Dead Letter Department #53

weather report

I got a couple of beautiful sunrises this weekend, or immediately post-sunrise, the sky going all soft & cotton candy pink as I drove out to Ferndale for cat sitting responsibilities. I always forget, down here in Bellingham proper, that if you go just the tiniest bit farther north the peaks rise up out of the horizon, sharp & snow covered, reminding you that the town is in a only a patch of coastal flatness & wetlands that slips all the way up to Vancouver and we’re actually surrounded on three sides by mountains.  Mount Baker herself looked movie set perfect, too snow tipped & enormous to be real, & there was even a little flock of snow geese sitting in one of the muddy farm fields when I passed, squawking to one another about where they were going next on their journey.

The cats were perplexed by my presence, in the way small furry creatures usually are when their own people are gone, but by the third day were rubbing themselves against my shins in a ecstasy of pre-breakfast delight, and allowing a few polite pets. The gecko was a little harder to interpret, as is the way of reptiles, but seemed pleased enough to accept two wiggling mealworms off a pair of plastic tweezers before scrambling back underneath her nice log, so I considered that to be a success. My niece made a big point of introducing me to the lizard when I stopped by for instructions beforehand, apologizing as she moved the various hides to reveal the little spotted fellow. “I’m sorry, but I want to show you to Uncle Max,” which was adorable on two counts—first, because I was being personally introduced to a lizard, and who doesn’t like that, and second because she’s calling me Uncle Max now.

The sun is actually setting after 5:00 PM for the first time in three months, & by that I mean around 5:03, but it’s still an improvement for my light-hungry eyes. This is the time of year when the last whip of winter strikes—the brief relief of what my friend calls Juneuary (warm, a few misleadingly sunny days) slipping away over the hills and leaving us alone with oncoming February, which is inevitably a dark, damp slog. The temperature has plunged, the faucets were left to drip overnight, & I am mentally doing my dark days due diligence: sunlamp, check. Constitutionals when I can stand them, check. Exhaustive to do lists, optimistically intended to stave off of the feeling that I haven’t done anything, checked off with a pen so firm I scar the paper, also check. Communing with the plum tree in the front yard, where the bud-heavy branches are a promise of what’s coming: occurring perhaps too often for the neighbor’s comfort, but check.

Does any of it help? It’s hard to say. Sometimes I suspect none of it helps at all & I just want to be able to say that I’m doing the usually recommended things, like doing preemptive yoga, so no one can suggest yoga to you, or explaining to your doctor how very many vegetables you eat before they can even start in on you with their dietary diatribes.

Part of it is the feeling of waiting, a screensaver ponging rather frantically from one side of the frame to another, but shouldn’t I be better accommodated to waiting at this age? Shouldn’t I be better at it, at still grasping what’s in front me with both hands even while I’m waiting for the next thing to crest over the horizon?

I’ve been watching the Crown, finally got to the Elizabeth Debicki as Diana seasons, which are why I wanted to start watching anyway, & one thing I’m not sure the show gets right is the heaviness of the constant waiting, decades & decades of it, for the queen’s heirs, the waiting inherent in being a heir. It almost makes me want to read Spare for another glimpse into that world, which I had though I wasn’t interested in until I read it was ghosted by the same author who did Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open (good reading even though I don’t know a single thing about tennis).

What I actually want, though, is the tell-all of the ghost writers themselves. I want to read about the process of extracting enough history & personality & narrative from someone else who is not necessarily able to easily articulate all of that, & then shaping it into a form that sounds more than plausibly like the subject, that brings them to life in someone else’s words, written as though they are speaking. How does that work? What do those interviews sound like, and how does the writer turn that into a life that isn’t theirs, but still written in first person? Do biographers & ghost writers have secret duels somewhere, literary or otherwise, over their various ways of engaging with the subject matter? The full-body bindings of NDAs doubtlessly prevent anything particularly exciting from being revealed after the process is over, but it would be fascinating to hear how it all works.

one good thing

My sibling set me up with a penpal, one of their online friends who is a huge music nerd, & I started sending him my quarterly mix CDs, which I love to compile & make an enthusiastic, annotated typewritten playlist for. He sends me mixes sometimes too, & the last one was his Best of 2022. I listened to it on my way up to a north county beach over the weekend, & it was a delightful proportion of familiar bands, people I’d literally never heard of, & music I’d read some buzz about but hadn’t actually listened to yet.

I expect it’ll be in rotation for quite a while in my car, & he got me so excited to get into some new albums. It was perfect timing, since I had been lingering for the past couple weeks in a somewhat stale phase of nostalgia listening. I'm all for a nice moody nostalgia listen, but you're never going to make any sharp new memories if all that's playing in your ears is the last thing you fell in love to, so I'm grateful to him for busting things open for me.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or consider subscribing to the secret edition, where I’m writing about transition & shifting identity—if the subscription is out of reach, just shoot me a note & I’ll see if I can comp you. Write to me anytime at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may whoever’s interviewing you for your own inevitable celebrity ghost-written memoir know exactly the right questions to ask.