i have gotten out from under the absolutely unstoppable avalanche of library holds that all turned up at the same time with an unexpected assist from nordstrom rack; when i was in california with my mom earlier this month i tried on some readers in the sunglasses display and lo, the fine print on the other glasses' tags leapt into almost aggressively sharp focus. turns out my book light wasn't on the fritz and i wasn't dying, or dying significantly faster than most of us are, anyway; i just can't see for shit now. i've kind of been waiting to wear glasses all my life, and i certainly spent enough time wearing clear ones recreationally to deserve this; it's fine. in the zombie apocalypse i would run out of blood pressure pills and go down even if presbyopia didn't lead me to miss a telltale lurch behind a burned-out car, so it's not like my long-term outcomes are super different now anyway. it is a little creepy that text without glasses now looks like pure fuzz–i was compensating enough to be none the wiser until that fateful day at The Rack–but we fall apart very slowly and then all at once, i guess.
it's time to revisit ye children's book draft and come up with a deal-sealing version that will win hearts and minds in the publishing industry and put jo and me on the path to creative nirvana. i have continued to keep my work calendar mostly free of more-creative projects to leave mental room for this, though i'm tired and scattered enough that i don't have much to fill that room with just yet. it's a little scary that i saw my family in california mere hours after my most recent call with maybe-editor (who has also seen the pee-wee documentary and knew what i was talking about when i brought it up!) and had difficulty describing her feedback in detail–but i took notes, so maybe it doesn't matter?
i had my yearly physical last month and received a handy-dandy little chart of how my humors have performed over the last decade or so. i can't say i was surprised, but it was still sobering (no pun intended) to see the dips and spikes in 2021, my first checkup after lockdown, like a tree's ring after drought or wildfire. i now enjoy something like consistent health, the fact that i'm becoming a mole person notwithstanding. i have three more half marathons and a five-miler before the end of the year; i have a novel i don't remember requesting waiting for me at seward park. it's the most wonderful time of the year.
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
06.28.25 [on the J train]
this past sunday was, i realized, the first day on which i've seen every member of my immediate family in 14 years (when my sister got married in san francisco). we weren't all in the same place: i woke up at my mother's house, went down to tiburon with that sister for my cousin's celebration of life (and we saw our father and other sister), then swooped back up to mom's. that's...better, honestly; i don't know that there's much to be gained by rounding all of us up, though it would be wonderful to have to consider it when, say, my niece or one of my nephews gets married one day. my niece, speaking of, asked at dinner the other night if we thought the robot apocalypse was nigh, and what did we think the world would be like in 30 years? she's latched onto the idea that the ozone layer repairing itself means that ecological disaster isn't nigh, and her mother does not wish to disabuse her of that notion. her father offered that he thinks there won't be any cars, and i predicted that humans would clot in denser living arrangements and free up more contiguous green space. i also more or less admitted that i expect her to grow up into a postapocalyptic warrior-chieftain who rules gently-parented peon-followers with an iron fist, which she seemed to take in stride; she noted that she thinks she's ready to see the terminator, and i warned her that she's going to have to deal with arnold schwarzenegger's bare ass if so. i guess that if a macho 11-year-old girl is going to experience an ass, that one is relatively benign?
on apocalypses, we saw m3gan 2.0 last night and i was prepared to be disappointed after learning that, as in terminator 2, the titular killer robot is repurposed to defend the very fleshbags it was once intent on annihilating. i'd forgotten how much i enjoy allison williams's unexpectedly-legit comic delivery, and kate bush is deployed delightfully. i'm not all that interested in talking about AI, but that was a pleasant riff on the end times.
on apocalypses, we saw m3gan 2.0 last night and i was prepared to be disappointed after learning that, as in terminator 2, the titular killer robot is repurposed to defend the very fleshbags it was once intent on annihilating. i'd forgotten how much i enjoy allison williams's unexpectedly-legit comic delivery, and kate bush is deployed delightfully. i'm not all that interested in talking about AI, but that was a pleasant riff on the end times.
04.26.25 [on the F train]
we flew home from portugal via toronto this past sunday on the first flight that has ever given me occasion to resent canada (we were delayed for flimsy-sounding reasons that kept changing; we had to transfer from one toronto airport to another that was, inexplicably, just offshore in lake ontario; we were assured many times that our luggage would be checked through and transferred without our having to collect and haul it across town, an idea so lovely and hard to believe that we visited the first baggage claim anyway and found our suitcases circling the chute like orphaned ducklings). our two weeks abroad were unusual ones: i thought to look up local protests the night we arrived on the eve of the "hands off" actions april 5, and was delighted to discover democrats abroad were planning an action in the praça dos restauradores, which was a five-minute walk from our hotel. i found an art store with poster supplies, holed myself up in the bathroom as joe slept off his jet lag, and made a double-sided placard: THEY ARE JOKERS, NOT KINGS and MAKE AMERICA CONSTITUTIONAL AGAIN (NAZI DOGE FUCK OFF). duolingo had been doing its best to teach me some portuguese and i considered cutting my sign in the shape of an apple (MACA = maça), but i checked myself before i wrecked myself. about 700 people gathered at the plaza—i actually believe this figure, a few diligent souls moved through the crowd counting us head by head—and drew comparisons with portugal's carnation revolution 51 years ago, yelled earnest things about social security (many expat retirees on the scene), sang leonard cohen's "hallelujah," which i have accepted as something we're going to hear everywhere on all occasions for a little while longer. (i kind of hope his estate is litigious?) we spent the subsequent week engaging in light tourism, with my mom and stepdad joining in a few days later, then took a train up to porto and boarded a riverboat, where in retrospect we really shouldn't have killed an albatross. it seems someone ele boarded when they weren't at their best, for norovirus whipped around the decks over the next week like me at the local roller rink when i was nine. joe went down early saturday night, mom and doug joined him in the wee hours, and at least four waves of contagion rolled over us as we tried and failed to sail up to spain, thanks to once-in-a-decade heavy rains that confounded the douro river's locks. we were stuck in the same valley town for four days, and the invalids couldn't even open the drapes in their cabins, as we were parked between other stranded vessels. the sandwiching was so enthusiastic that we accessed the beleaguered valley town through a couple of other ships, so i'm beginning to think they got a few turns with saramago's revenge as well. as that happened i learned that my cousin's brain cancer had accelerated and he was likely to die before we could get home, before i could get there if i bolted and brought him portuguese norovirus, and so he did. i spent my days joining various hikes and bike rides by myself watching fog roll through terraced vineyards in the rain and imagining what it would be like to be 40 and give birth to my second daughter right before my husband died. in my mind's eye my cousin is a little boy with a san francisco giants tee shirt hanging past his knees and ears like pennants, and i don't know when i will think of him as someone who isn't going to write back. our last interaction was his laughing at my enthusiasm for enrique iglesias's "escape," which is an easier place to leave things with someone than where my sister had to try to steer things at his bedside for all of us. joe came to the deserted patio where i'd been assembling a huge puzzle all week to say that it was time to come back and pack, it wasn't fair for me to clang around when he was sleeping, and i caved, then tantrumed: i'd had a rough couple of days, all i wanted was to finish a fucking puzzle, if he wasn't going to offer any comfort why couldn't he just leave me alone. so that's how i sobbed over a thousand pieces of the mona lisa while the night crew played eurovision pop, her right shoulder fused together where my mom had spilled nonalcoholic prosecco on it a few days earlier. i wish you were here.
12.31.24
hey hey, a non-train post! i hoped to write a post while donating platelets today, but it seems that downing extra multivitamins last night wasn't enough to summon The Good Blood; my iron was lower than it's been in ages. i ran instead, a satisfying-enough physical feat for the last day of the year, though it is a bit awkward that i didn't return the free socks they passed around before medical intake. in 2025 i'll snort caterpillar-fat rails of lentils and be an absolutely incomparable donor-diarist, david cronenberg wishes he had characters like next-year me at his fingertips. maybe i'll also lean into writing-writing?
we have new year's eve Outside Plans for the first time in many years, and tickets to something for the first time ever, i think: we attended and loved a night of yo la tengo's annual hanukkah residency at bowery ballroom a year or two ago, and the venue is close enough that we can walk there and back without soul-kissing THE LOWER EAST SIDE AFTER HOURS ON A HOLIDAY!!! for too long (i cherish our neighborhood, but its late-night chaos is uncompromising). yo la tengo won't play any of the songs they've played on nights 1-6 and they'll have mystery guests who won't be most of the soft boys (sigh, night four) or david sedaris (last night's opening humorist), and it's all very exciting. i actually found my old Dissipated Disco Mermaid sequined dress in the hall closet last night, so i will wear that and try to manifest a year of art and action.
we have new year's eve Outside Plans for the first time in many years, and tickets to something for the first time ever, i think: we attended and loved a night of yo la tengo's annual hanukkah residency at bowery ballroom a year or two ago, and the venue is close enough that we can walk there and back without soul-kissing THE LOWER EAST SIDE AFTER HOURS ON A HOLIDAY!!! for too long (i cherish our neighborhood, but its late-night chaos is uncompromising). yo la tengo won't play any of the songs they've played on nights 1-6 and they'll have mystery guests who won't be most of the soft boys (sigh, night four) or david sedaris (last night's opening humorist), and it's all very exciting. i actually found my old Dissipated Disco Mermaid sequined dress in the hall closet last night, so i will wear that and try to manifest a year of art and action.
03.30.24 [on the J train]
there's an oak leaf pressed in this notebook from the owl funeral i attended last month—along with the zoo photo safari i'd taken just over a week earlier, one of the stranger trips i'd taken for an article, though there's a strong likelihood i'd have gone to the funeral anyway. i've now been writing and/or fretting over my latest Earnest Science Feature for nearly three months, though it feels more like thirty. i haven't begged joe to read any of this one except for the first version of the opening scene (one of my favorite will mcphail panels is the one where a woman asks a spider she's trapped under a glass to read something she's written), but given how much i've bitched and tossed around in bed about it, i'm sure he'll be as glad to see it out of our lives as he was, say, when i finished my orwell essay for the new york times. out, it will soon be out! until i get a big old tattoo of its subject in may, that is. (owl, not orwell.)
a man on this train is snoring the sort of snore that seems like it'd rouse the snorer, or jolt him a few inches in the air, at least, but he snores on, and i wish him well; it would be nice to be flat for a few more hours. i'm trying to get a few more bleary mornings volunteering in queens out of the way early this spring, as i'm going to mexico on assignment(!!) in a few weeks and joe and i are then meeting my folks in copenhagen, where i have decided i don't care if it's touristy to truck out toelsinore kronborg castle. we have planned little else beyond a few meals and a night at the opera and, oh, a shared airbnb i picked for when we migrate to stockholm. will my stepfather, aghast at the way i live when i'm not at a high-end hotel, decide he doesn't love me anymore? will joe out-snore this guy on the train, who sounds with every breath more and more like he's awake and trying to fool schoolchildren? will i join the danish swans and leave my terrestrial life behind once and for all? hard to say. i ended up not interviewing a colleague out in prospect park for the swan essay i sent off to the printer this week, as the thing was short enough that bringing in another voice was going to be kind of weird and she was being flaky enough about meeting that i didn't have the energy to keep chasing. i did send a draft of the piece to my friend R at the bird hospital—not because i needed to check facts, exactly, but because anyone who knew what i was talking about would know where i was talking about, and i wanted her blessing.
she called me from her long-overdue vacation and gave it, and told me Secret Owl Things about my other feature, and let me know, when i finally screwed up the courage to ask, that bird ben, the northern cardinal i've loved for a a decade, died last summer. i don't know how to write about that, and imagine i won't for a long time; knowing ben changed me in a way i might not understand until i'm very old, if i get to be very old. i do know that R's three-part benediction—you've done right by swans, i trust you enough to tell you confidential things about the owl, we can remember ben together—felt a bit like permission to take full height in this version of myself. i wonder sometimes if she knows how badly i wanted her to see this identity all those years i cleaned cages and wrestled geese, and i know that one of her great gifts is to speak to the people we want to be on our best days. i don't mean that i'm a few inches in the air like the snorer uptrain (who's still at it!), but i have had occasion to say yes, yes, that is what i meant.
a man on this train is snoring the sort of snore that seems like it'd rouse the snorer, or jolt him a few inches in the air, at least, but he snores on, and i wish him well; it would be nice to be flat for a few more hours. i'm trying to get a few more bleary mornings volunteering in queens out of the way early this spring, as i'm going to mexico on assignment(!!) in a few weeks and joe and i are then meeting my folks in copenhagen, where i have decided i don't care if it's touristy to truck out to
she called me from her long-overdue vacation and gave it, and told me Secret Owl Things about my other feature, and let me know, when i finally screwed up the courage to ask, that bird ben, the northern cardinal i've loved for a a decade, died last summer. i don't know how to write about that, and imagine i won't for a long time; knowing ben changed me in a way i might not understand until i'm very old, if i get to be very old. i do know that R's three-part benediction—you've done right by swans, i trust you enough to tell you confidential things about the owl, we can remember ben together—felt a bit like permission to take full height in this version of myself. i wonder sometimes if she knows how badly i wanted her to see this identity all those years i cleaned cages and wrestled geese, and i know that one of her great gifts is to speak to the people we want to be on our best days. i don't mean that i'm a few inches in the air like the snorer uptrain (who's still at it!), but i have had occasion to say yes, yes, that is what i meant.
01.06.24 [on the J train]
if eater posts an item about a delicately-braised writer turning up on a platform in queens later today, that's me; i took the clinic-escort volunteer leaders' email about extra-cold-weather layering too seriously and am sous-vide'ing myself in some zippy thing i bought in akureyri last year and snow boots that are bigger than the cat. i am not one of those people, alas, who thinks sweltering one's way to the great mixed-recycling bin would be better than freezing to death.
one of my milder personal nightmares came to life yesterday evening at this off-broadway riff on a mentalist show at which i was singled out for a bit of audience participation. this was my own fault, since the performer was narrowing down his field of targets by telling people to sit down if they weren't left-handed and so on—i could have just done that—but being compelled to lie is also a personal nightmare, so that was off the table. luckily the guy doing the audience work seemed to catch my awkward-collaborator psychic stink and moved on. i told my mom about the show and she sympathized—she once got plucked from the crowd at a penn and teller show in las vegas. my mother is a brutal disappointer of magicians—an occasion on which she did so at a southern california fuddrucker's is canonical in my family—so this fascinated me. are these guys (they are always guys) like cats who know when someone doesn't want them to sit in their lap?
i sent my first passion-project pitches for the new year earlier this week and—you might want to be sitting down for this—they are about birds. it's time to write a weird science piece about birds! the ideal weird piece about birds would be a deep dive on the state of sky burials, as caitlin doughty talked about in from here to eternity (her boss book about death practices around the world and why pretty much all of them are a better deal than what we do here in america); as i recall, it's getting tougher to do them in places like india because the necessary raptors no longer show up (pollution? habitat loss?), whereas here we have carrion birds aplenty but it's illegal. which reminds me: i wrote several pieces for a friend's end-of-life startup (heh) years ago and never bookmarked their eventual URLs; is my relatively mixed-company-friendly explanation of what happens when a body is embalmed still out there somewhere? what about the quaker funeral breakdown? (for what it's worth, i like the sound of quaker funerals: simple, pretty green.)
the bird pieces i pitched are about owls and flamingos, so no human-corpse-eating to report out, probably. if i pitch the owl idea to another outlet i'm considering mentioning that my enthusiasm for them is so consistent that the only smartphone lock screen i've ever had is a grainy old shot of the midtown hooters marquee. a little beside the point, maybe, but it's true, and i eventually landed that piece i wrote about collecting nineteen eighty-four because i emailed a stranger about the time a pigeon threw up in my mouth, so...maybe?
one of my milder personal nightmares came to life yesterday evening at this off-broadway riff on a mentalist show at which i was singled out for a bit of audience participation. this was my own fault, since the performer was narrowing down his field of targets by telling people to sit down if they weren't left-handed and so on—i could have just done that—but being compelled to lie is also a personal nightmare, so that was off the table. luckily the guy doing the audience work seemed to catch my awkward-collaborator psychic stink and moved on. i told my mom about the show and she sympathized—she once got plucked from the crowd at a penn and teller show in las vegas. my mother is a brutal disappointer of magicians—an occasion on which she did so at a southern california fuddrucker's is canonical in my family—so this fascinated me. are these guys (they are always guys) like cats who know when someone doesn't want them to sit in their lap?
i sent my first passion-project pitches for the new year earlier this week and—you might want to be sitting down for this—they are about birds. it's time to write a weird science piece about birds! the ideal weird piece about birds would be a deep dive on the state of sky burials, as caitlin doughty talked about in from here to eternity (her boss book about death practices around the world and why pretty much all of them are a better deal than what we do here in america); as i recall, it's getting tougher to do them in places like india because the necessary raptors no longer show up (pollution? habitat loss?), whereas here we have carrion birds aplenty but it's illegal. which reminds me: i wrote several pieces for a friend's end-of-life startup (heh) years ago and never bookmarked their eventual URLs; is my relatively mixed-company-friendly explanation of what happens when a body is embalmed still out there somewhere? what about the quaker funeral breakdown? (for what it's worth, i like the sound of quaker funerals: simple, pretty green.)
the bird pieces i pitched are about owls and flamingos, so no human-corpse-eating to report out, probably. if i pitch the owl idea to another outlet i'm considering mentioning that my enthusiasm for them is so consistent that the only smartphone lock screen i've ever had is a grainy old shot of the midtown hooters marquee. a little beside the point, maybe, but it's true, and i eventually landed that piece i wrote about collecting nineteen eighty-four because i emailed a stranger about the time a pigeon threw up in my mouth, so...maybe?
12.18.23
no publication-related love (at least from my two outlets of choice, and i am too fickle to pursue others) for my little humor piece that could, alas—but it makes me laugh, and that's what's important. here's what in my head felt like a cinch:
These Trader Joe’s Hacks Are Magical
Foraging, grave robbing, waiting for a blue moon—who has the time? Whether you’re prepping for weeknight rituals or planning a ceremony for someone special, this grocery-shopper’s grimoire cuts to the chase and won’t cost you your soul, probably.
CASTING THE SNACKS
Hungry for a bit of cross-cultural, carb-based divination? Clear your mind, gather bagged treats as their shapes catch your eye in the aisles, then choose one that is slightly larger—say, a Parmesan Crisp—to represent yourself. Attach meanings to each of the others: a Spicy Porkless Plant-Based Snack Rind for Trickery, an Organic White Truffle Potato Chip for Prosperity, and so on. Set the Self item in the center of a tea towel, then cast the other items atop it and let their arrangement reveal cleromantic meaning. Know that if the snacks are fickle you may not receive a message—but you can serve them again and again until your intuition serves you.
VEGAN MILK BATH
When you’re in the mood for love and glamour and can’t maintain a herd of 700 lactating donkeys, we’ve got you covered. Give your charisma and attractiveness a dairy-free boost by boiling together a bottle of Charles Shaw Rosé, a carton of Unsweetened Almond, Cashew & Macadamia Nut Beverage, and a bag of Joe Medium Roast Ground Coffee. Stir clockwise until the mixture is browned and fragrant, then pour it into a hot bath and take a good, long soak. Absorb even more of the mixture’s benefits by removing all of your hair below the neck with Honey Mango Shave Cream.
FOUR THIEVES VINAIGRETTE
Swig this to sidestep the Black Death when cozying up to questionable corpses. Pour out half a bottle of Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar, then pop in four peeled garlic cloves. Add a small handful each of Seasoning in a Pickle, Herbes de Provence, Everything but the Elote, and 21 Seasoning Salute, then reseal the bottle. Let it sit for four full days, shaking once a day, then strain and rebottle. Hack on a hack: To banish someone bothersome, write their name on a piece of the Fearless Flyer. Soak the paper in your vinaigrette, charge it with the full force of your repulsion when the moon’s face is hidden, fold it up as small as you can, and compost it.
NO-KNEAD HOMUNCULUS
We could all use a little help in the kitchen—and cooking up a sous chef has never been simpler. Line an ungreased loaf pan with Plain Pizza Dough, pour in a carton of Cage-Free 100% Liquid Egg Whites, then fold the dough inward and pinch the edges to create a pocket. Cover with horse dung, then leave the pan to putrefy somewhere warm and dark for 40 days, or until the dough begins to be alive, move, and stir, which can easily be seen. Warily and prudently nourish and feed the dough with Bloody Mary Mixer With Clam Juice and more horse dung for the space of 40 weeks, and it will become a true and living infant.
NEXT-LEVEL SUMMONING
Ready to gain knowledge of the arts and sciences once and for all? Create a protective circle with 7 Salts of the Earth’s Hawaiian Black Lava (absolutely no gaps!), then create a second circle of White Chocolate Baking Chips within its confines. Use more Chips to trace an inverted pentagram, place Nutmeg Scented Candles at each of its five points, then place a sixth Candle and a pile of Golden Rounds Crackers beside it. Light the candles, then step between the circles; chant “Linan tasa jedan Paimon,” and picture a gloriously-crowned rider on a dromedary camel. Pro tip: Your guest of honor hath a great voice and roareth at their first coming, so summoners in the know tuck Bamba Peanut Snacks in their ears. Survived this recipe? Received dignities or lordships? Drop us a line in the comments!
These Trader Joe’s Hacks Are Magical
Foraging, grave robbing, waiting for a blue moon—who has the time? Whether you’re prepping for weeknight rituals or planning a ceremony for someone special, this grocery-shopper’s grimoire cuts to the chase and won’t cost you your soul, probably.
CASTING THE SNACKS
Hungry for a bit of cross-cultural, carb-based divination? Clear your mind, gather bagged treats as their shapes catch your eye in the aisles, then choose one that is slightly larger—say, a Parmesan Crisp—to represent yourself. Attach meanings to each of the others: a Spicy Porkless Plant-Based Snack Rind for Trickery, an Organic White Truffle Potato Chip for Prosperity, and so on. Set the Self item in the center of a tea towel, then cast the other items atop it and let their arrangement reveal cleromantic meaning. Know that if the snacks are fickle you may not receive a message—but you can serve them again and again until your intuition serves you.
VEGAN MILK BATH
When you’re in the mood for love and glamour and can’t maintain a herd of 700 lactating donkeys, we’ve got you covered. Give your charisma and attractiveness a dairy-free boost by boiling together a bottle of Charles Shaw Rosé, a carton of Unsweetened Almond, Cashew & Macadamia Nut Beverage, and a bag of Joe Medium Roast Ground Coffee. Stir clockwise until the mixture is browned and fragrant, then pour it into a hot bath and take a good, long soak. Absorb even more of the mixture’s benefits by removing all of your hair below the neck with Honey Mango Shave Cream.
FOUR THIEVES VINAIGRETTE
Swig this to sidestep the Black Death when cozying up to questionable corpses. Pour out half a bottle of Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar, then pop in four peeled garlic cloves. Add a small handful each of Seasoning in a Pickle, Herbes de Provence, Everything but the Elote, and 21 Seasoning Salute, then reseal the bottle. Let it sit for four full days, shaking once a day, then strain and rebottle. Hack on a hack: To banish someone bothersome, write their name on a piece of the Fearless Flyer. Soak the paper in your vinaigrette, charge it with the full force of your repulsion when the moon’s face is hidden, fold it up as small as you can, and compost it.
NO-KNEAD HOMUNCULUS
We could all use a little help in the kitchen—and cooking up a sous chef has never been simpler. Line an ungreased loaf pan with Plain Pizza Dough, pour in a carton of Cage-Free 100% Liquid Egg Whites, then fold the dough inward and pinch the edges to create a pocket. Cover with horse dung, then leave the pan to putrefy somewhere warm and dark for 40 days, or until the dough begins to be alive, move, and stir, which can easily be seen. Warily and prudently nourish and feed the dough with Bloody Mary Mixer With Clam Juice and more horse dung for the space of 40 weeks, and it will become a true and living infant.
NEXT-LEVEL SUMMONING
Ready to gain knowledge of the arts and sciences once and for all? Create a protective circle with 7 Salts of the Earth’s Hawaiian Black Lava (absolutely no gaps!), then create a second circle of White Chocolate Baking Chips within its confines. Use more Chips to trace an inverted pentagram, place Nutmeg Scented Candles at each of its five points, then place a sixth Candle and a pile of Golden Rounds Crackers beside it. Light the candles, then step between the circles; chant “Linan tasa jedan Paimon,” and picture a gloriously-crowned rider on a dromedary camel. Pro tip: Your guest of honor hath a great voice and roareth at their first coming, so summoners in the know tuck Bamba Peanut Snacks in their ears. Survived this recipe? Received dignities or lordships? Drop us a line in the comments!
07.16.23 [on the F and 7 trains]
[the good news is that i have a backlog of a few subway posts i never typed up; the bad news is that they're all achronological now. forgive me!]
a momentous peep at a friend's instagram story and a text thread on Stolen Ocean Moments with my sister have added up to a plan that we – my sister and i, that is – are going to swim across the english channel together. we don't have a timeline yet, but to keep things moving and maybe make it official i suggested we make it happen before i turn 50, which gives us five years and change. why the english channel? it's the golden oldie of open-water distance swims, a point of light in her and my mental landscapes for a long time (she suspects a science teacher we both had in high school disliked her in part because he began an anecdote by asking the class if anyone knew who gertrude ederle was and she did). a distance swim is a fitting feat of strength for us (versus, like, an ultramarathon or hanging by our nipples over the grand canyon or something) because we're both besotted with the ocean and feel like we return to ourselves there. the training would be tough and time-consuming, but a lot of it would be swimming, and that sounds wonderful to me. i am a strong and avid swimmer, but also a decidedly amateur one, and in adulthood i haven't made much of an effort to have a meaningful relationship with local open water, which i think is at least sort of relatable given the inconvenience of the commute to the good stuff and the nastiness of what's relatively close. so i figure that once we have a general timeline i'll start hooking up with local open-water swimming groups, join a gym with a proper pool, hire some kind of personal trainer or coach, and so on. there's automatically a time-buffer built into the swim, since you have to hire a pilot boat to hand you food, point you in the right direction, keep you from getting rolled beneath one of the channel's squillion commercial ships (i believe i read it's the busiest shipping channel in the world) and so on. having a pilot boat with an observer aboard it are also part of the requirements if you want your swim to count as official with the channel swimming association, which also stipulates that you have to wear a sleeveless and legless suit, a cap, and that's it (no thermal or buoyancy aids). you can coat yourself with "grease," which in the good old days meant actual goose fat and now means a concoction that prevents sunburn and alleviates irritation from jellyfish stings and prolonged salt water exposure. though i think sharks haven't messed with a channel swimmer since 1971, jellyfish stings are pretty common. i hope to hear more about all that when i talk to my friend's friend, the crosser she chronicled in the instagram feed that got this whole pelagic bird chase started. the night after jo and i agreed to do it i tossed and turned a bit, filling my already-customary insomnia hours with thoughts of giant squid (in my defense i was reading preparing the ghost, about the first photo of a giant squid), but after that weirdness i just keep getting more excited. i am not a sprinter in any medium and i am not graceful, but i am brave and stubborn and stoic, and i know i can do this. i don't know how it took me so long to realize i should.
a momentous peep at a friend's instagram story and a text thread on Stolen Ocean Moments with my sister have added up to a plan that we – my sister and i, that is – are going to swim across the english channel together. we don't have a timeline yet, but to keep things moving and maybe make it official i suggested we make it happen before i turn 50, which gives us five years and change. why the english channel? it's the golden oldie of open-water distance swims, a point of light in her and my mental landscapes for a long time (she suspects a science teacher we both had in high school disliked her in part because he began an anecdote by asking the class if anyone knew who gertrude ederle was and she did). a distance swim is a fitting feat of strength for us (versus, like, an ultramarathon or hanging by our nipples over the grand canyon or something) because we're both besotted with the ocean and feel like we return to ourselves there. the training would be tough and time-consuming, but a lot of it would be swimming, and that sounds wonderful to me. i am a strong and avid swimmer, but also a decidedly amateur one, and in adulthood i haven't made much of an effort to have a meaningful relationship with local open water, which i think is at least sort of relatable given the inconvenience of the commute to the good stuff and the nastiness of what's relatively close. so i figure that once we have a general timeline i'll start hooking up with local open-water swimming groups, join a gym with a proper pool, hire some kind of personal trainer or coach, and so on. there's automatically a time-buffer built into the swim, since you have to hire a pilot boat to hand you food, point you in the right direction, keep you from getting rolled beneath one of the channel's squillion commercial ships (i believe i read it's the busiest shipping channel in the world) and so on. having a pilot boat with an observer aboard it are also part of the requirements if you want your swim to count as official with the channel swimming association, which also stipulates that you have to wear a sleeveless and legless suit, a cap, and that's it (no thermal or buoyancy aids). you can coat yourself with "grease," which in the good old days meant actual goose fat and now means a concoction that prevents sunburn and alleviates irritation from jellyfish stings and prolonged salt water exposure. though i think sharks haven't messed with a channel swimmer since 1971, jellyfish stings are pretty common. i hope to hear more about all that when i talk to my friend's friend, the crosser she chronicled in the instagram feed that got this whole pelagic bird chase started. the night after jo and i agreed to do it i tossed and turned a bit, filling my already-customary insomnia hours with thoughts of giant squid (in my defense i was reading preparing the ghost, about the first photo of a giant squid), but after that weirdness i just keep getting more excited. i am not a sprinter in any medium and i am not graceful, but i am brave and stubborn and stoic, and i know i can do this. i don't know how it took me so long to realize i should.
09.13.23
i can promise you i didn't do anything system-preferences-related that would have caused my laptop to delete all of the files on my hard drive and in my icloud account last night; the most exotic alteration i make to it is the application and removal of a triangular piece of washi tape when i want to reveal its camera for a zoom interview or cover it up for everything else. i can also tell you the cats didn't do anything weird to the machine, because i closed it and sat on the couch watching msnbc for like fifteen minutes before opening it to a blank desktop. just closing and opening, and there were a few drafts i'd put in the trash that i couldn't restore because they'd turned from word to excel files(?).
this morning i spent half an hour on the phone with a tech who ultimately made me a reservation at the apple store that turns out to be in the oculus down by the world trade center, a mall that seems designed to send people tumbling down wide flights of marble stairs. at the genius bar i was the undiagnosable malady of the day: my genius confirmed that i hadn't undone any of the protections that were supposed to prevent my computer from eating itself, and that all of my drafts, research, contracts, interviews, transcripts, invoices, pictures disappeared at the same time for secret reasons. "it even took all of your music," he marveled. he confided that he was an artist and didn't keep any of his drawings on his machines; they all lived on an external drive. he showed me an amazon product page that i photographed with my phone (i was later advised that if this freakish thing ever happened again i should jam my phone into airplane mode, which would maybe outrun the sync that would devour all of its files, too.)
we eventually figured out that about 5,000 files - a weird mix of my work, individual, like, live at leeds tracks i don't even remember transferring from a disc to the machine i had before this one, and a bunch of files i'd deleted intentionally in 2014 were wandering in some sort of digital bardo apple had recently created for people who i guess deleted all of their shit and then had changes of heart? but it wasn't searchable and it wouldn't upload in a batch, so i had to "brute force" it (per the genius) and hope the stuff i wanted was in there.
i walked home past trinity church and the supreme courthouse and thought about how while i wanted to revise the pain-in-the-ass super-science-y story i've been working on all summer i really just wanted to know that a little video of steve jumping for a mylar balloon still existed somewhere that i could find it, and i cried a little. i said that to another apple tech on a phone appointment an hour later. "i lost a cat earlier this year too," he said. "i'd raised it from when it was so small it fit in my hand, and then it lived outside, and i went out to a doctor's appointment for a headache or something and when i came back ants were crawling all over it." he said he had a little boy and he would be devastated if his pictures of him disappeared; what if, one day when he was twice as old as he is now, he couldn't remember his son when he was a little boy and he didn't have the photos to help him, what if they were just gone from his mind one night?
some of my batch-restoring attempts eventually worked (brute force!) and i found the steve video. his balloon is yellow mylar, star-shaped, and he meows questions at it before leaping in the air to catch its ribbon in his teeth. his back curves like it does in the tattoo luca font designed for me at the beginning of the summer; i had sent him a couple of photos ahead of time, but when i showed up for my appointment, he asked me where steve's stripes were when i remembered them. one of the things i have always loved about tattoos is the thought that they can't be taken away; no matter where i go or what i become, i have jude's three legs, chuck's shadow at my back, steve forever in the air.
this morning i spent half an hour on the phone with a tech who ultimately made me a reservation at the apple store that turns out to be in the oculus down by the world trade center, a mall that seems designed to send people tumbling down wide flights of marble stairs. at the genius bar i was the undiagnosable malady of the day: my genius confirmed that i hadn't undone any of the protections that were supposed to prevent my computer from eating itself, and that all of my drafts, research, contracts, interviews, transcripts, invoices, pictures disappeared at the same time for secret reasons. "it even took all of your music," he marveled. he confided that he was an artist and didn't keep any of his drawings on his machines; they all lived on an external drive. he showed me an amazon product page that i photographed with my phone (i was later advised that if this freakish thing ever happened again i should jam my phone into airplane mode, which would maybe outrun the sync that would devour all of its files, too.)
we eventually figured out that about 5,000 files - a weird mix of my work, individual, like, live at leeds tracks i don't even remember transferring from a disc to the machine i had before this one, and a bunch of files i'd deleted intentionally in 2014 were wandering in some sort of digital bardo apple had recently created for people who i guess deleted all of their shit and then had changes of heart? but it wasn't searchable and it wouldn't upload in a batch, so i had to "brute force" it (per the genius) and hope the stuff i wanted was in there.
i walked home past trinity church and the supreme courthouse and thought about how while i wanted to revise the pain-in-the-ass super-science-y story i've been working on all summer i really just wanted to know that a little video of steve jumping for a mylar balloon still existed somewhere that i could find it, and i cried a little. i said that to another apple tech on a phone appointment an hour later. "i lost a cat earlier this year too," he said. "i'd raised it from when it was so small it fit in my hand, and then it lived outside, and i went out to a doctor's appointment for a headache or something and when i came back ants were crawling all over it." he said he had a little boy and he would be devastated if his pictures of him disappeared; what if, one day when he was twice as old as he is now, he couldn't remember his son when he was a little boy and he didn't have the photos to help him, what if they were just gone from his mind one night?
some of my batch-restoring attempts eventually worked (brute force!) and i found the steve video. his balloon is yellow mylar, star-shaped, and he meows questions at it before leaping in the air to catch its ribbon in his teeth. his back curves like it does in the tattoo luca font designed for me at the beginning of the summer; i had sent him a couple of photos ahead of time, but when i showed up for my appointment, he asked me where steve's stripes were when i remembered them. one of the things i have always loved about tattoos is the thought that they can't be taken away; no matter where i go or what i become, i have jude's three legs, chuck's shadow at my back, steve forever in the air.
06.18.22 [on the D train]
in attempting to send my dad father's day salutations i sent him some pull quotes from a piece about the harvard medical school morgue staffer who got caught selling donors' body parts to gothbros and issuing receipts for "braiiiiiins." better than a jerky of the month subscription or an ugly tie, probably? i was reminded of a few years ago, when one of the big outlets i'd been writing for pivoted, somewhat mysteriously but not in an interesting way, from travel to paranormal content. one of their editors asked if i was interested in writing about true crime, which is one of a handful of subjects that just don't grab me at all. ditto ghost hunting, and the combination is lethal–contacting the spirits of murdered prostitutes and the otherwise marginalized, yeah, no. there were some weird weeks in there when we were all making a valiant effort to maintain a viewpoint–maybe we could get some more mileage out of haunted hotels?–but it didn't last long. this sale-of-body-parts stuff is perhaps closer to the kind of corpse-related stuff that does interest me, like how the medical school is going to have to track down all of those families who thought their folks' remains had gone to science. (NB: read the fine print several times when you turn stuff over To Science.)
joe speculates that maya deren, our tiny new cat, has mellowed because she was spayed on tuesday. doctor google is vague on this; she is probably 2-3 years old (per our vet) and has had at least one litter of kittens (per the gal on staten island who fostered her as she weaned them). it's been suggested that once a cat has reached decisive adulthood, spaying or neutering doesn't have much of an effect on their behavior. i have so little experience with female cats of any age that i'm no better than doctor google–but she seems to enjoy our company, even matty's, and i'm glad for that.
joe speculates that maya deren, our tiny new cat, has mellowed because she was spayed on tuesday. doctor google is vague on this; she is probably 2-3 years old (per our vet) and has had at least one litter of kittens (per the gal on staten island who fostered her as she weaned them). it's been suggested that once a cat has reached decisive adulthood, spaying or neutering doesn't have much of an effect on their behavior. i have so little experience with female cats of any age that i'm no better than doctor google–but she seems to enjoy our company, even matty's, and i'm glad for that.
02.13.23 [on the F and B trains]
i've started back in on piecing my pandemic quilt, which is something i'd put on hold when steve was declining this fall and winter since it probably can't be laundered ever (i didn't even prelaunder any of my fabric!) and definitely can't be laundered until i finish sewing it together. i beat myself up about that, in my magical thinking i was harming him by trying to limit his sickness's impact on our stuff, and i know how dumb that sounds, but what can you do? he was the smartest cat i've ever known, and i felt like he knew what i was doing most of the time. i also fear that he didn't understand our calling the vet to the apartment last tuesday at all and that i fucked up the one thing i could give him at the end of his life, because grief is body-checking me to the worst places right now. i hope it gives me room to get to useful pieces as i draft the piece on cats i now owe my editor at the end of the month instead of today, but i won't feel like a failure if it doesn't. kidding! i always feel like i fail my animals, especially in situations like this one.
the pandemic quilt–or the top of the pandemic quilt, anyway, i don't yet know how i'll bind and back it–is now about the size of a twin bed coverlet. matty already nests in it while i'm working, as steve once did, which makes the sewing trickier but is otherwise restorative for both of us. i've now incorporated fabrics from an agricultural festival on st. croix, a vintage shop in new haven, a bunch of fat quarter bundles from liberty when we were in london, and a place in philly's fabric district; it's not the rothko-inspired, super-disciplined design i originally had in mind, but its new maximalism has suited the way my headspace has cauliflowered over the past few years.
after my midtown doctor's appointment i swung down through hell's kitchen to see our old pet store, which partners with a local rescue group to host adoptable cats that i was going to appreciate as a casual passerby and then definitely leave behind. they did not have any cats, other than a new-to-me shop cat; they did have an OG staffer who recognized me from across the room ("oh my god, i remember you!"). it's been 14 years since we packed up for the lower east side! the old petland up and around the corner on ninth avenue is now an orangetheory, which must boost our former little pet shop, and good for them. does the shop owner now run into his customers there like he did with me at the janky bally total fitness under worldwide plaza all those years ago? (that wasn't the guy i saw today.) i took an escalator down to take a lap through our old food emporium and talked cats with a cashier at our old health foood market. its natural licorice selection has become even more magnificent.
the pandemic quilt–or the top of the pandemic quilt, anyway, i don't yet know how i'll bind and back it–is now about the size of a twin bed coverlet. matty already nests in it while i'm working, as steve once did, which makes the sewing trickier but is otherwise restorative for both of us. i've now incorporated fabrics from an agricultural festival on st. croix, a vintage shop in new haven, a bunch of fat quarter bundles from liberty when we were in london, and a place in philly's fabric district; it's not the rothko-inspired, super-disciplined design i originally had in mind, but its new maximalism has suited the way my headspace has cauliflowered over the past few years.
after my midtown doctor's appointment i swung down through hell's kitchen to see our old pet store, which partners with a local rescue group to host adoptable cats that i was going to appreciate as a casual passerby and then definitely leave behind. they did not have any cats, other than a new-to-me shop cat; they did have an OG staffer who recognized me from across the room ("oh my god, i remember you!"). it's been 14 years since we packed up for the lower east side! the old petland up and around the corner on ninth avenue is now an orangetheory, which must boost our former little pet shop, and good for them. does the shop owner now run into his customers there like he did with me at the janky bally total fitness under worldwide plaza all those years ago? (that wasn't the guy i saw today.) i took an escalator down to take a lap through our old food emporium and talked cats with a cashier at our old health foood market. its natural licorice selection has become even more magnificent.
01.31.23 [on the F train]
i am going to try submitting something to the new yorker! i think it has a decent shot of being appreciated if i execute the idea well, which is kind of terrifying; now i have to write the hell out of it. i haven't worked on humor for, oh, a decade, when i would buzz mcsweeney's with a list every once in a while,* like a comet that wanted you to try the veal and tip your servers. this is a better idea than those were, but i haven't described it to anyone because i'll need to see if the premise works without explanation for early readers once i have a draft finished. (i don't have a draft finished, though i have the intro together, which for me is half the battle. i'm manifesting, just accept that 2023 is the year of woo-woo.)
this prospective ha-ha of mine - it's a daily shout, in theory - requires research, so i've been getting all kinds of exotic alerts from the academic journal aggregators i fired up when i was writing about iceland in the fall. sounds like a barrel of laughs, right? it is odd working regularly and earnestly at something new and unlikely, but i'm enjoying myself.
my other nonstandard project is an essay due in mid-february on, among other things, robot cats. i am to interview the makers of robot cats about what it is that makes them catlike, and i have a strong suspicion that no one at all will answer my queries. no, that's not quite right - i think one particular source will reply in a way that both bums me out in terms of my own mortality and makes me feel even worse about steve's illness than i already do. it's hard to tell how steve is doing, though it seems clear that he has unfinished business on this plane of existence. i am not not interested in interviewing him about it.
my aunt and godmother's brother died recently, and in the back-and-forth after i wrote to offer condolences i sent her one of some good death poems i read in the latest installment of emma straub's newsletter. it seemed like a good idea at the time - the poem made me feel good - but joe thought it wouldn't comfort her. you can read the whole thing here (it's the second one, "in the beautiful rain"); i was going to tell you my favorite part and realized i don't have one, it's all lovely, but the part that felt like it was meant for me is
*i should have quit when i was ahead with that one; they used my second (as i recall) submission in a book, and my batting average wasn't going to go up.
this prospective ha-ha of mine - it's a daily shout, in theory - requires research, so i've been getting all kinds of exotic alerts from the academic journal aggregators i fired up when i was writing about iceland in the fall. sounds like a barrel of laughs, right? it is odd working regularly and earnestly at something new and unlikely, but i'm enjoying myself.
my other nonstandard project is an essay due in mid-february on, among other things, robot cats. i am to interview the makers of robot cats about what it is that makes them catlike, and i have a strong suspicion that no one at all will answer my queries. no, that's not quite right - i think one particular source will reply in a way that both bums me out in terms of my own mortality and makes me feel even worse about steve's illness than i already do. it's hard to tell how steve is doing, though it seems clear that he has unfinished business on this plane of existence. i am not not interested in interviewing him about it.
my aunt and godmother's brother died recently, and in the back-and-forth after i wrote to offer condolences i sent her one of some good death poems i read in the latest installment of emma straub's newsletter. it seemed like a good idea at the time - the poem made me feel good - but joe thought it wouldn't comfort her. you can read the whole thing here (it's the second one, "in the beautiful rain"); i was going to tell you my favorite part and realized i don't have one, it's all lovely, but the part that felt like it was meant for me is
“Though grudging at first,i'm just about to finish straub's this time tomorrow and discovered last night that its heroine and i have the same birthday, which feels like something she (emma straub, that is) would find amusing; it's a Plot Point. maybe i have an unrealistic sense of what authors want to know about the people reading their books? i once sent patricia lockwood a photo of my purple toe after falling down the stairs in our friends' casita in the dominican republic because i was socked in with thoughts of her boss memoir, and i think it was well-received, but that might not be the best example. a few years after that i sent her a princess di beanie baby that went on to make an appearance on a mid-pandemic virtual book tour; patricia, i hope you never feel like you have to give the authorities a heads up about me.
he fell like the rain,
with his eyes wide open,
willing to change.”
*i should have quit when i was ahead with that one; they used my second (as i recall) submission in a book, and my batting average wasn't going to go up.
01.07.23 [on the J train]
if i had taken communications classes in college instead of lurching into and through my current career like an ewok in an imperial walker i would maybe know what to call the unpleasant shiver of self-awareness one experiences when one is revealed to be representative of a particular demographic (pardon the word salad here, i've only been awake and caffeinated for a bit) - you know, like when you're showering at a youth hostel in amsterdam and the guy in the stall next to you turns out to know your ex-boyfriend and also be a regular at the indie coffee shop you favor a few suburbs up the freeway back home in southern california. the unheimlich of realizing you're a type? this is not quite like when your phone correctly predicts what you're about to search for, but there is a flip side of this, a bourgeois relief when you realize strangers (or artificial intelligences, i guess) already know what you want.
this is all a very inelegant ay of saying i was starting to type WHAT POWERS DOES A GHOUL HAVE and my phone leapt to search results about the speaker of the house, which is in fact the other repulsive and luckless being i have been thinking a lot about this week. on the first or second day of unsuccessful kevin mccarthy coronation i was out for a walk and got an "it's hakeem jeffries" text that i initially thought was from joe - holy shit, i thought, six republicans grew consciences and formed a coalition of the comparatively sane with the democrats! - but it was actually a fundraising bot à la all the "nancy pelosis" that u up?'ed me this fall. i had kind of wanted to get a pool together to take bets on how many votes kev and company would shamble through but i couldn't decide what the prize for the most accurate guesser would be (the buy-ins would go to some charity, i hadn't decided which yet. the aclu?) but i live in fear of getting punished for misrepresenting contest rules, an aversion i developed when i got stuck managing back-of-the-book fine print as a magazine editor that might be with me for good. anyway, congratulations, SPINO, i hope your portrait is a corker.
on ghouls, i just finished bones & all the book, and was reminded in the acknowledgements that the author wrote her "eaters" (it is the story of young people who eat people) as ghouls rather than cannibals, a distinction in her mind that involved their being supernatural beings and not twentieth-century donner partiers or something. this comes up both in the piece that interested me in the book in the first place and in a lithub piece that makes an admirable effort to tease apart the difference between ghouls and cannibals (and the former in camille deangelis's 2015 book vs. the latter in luca guadagnino's 2022 movie with david kajganich's screenplay, which for my money deserves an oscar nomination for some killer edits). there's a lot to break down there, no pun intended, and even more if you engage with the idea that deangelis wrote her book around the time that she became vegan and intended it to address the ethical problems with eating flesh - and i don't want to be unkind, but i think that theme doesn't land very well for me at all, though i certainly care about the subject - but one big clunker is that the layers of compulsion and need aren't exposed with much clarity. in the book the only supernatural power the eaters seem to have is that they can devour whole people (per the title) very quickly and leave only scraps, whereas in the movie eaters aren't that efficient but can smell each other from, in some cases, a significant distance? which seems at least preternatural if not supernatural? (this is the trouble with writing on a train.) in the book the ghoulish urges read a bit more like kink: the antihero can only eat people he despises and the antiheroine can only eat people who desire her (except for her babysitter, which is apparently a different case because she ate her when she was a very small child). also, ghouls are pretty universally, canonically repugnant, and scavengers, and...necrovores? is that what i mean? mark rylance's character, sully, only eats people who have died, but unless you're a massive dragon, a particularly gifted vivisectionist, or the water snake i caught and fed a tadpole on a camping trip in mendocino when i was a merciless tween naturalist, you kill things in the process of eating them (the only character in the book or the movie who eats only part of someone is one who eats their own hand or hands like an autophagous fast-food mascot). inconsistent rules is one of my pet peeves in stories of the supernatural; my other is when vampires get all forrest gump-y and traipse through history only meeting famous people and writing shakespeare's plays.
anyway: ghouls! the ghouls in the book are on their supernatural road trip in the late '90s during clinton's impeachment trial, and its musical references suffer accordingly (no joy division here; one charater asks another if they like shania twain). the villain has a backstory that makes him considerably less interesting, and the endings don't land very well. deangelis was super gracious about and appreicative of all of the strenous adaptation kajganich did, to her credit, though even that adaptation left me fuzzy on the moral and practical distinctions between ghoulishness and cannibalism, but for my part, after watching like 36 hours of congressional shenanigans this week i can't even tell you if house republicans are ghouls or cannibals, so i respect people who can put themselves out there as a general proposition.
completely unrelated: dr. john wyatt greenlee's english eel-rents of the 10th-17th centuries! "any eel-rent noted as having one eel due represent a place where the record is unclear about the number of eels due (such as the rent due for the mill at wolvey in 1251, which called for the mill to pay 1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there to ivo de dene). in each of these cases, the actual number of eels due almost certainly exceeded one."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 are house republicans ghouls or cannibals?
02 how many eels does it cost to live where you live?
03 should i report on the train itself when i'm writing on the train?
on ghouls, i just finished bones & all the book, and was reminded in the acknowledgements that the author wrote her "eaters" (it is the story of young people who eat people) as ghouls rather than cannibals, a distinction in her mind that involved their being supernatural beings and not twentieth-century donner partiers or something. this comes up both in the piece that interested me in the book in the first place and in a lithub piece that makes an admirable effort to tease apart the difference between ghouls and cannibals (and the former in camille deangelis's 2015 book vs. the latter in luca guadagnino's 2022 movie with david kajganich's screenplay, which for my money deserves an oscar nomination for some killer edits). there's a lot to break down there, no pun intended, and even more if you engage with the idea that deangelis wrote her book around the time that she became vegan and intended it to address the ethical problems with eating flesh - and i don't want to be unkind, but i think that theme doesn't land very well for me at all, though i certainly care about the subject - but one big clunker is that the layers of compulsion and need aren't exposed with much clarity. in the book the only supernatural power the eaters seem to have is that they can devour whole people (per the title) very quickly and leave only scraps, whereas in the movie eaters aren't that efficient but can smell each other from, in some cases, a significant distance? which seems at least preternatural if not supernatural? (this is the trouble with writing on a train.) in the book the ghoulish urges read a bit more like kink: the antihero can only eat people he despises and the antiheroine can only eat people who desire her (except for her babysitter, which is apparently a different case because she ate her when she was a very small child). also, ghouls are pretty universally, canonically repugnant, and scavengers, and...necrovores? is that what i mean? mark rylance's character, sully, only eats people who have died, but unless you're a massive dragon, a particularly gifted vivisectionist, or the water snake i caught and fed a tadpole on a camping trip in mendocino when i was a merciless tween naturalist, you kill things in the process of eating them (the only character in the book or the movie who eats only part of someone is one who eats their own hand or hands like an autophagous fast-food mascot). inconsistent rules is one of my pet peeves in stories of the supernatural; my other is when vampires get all forrest gump-y and traipse through history only meeting famous people and writing shakespeare's plays.
anyway: ghouls! the ghouls in the book are on their supernatural road trip in the late '90s during clinton's impeachment trial, and its musical references suffer accordingly (no joy division here; one charater asks another if they like shania twain). the villain has a backstory that makes him considerably less interesting, and the endings don't land very well. deangelis was super gracious about and appreicative of all of the strenous adaptation kajganich did, to her credit, though even that adaptation left me fuzzy on the moral and practical distinctions between ghoulishness and cannibalism, but for my part, after watching like 36 hours of congressional shenanigans this week i can't even tell you if house republicans are ghouls or cannibals, so i respect people who can put themselves out there as a general proposition.
completely unrelated: dr. john wyatt greenlee's english eel-rents of the 10th-17th centuries! "any eel-rent noted as having one eel due represent a place where the record is unclear about the number of eels due (such as the rent due for the mill at wolvey in 1251, which called for the mill to pay 1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there to ivo de dene). in each of these cases, the actual number of eels due almost certainly exceeded one."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 are house republicans ghouls or cannibals?
02 how many eels does it cost to live where you live?
03 should i report on the train itself when i'm writing on the train?
12.23.22 [on the 5 train]
i'm reading an excellent book about eels (mostly anguilla anguilla, european eels), and last night's chapters burrowed into the mysterious longevity they experience (vs. enjoy) when they are taken from the wild and thus aren't prompted to transition from their third life stage of yellow eelhood, or adolescence, to the fourth and final life stage of silver eelhood, or sexual maturity, which is when they grow reproductive organs, their stomachs dissolve into their bodies, and they return to the sargasso sea to breed and die. there was in particular the story of a small swedish eel that a little boy caught and threw in a well in the 19th century that ended up living in twilight down there for what some claim was like 150 years. stories about this brantevik eel, called åle by humans and commemorated when he died in 2014, are often paired with anguilla anguilla stock photos captioned something like "this is not the eel we're talking about; this eel is alive." the very old eel never got very large, and his eyes got much bigger than yellow eels' eyes usually do. the eel book author presents the deathless nonsleep of åle the well-eel as something like a busted vampire's existence in an anne rice novel or only lovers left alive (a 2013 jim jarmusch movie about vampires starring tilda swinton ostensibly so far up my alley that it might straight-up be my alley that i somehow hated so much it's actually a little disturbing to think about it now). how bummed can an eel be, and how should our appreciation of how bummed an eel can be matter, if it matters at all? in my first 13 years, as a person who was at least in theory willing to eat fish, i am almost positive i never had eel - i've never had most seafood, actually - and i'm glad. in other news, did you know that the sargasso sea is just a seaweed-covered extra-mysterious patch of the atlantic ocean that's been squared off with currents? ("sargasso" comes from the seaweed, a brown algae called sargassum.)
on things that aren't pleasurable for me, we ended up at a matisyahu concert at brooklyn bowl last night. the initial plan as of early this week was to go bowling on the lower east side with friends, said friends discovered the concert at brooklyn bowl and suggested we bowl and see the show, and said friends then got sick and bowed out, leading us to realize beneath a giant dreidel-shaped disco ball that we didn't know as much about spiritual reggae-beatboxing as we probably should have before committing to the evening. it was the worst show i've attended since high school friends peer pressured me into seeing jars of clay at the orange county fair! but i survived, which is more than poor åle can say.
on things that aren't pleasurable for me, we ended up at a matisyahu concert at brooklyn bowl last night. the initial plan as of early this week was to go bowling on the lower east side with friends, said friends discovered the concert at brooklyn bowl and suggested we bowl and see the show, and said friends then got sick and bowed out, leading us to realize beneath a giant dreidel-shaped disco ball that we didn't know as much about spiritual reggae-beatboxing as we probably should have before committing to the evening. it was the worst show i've attended since high school friends peer pressured me into seeing jars of clay at the orange county fair! but i survived, which is more than poor åle can say.
12.16.22
joe forwarded me an article about the aquarium explosion in berlin this morning. we stayed at the hotel it flooded back in 2019, and had ill-advised cocktails under that dire cylinder, just before getting on a ship. do you think 1,500 fish in the road look the way you'd imagine they would? it's something you'd never forget. i wouldn't compare anything that happened to me to that much death in a very public way but in my heart i think of coming here to talk about what the last while has felt like and i think the fish are in the road, the fish are in the road. i can't imagine not coming here, but i don't always know what i'm ready to haul into the air.
we got really terrible news about steve this week; after some fairly extensive diagnostics, our vet thinks he has some kind of cancer in his large intestine and a rectal mass, probably a tumor, that she couldn't remove without a lot of risk and difficulty. he's lost a lot of weight and is essentially incontinent, but is also essentially himself, or at least what i understand his self to be, and so we did not take his doctor up on her offer to have the euthanasia discussion with us on tuesday. trying to decide how to show up most responsibly for a little nonverbal animal i both love dearly and don't want to anthropomorphize is my personal hell, as you probably know, and it is a hard time. i gave steve my toothbrush the other night, just let him purr and chew at the minty-ass bristles and god knows what fluoride does to a senior cat with likely terminal cancer. i turn my sweatshirts inside out before i put them in the hamper where he sleeps, both because i know they're going to end up smeared with blood and shit and because he loves the smell of deodorant, he loves all human smells, he's such a little roommate.
have i talked about how not drinking feels like not having any skin? i'm glad i stopped, it was indeed subtly and occasionally not so subtly desaturating my life, but oh how the fish are in the road. i've done so much work this year and am fiercely proud of what i'm finally getting to tackle in my professional writing, but i don't think i had any real idea of just how raw i would feel. or any idea at all, really. i wouldn't have told you i was partially numb, quite the opposite. i'm also fiercely proud of finally talking to a proper therapist, and finally talking to another proper therapist with joe; poor old doctor omnibus is a psychiatrist who wouldn't be expected to field my feelings even if he wasn't an old boot. though it is nice to be able to multitask, i miss being able to sleep.
we got really terrible news about steve this week; after some fairly extensive diagnostics, our vet thinks he has some kind of cancer in his large intestine and a rectal mass, probably a tumor, that she couldn't remove without a lot of risk and difficulty. he's lost a lot of weight and is essentially incontinent, but is also essentially himself, or at least what i understand his self to be, and so we did not take his doctor up on her offer to have the euthanasia discussion with us on tuesday. trying to decide how to show up most responsibly for a little nonverbal animal i both love dearly and don't want to anthropomorphize is my personal hell, as you probably know, and it is a hard time. i gave steve my toothbrush the other night, just let him purr and chew at the minty-ass bristles and god knows what fluoride does to a senior cat with likely terminal cancer. i turn my sweatshirts inside out before i put them in the hamper where he sleeps, both because i know they're going to end up smeared with blood and shit and because he loves the smell of deodorant, he loves all human smells, he's such a little roommate.
have i talked about how not drinking feels like not having any skin? i'm glad i stopped, it was indeed subtly and occasionally not so subtly desaturating my life, but oh how the fish are in the road. i've done so much work this year and am fiercely proud of what i'm finally getting to tackle in my professional writing, but i don't think i had any real idea of just how raw i would feel. or any idea at all, really. i wouldn't have told you i was partially numb, quite the opposite. i'm also fiercely proud of finally talking to a proper therapist, and finally talking to another proper therapist with joe; poor old doctor omnibus is a psychiatrist who wouldn't be expected to field my feelings even if he wasn't an old boot. though it is nice to be able to multitask, i miss being able to sleep.
01.23.22
the spotify station(?) that had been serving up the monster hits of my junior high's harrowing dances, a coincidence i would have died before revealing to my beloved charity bookstore's dewy manager even though he probably guessed as much,* played boyz ii men's "end of the road," because of course it did, and i let a few tears leak out, quick, under my mask like it never happened. "you look like you know a lot about books," said a customer who wanted something she hadn't read in fantasy or horror, and i sent her home with lovely hardcover copies of toby barlow's sharp teeth and babayaga. they had crowned my beleaguered section at the front of the store, where misshelved YA novels and mass-market thrillers kept trailing in like fuckin kudzu, for two months. i took a last, long whiff of the basement, bought a signed first US edition of the satanic verses (john - best wishes for your retirement. write a book... salman r., may 89) that had kicked around the store for years, and took my leave a final time.
a couple of days later i reunited with old friends from my wednesday-afternoon shift who hadn't been back to volunteer since the pandemic began. we gathered for holiday snacks at V's place, a stunning two-thousand-square-foot loft next to the stella mccartney store. she's lived there since the '70s and filled it with massive now-iconic canvases and furniture she picked up from friends and, like, department stores when you could get a frank gehry wiggle chair for a hundred bucks. "my cats loved them," she said, "and when they scratched them it just made them look even better." V lives in the new york apartment you'd expect a donna tartt or hanya yanagihara character to have. she's even got a singed child mannequin holding a heavy velvet drapery open!
when we were all arranged around V's refreshments, i told the story behind the email to the volunteer coordinator on which i'd cc'ed them. management had told E, the art-book expert who'd been the designated guy to get arrested at DC protests for years, that he wouldn't be rehired. they'd declined to hire a volunteer who said that as a staffer she'd be most excited about developing the community around the store. they'd told the current manager not to worry about selling books, and to do his best to pitch the store as an event space for hire; they'd talked about converting shelves into false panels that could slide back to reveal bars and coat checks. (the donation area disappared a year ago; it was distasteful to have it so close to the front door.) since they weren't interested in the hiring conditions the new union set forth, they brought in temps to replace all the volunteers who'd stopped coming back. the last employee we all knew, the one who'd assured me i was making his job easier, left. and i left. being a scab that also kept a zombie bookstore shambling along was too much, at last, for me.
P, the artist with koons cooties, thought i should write a splashy new york cover article revealing all of the sordid politics behind the store's slow, semi-secret death. a petition, there should also be a petition! A, the retired UN guy who lives on roosevelt island and has fabulous stories of drinking obscure national beverages and falling asleep under trees, nodded when i suggested that getting michiko kakutani interested in an RIP-barry-like piece could move hearts and minds. V made more tea and suggested we reconvene in the new year to figure out how we would save our store. saving a beloved neighborhood bookstore and saving a beloved neighborhood "bookstore" are not the same thing. is knowing the difference useful?
V sent around a times photo of a gorgeous library the other day. i'd love to get together again as well, i said.
a couple of days later i reunited with old friends from my wednesday-afternoon shift who hadn't been back to volunteer since the pandemic began. we gathered for holiday snacks at V's place, a stunning two-thousand-square-foot loft next to the stella mccartney store. she's lived there since the '70s and filled it with massive now-iconic canvases and furniture she picked up from friends and, like, department stores when you could get a frank gehry wiggle chair for a hundred bucks. "my cats loved them," she said, "and when they scratched them it just made them look even better." V lives in the new york apartment you'd expect a donna tartt or hanya yanagihara character to have. she's even got a singed child mannequin holding a heavy velvet drapery open!
when we were all arranged around V's refreshments, i told the story behind the email to the volunteer coordinator on which i'd cc'ed them. management had told E, the art-book expert who'd been the designated guy to get arrested at DC protests for years, that he wouldn't be rehired. they'd declined to hire a volunteer who said that as a staffer she'd be most excited about developing the community around the store. they'd told the current manager not to worry about selling books, and to do his best to pitch the store as an event space for hire; they'd talked about converting shelves into false panels that could slide back to reveal bars and coat checks. (the donation area disappared a year ago; it was distasteful to have it so close to the front door.) since they weren't interested in the hiring conditions the new union set forth, they brought in temps to replace all the volunteers who'd stopped coming back. the last employee we all knew, the one who'd assured me i was making his job easier, left. and i left. being a scab that also kept a zombie bookstore shambling along was too much, at last, for me.
P, the artist with koons cooties, thought i should write a splashy new york cover article revealing all of the sordid politics behind the store's slow, semi-secret death. a petition, there should also be a petition! A, the retired UN guy who lives on roosevelt island and has fabulous stories of drinking obscure national beverages and falling asleep under trees, nodded when i suggested that getting michiko kakutani interested in an RIP-barry-like piece could move hearts and minds. V made more tea and suggested we reconvene in the new year to figure out how we would save our store. saving a beloved neighborhood bookstore and saving a beloved neighborhood "bookstore" are not the same thing. is knowing the difference useful?
V sent around a times photo of a gorgeous library the other day. i'd love to get together again as well, i said.
*the welsh researchers who studied how masking affects facial attractiveness report that the effect isn't about occlusion, but i am unconvinced.
12.26.21
i decided to get tested for COVID at a mobile clinic on monday, though my peek-a-boo symptoms seemed to have more to do with generic winter-cold bullshit and being 43 than with a breakthrough infection. around ten in the morning i queued at the van on delancey street that's become a portable building and froze my ass for two and a half hours, along with a bunch of canadian teenagers who were sure their friends were sick, someone named alfonso whose results were handed to me along with my own, and someone smoking so, so much pot. i requested the rapid test and the PCR, and alfonso and i eventually got the all-clear. how about that! (i still haven't gotten the results of my PCR test.)
on christmas eve i woke up with phlegm and a sinus whatsit that burned off like marine haze over the course of the day, but as we were to head out to see licorice pizza at nitehawk before settling down for a long winter's nap, i took one of the at-home tests i almost accidentally snagged on wednesday en route to my bookstore shift.* it was so positive it was almost a little insulting: that pink line was downright lurid, like one of the savage primitive markings the cat is forever giving joe. (it's a lousy way to treat someone you like, steve!) i took a second test that was even more vivid than the first, our very last one indicated that joe was negative for the time being, and that was that. i got a gift-card refund from the movie theater, the bar we visited on wednesday told me they'd toss my FYI on their pile, an email to the bookstore's volunteer coordinator went unanswered. my debate with joe biden went ahead as planned, of course.
i had a quick and dirty stress-cry yesterday morning (or was it sometime on christmas eve?) about the idea of being trapped here while joe just ordered in wine and boozed through the boredom of quarantine, which is not something he would ever do but something he joked about when we'd talked about my getting tested last weekend. i do not find that funny at all, and he does not enjoy it when i joke about being a grown version of the kid with chickenpox who abruptly scores playdates with everyone in the neighborhood (did families in your town do this? did the ones in ours really do it?). i suppose we could have requested one of the hotel rooms the city is providing for people who need to isolate from their families, but the idea that joe could dodge exposure after having been holed up in this apartment with me is just laughable. god knows how long another PCR test for me would take, and i'm not interested in infecting a bunch of my neighbors while attempting to get one. we have a few weeks' worth of cat food, a respectable pile of clean underwear, one full carton of soymilk.
i used to open my eyes when i was lying on the ocean floor waiting for a wave to pass over me. the physical sensation itself is moderately uncomfortable, but the way i felt powerful and ever so subtly aquatic when i did it was addictive. science, diligence, and patience are a helluva cocktail.
on christmas eve i woke up with phlegm and a sinus whatsit that burned off like marine haze over the course of the day, but as we were to head out to see licorice pizza at nitehawk before settling down for a long winter's nap, i took one of the at-home tests i almost accidentally snagged on wednesday en route to my bookstore shift.* it was so positive it was almost a little insulting: that pink line was downright lurid, like one of the savage primitive markings the cat is forever giving joe. (it's a lousy way to treat someone you like, steve!) i took a second test that was even more vivid than the first, our very last one indicated that joe was negative for the time being, and that was that. i got a gift-card refund from the movie theater, the bar we visited on wednesday told me they'd toss my FYI on their pile, an email to the bookstore's volunteer coordinator went unanswered. my debate with joe biden went ahead as planned, of course.
i had a quick and dirty stress-cry yesterday morning (or was it sometime on christmas eve?) about the idea of being trapped here while joe just ordered in wine and boozed through the boredom of quarantine, which is not something he would ever do but something he joked about when we'd talked about my getting tested last weekend. i do not find that funny at all, and he does not enjoy it when i joke about being a grown version of the kid with chickenpox who abruptly scores playdates with everyone in the neighborhood (did families in your town do this? did the ones in ours really do it?). i suppose we could have requested one of the hotel rooms the city is providing for people who need to isolate from their families, but the idea that joe could dodge exposure after having been holed up in this apartment with me is just laughable. god knows how long another PCR test for me would take, and i'm not interested in infecting a bunch of my neighbors while attempting to get one. we have a few weeks' worth of cat food, a respectable pile of clean underwear, one full carton of soymilk.
i used to open my eyes when i was lying on the ocean floor waiting for a wave to pass over me. the physical sensation itself is moderately uncomfortable, but the way i felt powerful and ever so subtly aquatic when i did it was addictive. science, diligence, and patience are a helluva cocktail.
*a woman at the duane reade register beside me asked for them while i was buying the diet dr pepper i'd been craving ever since i saw a fake trump elector carrying one at the wisconsin state house on a cable news segment. i bought two (boxes of tests; just one soda, though knowing what i know now–).
12.19.21
the seraph painted in red on the scrim that came down between acts at last night's tosca really did look like the she-wolf created for agrippina, the last Big Art we saw before entering lockdown last year, but we would have been reminded of it anyway, of course. i can't help feeling that our deciding to return to the met for opera caused the weird, dark turn new york city has taken this week–that would be very operatic–but epidemics probably don't strike poses like that.
last week i saw and scoffed at a few tweets about how the city was starting to feel as it felt last march, which is ridiculous: sirens howled all night every night, refrigerated trucks accumulated in front of the hospitals, i remember using bleach on our floor at one point, being unable to smell it, and collapsing into tears, sure that i was going to die. people were exiting like tosca, just stepping into air.
the man sitting beside me in the family circle was one of those operagoers who peers like a sniper through his opera glasses and volleys big, hearty BRAVO!s over the balcony as he claps for arias, and i loved him. i was the blue-haired lady with a passing tickle in her throat who coughed once, twice through her mask into her velvet cloak, and i didn't think until i woke up this morning with joint pain, a headache, and a proper soreness in that throat that anything truly tragic had happened. by the time i'd learned that all of the testing sites in the neighborhood had maxed out for the day and that PCR test results are taking at least three and more like five days to come back, the combined effects of my morning coffee, ibuprofen, a brisk walk around the lower east side and watery sunshine had somehow addressed all of those things: why, even the plantar fasciitis i've had since halloween disappeared for a few hours! i extended the walk as long as i could, grateful for a little more time.
it does feel like borrowed time. i got a booster shot a month ago and am eight lives away from crying on my bleachy floor, but the thought of having sidelined everyone's nana via the opera was a dreadful one. my sister and her family canceled travel plans to see us after christmas; i brushed my cloak and folded it into deep storage again. as i was telling friends today, i'm reminded of swimming in the pacific when i was a little girl–of watching a massive wave crest far too close, knowing it's too late to dive through it, and holding my breath and flattening myself on the ocean floor. send a body head over heels just once and it falls in step with the tide forever.
last week i saw and scoffed at a few tweets about how the city was starting to feel as it felt last march, which is ridiculous: sirens howled all night every night, refrigerated trucks accumulated in front of the hospitals, i remember using bleach on our floor at one point, being unable to smell it, and collapsing into tears, sure that i was going to die. people were exiting like tosca, just stepping into air.
the man sitting beside me in the family circle was one of those operagoers who peers like a sniper through his opera glasses and volleys big, hearty BRAVO!s over the balcony as he claps for arias, and i loved him. i was the blue-haired lady with a passing tickle in her throat who coughed once, twice through her mask into her velvet cloak, and i didn't think until i woke up this morning with joint pain, a headache, and a proper soreness in that throat that anything truly tragic had happened. by the time i'd learned that all of the testing sites in the neighborhood had maxed out for the day and that PCR test results are taking at least three and more like five days to come back, the combined effects of my morning coffee, ibuprofen, a brisk walk around the lower east side and watery sunshine had somehow addressed all of those things: why, even the plantar fasciitis i've had since halloween disappeared for a few hours! i extended the walk as long as i could, grateful for a little more time.
it does feel like borrowed time. i got a booster shot a month ago and am eight lives away from crying on my bleachy floor, but the thought of having sidelined everyone's nana via the opera was a dreadful one. my sister and her family canceled travel plans to see us after christmas; i brushed my cloak and folded it into deep storage again. as i was telling friends today, i'm reminded of swimming in the pacific when i was a little girl–of watching a massive wave crest far too close, knowing it's too late to dive through it, and holding my breath and flattening myself on the ocean floor. send a body head over heels just once and it falls in step with the tide forever.
12.16.21
the exotic personal weather and promise i made to myself when i tearily high-fived a tree after a thunderstorm this summer related to the fact that i had very recently and suddenly decided to stop drinking; the promise was that i was really going to do it, that i was going to level up. and i have! or i have really done it, anyway. i don't drink now. i think i am probably an alcoholic.
the question of whether or not i am an alcoholic—or, more precisely, whether or not i tell anyone that i am an alcoholic—has felt weirdly important to me. it's shorthand for the fact that i have a problematic relationship with drinking, and dropping a few strategic a-bombs with people i love and respect felt like a way to force a decisive end to a war with myself. if i disclosed that and then any of those people ever saw me drink again, oh, i would be so ashamed. shame has always been a big motivator for me, which is ironic, given that several of what i consider the most shameful things i've ever done are things i did when i had been drinking.
i don't know whether or not it matters that i didn't have any big, dramatic bottoming-out moment. given that i work from home on my own schedule and don't have children, it's conceivable that my life could have tootled on in a nominally functional, undramatic way for quite some time, or forever. but i felt like the color was draining out of it, and i hated waking up with the panicky feeling that i might have said or done something foolish or hurtful; i worry about that all of the time anyway, and drinking, or being hung over, eroded whatever assurances or confidence i managed to cobble together. my friend sarah once joked that my memoir would be called i just don't want anyone to feel bad, and i believed everyone felt bad.
for a while, the only people who knew i'd come to this realization/decision were joe and a few friends who are sober; i didn't want a sponsor or anything (i don't think aa or meetings are for me?), but they had inspired me, and i wanted them to know that. (some of them check in with me even though i don't ask, which is both predictable and shockingly touching.) i didn't know what i would say to my parents, and i worried about it, even though i knew i wanted them to know. i have a mica-flaky memory of sitting at the dining table with my mother and sisters on my twelfth birthday and my father telling me over the phone that he was in recovery and couldn't be with me and that was a gift to me, or something. it turns out that it's pretty easy to talk to my mother about drinking and our family; we did it a lot in september when we hiked across hampstead heath and swam in the kenwood ladies' pond together. it seems that my dad doesn't want to talk about it, and i learned twenty years ago when he left my mother that learning too much about the dissolution of a relationship is one of the costliest experiences you can have, even if offering boundary-free adult friendship and support to the people who created you feels like the only way you could ever hope to repay them, so that's fine.
realizing that all of this is the course for me was/is something like watching a time lord regenerate on doctor who in that i'm mourning and excited all at once, and if i end up becoming david tennant i'll know for sure that i did the right thing. occasionally i wish the realization hadn't been so sudden, but i have always felt that it's best not to know when you're doing something for the last time.
the question of whether or not i am an alcoholic—or, more precisely, whether or not i tell anyone that i am an alcoholic—has felt weirdly important to me. it's shorthand for the fact that i have a problematic relationship with drinking, and dropping a few strategic a-bombs with people i love and respect felt like a way to force a decisive end to a war with myself. if i disclosed that and then any of those people ever saw me drink again, oh, i would be so ashamed. shame has always been a big motivator for me, which is ironic, given that several of what i consider the most shameful things i've ever done are things i did when i had been drinking.
i don't know whether or not it matters that i didn't have any big, dramatic bottoming-out moment. given that i work from home on my own schedule and don't have children, it's conceivable that my life could have tootled on in a nominally functional, undramatic way for quite some time, or forever. but i felt like the color was draining out of it, and i hated waking up with the panicky feeling that i might have said or done something foolish or hurtful; i worry about that all of the time anyway, and drinking, or being hung over, eroded whatever assurances or confidence i managed to cobble together. my friend sarah once joked that my memoir would be called i just don't want anyone to feel bad, and i believed everyone felt bad.
for a while, the only people who knew i'd come to this realization/decision were joe and a few friends who are sober; i didn't want a sponsor or anything (i don't think aa or meetings are for me?), but they had inspired me, and i wanted them to know that. (some of them check in with me even though i don't ask, which is both predictable and shockingly touching.) i didn't know what i would say to my parents, and i worried about it, even though i knew i wanted them to know. i have a mica-flaky memory of sitting at the dining table with my mother and sisters on my twelfth birthday and my father telling me over the phone that he was in recovery and couldn't be with me and that was a gift to me, or something. it turns out that it's pretty easy to talk to my mother about drinking and our family; we did it a lot in september when we hiked across hampstead heath and swam in the kenwood ladies' pond together. it seems that my dad doesn't want to talk about it, and i learned twenty years ago when he left my mother that learning too much about the dissolution of a relationship is one of the costliest experiences you can have, even if offering boundary-free adult friendship and support to the people who created you feels like the only way you could ever hope to repay them, so that's fine.
realizing that all of this is the course for me was/is something like watching a time lord regenerate on doctor who in that i'm mourning and excited all at once, and if i end up becoming david tennant i'll know for sure that i did the right thing. occasionally i wish the realization hadn't been so sudden, but i have always felt that it's best not to know when you're doing something for the last time.
11.06.21
i spent the morning stacking and scattering little piles of fractured CD cases and orphaned discs on the living room floor. after promising ourselves we'd do something about the wall of obsolete music between our swaybacked grey sectional and my nineteen eighty-four collection for like a decade, i finally built some banker boxes and got to sorting them for banishment in the top of the hall closet. there were so very many mixes: the ones my stanford roommates made for me, the several one of joe's congressional coworkers made for him, the gems from pauline, the mix-portraits from stewart, the dauntingly obscure 2009 former-college-DJ monthlies from our friends' friends. there were a shitload of foraged shoegaze singles with prices in pounds, a zillion used albums with stickers from amoeba music. at least two copies of beth orton's daybreaker, three copies of ryan adams's gold, and a bunch of bowie rarities i'd hoarded without opening. david foster wallace reading a selection of his own pieces? it seems my taste isn't nearly as bad as i'd figured i'd be forced to acknowledge it is, which leads me to suspect i've been quietly weeding our CD stacks all this time. i also didn't start acquiring CDs until my parents gave me a player for my 16th birthday, which meant my first disc was pisces iscariot and not a "we didn't start the fire" single or something.
i unkinked my back after hours crouching over old pulp albums in time to head up to midtown for a thundercat concert, the one we were supposed to see at cozy, iconic webster hall in march of 2020 that became a show at nasty, thunderdome-y terminal 5 tonight. did you know everyone wears sneakers and smokes indoors (not even just pot!) at shows now? it's true! we weren't the oldest people there, but we were close, and we were definitely older than thundercat. i felt significantly less hip than i felt when we saw slowdive at that same dreadful venue in 2014, and they and we were already old then.
i unkinked my back after hours crouching over old pulp albums in time to head up to midtown for a thundercat concert, the one we were supposed to see at cozy, iconic webster hall in march of 2020 that became a show at nasty, thunderdome-y terminal 5 tonight. did you know everyone wears sneakers and smokes indoors (not even just pot!) at shows now? it's true! we weren't the oldest people there, but we were close, and we were definitely older than thundercat. i felt significantly less hip than i felt when we saw slowdive at that same dreadful venue in 2014, and they and we were already old then.
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