Dead Letter Department #127

weather report

Blue skies this morning. On one side of the window, the great burst of pale pink from the neighbor’s blooming tree, and on the other, the white branches of an apple tree belonging to a different neighbor, so that there are drifts of petals everywhere in the yard.

I went to the big protest this weekend. All of the posts about it said that parking was going to be even more limited than usual, so I decided to ride the bus. I am sure I must have ridden the bus in this town at some point, but I sure couldn’t remember when. The first thing was to figure out how, which turned out to involve an incredibly easy app. The app lets you load money & look up routes, and the bus stop is a brief waddle from my house, so from there it was just the usual anticipatory anxieties, like what if I can’t figure out how to request a stop, what if I can’t get back on the bus for some reason & have to figure out how to walk all the way back home & die & no one knows where my body is, or anything else improbable that part of my brain likes to toss out there before I do something, especially something new.

So I waited at the bench, with my bag of the usual protest supplies, and as soon as I got on, I realized that most of the other people on there were also going down to Waypoint Park, based on their red knitted hats & big cardboard signs. (It was like that for the first Women’s March in Portland too, all that time ago, when my sibling & I rode down to the swelling crowd of thousands, packed together like sardines on the MAX light rail or the bus, I can’t remember now which it was.) It’s a good, heart-lifting feeling, stepping up into the bus & realizing that you’re all going the same place, that the event has in some ways already started.

This is also where I allowed myself to be led astray by the crowd, because I had a particular route picked out, one that would have spat me out near the library for a ten-minute walk to the protest site, but none of the other people were moving to gather their things or ring for a stop. I doubted, I hesitated, I thought to myself, these seem like organized folks, they must know something that I don’t, so I guess I’d better just follow them to where they’re going, which is how I ended up at the downtown bus stop waiting for a different line, in a knot of confused people who kept going to ask various employees what was happening & then coming back to triumphantly announce what they’d discovered.

We did all finally manage to board the waterfront line, the last of us settling down into the very last seat available, and there were people streaming down to the park everywhere I looked, with signs & wagons & dogs. Without the neon-vested volunteers, I’m not sure the bus would have even been able to make it all the way to the stop through the hordes of people, but it did, and then I was in the crowd.

This gives some idea of the size, if you weren’t there yourself, or if you didn’t get all the way up to the bridge to take a look before the march started. Jewell James, Lummi Nation artist & activist, was an incredible speaker, largely on the Constitution, and our obligations to each other & to the next generation. He absolutely had the crowd in his grip, & after that I ran into my friend N (what are the chances, in a crowd of so many thousands?) & got to catch up with him while we listened to the rest of the program.

I will say that going is better than not going. I hate crowds; they make me anxious. I go to Trader Joe’s at 8 in the morning because I hate crowds so much. There are whole parts of my life I build around this entrenched intolerance, and it is still better to go and bump shoulders with all of my neighbors who are feeling the same things I am, looking at the same stories, despairing identical despairs. I don’t know if I think we’re coming back from this, or if it’s all just going to burn faster and hotter, like an out of control brushfire. I don’t think anyone knows, but it’s still better to be out there with everyone than home, worrying at it alone.

incomplete lists

what instagram thinks i should buy: gorgeous, expensive rugs, even more expensive sheets, home decor ranging from the adorable (slumped potato lamp) to the—again—obscenely expensive, bordering on ludicrous, perhaps a nice stay at a design-forward resort in Mexico, or a famous dive-y hotel in southern California where each room is themed. Diagnosis: I’ve been looking at too many rugs online.

what mobile games think i might buy: temu clothes, temu furniture, temu shoes, a pornographic dragon-fucking fiction app that I can’t believe is allowed to advertise at all, a pergola (the actual ad says something like, ‘Trying to convince your husband to buy a pergola?’ which just begs the question of how many husband-having people are out there engaging in pergola related arguments on the regular), other extremely questionable mobile games that would absolutely give my phone a terminal disease, betting apps which assume a level of college sports retention I have never and will never have. Diagnosis: mobile games are a terrible glimpse into the semi-beating heart of scam capitalism.

what Reddit thinks I need: boner pills, less shady financial apps, medication for schizophrenia, cruises, advertisements in Portuguese & Spanish. Diagnosis: Reddit thinks I am a moneyed, schizophrenic, Portuguese speaking guy with a bend in my penis who needs a vacation. There have been worse assumptions made about me, probably even recently.

what Facebook offers: rescue dog that cannot be around other dogs, rescue dog that requires eyedrops seventeen times a day, rescue dog that comes with additional emotional support dog, rescue dog that cannot be around men over 5’7”, rescue cat, rescue donkey, rescue parakeet, rug advertisement. Diagnosis: my petless status is tragic, but at least I don’t have to worry about a rescue dog ruining all those expensive rugs I didn’t buy.

the vision

I woke up from a dream, early in the night, absolutely possessed with the need to remember the vision I’d just had in which I made a drawing—a very important drawing, the dream emphasized, and one that I had to remember. It was so crucial to remember the drawing, and be able to reproduce it the next day, that I startled awake from full REM in order to make a note.

Would you like to see the drawing? Of course you would.

Square Horse, my dream said. You must remember Square Horse.

Make of that what you will. Actually, if you can make something of it, do feel free to tell me what, exactly, to make of it, since the certainty of the dream faded, leaving me only with Square Horse.

More soon, and in the meantime may you trust yourself enough to get off at the correct bus stop. Thank you as always to those who support the newsletter with a paid subscription, especially in these months when I have been fighting to write more regularly.