09.05.26 [on the F train]

at the risk of getting so meta that i collapse into myself and turn into a zip drive like scarlett johansson's character at the end of lucy, i transferred three of my very old longhand posts from this notebook to my website last night and realized i have got to stop talking about prospective books to be written and/or published. i mean, i still intend for them to exist and am slithering forward, but i don't think blogging them into existence is a thing. so: for my next two tricks i need to come up with a good ice-cream-related pitch for the indie food zine i wrote for this spring, and a good secondhand-clothing-related pitch for a new-to-me magazine now published by the folks who put out the weed/mushrooms/cats/sound/sun-and-moon magazines i've written for in the past. the latter is much more intuitive, of course, i want to do something with mourning garments, i just have to figure out if it's something they've touched on before without buying every single back issue. the former... i would love to do something about southern california's gothic relationship with frozen yogurt and how i have come to find comfort in both it and carob chips as an adult in a way that represents both evolution beyond and a kind of permanent limbo in late '80s and early '90s diet-and-fitness culture–i also have Big Feelings about diet root beer, which is what the therapist i had as a tween offered me from a minifridge in her office before she'd ask me to describe ink blots to get to the bottom of why i was incapable of sleeping alone–but i don't know if touching on Body Stuff is something they're interested in doing. i mean, they probably are if i can thread the right needle on it, but i have this maybe-memory of reading something in one of their pitch calls about how they weren't interested in diet culture. am i just making it up? i very much enjoyed how my first piece for them ended up being about my family, at least in part, though it ended up being about a family member who's dead, and that's quite unlike talking about people who can still decide to correct or resent you. i checked in with my mom before writing about her father, though, and if i get the chance to go forward with this i'll consult my sister and dad before braiding them in. i'll be seeing both of them soon, on a trip back to northern california to help my mother move and for thanksgiving, respectively. the holiday is a surprise: [as i mentioned a few posts ago, whoops] i haven't spent it with my father since before trump was elected the first time, as my shitbird stepbrother ended up supporting him after rubio dropped out and went on to be a member of both administrations. i think said shitbird has finally given up his apartment here in new york; maybe it's simply that he'll be out of town? could it possibly be that my dad has officially stopped coinciding with him? we only talked about it in person once and i didn't (yet) have the nerve to ask what changed, but i'm curious enough that i'll push it, maybe after i've gotten his blessing to talk in print about how he feels about fat people (spoiler: it's weird).