Dead Letter Department #83

weather report

It’s been bitter, bitter, cold—coldest weather in 10 years, a low of -6 with windchill, in a time of year when it’s more often damp and mild, cold enough to freeze the inside of your nose in just a few moments, and leave a thickening, bulbous skin of ice anywhere water passes. I’ve spent most of the past few days indoors, occasionally venturing out to feel the bite of it, and to haul the humming bird feeder in & out in the hopes of providing them a few hours of access to their usual buffet before it froze solid again.

On Saturday I drove to a couple of the waterside parks to see how the bay was taking the freeze. There was a haze of sea smoke on the horizon—a thick mist rising off the water, which was actually warmer than the air, and the rocks were glazed with frozen salt water. I stopped at the lagoon in Fairhaven to admire the view, and found all the water birds bunched up together where the ice had not yet managed to reach.

The waves were coming in under the ice, making the whole sheer mass of it shift and shimmer ever so slightly as they pushed their insistent way to shore.

We made it very nearly through the cold snap, dripping the taps steadily, running a space heater pointed towards the pipes set in the wall of my apartment where it’s coldest, but yesterday afternoon there was a colossal noise from somewhere underneath the house, and investigation found that a heating vent in the house downstairs, rather than pushing warm air out, instead contained running water from a pipe that had burst somewhere underneath the floor. A scramble followed, including a lot of panicked googling of the ‘water shut off where’ type, but by sheer coincidence I did manage to find it & flip it off so we at least were not listening to the expensive sounds of damage roaring away under the floorboards while we waited for our lucky number to come up with the plumber.

He was very nice, gave some gentle advice about styrofoam blocks for the vents in the crawlspace—which, honestly, twenty minutes before I could not have told you existed at all), fixed the burst pipe in the exterior hose bib, warmed up briefly by the fireplace, the only source of heat in the downstairs apartment with the furnace in a questionably damp condition, and went on his way into the dark to solve someone else’s problems. It took only about five hours from phone call to running water and heat restoration, which given the number of burst pipes and sputtering furnaces in the county at the moment, felt quite close to miraculous.

brain weather report

My attention project is, I think, just barely beginning, but there are some sightings of progress. I told you last time about some new habits I’ve been trying to hammer into place, rebuilding my mental scaffolding again (& again & again), & so far I’ve been spending more time reading actual books than scrolling, which is already helping. There’s been a bit of useful wool-gathering, which of course can only happen when there is leisure to do so, and I’m not stuffing content into every second of the day, leaving nary a crack for anything else to get through. The side effect of that, as I keep saying, is my work can’t get through either: there’s no place left to think about the stories I’m trying to write, or to stomp along turning one of my characters over in my head.

When I absolutely cannot stand anything more challenging, I’ve been reading old favorites and diving back into fan fiction, which activates something similar to the endless scroll, with the advantages of having a least a semblance of a narrative arc and an actual stopping point, at which it might occur to me to either get a snack and go back to it or go on to something else, if I’m feeling sufficiently restored.

My hopes of spending more time outside were, obviously, suspended by the arctic blast (which I still say sounds like an unpleasant frozen drink you’d buy at 7/11, possibly of the blue raspberry variety), but I have hopes that having it feel relatively warm, compared to this when it has finally passed, will send me sailing out of doors in the next few days, happy to see something other than these same four walls.

other indulgences

Listen, I can’t tell you when I started watching the Housewives franchises, but I can tell you there is nothing more candy coated & low stakes than watching a bunch of millionaires with truly bonkers aesthetics fight each other over perceived slights. It’s court intrigue, essentially, with shifting alliances and disinformation tactics, but also I don’t have to care very much about any of it because they’re all so terrible. I’m currently deep in the latest season of RH: Beverly Hills, part way through Potomac, which truly becomes more unhinged every season, and looking forward with bated breath to the new Vanderpump Rules offshoot which appears to be set in some kind of French manor house/hotel, if the stingers I’ve been served up are any indication.

Did Lisa Vanderpump really recruit a dozen exceptionally well-groomed and expensively dressed young people to fight in a big house in France? If so, I cannot wait.

Also, if any of you happen to have a bead on how many marriages make it through the reality wringer compared to similar, non-fighting on camera type marriages, please send me the article immediately, because I am dying to know. So far my only money is on Lisa and Ken Vanderpump, because they actually seem to enjoy each other—most everyone else appears to be in a trajectory towards to divorce of varying incandescence, not least because being on the show seems to be a pretty intense personality rewiring, but one that occurs over several years, and I can see being pretty startled by it. Truly, some of the people on the show behave as if they've never seen the show, and I appreciate their dedication to the fourth wall.

Thank you for continuing read these letters, and extra gratitude especially for those of you support the Dead Letter Department by subscribing. I’ll have a Secret Dead Letter coming out in the next few days, and also owe several of you personal letters in the mail, which I hope to send shortly. I’ll see you here again soon, and in the meantime, may there be exactly the kind of candy-coated nonsense you like best when you need to rest your poor tired brain.