Dead Letter Department #101: Status Report

listening to:

GNX, Kendrick Lamar

Lungs, Florence + the Machine

reading:

The Diary of an Amorous Woman, Ihara Saikaku

Loose Woman, Sandra Cisneros

drinking

Narrative’s brown sugar bourbon latte: rich but somehow keeps the bitterness of the coffee intact, instead of swaddling it in a cotton candy coat.

L&L Libations Super Graphic Ultra Modern, which I have not stopped thinking about since I had one: tequila & tropical & delicious.

anecdote from a stranger:

All of the name change paperwork has necessitated getting into the safety deposit box a couple of times, which I am always surprised to find holds a sensible array of things you’d expect in a safety deposit box: original documents, a hard drive with a full back up of computer data, likely quite out of date, that I should remember to switch out with a fresh one at some point (I like to have backups of my backups, because I am a paranoid person).

It’s always a bit of an anticlimactic experience, because I am thriller-movie-pilled, & when I think ‘safety deposit box’ I picture a vast wall of shining doors, & a pile of diamonds, and inheritance paperwork: heist material.

Instead, at my little local credit union, it’s a slightly nondescript room with a waist high safe, a battered table, and a couple of discarded machines facing a wall of brassy metal doors of various sizes.

I tend to complain about this to whomever is tasked with getting the box out with the bank’s key, because surely I cannot be the only one who thinks this should be a slightly more glamorous experience, & the last time I went, the clerk told me about his job at Unnamed Large Bank, before he came to the credit union, and how disappointed he was for those exact reasons the first time he saw the vault, which he expected to be intimidatingly large & full of piles of sexy cash.

He did not say sexy. That’s just me.

But he did say that sometimes when people stop paying their rent or die (same thing in capitalism, I guess), they have to drill the boxes open.

“The weirdest was one of the big boxes.” He made a large square shape with his hands.

“What was in it?” I asked.

“Medical specimens,” he said. “A bunch of wet medical specimens, in jars.”

“No way.”

“Really. There was a whole hand in there. That was the weirdest one.”

Now, it is of course entirely possible that this guy was pulling my leg, that every time someone makes a tired joke about the safety deposit box room being insufficiently cinematic, he comes up with a different implausible but exciting thing he found inside the vaults once, but here’s the thing: he totally didn’t read that way. He was telling it funny, but matter-of-fact, no extra embellishment, no side story—never found out WHY, for example, or tried to inflate it—so despite the implausibility I am inclined to believe him. Also the use of the phrase ‘wet medical specimens’— it’s so visceral, and non-scientific.

I guess I’ll have to stop complaining about it being boring, because the next time I go, I’ll be picturing strange severed bits suspended in something tucked away behind all those little doors—or I guess the medium-sized ones, since the small drawers could really only fit, like, a finger, maybe an ear. It’ll be cinematic in its own way.

actual emotions

Ugh, gross, I guess if you insist, but I’m going to keep it brief.

I never really understood the grief anniversary people before. This is largely, I think, because my memory is very much of the Swiss cheese varietal: I know there are going to be holes, but I can’t anticipate where or when, so even traumatic events tend to get buffed down to a season, or an era, rather than a date.

But I am extremely conscious of the fact that my dad died the morning of November 6th. When December rolled in like a peppermint-stinking apparition, I kept thinking, “I’m about to leave the last month that I had my dad in behind,” and of course when the new year approached, “2024 was the last year I got to have my dad.”

It’s an arbitrary date; I don’t know why it matters, but it does. I’m now in a week and a month and a year without him.

At some point I might want to write about the giant photo archive project I did over the winter holidays, but for now I will just gently suggest to you, reader, that should you get a little maniacal about trying to be productive when you can’t be working, picking the most complicated, fraught, upsetting option and tossing yourself into it head first is maybe not the most sensible choice.

I kept saying, oh, it made the most sense to do it now, because I just couldn’t stomach packing it up & moving it one more time, after having, in some cases, packed & moved the boxes five times in & out of various garages & basements. Better to do it now than in the summer when I would actually want to enjoy the time I take off, or I just want to find some good pictures of Dad. All of that was true, but it was also a terrible idea. It’s just that it wouldn’t have been a less-terrible one later, and now it’s done.

one good thing

Literally a thing, in this case, sent by my friend E., which has been illuminating these dark winter evenings in a very friendly & quizzical fashion.

Thank you for sticking with the DLD during my long hiatus, especially those of you who continued to support it financially even when it wasn’t sliding, like a wet medical specimen, into your inbox on any kind of regular schedule.

I’ll write to you again soon, & in the meantime, may you be well on your way to recovering from the winter holidays.