Dead Letter Department #93

a non-exhaustive list of things i thought about this long weekend

*I was walking on the beach up at Semiahmoo, no other cars in the parking lot, no one else to be seen, just the waves & the roses falling out of the hedges, and three great blue herons who were hopscotching each other as I crunched along, always trying to stay beyond some invisible borderline, so that as I passed it, they would flap up with great indignation and sail on to the next little rocky outcropping jutting out of the surf. Suddenly the whole idea of being a persistence predator started to make a lot more sense: wearing them down, all that energy it took for them to lift those enormous wings, that ungainly-looking takeoff, while I just kept trudging along after them.

also this post i saw afterwards:

*old friends, who even after years still make me laugh so hard my face hurts, & the pleasures of reconnecting. i sat at at a picnic table at one of my local hangs (a place that has beer & a produce stand with fresh asparagus & hanging baskets, and a food truck that specializes in dumplings) for like two hours with the friends I used to take breaks with every day at my corporate job & drank beer & caught up on everything we’ve been doing the last few years.

I always get stressed out when I see people I haven’t seen in a long time—will we still make sense to each other? Am I going to accidentally be a huge weirdo? I probably was, but in the end it didn’t even matter: it was simultaneously like no time had passed, as though we’d walked up to the bridge on our morning break just yesterday to look down at the water flowing, & like we had all the intervening years of news to catch up on.

*Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (recommended, I think, in Roxane Gay’s newsletter), which was poetic & thrilling & devastating. The writing is so fucking sharp, & I think it’s the best thing I’ve read on how social media can absolutely drown you in poisonous, curated access to lives you’re envious of. It’s written in beautiful little bite-sized chunks, which makes it rather like scrolling through something, & while I’ve been on a good roll with reading, I kept thinking how perfect it would be for a fallow time, because turning the pages became absolutely addictive.

*The approach of summer: it’s truly late spring here now, the irises fading, the peonies just a couple of bright clinging petals, & everything getting lusher & greener by the day. I know a lot of places summer really starts Memorial Day, but it was grey & raining for most of the weekend here, with a hazy break long enough to pull weeds & have coffee outside a couple of times. I think we’ve got some wet cloudy spring left in our run, & I’ve been thinking about what I want to try to do this summer, when the water finally gets a little warmer and the nights are so short.

*Aging, my own & my parents, & the inevitability of the failures of the body, but also simultaneously this Charlotte Shane essay about resignation & bodily suffering. I have never done a single Pilat (the singular of Pilates, I assume), & I’m not totally clear on what Rolfing is, but ever since I read this, I’ve been rolling the ideas around in my mind: what have I resigned myself to that I don’t actually need to endure?

Many things, I’m sure, and as I’m starting, a year after surgery, to really grapple with the chokehold that dysphoria had, &, honestly, continues to have on me, perhaps there are some places where I actually don’t need to be enduring quite as hard or as painfully.

*Repetition, being doomed by the narrative, and this story, You Will Not Live to See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension, by Isabel J. Kim.

*Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, and particularly the threads that wind back to her essays & autobiographical writing. I hope someone does a long, juicy piece about that—I wish I could—about the way her essay on her three father figures sits next to this book, & the writing she did about Iowa & being a waitress butts up against Commonwealth’s Franny stepping out of her shoes behind the bar. I’m eventually going to be a Patchett completionist, I suspect, after my sibling having introduced me to her work a few years back with Bel Canto, & my friend’s mom recommending Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, which I’ve now probably read three times, with increasing understanding. If you read Commonwealth, write me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & tell me what you think.

*How the neighbor’s cat has learned my schedule, so that three times out of five when I go to sit on the patio in the evening he has either wedged himself under the fence or is standing outside the gate & making pitiful noises until I let him in to eat grass, roll around on the concrete, and occasionally deign to purr at me. He also knows approximately how long I stay, so he gets up with me and waits to be let out the gate again, to go about his feline business.

one good thing

An artichoke the size of a softball, purchased for $2.29 at Trader Joe’s, stem sliced short, steamed for 20 minutes, served with melted butter into which I dropped a couple of crumbles of blue cheese, eaten while watching the Vanderpump Rules Reunion (boy, Tom Sandoval is a nightmare, huh?), napkin fully spread across my chest to unsuccessfully contain the mess. Truly a decadent experience.

Thank you for reading, and to those of you who are able to support the newsletter. You can always email me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com with your own artichoke recipes. I’ll write you again soon, & in the meantime, may your persistent predation pay off in exactly the way you need.