Dead Letter Department #41

weather report

Bright fall appears to be over already, which means dark fall has arrived. Bright fall lives at the end of August & sails through most of September, when the skies are still high & blue even though the leaves are starting to color & drift. You can almost tell yourself it’s still summer, that it won’t be that grey that soon—and then dark fall swoops in & drops a blanket of mist over the whole business & you remember what it’s going to be like as the year staggers out.

I, for one, can’t wait for the rains to begin properly. It’s been unsettling watching the grass crisp up into brown. I picked a hell of a year to start a bed of ferns in the garden, so they are absolutely panting for the change, AND lot of my favorite spots clear out substantially at the first sign of moisture in the air, which I always find kind of puzzling, but am certainly not going to complain about—it’s a lot nicer to sit on the concrete pilings by the Bellwether without tourists trying to nudge you to the side of their perfect shot.

It also means whatever iteration of seasonal mood bullshit I’m about to experience is standing in the wings doing a few last stretches in preparation to try to ruin my life for the next few months, so I hauled the SAD lamp out of the garage & rearranged my desk to put it next to my eyeballs. It then took me six days to actually turn the thing on, but hey—I remembered today, & here I am writing to you.

park evaluation board

For a long time I didn’t go to any of the locally famous outdoor places where I couldn’t bring my dog. It just seemed so silly to go do something outside without him when I could be doing something with him & he’d be having a better time than pretty much anyone else there. Even though he’s been dead a long time, some of those places sort of slid out of my mind as possibilities, so I’ve weirdly never been to the Stimson Reserve before, or, in this case, Big Rock Garden Park.

In a feeble attempt to stop spending so much goddamn money on coffee (I’m looking at you, macadamia nut latte with cardamom syrup), I put some French press coffee in a glass jar & set off up Alabama Hill. When I got there, after going down a spookily narrow alleyway to an eight-spot parking lot tucked between wood-shingled houses, I found myself to be the only one who thought this was a great activity at 8:00 AM on Sunday. There was no one else to be seen, except for a pack of even earlier rising walkers who zipped past me such high speeds I barely even got to eavesdrop.

Passing through the swinging wooden gate, I found myself in a grove of cedars, winding gravel paths & beds of ferns, with sculptures around every corner. I walked up and down, edging slowly down the steeper bits, resisting the urge to touch the gnawed-looking stone (I think you’re not supposed to touch even outside sculpture, right?), & mostly found myself—I am sorry to say—annoyed. I looked at the metal & the wood  & the stone, I read the little plaques, I thought about intention & placement & materials & light, & the entire time I felt myself totally unmoved. Even, I would say, dismissive. Mostly it seemed like I would have had a better time looking at the trees. There was one piece I appreciated, but mostly because it was part of a tree, & I was trying so hard to enjoy something at that point.

This is the second time it’s happened recently. I was at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner last month—it’s a very cool little museum (also free!), at an painter's exhibit (with work by his teachers on the second floor, which I thought was very interesting staging). I walked, I looked, I thought, & I felt absolutely nothing. I sat outside on the bench afterwards, pulled my mask off with relief, & wondered briefly if I’d lost the ability to respond to visual art.

It’s starting to seem like I might need to bring in a heavy hitter to wake myself up again—the beloved Italian Room at the Seattle Art Museum, maybe, for some localized time travel, or the overwhelming scale of a Kehinde Wiley painting.

park count: 1.5/44 (previous park field trips: Cornwall rose garden, back in DLD #37)

park judgement: unclear, I’ll probably go back sometime when I’m feeling fresher or have someone with good eyes to help me look.

housekeeping

I’ve been wanting to write more to you about transition, fidgeting around with some little seeds of essays & letters that I think would be good for the Dead Letter Department. Here’s the problem: the unholy, heaving mass of transphobic harassment anyone even remotely online & trans inevitably experiences. If you’re not particularly online yourself, you might not be aware of the absolutely insane way it’s grown in the past few years. There are a lot of cultural reasons for the massive pendulum swing to the right we’ve been seeing (some that I even want to write about), but as a geriatric millennial who used to be a lot more optimistic about where we were headed, generally speaking, it’s been incredibly disheartening.

The idea of putting some of my most intimate ongoing experiences out there for anyone to access for free is unsettling, & at this point truly seems like a willful lack of self-protection. The solution I’ve come up with is a minimal paywall that will support the ongoing existence of these letters & also hopefully cut out a healthy fraction of any bad actors. The current version of the Dead Letter Department will continue as it is—free & occasional, with weather reports & reading thoughts & field trips a couple times a month.

However, if you’re interested in more personal writing on queer masculinity & transition & probably some deeper dives on writing habits, please consider signing up for the (Secret) Dead Letter Department. The first membership tier will only be $2 a month (or $20 a year) as I’m experimenting with this format. I’m adding a second tier too, just in case anyone wants to get actual, physical mail, mostly because I like sending it so much.

If you’re an enthusiastic &/or long time reader, especially if you’ve written to me in the past, but the price for more letters is out of reach for you, email me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & I’ll comp you a digital subscription.

one good thing

Listen, I know I already told you about the macadamia nut milk latte with cardamom syrup but I don't care, we are circling back because it was so delicious that I looked up how to make cardamom syrup at home. Black Fern is in the Granary building down by the waterfront, so you can take your coffee out to the pier & look for straggler salmon, or watch the industrial cranes working at the construction site. I’ll meet you there pretty much anytime you want, especially if we get a donut muffin, because I really want to know what they taste like.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. If you want more frequent letters, you can subscribe. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may you find yourself able to look & be moved by what you see.