Dead Letter Department #124

weather report

The moon was briefly visible this morning as I was making coffee, hanging above the neighbor’s tallest pines for a few minutes, shining like a pearl, until the clouds wrapped her up again. I was up until 2:30 last night, I think, wandering various labyrinths of anticipatory grief & current event horrors until my brain finally wore down enough to hit a hard reset. I couldn’t tell how much of it was the Sunday scaries after a long stretch of time off, but I’m not exactly off to a great start this morning.

Now, do I actually & logically think that the first week of the new calendar year is some sort of magical level-setter, and that my performance during such will not precisely determine but somehow set the tone for the the rest of the year? No, but only because I’ve lectured myself pretty repetitively about the slippery slivers of difference between superstition & compulsion. I’ve managed to bargain down from ‘absolutely crucial to excel in all ways the next seven days’ to ‘it would be nice (to excel in all ways the next seven days),’ and if that doesn’t seem like an improvement, we do not fight the same battles with our brains this time of year.

I made no lists for New Year’s, tallied nothing, did no summaries, partially because I simply did not have the energy & partially because it felt like it would be an exercise of dispiriting diminishing returns. My goals haven’t changed, and won’t until I succeed at some of them; last year was hard, and probing around to try to extract a few pitiful drops of completion was only going to make me spiral. There are about a thousand things I would like to do, sky-writing fantasies, but time & money prevent even spending much time contemplating them.

Yesterday I marshaled myself firmly into my raincoat, gathered up my water bottle & emergency snack, & set off for Point Whitehorn, thinking it was sufficiently early & rainy that it might be quiet enough for me to brave the stairs at the cliff. The parking lot was entirely empty when I got there, & so with Cameron Winter in one headphone (the other wedged in my shirt so I could still hear the birds), I wound through the woods, crossing over innumerable streams, each with their own little wooden bridge, noted several thrones, temporarily vacated, and before I could talk myself out of it I was at the switchback down to the beach itself. I went slow, but there was no one around, so it didn’t feel embarrassing, and getting all the way down to the foot of the cliff, with the tide nearly all the way in and pounding against the shore at my feet, was more than worth it.

I realized it hadn’t actually been raining, so I stripped off my coat & folded it into a cushion on a very damp log where I sat & watched the waves for a long time. There were clouds so low they were dropping down onto the tops of the green islands on the horizon, and the sun kept sending spears of light through, making the far off mist glow. A seagull was having a full Little Mermaid moment on a nearby rock, doing a little wing flap & hop every time the white waves crested behind it. I’ll have to go back sometime when the tide is out & have a proper beach wander, but even the little sliver I had was lovely. My knees didn’t even hurt that much, once I had climbed back up to the top.

reading room

I’m still in the depths of Danez Smith’s Homie, which I could not recommend more, and nearing the home lap of Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time. I like reading gardening books in the winter, though it does sometimes lead me to improbable fantasies, and this one is especially good: both a love affair with her own garden, previously owned by another master gardener, which she is restoring to glory, and an examination of the cultural & economic roots of the English garden specifically. She follows the trajectory of a particular estate in her neighborhood all the way back to the origin of the wealth that built the legacy: slavery. American plantations, worked by enslaved people, with all the money flowing back to England, pouring into the extravagant house & meticulously landscaped gardens. She also writes about the enclosure of the commons, a concept I had heard before but never really understood, in a way that I think has permanently shifted how I view the landscape.

Next up is The Grand Affair, by Paul Fisher, my interest in John Singer Sargent having sparked up after Isabella Stuart Gardner, and then Martha Wells’ new Queen Demon, which I didn’t think I was going to be able to get my hands on for a while, until my dear friend N. surprised me with a copy.

one good thing

I was dropping some books off at the library before it opened, and there were a couple of guys posted up right in front of the book drops, gathering up their possessions after spending the night there.

“Excuse me,” I said, and my midwestern roots jumped right out, “I’m just going to scooch in here between you.”

“Oh, sorry, sorry!” one of the guys said. “We’re just getting our stuff together & we’ll get out of your way so you can have your library back.”

“Hey, man, it’s your library too,” I said, and he lit up, started to talking to his friend about nice library patrons, and told me that he’d rather sleep there than the Mission, even though it was outside, because the people were nicer. I told him I’ve heard really mixed things about the Mission & I asked him what it was like there, which launched him into a whole saga. Anyway, it turns out he’s a writer, working on a project about the experience of being homeless in Bellingham. I asked for his name so I could keep my eye out for his book, and we shook hands before going on our ways, both of us back to our writing.

More soon, and in the meantime, may you be able to remind yourself that this week is an arbitrary set of numbers, an agreed upon construct, not a referendum on what you’re going to be able to accomplish & who you’re going to be for the entire next year.