flâneur

Monuments Of You: Slingshots That Miss and Guns That Don't

fugitivemargins.substack.com · 6,551 words · saved by 1 readers

On the objects we keep to measure ourselves and the ones that measure us whether we like it or not.

There is a slingshot on my bookshelf that I made when I was nine years old, and I have not been able to throw it away in the twenty-four years since, even though it no longer has its “sling.” I cut the wood from a forked branch in the forest behind my childhood house in upstate New York. A “Y” of oak; made from the good kind of branch only children and dogs can identify, one that put up a little fight and then cracked when it split off the tree. My father showed me how. He had a firetruck-red Victorinox pocketknife he let me use under supervision and then, that summer, without it, his…

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