Residual Rain
By Tom Swift
June 14, 2026
The morning after evening rain I stepped into my squint-worthy-bright backyard. Wind clapped the leaves of my red maple and made a shower you could see around. On my way for a morning stroll, I made my way through the alley, down the sidewalk, into the community garden, through the adjacent school yard, other tall, mature trees also made personal showers from the drops delayed. Last night I had a notion to go for a walk but didn’t on account of the rain, which started as soon as I did. This morning, as the cool clouds tears intermittently fell on my shoulders, I got the sense that this wetness waited for me. We can, after all, avoid certain fates for only so long.
Sitting with the experience a couple hours later I try to take advantage of the distance.
Trees give oxygen. Trees = air.
Water sustains. Water = body.
Sun sustains. Sun = life.
At one point as I walked along the parkway the gust was such that outpouring felt akin to a cold shower of the sort usually started by a faucet. “I didn’t need that one,” I said aloud even though no human was near enough to hear me. Upon review, seems I was wrong about that. I need it. I need it all. And how lucky I am right now that I have it.
It All Counts
By Tom Swift
May 30, 2026
The other night I dropped my pedometer on the ground — and I didn’t know where or when I did. The downside of noise-canceling headphones is that they work during moments that you would like to register with sound.
Instead, the moment I reached into my pocket and didn’t feel the pedometer registered with distress. I knew immediately how the pedometer escaped my person: my Vuori shorts (a clothing brand, by way, that quickly fails at the seems — just saying) had a hole in the left pocket. I didn’t think the hole was large enough for the pedometer to fit through. Usually, I would put the pedometer in my right pocket but what I did know about that hole is that definitely my keys would slip through and I didn’t want both keys and pedometer in same pocket. I couldn’t hear myself but I still didn’t want to sound like a human maraca.
On one hand, the pedometer wasn’t expensive — an analog counter of the most rudimentary kind. Not only does this little display with a cheap clip not come with an app or a wire, there isn’t even an on/off switch. There’s one button, which, when pressed and held, zeros out the numbers. Otherwise, the count goes up when you move and the count stays put when you do. I carry this low tech gizmo most every where I go.
There’s something about the marvel of the mind — that we can experience times and places from our past; we can imagine things that aren’t there; we can create, plan, reflect, analyze, project, and, feel a sense of oneness with other living things. That’s the mind. The brain itself … well, that’s rather simple. Food. Sex. Sleep. The brain is pretty straightforward in its pursuits and desires. I carry a counter in my pocket and this counter gives me one piece of data — and one piece of data only — that has become essential to my satisfaction and motivation during recent surgery recovery and beyond. Now that I’ve reached a place where exercise is fundamental not just to recovery but to everything else that I want to build and maintain the rest of my years.
It’s the most basic form of psychology: I move more when I know the number will reflect my efforts. I feel more satisfied when the number is higher. Practically, this isn’t nothing. I have come to know, for example, that I am likely to sleep better if the day’s total is 14,000 than if it’s 8,000. But — stepping back from this step counter — you might say I’m no different than I was as a boy when there was a score on a board. When the number on the scoreboard told me my team was ahead, I was content. Simple tracking — of steps or food or whatever is important to one’s health — affects behavior. In some cases, significantly.
(Of course, one could make a case that total steps walked is an incomplete picture of fitness and they would certainly be right.)
And, well, when the whereabouts of the device that gives me this boost of self suddenly was gone — and there was also the awareness that steps had been taken, un-registered (gasp!), in the interim — that gave me a different kind of start. Well after dark, I had only a phone flashlight to guide my way. At first, I thought how unlikely it would be that I would find the thing. I figured I could buy another one. (At least for now; who knows how long they will continue to make devices that don’t give companies data about us.) Again, this wasn’t a financial concern. But how long would it take for me to obtain a replacement? Probably not many days but certainly I wouldn’t have one in time for the remainder of this walk and probably not for the entirety of multiple others.
Yet, after the initial sense of things subsided, something told me that I would, in fact, find it. As I retraced my steps I told the rabbits, “I will find it and it will be glorious.”
Retracing my steps with my phone flashlight low to the ground I did find it and did experience my moment of elation. My answer to the Tom Hanks character Check Noland’s “Wilson” in the movie Cast Away was back in my possession, gripped in my hand rather than dropped into my pocket, the numbers again went up and all was right in Magic City.
My steps were suddenly lighter and easier — and proved another simple psychology hack: Knowing what you’re looking for gives you a chance to find it. In that way, I had lost some steps off my count for the day but I had gained a different sort of satisfaction, as I walked slowly in the dark with hope that I would, as I did, find in the shadows something uniquely useful to me. The best metaphors are the ones that write themselves.
On Trying to Hug a Cloud
By Tom Swift
May 26, 2026
I strolled through Magic City after midnight in various stages of bliss.
During the total of this particular Saturday-night-into-Sunday-morning excursion I talked to precisely one person, a man who came outside to see what was causing his dog to bark so steadily and loudly all of the sudden.
“There’s a fox out here,” I said. A streetlight glowed on this tree-lined street. The dog was behind a chain-link fence. I couldn’t see the dog and I couldn’t see the man.
“Oh, that must be what he’s fussing about.”
“He also could be annoyed by me just standing in the road looking for the fox.”
That plus pleasantries were the sum total of words spoken to me or by me to a specific person with capacity to hear them.
This is different than saying my utterances were over for the evening. At the time when the fox crossed my path, I was, in fact, just getting started. During the rest of my meander I talked to rabbits — I have decided it’s my mission to lessen the collective fear of a species; the initiative is slow but I’m in it for the long haul — and various people who were invisible to the naked eye.
I experienced a fun, flirty, connection with a woman I barely know who wasn’t at any point present.
My imagination engaged me in a discussion with siblings who also were not anywhere nearby.
I talked to my therapist — uh, no.
I conversed with myself, of course, as well as one or two other people who temporarily occupied space between my ears.
Sometimes my words were uttered aloud. Most were in the form of the internal conversation that comes standard issue with the installation of brain waves.
So in that respect I engaged in the experience of being alone with one’s thoughts. Except the tenor and tone of these conversations felt different than is usual for me. Among other ways in which this was evident is that while walking I also did a lot of dancing. I’m not a gadget guy but I bought a set of noise-cancelling headphones a few weeks ago and I am enjoying the sound that can come from something I bought foremost for its capacity to create silence.
One way to look at this walk is as a denouement of a week in which I had felt a wider range of the human panoply of emotions than is common in my experience. Or maybe I didn’t feel more total emotions; maybe it was just that the emotions I did feel struck me in ways, and more deeply, than I’m used to.
I feared the loss of a seminal relationship and took steps to mitigate that loss, steps that in themselves aroused fears and the kind of stress that comes with significant decisions.
I later showed up for that relationship with vulnerability, which, in turn, changed the frame.
Separately, I faced a conflict that had weighed on my mind for more than a week. I did so with, more or less, the version of me I want to be present in such moments but getting there took some work.
One morning I felt a burst of grief while running on a treadmill. I simultaneously imagined myself running in a dead sprint on a sunny day down the backyards of my boyhood home and also my deceased brother outrunning the death that brought about my life. Yeah, not the usual treadmill mindset.
At various times during the week I experienced feelings of loss and even some betrayal. I overcame indecision that could have left me stagnant until I finally chose to do something I wanted to but didn’t think I could ever do … I used aggression in mostly constructive ways … I made friends with indecision and confusion; I let the dust settle … I worked through common stress … Health concerns — my own and those of people I love — came and, if not went, were managed. I have never surfed but this felt like I road a lot of emotional waves.
I encountered someone who managed my anxiety in rare and appreciated ways, which allowed me to see the fear and therefore watch it rapidly dissipate.
I received touch that healed.
I saw colors with my eyes closed.
I encountered beauty I didn’t think my shame would allow me to see.
Maybe I have consumed a jambalaya of emotions like this one before in a single week but never, that I can recall, did so many feel so acute.
In the 36 hours immediately before this walk, in separate spaces and in different ways, I released energy from my body that had been inside me, in some cases, I suspect, for a long time — in one instance I had the sense of touch on my chest by a non-human hand that sealed a vulnerability that had existed as long as I have had biology. I would be the first to say this could be pure fantasy; it’s too early to say and never could it be proven.
This walk was, then, something of an exhale. The consolidation that follows chaos. The celebration that arises from letting go of weighty psychic stores that no longer serve.
Stress builds up and the dissipation can be profoundly palpable.
I am talking in the abstract here, no doubt to the annoyance of the reader, but I am trying to sit with feelings that by their nature are hard to capture. The particulars of the stories would distract; in some cases they would require too many details to be concisely coherent anyway; in others, well, I just don’t want to go there right here right now. I danced alone under the stars and writing about my moves does something for me — even if not for anyone else.
One thing about emotions is that, for all their power, after they pass you can easily dismiss them. Maybe, at least in my case, even feel shame for having felt them so deeply. I think of music. Once I shared with a friend an affinity for an old song that was hard to find even in a streaming world. I was taken with the song in ways that, in hindsight, seem a little over the top. My friend liked the song, too, but our experiences of it were, of course, different (personal to each of us). You can share your feelings but this only goes so far; another person can relate but they can’t do an upload. We can be listening at the same time but none of us hear the same song.
“He was just being emotional,” is a phrase. I have studied Stoicism and such schools of thought tell us that emotions (“the passions”) aren’t to be trusted. Certainly not as much as reason. I’m not only ignoring that right now I am sort of doing the opposite.
Why try to cement this moment with words? It’s a fair question. I don’t know that my answer will be any more durable than are the emotions themselves but there’s something in the ephemeral aspect that makes certain emotions worth savoring and acknowledging. The attempt is one thing that glues me together.
Clouds pass, never to be seen again, not exactly, yet a choice few have appeared in more than a few compelling photographs. I live in a world in which my primary way of perceiving experience isn’t the one that, in most cases, the collective We operates in. Hey, reason and logic are essential — especially in public discourse and in the establishment and execution of societal and professional laws and norms — but, as I have heard philosopher Martha Nussbaum put it, emotions can also be foundations of profound personal knowledge. Besides, if feeling this way is wrong then I don’t want to be right.
I’m attempting to capture a cloud with my fingers. There are no lessons here. No formulas. Only dualities.
Mind and body.
Thoughts and feelings.
Memory and the moment.
The sense of being alive infused by the acceptance of death.
Under starlight and set to music, I moved through the night as something of a happy drunk — one who hadn’t consumed a single chemical — and I don’t know that what language I’ve used to describe the moment does anything useful for anyone else but me and this time, at least, that’s reason enough.
The Nighttime Spell
By Tom Swift
May 17, 2026
When you walk after dark in the city you not only experience magic you also encounter some weird shit.
The jogger who runs no faster than you walk wearing both a lit-up, reflective vest and also a headlamp. A human holidazzle.
The fella riding on a stacked bike, slowly circling a side-street like he’s surveying a scene only he can see.
The car that moves so slowly it’s hard to tell whether there is, in fact, a driver.
The front-yard glow stick that looks like a mushroom. Or maybe a penis.
Like finding a person’s keycard, keys, and miscellaneous chords in the middle of a road alongside a printed notice for a Bible study … and elsewhere the remnants of what may have been a recent car-jacking: jumper cables on the curb, floor mats strewn about the road.
And that was just last night.
Indeed, Magic City After Hours includes moments when you feel compelled to put your head down and pick up your pace.
Writing that sentence makes you recall the night this fall, when for a few moments you felt like you were in the opening scene of a cheap horror film.
You were half a block from home — in your car this time; not walking — and you spotted a person in the parking lot of the neighborhood convenience store long after the store had closed for the night. You couldn’t not notice this man. Even though you weren’t absolutely sure he was, in fact, a man, given that he wore a mask and a hoodie or a hat. You’d have guessed he was in his 20s but because so little of his face showed and because he was both in the dark and under the glow of a street light, you couldn’t know much for sure about this arresting figure.
Illuminated and in the shadows, he carried a backpack or a satchel. He stared at the ground, like he was looking for something. Like he was looking for something — money, valuables — a shopper may have dropped.
You passed him. He saw you see him. And you saw him see you see him. He watched you until he realized you weren’t stopping, then returned his downward gaze. All of his movements … they … were … so … slow.
You didn’t want him to know where you lived. You went a block out of the way; you pulled to the far side of your alley, your head on a swivel, and as soon as you turned into the alley you immediately hit the breaks. Two young women were before you, crouched over, regarding a small cat.
Yes: A small black cat.
You rolled down your window. There wasn’t any fog but in memory that would be an easy add to this scene.
“It just came right up to us,” one of the girls said.
The girls quickly cleared space for you to pass.
“It’s not our cat,” the other girl said.
The first girl apologized, not once but twice. She did nothing wrong. Neither of them had. They paid attention to a cat. This was hardly offensive behavior. This was maybe the opposite of offensive behavior. Thin and dressed in black tops, they appeared about 19 years old. Presumably, before they suddenly entered the film reel spinning in your mind they had just gotten out of an actual movie. The theater’s rear exits were feet away.
You told them you didn’t mind waiting.
“The cat doesn’t have a collar,” the first girl said to you, then turned to the cat. “Move kitty.”
“I won’t hit the cat — no chance of that.”
The cat scurried off. The girls turned and headed down the sidewalk.
“You both have a good evening.”
“You, too,” they kindly called back.
Cat cleared, you pulled slowly down the alley and into your garage. You were no longer thinking about the unpaid parking lot attendant you saw before this adventure around your own block began as you got out of your car and headed on foot, down the alley, toward the spot of the interaction with the cat. Maybe the cat lived in the house behind the theater. Those people have a loose affiliation with common social mores. There’s often a tarp out back and usually a van with a flat tire. But then this cat seemed thin. The fact she came right up to the girls ... was she hungry? Sick? It’s unclear what you would do even if you did see the cat again. But then the lack of a plan never stopped you before. You simply felt compelled to check it out.
That is, until you got halfway down the alley, and the man with the mask and the head covering slipped out from the behind the far side of the theater — Jason with an N-95 instead of a hockey mask. He now stood precisely on the sidewalk where the girls were moments before. He traveled more than a full block since you saw him at the store. He must have more than one speed. He saw you see him. He stood there. Unmoved. Again, his moments were slower than tai-chi.
You made like you’re going into the small apartment building nearby, which put you behind a garage and out of site. But then you looked back to see if he headed your way and, no, he’s wasn’t but, yes, he was still there. Just standing, still as a tree, facing the alley.
You walked toward home, trying to stay in the shadows. You stopped. You looked back. He slipped behind the wall again but you can still see his covered head. You sensed he was keeping tabs on you.
You stood behind your neighbor’s garage until you poked your head down the alley once more, saw he was gone, and dashed across the alley, inside your fence gate, locked up outside, and unlocked the inside back door with all due speed. Again, like in a horror flick, your key got stuck. Then, after a tense minute, you got in and bolted the door shut.
You wondered if you’re just being paranoid. But then you told your neighbor and some minutes later he also put eyes on the man and registered a similar reading on the creep-o-meter.
Every sound in the house the next few hours would be scrutinized but this film was otherwise over.
Oh, the nighttime vibe! Authentic characters, sleek black cats, random objects, and unexpected shadowy figures who slide in and out of your frame. It’s dreamy. It’s scary. It’s exciting. Nope: There’s nothing like the spell of night to make you feel awake.
Walk This Way
By Tom Swift
May 13, 2026
After more than seven years at my address, I have officially found a new favorite haunt in Magic City.
The running track sits at the juxtaposition of nearly everything: a school, a church, a tree-lined city street, and the biggest sky in the neighborhood.
I stumbled onto this wonderland of synthetic rubber and polyurethane one night a couple of months ago. On my way home from an appointment, I initially had a notion to stop by the recreation center. But when I got there, the place was booked. I figured the universe was telling me the recreation center isn’t where I should be. I would go home and take to the sidewalks. It was, after all, a nice night. Except, along the way, I observed, as if for the first time, this track. There was a man on the track. This man was running. To the extent I thought about the track I had assumed it was strictly for student use. But then this many running didn’t look like a student. I pulled into the parking lot and encountered another man — this one sitting in a truck with its window down. I didn’t even get the question out of my mouth before he said, “sure, you can use it.”
In January, while recovering from surgery, I had a dream in which I crossed a street without looking and ended up on a running track — a nice one. I will leave some personal details out of this story but, suffice to say, this nocturnal scene was symbolically meaningful for me in more than one direction. That these weeks later I found myself, again, unexpectedly on a track — this time in waking life — deepened what would prove to be layers of synchronicity I would experience during those inaugural laps.
Usually an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of guy, of late I’ve found myself drawn to a long evening constitutional on the track well after sunset. Many people live for sunny days and I get that. Warmth and light have a lot going for them. Me, I’ll take spring nights as an ideal time for just about anything.
Wind blowing, shadows dancing, tunes turn the scene into cinema. I don’t know what time it is and I don’t care. What I do know is that it’s an hour made for lone wolves and young rabbits.
It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s an Ad!
By Tom Swift
May 8, 2026
A quintessential twenty-first century American moment: On a beautiful spring morning in an area of the country, Minneapolis, where such days are few and therefore cherished, I’m walking around a middle-school running track with the aim to exercise, think, and otherwise enjoy an hour in the sun. A tow plane flies overhead. The banner doesn’t face me so I can’t easily read the specific name of the prescription medication mentioned in the aerial advertisement. But I can clearly make out the message I’m being given from on high: “Ask your doctor about it.”
It’s part of the ambience of life in the United States, circa 2026, that several times a day our eyeballs are presented with advertisements for drugs. It’s worth nothing that it didn’t used to be that way and that it still isn’t that way in all but one other industrialized nation (New Zealand). America used to effectively prohibit direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs — and this wasn’t back in the days of bloodletting. Before 1997, the FDA required all prescription drug advertisements to disclose a summary that included all warnings, precautions, contraindications, and adverse events — requirements that effectively blocked most advertising, since you couldn’t fit all of that in a television or radio ad (and it would have made for an exceedingly long airplane banner). Direct-to-consumer campaigns initiated in the 1980s, for example, rare as they were, used print media only. Then, in 1997, the FDA relaxed its rules, which gave rise to the advertisements that dominate our feeds, fill our airwaves, and blemish our blue skies.
As I do my loops and the plane does its loops, I look to the heavens and wonder: Is there a drug that would immunize me against drug company advertisements? You know, I think I’ll ask my doctor about it. Because that would be right for me.
The Gathering
By Tom Swift
March 26, 2026
I step outside for the morning walk and there are the geese. All the geese. Waves and waves of geese.
If I lived in a Hitchcock film this scene would be scary. But it’s not scary; it’s the opposite of scary. Immediately overhead, high over my leafless maple tree, the geese are loud and proud, and this happens every year, I suppose, but never ever have I seen this many geese flying together, all at once, no, sir. More and still more join in. The geese align into a decidedly upper-case V.
Come one, come all, join in, wherever you are.
I go for that walk. I find myself in good spirits. I chat up a neighbor or two as we pass on the sidewalk. I greet the dogs (of course). Upon my return home, I notice that the steps sunk in. I have the sense this was a good decision. I go back inside my house. I sit on my couch. I take out my notebook. I don’t write long. I set my pen down.
A calm — a rare calm for this cat — comes over me. I have this unmistakable sense that everything’s going to be all right, and I don’t just mean today. I have this sense that something passed over me, through me, and that I will never be the same.
The only logical conclusion is that this feeling is a gift from the geese.