Dead Letter Department #102

wearing: Slow Explosions, by Imaginary Authors.

This is a cold weather scent for me, too warm & rich for the sweaty months, but full enough to feel like draping on an extra silky layer to stave off the frost.

listening to:

Doechii, who I love. I also took a run at Ethel Cain’s album Perverts, but knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw the track lengths: 11 minutes for the opening song. I couldn’t find my way into it, driving on a sunny day the way I was, & kept thinking it would really hit if I was wearing headphones & rocking back & forth on the floor, so perhaps I’ll try it again the next time that’s the vibe.

loss of the week:

TikTok, sliding inexorably away into the great afterlife of apps, presumably to join Vine & MySpace & Napster, in whatever suffices for an electronic heaven. The rest of the world will still be on it, and I saw a video about how much they’re all going to miss their drunk cousins—Americans—being as dramatic as possible. “Americans aren’t real,” someone said in the comments.

There isn’t really a replacement. Tumblr isn’t dead, contrary to popular opinion, but I mainly use it for a high dose of art & weird niche interests. Facebook is only useful to me for the local groups, both useful & inflammatory (I joined a right-wing leaning page because it’s good to know what your opps are up to), because the rest of the feed is taken up almost entirely by ads—plus of course Mark Zuckerberg’s cowardly, predictable winnowing of what little fact-checking & moderation remained. Instagram has always set my teeth on edge, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, & I think the expectation is we’re all going to settle down & submit ourselves to Reels, finally, but I just don’t want to.

Easy to say: well, less time on social media, probably a good thing. I suppose it is, but I’ll miss the window into other lives: the Mongolian guy teaching us about his culture, that one dude who traveled from Europe to Japan by foot and bus and boat and train, the farmers, the artists, the nuns. Over the course of the app’s lifetime I probably saw a dozen trans people go from realization to joyful transition, a hundred proposals (including my favorite genre, the surprise double proposal), a thousand animal adoptions, the most insane drag available to humankind—& now it’s all receding into the mist.

Something else will come along? Sure, that’s the way the world works—history, famously, is just one god damned thing after another—but this time, in all its glittering specificity, will never come again.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, actually, wading around in the variable tides of grief.

I’ve talked here before about how the city is changing around me: it feels like a city now, whereas when I moved here all those years ago, it was more of a big, rambunctious town. Now there are four and five story apartment buildings shooting up all over, and the opioid crisis has certainly not skipped over us. There used to be a dahlia field across the street, now my beloved neighbor lives on that lot in a manufactured home. I took what used to be a fairly quiet walk on one of the beach trails near my house & when I got down to the water, there were multiple people nodding out at 8:00 on a Sunday morning.

I miss places, I get nostalgic, but it’s not the places I miss, not really, it’s the times that we had there. I was sad when Casa que Pasa closed, but it’s the fact that I’ll never again have a margarita there with my dad & my sibling that guts me.

in other news, whatever they’re hunting at Semiahmoo is still getting hunted, so after a slightly more apocalyptic than preferred march along the beach to the sound of gunfire from small boats on the water, I betook myself to Birch Bay instead for the therapeutic log sitting that I required. This happened to correspond with the first semi-sunny day in what felt like ages, & it was amazing how my mood improved, plus the view down Grandview gave me a cutting clear vision of the full ring of mountains, marshmallow white peaks jutting up into the clouds.

If you’re local, there’s a very cool free exhibit down at Allied Arts (new location, so look it up first) of indigenous artists, including beautiful work by Jason LaClair, amazing little cedar baskets, and a structure made of hundreds and hundreds of yellow ribbon roses, one for each of the victims of the Indian residential schools that have so far been discovered. It was beautiful & sobering. There’s an art supply thrift store in the back, too, which I had to peel myself out of, having spent my allotted five dollars.

I had also intended to go to Wonderz Market, which promised local art & vintage treasures, but was so jam-packed with every stylishly dressed person under the age of 25 in the city (which we have in tremendous abundance, due to WWU), that I didn’t even make it in the door. The Free Mom Hugs people were outside with their sign, and it was very sweet to see the kids scuffing their feet a little sheepishly & then deciding that no, they really did want a free mom hug after all. Perhaps the next weekend it runs I’ll go a little earlier & actually make it inside.
I also manfully stayed outside of the dog rescue lounge downtown, so if you see any smudges on the window from where someone pressed their nose up against the glass from outside to coo over all the little puppies that I for sure should not be adopting, it definitely wasn’t from me.

one good thing

In this case, it’s not the object itself that’s good, but the fact that I felt like making a thing & made a thing, & here it is. I don’t remember if I’ve ever shown you any of the little guys I used to make, but this one is from scraps of an old corduroy jacket, with the face & paw pads & ear backing out of the pocket lining. I’m not quite sure who or what it’s intended for, so if you think it might need to belong to you, let me know.

Thank you for reading the Dead Letter Department, especially as I’m finding my footing again with sending it more regularly. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, may you find a therapeutic log of your own to sit on, just when you need it most.