The news reports with eager glee on a now eight year-old study reporting that “just being within sight of water can calm the body and reduce anxiety.” It is forwarded to me numerous times and each time the only thought in my head is “no fucking shit” as it is, in fact, the only glue holding me together.

My little morning routines, evidence of the rapid descent into geriatrics, to which I must simply surrender: wake up and be horrified at the sounds my knees make, the actual leather stretching sound of near 40 year old sinews over increasingly knobby bones; walk by the river, see the river, marvel at the river, walk by the birds, see the birds, marvel at the birds; get my coffee without having to tell the baristas what I want, tip generously for never having to discuss neither the order nor the predictability of it; drink outside; do my duolingo (680 day streak), feed the birds, imagine myself as a known entity to them, a benevolent demigod bristling with peanuts; gnash my teeth at the reality of shitty little free range LA kids and their shitty little free range LA parents; walk back by the river, see the river, marvel at the river, toss peanuts to the crows.

I fret that, little by little, the predictable little cultural signs of aging are being repackaged and sold back to my silly aging cohort as somehow anything but that. Each night for the past week we bask in the genius of Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face, but I can SEE with Jessica Fletcher clarity that this is just Murder She Wrote for millennials. Each day my friends and I log each other’s Wordle scores in our group chat, our little virtual rest-home reporting of The Jumble. I know that it is only a matter of time when some chic cafe or restaurant in Silverlake will start offering a very cleanly branded “Late Brunch” that we will flock to, realizing too late that this is simply the Early Bird special by another name and that it smells just as sweet. See also: orienting my whole daily routine around feeding the fucking birds. Tuppence a bag, bitch!

Anyway, the light has been lovely lately.