Dead Letter Department #123

scraps & small pleasures

This morning, under the date in my notebook but above where I scrawl the week’s tasks, I wrote ‘just do the best you can.’ The silent corollary for that is simply that sometimes this time of year your best is really pretty bad; do it anyway. You know how people say nothing good ever happens after two o’clock in the morning? This is, for some of us, the two o’clock in the morning of the year. Time to call an Uber, stumble home, put out a glass of water for the next day. Then you can hunker down & wait for it to be over.

We’re down to one weather alert, which is for landslides; a frightening prospect with the sodden landscape around here & several sinkholes having taken down chunks of local roads. Yesterday I walked down to the pier at Little Squalicum (closed, due to rain erosion, so now it stretches out into the bay empty of the usual walkers, & once, memorably, unicyclists using the railing to practice). The wind was thrashing the bare limbs above me, stripped of the last few clinging leaves, and the water, when I reached it, was almost grey-brown with all the silt. The waves hammered against the shore, & I kept imagining how fast I would lose my footing if I stepped out into that white froth. Pushed back into the estuary was a whole fleet of logs driven up by the high tides, but the ducks didn’t seem to mind.

I have a hard time with breaks. There’s a part of me that still, even after many object lessons to the contrary, thinks that unless I’m diligently chipping away at my work six days a week I must be underperforming, that any days off are greedily snatched from something more important, and that I really have to be somehow maximizing rest so that I can take as few of said days as possible (question to self: how?? answer: always unclear, but the feeling is there).

There’s a stupid puzzle game I’ve been playing on my phone, where you have to move blocks of different color through little doorways within a certain period of time, and sometimes I’ve done it over and over, run out of lives, convinced myself the puzzle is impossible, and finally put it down out of frustration. Sometimes when I go back to it later, the solution just springs right up at me: move this one here, that one there, and look, you’ve solved it. I’m trying on the thought that a break might feel like that for some the intractable puzzles of my life, that when I set myself back to working on them, I’ll maybe find some way to move the pieces that I couldn’t before, instead of just smashing the buttons in the same old useless order.

Please, please, for the love of god, note that this is not the same as the frenetic, illusory feeling that tells you you’ll somehow be completely new & improved after a vacation, suddenly turning into the kind of person who promptly clears out their voicemail, does yoga at five in the morning, & eats kale every day, or whatever your particular mile markers are for impossibly virtuous living. No, this is just giving yourself a little room for things to shift with the season, leaving yourself a little space for the possibility, for change.

reading room

I’ve been back to Didion again: The White Album's titular essay seemed apropos for the moment, so I read it one long thirsty setting & then put the book on my desk as a temporary talisman of sorts, studded with brass bookdarts. I finished Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, including her somehow hilarious translation notes, and moved on to Danez Smith’s Homie, which is evisceratingly excellent.

In other media, I finally started the second season of Severance (an uncanny fever dream for anyone who’s ever worked in a corporate office) & Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey show my friend told me is so steamy I should schedule some ‘personal intimacy’ afterwards. I have a sewing project I’ve been thinking about starting, but my hands are to the point where I can’t really sew in the evenings when I’m working. Maybe this next week will let me get a jump on it, and if I’m doing something with my hands, I might actually sit through one of these shows.

a list of various buoys to find in the cold current

The sad bastard playlist I made on Spotify (hit me up at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com if you need the link), the bottle of bourbon in the liquor cabinet, the bag of chips in the kitchen cabinet, don’t worry I already hit Costco to restock so I don’t have to go there, a list of low stakes house chores, two well-worn & absorbing video games where you can make everything turn out okay in end if you just fight long enough, enough books left in the Vorkosigan Saga that I could not possibly run out by New Year’s, inchoate plans for new projects once the current one is wrapped up to my satisfaction, daily phone calls with J, plans after the holiday with P, the unopened box where a fresh bottle of one of my all time favorite perfumes waits to be unwrapped (after missing the last window when the perfumer was making it, I could not risk missing it again), presents on the way for post-holiday meet-ups, walks down to the beach on the off-leash dog trail where the dogs are having the best day of their lives pretty much every day.

one good thing

My friend C. just achieved something major in her professional life and we met at a new bar downtown so I could buy her a drink. The place is called The Den, & the owner wanted it to be like hanging out in his grandpa’s basement when he was a kid back in the day, which he somehow managed to achieve: big squashy leather couches, reasonably priced drinks, an 80s soundtrack that you would have heard in the actual 80s. The bartender brightened hugely when he saw me, launched himself across the bar to grab my hand, & said “Good to see you again, brother! How are you? What are you having?”

Reader, I had never seen this man before in my life, or set foot in this bar, but I just rolled with it, figuring that every fourth person who shows up there is probably a short fat guy with a shaved head, and honestly the gender euphoria of being rolled indistinguishably into such a group still hits pretty hard.

The Den is dimly lit but not impenetrable, with some tasteful, almost old-fashioned colored lights in the windows, boughs of greenery here and there, and the bar itself was crowded with people in their 40s who looked like they were visiting for the holidays, with the slightly over-enunciated vibrancy of a group that doesn’t see each other that often. For a moment I genuinely felt as if I were in the first ten minutes of a Hallmark Christmas movie, that someone over there by the bar was going to be discovering the real meaning of love or family or whatever in the next ninety minutes, but I had the pleasing lack of obligation tied to being a background character, and could simply let the plot unfold while I had my drink & then leave them to it.

More soon, but likely not until after the New Year, which really, truly is fast approaching. I promise. The days this time of year are short and strange, but we are getting closer. I hope your own buoys for the season are highly visible and not too far apart from one another.