When I thought to share this song with you, I said, “Oh perfect, it’s September.” In fact, it is July, which is even more perfect, since “September Song” is a capsule of timelessness and disorientation. Lightning Bug’s frontwoman Audrey Kang reportedly wrote it after camping solo for a month on the Baltic Sea, watching the sun set very slowly and very late each night. “I’d watch it disappear, this glowing orb sink into the sea every night to the point where I felt kind of insane, like I was hallucinating … and I started reliving memories but they felt like they were right before me and then I felt confused, was I reliving memories, or seeing into the future?” Yes, yes, which is it. Listen here.
Remember when we were alone in our houses during quar and we got to believe all the beautiful projections we read in The Atlantic and whatever about how life would be better and fairer now that we’d discovered just how broken things were? That’s the kind of fantasy you get to have when capitalism is turned off for five seconds, but fast forward a year and here we are with the flights, the space missions and the stonks, having grown not at all.* The Twitter office recently opened back up in San Francisco, and just like that, “Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region’s bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live.” Nature is healing, though, right?
*speaking of not growing
Offices + People = a lot of freaked out one-year-old dogs who’ve never been alone before. To help ease the transition, a number of Bay-type companies are making pet-sitting a corporate perk, which is great news for the pet care businesses they’re contracting, obviously, although dog trainers are losing their minds tending to the wave of pandemic puppies with separation anxiety. But they’re not the only ones raking it in: Small Door, a “OneMedical for pets,” is starting to take off while Barkyn, a “dog wellness” company that sells food subscriptions + pet telemedicine, raised a $9 million Series A this spring. If you deal in birds, though, you’re out of luck: everyone’s ditching the chickens.
One pandemic thing that won’t change: we <3 parks. On that note, have you seen all the great Parks Project merch? This org is working to protect and preserve parklands for years to come by educating, advocating, volunteering, and activating park supporters to get involved in conservation. To date, their brand collaborations have helped them contribute over $1,500,000 to fund vital projects in parks, and they just dropped a new one with National Geographic©. It’s butterfly-themed and heavy on that vintage National Geographic esthetic, which we love. Snap it up quick!
