News item: A person scaled the Benjamin Franklin Bridge over Labor Day weekend, said to be scattering the ashes of a friend, before eventually descending and being detained by authorities.

BY JOEY SWEENEY | Ben would have approved, you know, and would have vehemently protested your arrest. He may even have joined you. On a Sunday, in the early evening, in the late summer. 

Even to speak it feels like a dare. Maybe this is the upside of grief, to be dared into feeling, to coax oneself into treating the city as an extension of oneself; have you ever noticed, these days, that those with the least fucks to give, the least to lose, actually treat this place the way it was meant to be treated? To treat the whole of it like a public square, to treat the greene country towne like it was your goddamned living room, and hell to anyone who’s got a problem with it because they clearly didn’t read the manual or get the memo or smell the very air here. 

The very air: Think of that first day, every year, when the winter finally breaks and the whole of Center City smells like weed. Every street dank, every new block a different strain, sweet with freedom. Ben would have approved of this, too, Benjamin Franklin, noted bisexual and vessel among us who discovered electricity itself. 

I don’t know you, my brother, but I know it like I feel my feet on the ground that your person deserved nothing less than what you did for him up there, and I bet I know what you know: Whatever it cost, it was worth it. May all blessings be upon you.