Dead Letter Department #15

(did you miss dead letter department #14? catch up here!)

local art

The rains have begun in earnest. The back lawn gave up and died off about halfway through the summer, for the first time since I moved here, but now it’s soaked again, sending up little green shoots and hosting tufts of thick green moss. I found two dahlia tubers I bought with excellent intentions when I was dreaming about flowers last winter & then totally forgot, leaving them in their little nest of paper for more than nine months. One of them, unbelievably, actually managed to sprout inside the dark paper bag so I went ahead & planted them next to an optimistic lavender by the back fence. It’d be nice if they had a chance despite my negligence.

There’s one of those shabby temporary wooden fences down by the new park in town, presumably to hide the huge gash of raw earth where a tower of new condos is going to go next to the bay trail. During the height of the protests last year the wall was covered with murals and now it’s a sprawling mess of art. I like it a lot better than some of the very nearly lifelike paintings around town, the kind where a uncanny but not quite realistic baker looks like they’re about to walk off the wall and pursue you down the street, presumably using their oddly angled tray of inedible baguettes or shard-like fudge as a weapon. I have the same objection to the bronze statues by the bookstore in Fairhaven, which definitely get up and walk around at night when they think we aren’t looking.

Scrawled between two of the more finished pieces on the wall by the bay, it says in messy, spraypainted handwriting: “I KNOW LIFE SUCKS BUT THE MONSTER”

No finishing punctuation, no finishing the thought. “The monster what?” I said as I drove past it, nearly snapping my own neck in an effort to read the rest, but there wasn’t any more. I assume they did what we’ve all done at one time or another and badly miscalculated how many letters would fit in the remaining space, but I think it’s a perfect sentiment as it stands: I KNOW LIFE SUCKS BUT THE MONSTER

I guess you have to finish it yourself.

I’ve been vacillating wildly between extremely regimented days (up at 7:00, dutifully drinking black tea under the SAD lamp & drawing little tomatoes in my notebook for each unit of work I accomplish) and lightly unhinged ones (‘research,’ errands that definitely could have waited, reading ALL the drama on the forum for my side gig, logging back in to work way too late in the evening). The regimented days feel better, both while they’re happening & afterwards, but a key part of the really good discipline I used to have about work was feeling like there was a time when it was over: I could see my friends, skip out of town for a weekend, even just go to bar, for god’s sake. With so little of that to be had it’s hard to divide the days; is this work or life or some strange, insufficiently productive swirl of both?

reading room

I finished reading Audre’s Lorde’s The Cancer Journals but I think it’s going to stay on my desk for a while, keeping Alexander Chee & Michelle Tea company in my ‘constantly thinking about pile.’ I’ve been dealing with some health shit which makes me think about mortality a lot, not that it is necessarily mortality-level health shit but because I am essentially a dramatic bitch (h/t to Kelly for this delightful phrasing) who thinks about death a lot anyway, especially when I am reminded of what a goddamn scam it is most days, this whole having to be physically embodied thing. “There must be some way to integrate death into living,” Lorde writes, “neither ignoring it nor giving in to it,” and in The Cancer Journals I think she shows us one way, giving us both her raw, pained journal entries, her struggle against despair, and the precise, revolutionary language of her essays.

She confronts the superficial spirituality required of cancer patients, the insulting narrative that they have somehow developed cancer through a lack of positivity, failed themselves and their bodies by insufficiently happy in a world filled with devastation. She writes over and over again about her own fear and how she is learning to manage it, metabolize it, turn it into something else: “I think I find it in work, being its own answer. Not to turn away from the fear, but to use it as fuel to help me along the way I wish to go. If I can remember to make the jump from impotence to action, then working uses the fear as it drains it off, and I find myself furiously empowered.”

Finally, here’s the quote I’ve been thinking about the most, and scrawled on an index card to keep close. It’s almost brutally succinct but not without hope, the real kind that acknowledges inevitability, not the bleached-out, tepid variety that assures us nothing bad will happen as long as we behave exactly the right way:

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my morality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?”

one good thing

Hockey’s back, baby, & I finally have a home team to root for! I was worried they were going end up being the Seattle Steelhead or Sockeye or something else boring & salmon related but NO, they are the Seattle Kraken which is much cooler. I know almost nothing about any of the players except Brandon “I saw a Ghost” Tanev, Jamie Oleksiak & of course the goalie, Phillipp Grubauer, but I am excited to learn all about them & get way too attached to their storylines this season. In the world of streaming it’s actually really nice to sometimes watch something & know a bunch of other people are all experiencing it at the same time.

write back

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime may you find a surprising sign of life somewhere.