Dead Letter Department #44

weather report

As I lay on the kitchen floor, I was thinking about the tequila shot theory. Have you heard that one? We all have an unspecified number of tequila shots assigned to us in our lifetimes. It might be one, it might be thousands, but the number itself is unknowable, until the one that makes it immediately clear that it was the last.
I was, unfortunately, not actually drinking tequila I lay there on the floor. I’d slipped on a little bit of spilled water—or maybe some pumpkin guts—& was staying as still as possible, doing the kind of gritted teeth breathing you do when you’re trying to figure out just how badly you’ve hurt yourself without hurting yourself more. It took me a while to scoot over to the carpet, where the footing would be better, and try to scramble back up to being bipedal, & while I inched over there I was mostly thinking about two things: my friend who recently busted the shit out of her ankle in a similarly random accident, & the idea that I might have just in that very moment run out of my allotment of falls that don’t cause permanent damage.

We are only ever temporarily abled, as I so often read, & I definitely had a good long moment there on the linoleum thinking about whether or not not I had just run through my number of days with two working, bending, swiveling knees. I have always been a clumsy person, not always totally sure where my skin ends & the world begins, assuming either too large or too small a footprint, but either way drastically misunderstanding the scale. Once I fell down a flight of stairs backwards, fortunately cushioned by the enormous army backpack I had on, full of a couple weeks worth of dirt bag laundry. In college I used to rip the pockets out of my coats all the time because I’d be walking around in the snow with my hands shoved in there & when I slipped I’d just faceplant directly into a cold white bank instead of somehow managing to catch myself. I’ve sprained my ankle any number of times, most recently by steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the existence of the library’s streetside curb, but also, memorably, by falling in a hole at the lake & having to drive home while bleeding profusely through the gravel embedded in my knee, because a water bottle’s worth of liquid wasn’t enough to properly rinse it.

This time, I did all the things, once I managed to get back up: took ibuprofen, used the solid ice block I put in the cooler for the first night & borrowed a bendier ice pack afterwards, elevated, tried to stay off it, and contemplated whether there was any point in trying to see a doctor. I eventually decided against it, since I think it’s just wrenched, not torn or shattered or any more violent verbing of the joint, but a good chunk of that deliberation always is—what is the likelihood that a doctor will look me, a fat person with a joint injury, & have anything useful to say? If you’ve ever had the experience of going into get evaluated for, say, strep throat or an ear infection & instead getting a long, wildly inaccurate lecture about counting calories, then you know just what I mean.

I’d been having a good day before that, running around doing errands, sitting on the floor & watching Cabinet of Curiosities while making a pretty unhinged looking jack o’lantern & then picking through the innards to get all the seeds for roasting. It felt like whiplash, like a sudden unexpected genre shift that I hadn’t been prepared for, even though I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about aging & the failures of the body, generally. I’m trying to learn to see the beauty in decay, even my own, & I don’t mean that in a self-indulgent way—I think it’s a discipline, to see the changes that are arriving, the ones that are still strewn somewhere out along the horizon, maybe too far off to judge their distance, & try to greet them with something other than rage & wailing. I’m all for rage & wailing, obviously, but even the classics benefit from a certain amount of variety.

reading room

A friend lent me a hilariously chewed-upon copy of The Once & Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow & it turned out to be just the thing for late fall. It’s our world, but slanted towards fantasy, set in the age of the suffragettes trying to win the vote. The story is full of delicious things: sisters, witches, schools of magic, & an alternate history that actually grapples with America’s racism & imperialism in a real, fascinating way instead of smoothing it over with spells. It’s a visceral book—the city streets are dirty, poverty is a grinding, bone-cracking struggle, and magic has a cost, in blood & bone, but that just makes the places where the heroines beat back powerful forces even more satisfying.

I’ve been having this problem with all the books I’ve read lately where I struggle through mud for the first forty or fifty pages—it’s not a reflection on what I’ve been reading, it just seems to take me that long to get my feet under me, but then I’m off to the races, breaking off huge chunks of narrative when I have time, especially in the evening, now that the nights are getting dark so early. When I finally hit that magic mark, I was all in for Juniper James, of course, & her furious, foul-mouthed power. If you read it, tell me what you think.

As a housekeeping note, links to currently published books will now be going to Bookshop.org instead of publisher’s sites—I set a page up there for the Dead Letter Department to keep track of everything I’ve written about. It is also an affiliate program, which means if you happen to buy something from an independent bookstore through the link, a fraction of your sale will support the newsletter. Links to older, out of print books will still be through Biblio, & as always, if you’re local, please support our beloved Village Books & Henderson’s.

one good thing

My friend & I have a monthly meeting where we talk about goals & projects, how we’ve been spending our time & what we want to do differently, & then we pull a tarot card to inform the next month. Having another ambitious person to talk to regularly who wants to get granular about habits & process has been hugely helpful for me, both in resetting when I’ve managed to drift off the road & in actually remembering to acknowledge all the places I’ve been working hard. This month I drew Temperance, which seemed especially relevant.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or consider subscribing to the secret edition. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may any falls you take be cushioned by a truly forgiving snowbank.