Dead Letter Department #119

things i’ve been thinking about lately

the yoga pose i did the other day, after months of not doing yoga, that proved so challenging to my poor stiff body that it actually recurred repeatedly in my dreams the next night, most memorably as a corporate bonding activity that my new dream-job was requiring all hires to do together. this unfortunately means that i really do need to commit to doing it nearly everyday, if such a simple stretch sets the whole apparatus zinging right into the unconscious—alert, alert! things are moving!

that (this is so obvious i feel idiotic writing it) in order to do the best creative work possible, i do have to acknowledge that the work comes out of the body in addition to the mind & whatever else we have going. on the most basic possible level, you do have to have a body to have a mind, i keep telling myself, and that’s without even getting into having a nice smooth relay between the two. regardless: you have to have a mind to work, so go for a fucking walk. or do some yoga, & then have weird dreams about it, i guess. at least that means those two are talking.

i keep thinking i’ve missed the salmon, but google tells me there are runs late into the fall, so i still have time.

listen, i promise i’ll stop talking about the shining after this, but i had a picture-perfect clear image of the topiary animals coming alive & chasing the little kid, only it turns out that wasn’t in the movie at all, it was in the book. i had a teacher in high school, a good one, who firmly believed that if you don’t remember something forever, you never really learned it. i think about him whenever i try to to remember the whole kingdom/phylum/whatever thing, because he taught it, & i would have said that i learned it at the time, but i could not, should my life depend upon it, accurately relay it to you in this moment. does this mean i never learned it? by his standards, i arguably have only ever learned a few things in my life. two or three things i know for sure, dorothy allison would say.

i’ve been doing various fiddly little projects around the house as fall settles in & the world turns more to the interior: wrenching the furniture around in my bedroom to have everything at a different angle—always a colossal pain the ass, due mainly to the volume of filled journals housed in tubs under the bed—resettling the portion of my dad’s art book collection that i haven’t gone through yet into more permanent stacks, since i’m absorbing them more slowly than i anticipated, new fantasy art in the bathroom to accompany the Where the Wild Things Are print my friend gave me ages & ages ago, long before i chose my name. i checked out a book at the library that purported to be about dopamine decorating, thinking it would either be fun eclectic interiors or algorithmic nonsense with ineffectual DIY projects, and it sadly turned out to be the latter.

there’s a little grouping of pictures of my dad, some talismans, & a candle, all arrayed together next to the angel raphael statue he bought in new mexico on the top of the bookshelves next to the plants. i keep thinking early next month will make it a year since he died, and that might be the time to put some of the pictures up, settle some of the other things away. time distorts; it feels simultaneously like it’s been way, way longer and like that all happened last month, the rapid descent, the difficult decisions. the day itself is going to be hard in the kind of way you can feel roaring up over the horizon but can’t necessarily do anything about until it arrives.

one good thing

i have written here, at length, about how much energy it takes to go to protests, the struggle to make myself go, even though i know, i know, i know that i’ll feel better about it once i do. saturday’s was a big one, big when i arrived, getting bigger every moment with people streaming in on bicycles & buses, tromping down past the waterfalls, until we practically filled the park, the steps crowded all the way up to old city hall. i never seem to make it close enough to hear the speakers properly, but what i could hear was good, & my friend N. was there too, so I got to stand shoulder to shoulder with him for a while.

there was one shambling MAGA-hatted opponent making his way through the ranks, operating at a high pitch of antagonism, shouting things at people, trying to pick fights & call us stupid. “oh, singing,” he said, “sing a little song again, why don’t you?” the crowd didn’t open up around him, but you could feel the way the energy swung away as he pushed through, trying to get someone to argue with him, or even to make eye contact. no one i saw would; it was almost uncanny. he was alone, scrabbling away to try to get us to pay attention to him, and we were together. he couldn’t ruin it, as much as he tried.

there were dogs & babies & goofy-ass inflatable costumes (unicorn, centaur, axolotl, of course the famous portland frog), every kind of sign you could think of, guys in vietnam veteran hats wearing resist t-shirts. it’s so easy to sit alone in your house with your newsfeed & feel increasingly insane, but then i go out into this crowd of furious neighbors & realize just how many of us there are. all is not lost. my friend texted me as i wrote this that 6.6% of the entire population of vermont turned out at her local protests. the news tells me i was among about 5,000 here.

if you didn’t make it this time, maybe i’ll see you at the next one. you can come stand by me.

thank you, as always, for reading, and particular gratitude to the people who are able to subscribe. more soon, and in the meantime, may you catch hold of any solidarity & bedraggled hopefulness you can find.