HeyJaredpotomac notes + blues
field notes + blue notes from the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 3, 2026
Latest issues
I saw the tree with the lights in it (opens the original)
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When I was thirteen, I saw a tree become alive. Situated on the bank of a creek along the neighborhood greenway, the tree, a beech, was not distinctive in any way I remember. Many afternoons in the years before I got my driver’s license, I would bike the few miles from my house to the creek. Here, I would sit for a minute or two on a bench before throwing a few rocks into the water and biking home, having successfully killed another lonely hour.One afternoon, as I sat on the bench staring at the
an update on the potomac sewage spill (opens the original)
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I’m shocked to discover the sun doesn’t rise until almost seven o’clock, one of many signs that summer is almost over. Along the Potomac, spicebush berries glint like rubies, the floodplain stinks of pawpaw, and swifts dance over the river at dusk. I spent so much of this past season away from home these slight shifts toward fall have caught me off guard. Yesterday I noticed the silverrod has already gone to seed, a natural, normal fact that was nevertheless surprising to me.The slow slip into f
summer is a verb (opens the original)
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“To summer” is the most controversial verb in American English. Far from simply indicating that one spends their summers elsewhere, no other word conjures the affluence — and the public performance of such affluence — more than “summering.” The pretensions of the verb are portentous: “to summer” has a whole entry in the WASP how-to-guide, The Official Preppy Handbook, and has even been <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nyti
waving the wild flag (opens the original)
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On Christmas Day 1943, the New Yorker published an odd editorial. Structured as a parable, the story imagines life after a third world war — a conflict so destructive that by its end, there were only “a handful of people left alive, and the earth was in ruins and the ruins were horrible to behold.” As the story opens, the war’s few survivors have gathered to plan for a new world order; each delegate, representing their country, agrees to carry
if you want to write, stop reading (opens the original)
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One of the more painful lessons I learned while completing my first manuscript was that in order to write, I had to stop reading. This discovery ran contrary to everything I had been taught about writing. In order to write well, my teachers had instructed, you had to read and read widely — across genres, eras, continents. As a result, the more I read, the more my own subject expanded. New ideas unfurled and arguments proliferated. At some point, the outline for one of my chapters looked like a f
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