Dead Letter Department #103: Post-Election

I talked a good game this weekend about staying the fuck off the internet on Monday or at the very least micro-dosing the news, remaining calm, etc, and as soon as the executive orders began to drop, I glued myself to my phone & started to obsess. I feel a little silly about it now, in the cold bright light of this winter morning, but also very aware of the fact that I’m one scroll away from doing it again, quite possibly as soon as I step away from the computer. It’ll be a balancing act, again, trying to remain informed & active without falling into one of the various pits of despair that are now strewn so liberally around my mental landscape.

Rumors of ICE trucks in Seattle? Pit. Withdrawal from the Paris Climate accord & World Health Organization? Pit. Executive orders rolling back protections for trans people? Also, this will come as no surprise to you, a pit lined with despair. I spent a long time looking at this map yesterday, which I recommend if you want to get granular with your anxieties. Sometimes I just stop & think about the fact that we’re only estimated to be 1.6% of the population in the US: quite a small number of us, for such a tremendous amount of hatred.

Part of it for me is that I was already not exactly starting from a position of strength, not exactly feeling fresh & well-armored & chomping at the bit to set off for the battlefield again after the horrors of the past season: memory care, where I watched my father recede faster than I knew was possible, long hours at his death bed trying very hard to remain present in the room with him, a tangible, audible sense of connection & love as he was departing. I’m clawing my way through the days, digging my nails into whatever sense of discipline I can muster to pay bills & try to find my writing practice again—and now this. Having seen it coming from a long ways over the horizon doesn’t make the day it arrives any easier.

There’s the theatre of the absurd aspect, too: TikTok is back, supposedly, but like any beloved thing exhumed, has come back wrong, leaking trails of censorship & the tell-tale signs that the algorithm has already been altered. Friends are streaming off of the Meta platforms, and the community groups I still belong to there are absolutely bursting with anti-trans absurdity from my neighbors, who now know they have free reign for it. Watching the tech oligarchs sit in a row at the inauguration, every last one of them uncanny valley-ed with whatever rich people ‘wellness’ practices they indulge in, sent a chill down my spine.

This is where the turn is supposed to come, where I find something that uplifts me I can tell you about, but I don’t have it. I’m here, writing to you. That’ll have to be good enough for today, & maybe tomorrow: a letter sent.

i took a break here…

& instead of getting on my phone to scream at the news some more, went out to mail some packages, blessedly missing the one super mean guy at the Post Office, & stopped at Narrative for coffee, where they produced something tasting of cherry & almond & smelling of woodsmoke (??) which I’ll need to go order again just to understand how it was produced.

It was cold enough for the hummingbird feeder to freeze the other night, which means I’m now on cold watch: checking the forecast every night to see if I need to bring it in & set it somewhere warm overnight, or open the cabinets & drip the taps on the under-insulated side of the house. I’m wearing extra layers at my desk, since it’s the farthest point away from the heat source in my apartment, and I managed to find the gloves that I wedged down into the side pocket of my car. When I scraped the car before going out, the ice peeled off in thin, fragile petals, and I caught them in my hand for a second before letting them drop to the frosty ground.

I think I must be exuding something right now that says, for the love of god, more light, because a second friend, unprompted, sent me a light source, this time a sleek pendant that hangs from a bracket in the ceiling & will let me grow plants in a previously dim corner of my apartment. I haven’t been able to get any new plants yet, but I moved my ailing avocado, which I’m unnaturally attached to, having grown it from a pit, and the stubby little pilea offshoot I kept when the mother plant got too big and wobbly and leggy to manage. It’s full-spectrum, so I feel a bit like I’ve hung a miniature sun in a corner, probably perfect for this dim and dismal time of year.

currently reading

The very last few pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras, about which more later, but I will say choosing to delve so deeply into a memoir about the horrors of mid-facism while we’re in the beginning stages here was—a choice.

Delicious in Dungeon, Vol 1, by Ryoko Kui, after watching & finding myself quite cheered by the animated show on Netflix.

The Friday Afternoon Club: a Family Memoir, by Griffin Dunne, because I cannot resist the siren call of Joan Didion, or in this case, her nephew writing about her, among other relatives.

one good thing

The tiny spider who lives in the window above my desk and which I have watched grow from a pinprick to a gallant hunter of fruit flies caught its first full-sized fly yesterday. I hate flies in the house: the buzzing, the bumping, the way they sit and wash their hands before trying to land on you again, how they crawl out of some nook even in the depths of January, so to me this felt like a very personal, though inadvertent, service. For most of the afternoon the spider was busy dancing close on its web to the thrashing fly and then far again, laying down the little strands of near-invisible silk to capture prey ten times its size that had somehow become ensnared and now needed to be subdued. By evening, it was triumphant.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, I hope that if there isn’t enough light, your friends can send some on for you.