We stand on the precipice of a magnificent achievement in the category of literary endurance. Next week Perfect Duluth Day will launch the eighth year of its “Saturday Essay” series by publishing the 300th essay. Did we think when we launched with the first essay in 2016 it would last this long? Of course we did. We like to write; you like to read. Duh.

At the end of each year we briefly rest our typing devices and look back at some of the highlights of the previous year. Last week we focused on the most read essays of 2022. This week we ignore the numbers and look back at a few select essays of similar quality that might have been missed by non-compulsive followers.

Season seven of Perfect Duluth Day’s “Saturday Essay” series has drawn to close, and it’s time to look back with the usual popularity contest. In 2021, Jim Richardson pulled off an unprecedented sweep of the top-five most read essays; this year he remained the click hog, but holds a more reasonable three out of five works deemed by Google Analytics to be your favorites.

Next week we’ll highlight a few “select gems” judged by attributes other than page views, but this week it’s all about which ones had the most people tap the Read More button.

“A hoarder is someone with an unusual ability to see beauty in the ordinary.” I heard Malcolm Gladwell say that during a harvest, and had to pause and write it down (the Dragon Psychology 101 episode, which aired at the midpoint of 2020).

Exactly two years and twenty days ago, I rescued these ancient Red Wing boots from the trash. The sound of the garbage truck trundling down the alley produced a pang of regret, so I pulled them from atop a frozen bag of excrement at the last possible moment:

Reunion with these works of art wrought rhapsodic joy. A rabbit hole opened. I dove way down, even though I knew it didn’t make much sense. Every drop of value had been squeezed from them already, or so I thought.

I set them in the sun, and admired them. My adoration, combined with the angling sun’s illumination, bordered on the beatific. I shot several photos. Perhaps that would be enough to say goodbye. Sensing more, however, I kept going.

It was his 73rd birthday. He’d been taken into inpatient psychiatric care the night before, a phone call I had received while out at a bar with a group of friends. We were watching a Minneapolite musician, Dessa, play at Pizza Lucé in downtown Duluth. I liked Dessa’s music, but I really liked her writing. She’d detailed her experience rewiring her brain to forget a dangerous, almost obsessive love affair: the mechanics of love, told in poetry and electromagnetic imaging. Before the psychological intervention, she said, she had a kind of wild and inevitable connection to this man who could not be trusted with her heart. They were incendiary together, in good ways and not: a fire started with a glance, burning down the house with everyone inside. I’ve never had a love like that, but I could feel it anyway — her despair, her passion, and the terrible realization that whatever was happening in her was above or beneath her conscious mind, scratched into her whole brain. Every thought she had about anything traversed the rough path of that scratch — removing him from her heart was reductive: she needed to remove him from the apparatus of her Self, the thing that made her her.

I didn’t understand why this was so moving to me at the time, but now I do.

Co-written with Allen Richardson

Dr. Mallard McPurdy disappeared in 2005 while surveying regional probability for the University of Minnesota Duluth’s short-lived Anomalies Department. A team led by Dr. Leon Oswald recovered McPurdy’s yellow pressure suit on Skyline Boulevard, but McPurdy remains at large. His suit contained video files from which the following transcriptions were made; we obtained these with a Freedom of Information Act request.

Duluth 1. Air analysis complete: Bacteria Spore, Origin Unknown. I hope these cheap-ass containment suits actually contain.

The dim, overcast light coming through my smeared faceplate told me little about season or time of day. “Dr. Oswald!” I screamed, weeping as the dread and isolation overwhelmed me. I put on a brave face, clenching my fists, unimpressed by the amount of courage I could muster.