Dead Letter Department #138

weather report

The hummingbirds are fighting again; really, they never stopped, over our feeder & the one next door, and as I sat down to write this to you I saw two of them angrily zip up, high above the peak of the neighbors house, trying to drive each other away from the equivalent of a thousand gallon tank of Sprite.

I tried to swim in the bay last weekend, made it about halfway in, which was really pretty damn good given that it was 55 degrees and 7:30 in the morning. For some reason I could not muster whatever it takes to get to the lake, my preferred spot, which is about 25 minutes away, but I am terribly conscious of the ever-lessening number of swimmable days, and I still needed to get to the water, so I drove to Marine Park early, before the kayaks and wind surfers and even the water polo players (also kayakers, but with hilarious goals bobbing on the waves, and a great deal of shouting).

Of course I got tangled in bull kelp almost immediately, sloshing slowly forward while towing twelve feet of seaweed wrapped around my ankles, which was fine once I realized it was vegetation and not a mysterious Creature attacking my crocs. It felt good, even as my calves went numb, but I just could not quite make myself dive in all the way that morning, even though I think the shock of cold would have felt really good after I did it. Maybe next time. The rock sitting afterwards, letting the sound of the waves scrub everything out of my tired head, was lovely, and so was the sight of a huge purple starfish, the first I’ve seen at that beach in a long time.

There’s another park being built along that same waterfront, where the rotten little industrial beach at the end of Cornwall used to be, and although I had known it would eventually be closed off for construction, I kept meaning to go one last time & pick up a couple more pieces of seaglass until one day I drove past and the barriers were already up. Too late, and the next time I go there will be in a couple of years when the waste has been carted off and the landfills capped and built over with sod and trees. There’s something significant about the fact that so many of our sites for recreation and enjoyment here are built over former waste sites, isn’t there? Akin to the feeling of picnicking at the empty Weyerhaeuser building, or going for a nice long walk at the old mental hospital grounds, having a beer at what used to be the GP paper plant and is now a bike track. Maybe it’s true for all the places that used to be industrial cities and now are mostly something else, or between one thing and another, living on top of the undecayed bones of things.

There’s been so little rain that I watered what always feels to me like the most fragile tree in the backyard, though I suspect its probably actually fine, just something of a diva when it comes to hot weather. The lawn is completely crisped up, and while I kept most of the container plants alive through the middle part of the summer, they’re starting to go now, drying up inescapably, which feels early, and a little sad. I love fall but I think it’s going to come very early this year and I am simply not ready.

The new medication is making me tired. It was an exhausting couple of weeks starting it; now I’m at the stage where I have to tick it up a bit, and boy howdy did fatigue ring my doorbell immediately. It’s a little like being in the middle stage of a mild illness, where it feels like I’m going to be sleepy and dull forever, even though I proved that untrue during the last round. I keep telling myself it should wear off in a week or so, but it is very much like fighting through mud up to my knees to get even the baseline things done this week, let alone the extras that give a zippy little bolt of energy from completing them. Still, I must slog on, and hope that by this time next week or the following it will have dissipated.

The follow up appointment for the stupid health shit I mentioned in letter #135 is on Wednesday, and I am absolutely dreading it, even though the whole business is really very low stakes. Part of the annoyance is simply administrative—when I legally changed my name, it seems to have created two patient profiles in their system, and apparently never the twain shall meet. I have had conversations with the front desk people a total of three times now about the fact that I am in fact Max, middle aged dude with a beard currently taking up real estate in your waiting room, and also [Redacted], and therefore not a new patient who has to fill out a bunch of fiddly new patient forms, unless, god forbid, they want to create a third profile for me.

There is great bewilderment from the receptionist and then the assistant and then the doctor all in turn, as they pass me down the line, glancing repeatedly down at the forms and then up at me, as though having to connect the dots visually before we can proceed. No one’s been actively dickish about it, so it feels less like transphobia than it does all of us collectively being stuck in some sort of paperwork hell from which there is no escape. I really should have just pretended to be a new patient the first time and started fresh, or maybe gone to a new clinic entirely, but if there’s one thing that’s even more upsetting than going to a doctor it’s going to a new doctor, so I’m currently resolved to stick it out. My last eye doctor played Christian music in the waiting room, and the one before that yelled at me about contact lenses, so somehow even coming out repeatedly in a reception area that used to be the drive-through part of a bank is still an improvement.

More soon, and may your own slog be getting less muddy by the day.