Dead Letter Department #43
weather report
The rains have finally began. It’s been so dry the whole state’s been rattling like a tinderbox, wildfires flaring up and filling the skies with smoke. The season finally shifted, though, cranked a quarter turn towards darkness & rain as I was driving through Seattle on Friday, the first few heavy drops smacking against my ash-streaked car right as Rejoice started to play. It kept going, anywhere from a patter to a sluicing wall of water all the way down to Portland, & while I understand the roads are slick during the first proper storm of the season (summer ice, they call it), that is really no excuse for the absolutely bonkers driving that seems to temporarily afflict the region when the weather changes.
The first mistake I made was getting a bag of cheetos, which insured that the right thigh of my jeans would be streaked with neon orange dust for the rest of the day, but the second was recalling the port-a-potty in the airport cell phone parking lot. Bathrooms are getting to be a bit of a problem these days, as even the most tits-out posture doesn’t really correct for the rest of the changes, but no one cares who’s going into a gender neutral outhouse, except perhaps in a ‘pray for that poor sinner & what they are about to experience’ way.
It was appalling in there, unsurprisingly, but blessedly ungendered, & with a full bottle of hand sanitizer bolted to the wall, so certainly not the worst bathroom experience I’ve had recently, but I really hadn’t thought through the fact that I was now very nearly at the airport, & would have to pass all the way through it to get back to the highway. I ended up circling through the arrivals lanes, ducking & dodging taxis & people embracing over their wheeled suitcases, & it seemed to take forever, largely because I had no business there, & negotiating all of those lanes when no one is flying anywhere is totally ridiculous. Next time I’ll have to either dehydrate properly so I don’t have to stop or try for a less ludicrous option.
We went to Kinokuniya so I could salivate over the notebooks for types of writing & drawing I don’t even understand, let alone practice, & so my sibling could get blind boxes for their friends, passed through Powell’s in the most glancing of fashions (I didn’t even buy anything, which should be illegal), & ordered piles of dim sum. If I could get lotus leaf sticky rice & BBQ pork buns at home, I’d probably eat them three times a week, but since I can’t my sibling is indulgent about always ordering when I visit.
They also had gotten us a subscription to a live performance from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, by the upstart crow collective, which means I got to watch the first play I’ve seen in years, a thrill even if it was from a couch instead of the round. I was worried I’d have trouble keeping up with the language—it’s been so long since I’ve seen any Shakespeare, so I read King John beforehand. It’s a weird play, about bastards & bloodlines & Pope Innocent III’s machinations, but it does have a riveting portrayal of grief in the form of Constance, Prince Arthur’s mother, betrayed by the king who swore to help her & utterly undone when Arthur is kidnapped, stolen away to England.
“You are as fond of grief as of your child,” King Philip says, which seems like an awfully convenient take from a man who just broke his word to her, & this is Constance’s answer:
“Grief fills the room up of my absent child/Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me/Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words/Remembers me of all his gracious parts/ Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;/Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?”
I keep thinking about that—grief lying where her child used to sleep, wearing his clothes, walking beside her as her only company, since the men who were supposed to aid her have not only abandoned her cause but accuse her of madness.
“Fare you well,” she says to King Philip, as she goes to die offstage. “Had you such a loss as I, I could give better comfort than you do,” which is incredibly damning. I would do better for you than you have done for me—isn’t that what we want to tell the people who fail us?
The other performance that stuck with me was the actor who played Blanch, King John’s niece, wearing a crown of golden wire over her braids. It’s a very small part, but she inhabited it utterly, showing with every expression & gesture what it meant to be exchanged in marriage to a total stranger for political gain, & then to have the peace she was bargained for fail completely, making a ruin of her sacrifice.
The company was small, especially for a play with so many battle scenes, which made the staging both clever & beautiful, moving the actors like chess pieces & using refracted images behind them to make magnified battlefields of just two bodies lying on the stage.
I know it’s sort of been done before with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, following the minor players around the outline of the main character’s plot, but I’d watch the shit out of a play that put all the Shakespearean women who die off stage around a table.
one good thing
My neighbor’s cat Nico, a sturdy, boldly friendly striped tabby, is such a wanderer that they’ve put a GPS collar on him to track his explorations. “He’s like the mayor,” she told me, when she came looking for the lost collar one day when he’d returned home without it. “Everyone knows him.” Nico made himself a cozy spot under one of the hedges out front, which I discovered when I saw a flash of stripes the other day, but it turns out he also has approximate knowledge of when I check the mail, & sometimes when I go out with my keys he’s waiting right there in front of the back gate, making polite meows as I talk to him. Nico is perfectly capable of scaling the fence or going underneath it around the back, but I appreciate that he likes to be invited in sometimes, to roll around on the concrete & get a few pets before going back to his very important business.
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