Ridgeline subscribers —

Thanks for all the “Yo!“s last week. It looks like transmissions from mailbot2k are getting through. (Let me know if you see any “rendering errors” in your email clients; I think we fixed the Proton Mail issues.) FYI, because the last issue of Roden ended up in many a spam folder, let me also announce here a reading I’m doing next week:

• Wednesday, June 10, 2026, Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC (RSVP at that link!)

Hope to see you there!

Hello Brooklyn Bridge. How long had it been since I’d walked the Brooklyn Bridge? I was trying to get from Tribeca to eat some pizza at Aromi over in Carol Gardens (Aromi ended up being … fine? Also, I think Carol Gardens? The fluid boundaries of Brooklyn / Manhattan neighborhoods continues to confound / intrigue), and walking seemed far more fun than any other way of getting there. So I set off up and over the bridge.

Holy foot traffic. Just: Obscene crowds, all jostling for selfies. The world, one giant selfie jostle. Eventually, right before the machines turn off our light of meat-based consciousness, we’ll do some Borgesian space selfie and be done with it all. But for now, we selfie on the ground, with great desperation, preening for the screen, to be uploaded to god only knows where for god only knows what audience. The volume of media captured defies comprehension. It is empyrean in volume, flip-flopping beyond theory into the theology of bytes, for how could so many selfies be contained within the physics of our world?

But they are: contained, taken, stored on (or near) earth. Those selfies. Taken and eaten like the body of Christ, over and over again as the sun sets and the sky cycles orange and red and purple above the Brooklyn Bridge with all its crisscross jazz wires. I always think of Sonny Rollins’ The Bridge cover when I see the bridge from the pedestrian path. It is iconic. But, alas, that cover is not the Brooklyn Bridge but the Williamsburg Bridge, the one Sonny hid under to practice for a few years before emerging as Sax God. One might wonder why the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges are all so close to one another — turns out NYC went bridge crazy in the early 20th century and here we are with three mega bridges all in a row.

Once, back in the old days of the internet being embarrassingly optimistic and innocent, someone made a typographic poster of the Brooklyn Bridge. Or maybe it was the Manhattan Bridge. (No, it was Brooklyn.) Some bridge, nearby, or the very one I was walking over, made of letters. With a typo! Brooklyn as Brookyln. Noticed only after the many many sold copies had been letter pressed and shipped. Now iconic (the typo, the bridge) in and of itself.

Minds are strange. We “see” but don’t. The typo is a good example. I live in near total paralysis of a reader finding a typo in one of my published books. Because: we constantly fill in the gaps. So many gaps. The ever-present literal physical blind spot of our optics always overwritten by the brain. We assume or project so much information into our fields of view. LLMs hallucinate, but we are in a state of constant hallucination, survive by hallucination. Is the maniacal need to take a selfie part of filling that gap, of trying to fill in all the blind spots? That’s probably too generous. Just an old monkey brain doing the old monkey brain thing: Narcissus times eight billion, it “feels good” to look at yourself, especially when the filters smooth away all the icky human pores.

Families walked the bridge. Big families. Like twenty-person families, or extended families. They were like whales amongst the single walkers. Huge blobs of humanity huffing and puffing up the bridge, doing a thing they clearly normally never do (walk, climb, move their bodies?) in order to get into place to take the selfies which are the most valuable thing you can acquire on a trip. To travel and not selfie is to not travel at all. All value is in the arm-length photograph, looking back at the self, face in frame, object of second-order import behind the first-order face. Nothing else matters. What you ate or saw with your own eyes is meaningless in the context of Selfie Time, which is like a personal Hope diamond, self-generated, stored in the cloud and perhaps never — not even once — looked at again. To simply have gone and been in the place, the place of “import” and selfied is to have lived. No travel before the smartphone counted. For a moment all the pain of the (easy) climb is worth it and you can assuage the algorithmic imp always and forever whispering in your ear to selfie selfie selfie; hilariously, the One Ring at least made you invisible. Gollum, poor boy, unable to selfie.

I, myself, did not selfie. Not that I am above the selfie. I got my fair share. I don’t say I didn’t selfie with any pride. I judge the selfie people, of course, as I assume I am judged when I selfie. But also, in New York, I find whatever insane inner monologue I may be indulging is often being expressed out loud by someone else nearby. “Oh yeah ya morons! Standing in big groups in the middle of the bridge is really fuckin’ smart!!” one guy yelled to everyone as he strode (attempted) by. Yes, I thought, I feel sane here. My brain feels seen. As for selfies, I selfie when I remember to. But as I strode (attempted) over the bridge I was on a pizza mission. And I was running late. And in those moments, running late with pizza on the mind, the imp of selfie shuts the hell up and is overridden by the imp of shame of late arrival.

The crowds thinned out, eventually. The further you got from the majestic trusses of the Brooklyn Bridge, the quieter became the imp, the fewer folks seemed the need to turn backwards, hold the camera out, and look happy or despondent or unimpressed or very impressed or look whatever way they think they are supposed to look on social media these days. Beyond the bridge nobody selfied. I walked through a park with Brooklyn people walking their Brooklyn dogs, and came to a literal courthouse on Court Street, in front of which middle-aged men on BMX bikes did tricks. Since arriving in NYC, I have never in my life seen more middle-aged men on skateboards or BMX bikes. They looked like they were having fun. It’s almost impossible to take a selfie while doing a trick.

C