. We’re one scratch-and-sniff sticker away from teleporting here:

Someone tell Mars Cheese Castle to get on an aisle like that.

• Oh no, I just went down this rabbit hole. DO I WANT THESE?

What delights popped up in your July?