Dead Letter Department #118
(working) weather report
It’s strange, I feel as though I’m writing to you after being away, if away means I’ve been vibrating intensely at my email inbox while I waited for feedback on my manuscript from my brilliant agent, and in the meantime have been circling the drain at higher and higher speeds. I spent a lot of time pointlessly catastrophizing about the news, and possibly even more turning my brain off entirely with the aid of silly, addictive phone games & other people’s business on social media. There’s nothing to really digest in any of that, because the news continues to be gut-wrenching poison, will continue to be poison, and the rest is the equivalent of eating something highly flavored that has no actual caloric content, leaving you hungrier after you started than when you began. One of those horrifying packaged diet products of the 90s, perhaps, where the chewing alone leaves you with a net negative.
I did manage to keep the other parts of my life largely in motion: house projects, personal responsibilities, getting the garden ready for fall, keeping up with the gig that pays the bills, but it does feel like the greater part of my brain had been turned off and now I am bringing it back online, because it’s time to be awake again & get back to work. Novel edits require the full apparatus. I missed my characters, while they were with K. Now I get them back again, and I get to pull the pieces apart & put them together better. I want to work fast, while things feel fresh.
The days are already so much shorter. I have to turn the hood light on to see the coffee grinder in the morning, and I started up the sun lamp again, although I’m not at all convinced of its efficacy. I have enough lingering New Englander in me to want to push the day I first turn the heat on out as far as possible, & underperformed this year when the temperature overnight dropped down into a ‘feels like’ in the high twenties. I have slippers under my desk, various layers scattered around the house, & the heavy quilt back on the bed.
Last night I had an urge to watch something vaguely classic, so I clicked around in various streaming services until I landed on the Shining, which seems appropriate to the season, at least, and which I haven’t seen in decades. My first thought was that Jack Nicholson is absolutely chomping away at the scenery, while Shelley Duvall feels so natural she might as well have walked in off the street (or out of the topiary maze, I suppose), and my second was about just how far away in time everything about it feels: not just the clunky wall telephones & the primary colored clothes, but the actual cadence of speech. Early on in the movie, Duvall’s character gets a house call for a minor injury to her son, and then fully lights up a cigarette right in front of the doctor. I looked it up, and the movie came out the year before I was born. It’s wild to have lived so long, isn’t it?
I only have about a hour of that kind of attention in me so I didn’t finish the movie last night (I do know it’s scandalous to break things up that way) but I’ll report back again once I’ve finished. I read a lot of Stephen King at one point in my life, and I do think he’s fascinating, the way some themes recur and recur, while the underlying horror shifts.
reading room
Having finished Doppelgänger, I can thoroughly recommend it as a very good & useful book for grappling with the current moment. I feel like I’m thinking about politics more coherently after having read & digested it, and since you know the chaotic state of things as well as I do, you know what high praise that is.
There are two other standouts in my finished pile, Land Of Milk & Honey by C Pam Zhang, which I loved so much I want to prescribe it to everyone who’s been struggling to be in touch with their own appetites: the perfect marriage of erotic & apocalyptic, beautifully written, down even to the author’s note.
The other is Summer, by Edith Wharton, and although I’m a Wharton fan from way back (the Age of Innocence with Michelle Pfeiffer & Daniel Day-Lewis has a permanent place in my heart), I had somehow only ever read the ones which I think of, loosely, as society novels. There is a great deal more going on in them, of course, but at least one character is on their way up into the glimmering pantheon of the wealthy & well-regarded, or scrabbling desperately to hold on to their place there. House of Mirth devastated me for about a week, even though I knew going into it how it would end. Summer is not like that, & I found myself astonished all over again by Wharton’s range, by just how convincing & alive the characters are.
My edition has a masterful introduction by Marilyn French (author of the Women’s Room), which is the perfect set piece to start with, although I will confess it was the back jacket copy that got me. “Summer, Edith Wharton wrote to Gaillar Pasley, ‘is known to its author & her familiars as the Hot Ethan.’”
It was, extremely, & I will be thinking about it for quite some time.
one good thing
When I got the notification that my testosterone prescription was ready, I took off like I’d been fired out of a gun, because every time I go to the doctor something about it gets messed up: the bulk place where I used to buy needles now needs a prescription, but the prescription can’t be for a bulk amount. There’s a shortage, and the pharmacy can’t get it, or it will be late. No, of course they don’t have any idea how late. The number of needles prescribed has somehow been changed to two instead of four. The doctor would like to change my dose again, even though the correct bloodwork was not done, & every time she changes my dose, something goes haywire with the script. The doctor would like to prescribe two vials instead of four, even though the vials are single use, which I then have to very diplomatically explain in the messaging portal. All the while, I am carefully reminding myself of how lucky I am to have this access at all, to live where I live, etc.
Anyway, this contributes to a certain time-sensitive attitude around picking up my prescription, so I flung myself vigorously in the direction of the pharmacy counter, which had a line six deep when I got there, and discovered that my hero, the tech who always has seasonal nails, had once again managed to untangle the mess, not for the first time, likely not for the last. The pharmacy has been a hot mess since all the RiteAids closed (someone there told me recently they’re getting all the customers but no more workers to cover), but she somehow managed it anyway, and I dropped four vials into my Trader Joe’s bag with the sardines on it, bought my pretzels, & came home again with the relief of having restocked.
Thank you for staying with the Dead Letter Department during the recent fallow period. More soon, and in the meantime, may one of your bureaucratic tangles be undone with the grace only a customer service professional can bring to the job.