Dead Letter Department #65
weather report
I don’t know if you guys know this, but taking time off for something that’s not health-related or for a minor emergency is really nice, actually! I had four days, & I spent them all, used them up with abandon, & woke up this morning with my sleep schedule finally, blessedly, reset.
The lake was the highlight. I went as early as I could stand, & was delighted to find a family already set up a little bit down the way from me, with a sun tent & a indecipherable number of children in rash guards already in the water. Sometimes that spot, early in the day, is just me & the outdoorsy bros, so it was nice to have someone else in earshot, since it’s a long way from anywhere else. The fish were jumping a little farther out, and the water was clear & cold enough I couldn’t stay in long, so I just sat on a log swinging my feet in the water & met someone who named her scull after the goddess of calm seas.
The past few years, when the dysphoria really started to metastasize, swimming got harder & harder. It wasn’t necessarily in the front of my consciousness, it just was such a heavy lift, in a way I didn’t necessarily attribute to the dysphoria at all. It’s such a long drive up the lake, after all, & takes up way too much time, & I usually don’t even stay in for that long, & there isn’t anyone to come with me at that time of day, but if I go later it’s unbearably crowded—& on & on. Something that’s always been one of my favorite things to do eroded away a little at a time, drew further & further out of reach. Last summer I think I only went two or three times.
It’s a short swimming season here (unless you’re part of the cold weather swimming group, a social scene I’ve been eyeing covetously for a little while), so it meant one of my favorite parts of the year had been reduced down to a couple damp slivers.
When I went this time, it was easy. Partially this is because it was at the end of my days off, in that sweet spot when I’ve gotten enough sleep & chore lists out of the way to go do something without creeping exhaustion or to-do list guilt, but partially it was the fact that I didn’t have to haul a pair of ill-fitting tits around me wherever I was going. I wore a t-shirt & swim trunks, and they both had almost dried in the morning air by the time I got in the car & drove back to town. I left the backpack with all my swim stuff by the door, as a reminder to go again soon, the very next time I can.
I dug up the bed by the back gate, where the butterfly bush (invasive) had to come out, planting daphne & two different kinds of lavender, & unearthing a puzzling number of bricks. I had a blizzard from Dairy Queen, which tasted exactly the way it should, & made several elaborate fruit salads, now that the peaches & nectarines are coming in but the apricots & raspberries haven’t yet dwindled. I fussed with the apartment, with the houseplants, finally hung something in the big white spot over the couch, and generally just made things a little nicer, a bit more organized, for when working me had to get back into it.
The only television I watched was Vanderpump Rules (one of the Real Housewives Of descendants, if you’re not familiar), & there is something desperately comical about the ‘post’-pandemic episodes, in which the cast is still reaching a little frantically for the same story beats they’ve always had: going to parties at which they are now the only attendees, DJing for dance floors where eight to ten people spin and shake their asses under professional lights as though they’re still in a huge crowd. There was one moment where a cast member is sobbing hysterically about an actually sad event in her life (as opposed to something giving her the cut direct at a bar, or whatever), & her friend is rubbing her arm almost frantically & repeating, “Let’s just have fun! Let’s just have fun!”
They have to have fun, or they don’t have jobs. They have to fight with their friends, & wear increasingly insane extensions, & spray tan, & appear to be amusing themselves because that’s what the filming is meant to capture. I cannot explain why I find this all so soothing. In our idiotic hustle culture world, where everything is supposed to be content, maybe watching people who have managed to make their entire lives content has a certain tang of honesty, like it’s so far into image manipulation it actually overshoots the mark & becomes something strangely authentic again. One of the cast members has had not just one but two on camera weddings! There was a divorce in between, obviously, that got slightly less screen time, but imagine the optimism required! Also, I just love drama & gossip, especially when it has absolutely zero stakes in my actual life. Anyway, I only have about a third of a season left & I will be bereft when it’s over.
one good thing
Pretty Baby, by Chris Belcher, is exquisite: a piercing memoir about queerness & gender & academia & sex work, & the messy place they all intersect. I think she’s particularly incredible on the way that living on the margins of something colors your vision on it forever, whether that be sexuality or identity or labor. Some of her experiences growing up were similar enough, generationally, to mine to give me that shifting feeling of recognition, when a writer has phrased something so perfectly it spins your own experience, long locked in memory, into a new configuration.
“It’s not just the money,” Belcher writes, of her work as a dominatrix. “It’s that I get to say no. The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them.”
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I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may the gossip be abundant & exciting, but never about you.