Dead Letter Department #80

weather report

What I would like to be doing right now is either 1) going on a trip with one of my best friends to someplace that’s never even heard of Christmas or 2) going somewhere solo where I could turn my phone off and walk by the ocean & write & then walk by the ocean some more & maybe eat some crab.

Neither of these things are going to happen, but that does not stop me from getting online & wistfully pricing out the cheapest possible hotels in Manzanita, where I haven’t been for years. I love the bay here, and Puget Sound further south, but I miss the massive wildness of the coast, & am feeling a powerful desire to have that winter blast of ocean that blows everything out of my head & leaves it salt-scoured & temporarily empty.

If I were feeling more optimistic, I might try to get some sort of retreat-at-home planned for myself during the next couple weeks. I’m packing in as many side gig hours as possible because it’s about to slow to a trickle, which means my budget is greatly diminished but my time & theoretically my energy is about to increase, and I’m already getting frustrated because I don’t feel I’m able to use that time well, or in some cases at all.

It’s a bad time of year for me. We have a scant eight hours of sunlight a day, and it’s impossible to go into a store without being auditorially bitch slapped by carols. Sometimes my only rational responses to the season are anesthetizing, but that doesn’t just mean terrible memories don’t get through: nothing does, including my work.

I would like to Kool-aid man into the wall of the new year feeling ambitious, disciplined, overflowing with ideas, itching to get to them all. Instead, I’m rather limply dragging myself from one day to the other, occasionally glancing up to try to find some little outpost of pleasure to stop at. I had a few brief beautiful bursts of clarity and drive earlier this month, but they seem so far off now as to be positively imaginary, like I must have been fooling myself when it happened. Also how I start feeling about sunlight, usually around this time of year—when it makes an appearance I feel like I’m seeing some sort of mythical creature I had convinced myself didn’t really exist anymore.

It seems like it would be logical to rest, if I can’t do anything else, but rest feels almost as impossible as good work does right now. There is a difference, as N. & I were discussing the other day, between rest & falling into a sort of stasis, a lightly dissociative state where time passes until the next thing occurs. I can almost always reach the latter, that’s been a survival skill for me, sort of like a robot powering down for a while, but I don’t think that’s rest in the way that other people describe it. K.C. Davis, who I love, described rest the other day as something you are pleasantly conscious of doing, meaning a condition that pushes you into numbness, blankness, is not actually rest.

I’m doing my best—I have a list, several lists, one for the grocery store, so I can get the necessary shopping done before the onslaught of panicked buyers begins, one of things to watch or read, so I’m not staring blankly at the streaming services, one of small projects it might be good to do. I only have one thing left to buy, for my niece’s parents, and a quick stop at the bookstore to buy a book for a stranger. I did not turn this letter to you into a mean little airing of my even pettier grievances, though I certainly have enough to do so, since this time of year always seems to leave me with a fine, fresh crop of them. Maybe I can turn those into fuel somehow, or at the very least a big pile of mulch.

one good thing

There’s a new Murderbot book by Martha Wells winging its way to my mailbox as we speak, so at the very least I will get to keep company with one of my favorite non-humans while I slog my way through the next couple of weeks. If you haven’t read them yet, I can’t recommend them more, especially if your grasp on humanity sometimes feels as awkward & tenuous as mine does.

If you missed it last week, I’ve got a short story in the new F(r)iction, with an absolutely gorgeous illustration by Isabel Burke. You can order the Bodies issue here, or wait until the next time you see me, when I will doubtlessly thrust it enthusiastically into your face for you to admire.

Thank you for reading. This may be the last you hear from me in ’23, but I’ll be sliding back into your inbox again in the new year, & I look forward to seeing you there. You can always write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com, & in the meantime, may you have enough outposts of pleasure to carry you from one day to another all the way through the end of the year.