Dead Letter Department #73

weather report

The basil on my windowsill is growing increasingly leggy & strained-looking, and yesterday morning was what felt like the first properly tumultuous mid-autumn rainstorm: hard drops pelting down, enough wind to whip the sound of the branches & my neighbor’s cursed wind chimes in through the cracked windows.

I dragged my sunlamp out of the garage a couple weeks ago & set it up on my desk for the increasingly dark mornings. I haven’t the slightest idea if it helps at all. Some years I’ve thought it did, but the last couple I’ve sometimes thought I use it partially so it can’t be flippantly suggested to me, like already being able to say you do yoga when someone recommends it to you for your chronic pain.

I went to see the salmon running, hanging over the bridge downtown next to the post office to watch them beat themselves against the current, up and over the heaving white froth. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust, to catch the right angle of the glinting water & the dark fins. The stream that leads up to the fishery and then the falls was dotted with fisherman, from the extremely serious to the clearly amateur, who looked as though they had been rolled out of bed & suddenly recollected the existence of salmon on their way someplace else, but thought they might as well throw a line on their way. The foot of the stream meets the bay right next to an extremely divey bar, and I hung over the bridge for a while there too, watching them working steadily against the tide, clustering up in groups that made them look like they were all about to press their way onto a busy commuter train.

Sometimes I stay long enough to watch one make it all the way up the falls, but I couldn’t that day, so hopefully next time I hear they’re running I’ll have time to wait. It always makes me feel lucky to witness one climbing all the way to the top of the falls, like I’ve won something, witnessed a tiny, repeating miracle.

I’m trying to lean hard into the small delights of fall—salmon runs, pumpkin carving with my friend, roasting the seeds with garlic & smoked paprika, dinners that require the oven—because I’m feeling more than usually tentative about the darkness. Part of it is how many of the indoorsy things I used to love in the wetter days are difficult to access or even impossible while I’m still doing my best to be COVID cautious: I’d list them here, but that would just end up with me putting my head down on my desk & probably giving up entirely for the day.

It’s one thing to stride boldly into the dimming days when I’ve been full up on summer, having spent enough time with friends and at the lake and out of town on weekends that it feels right to settle into a more studious pattern, but such pleasures have been light on the ground for some time now. I don’t feel like I crammed enough sunshine days in to get me through this year, but time only flows the one way that I know of, so here we are.

reading room

I finished Momfluenced, by Sara Petersen, which I thought was absolutely dead-on about the world of social media and how it colors expectation and experience. I thought she was particularly good on motherhood as a performance, not for children, because children don’t actually give a shit about that side of it, they’re busy being kids, but, as she says: “The performance is for me. It’s for us, who were trained to perform for the male gaze & whose primary value as sex objects no longer holds so much currency.”

I also loved Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story, by Julia Wertz, which the Small Bow newsletter recommended a while back. Her art style is addictive, with these incredibly detailed drawings of her neighborhood in New York that made me wildly nostalgic for the last time I was there, and she’s raw and disgusting and real about the shame of alcoholism, how it stripped away everything out of her life except working and drinking.

It’s also the time of year when I hyper-fixate on making small adjustments to my apartment. I get large stacks of home decor books from the library, which are about as useful as a horse in my tiny space, because they often say things like, “Open up to natural light by putting a skylight in!” or “Nothing could be more practical than papering your entire bathroom in handmade suede.”

Continuing on in my tragically suedeless fashion, still, I rearrange and rehang, making things fresh and neat for the season, including a mood board for my current project, which I finally realized can just get smacked onto the fridge with magnets, since that surface conveniently abuts my work desk.

one good thing

When I was down in Portland two weekends ago, my sibling & I found an extremely fancy vending machine courtyard—the machines were filled with little boxes of opera cake, fancy pickles, tinned fish, home-made Kinder eggs, and there was a Zoltar machine, which is at least as creepy as it is in the movies, with a surprisingly resonant voice delivering your fortune. Behind it, in a closed off courtyard, a group of skeletons sat at a table, involved in some perpetual and mysterious business of their own.

We were on our way to a fancy coffee shop, where I got a cardamon latte and my brother got iced ube, which was purple & delicious. I felt like I was properly in the city: seeing things I'd never see at home, making little weird discoveries with one of my favorite people.

Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may Zoltar have only good fortunes for you.