Dead Letter Department #96

weather report

Well, after a long, gorgeous vacation, I came back ready to jump into work & clear the backlog & see all my local people—instead of which I promptly fell ill with a fever, which had me pretty much flattened for a full week. It started over the weekend, although at first I just thought I was having trouble regulating my temperature at night, and by Tuesday, I was at 102.6 (with fever reducing Tylenol) & a brain that was fried like an egg in cast iron. I’m always a bit of a worst case scenario thinker, and having an odd illness sapping my already limited rationality made things even worse, so I spent a lot of time staring at various walls & sweatily trying to think my way through various disastrous situations, which I will tell you right now is not especially restful. I don’t even know that I remember what most of them were, but at the time it seemed incredibly important that I plot them out to the very last detail.

I couldn’t sleep like I usually do when I’m sick, so there were no restorative naps, and nights got very odd and anxious, as I dutifully put myself to bed and then flopped around like a beached fish for hours waiting for sleep to finally come, going from sweating to freezing and back again. TV or talking on the phone was impossible, books utterly inscrutable, and video games only in extremely small doses, which made the days very long & sharply isolated, especially after having spent two week living with my best friend. I ended up spending a lot of time reading internet advice forums, which had the advantage of being both bite-sized & insanely dramatic.

Also, I did have this song stuck in my head on & off pretty much the whole time, which was a painfully melodramatic choice by my subconscious.

Died of a fever, you say?

This last week’s been better, but since it was a holiday weekend, sort of, I spent the first couple of days grinding away, knowing the side gig jobs would get increasingly sparse and frequently undoable. On Thursday I scooted myself down to my friend’s cabin a county away in the hopes that peace and quiet would help me reconnect with my big writing project, and maybe reset my brain, which feels as though it needs a nice dip in cool water & quite possibly a day hung out on the washing line in order to recover.

I thought I was extremely clever, doing this on a holiday instead of staying in town, but completely forgot that fireworks are legal in Skagit county from noon to midnight on the Fourth (they are illegal in Whatcom, although that truly does not seem to slow people down any, if the last couple of nights are any testament), which means I was in a bit of a race to get enough work done to make the cost of gas money/time to get down here feel worthwhile before the hour strikes & people start letting off clouds of mortars into the sky. On the one hand, I totally get the appeal of making colorful sparks fly & creating very loud noises—the couple of times I’ve done it myself, it’s been super fun—but on the other, I kind of hate the noise, & going to the parks & beaches the day after, when everyone’s left great heaps of extinguished trash all over the place, has increasingly become a real bummer.

When I finally could read again, early in the week, I rabidly chewed my way through Penance, by Eliza Clark, which is an extraordinary novel, centered around the extremely upsetting murder of a teenage girl, profoundly insightful on our collective obsession with true crime, grappling with the exploitative side of it, while simultaneously being about a gruesome crime, on internet culture, on the very specific ways being an isolated teen girl is dangerous. If you’re interested in any of those things, or if you just like an unreliable narrator, I can’t recommend it enough. I also read an omnibus of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, Midaq Alley, The Thief & the Dogs, and Miramar, all in one volume I picked up at some library sale or another, and it’s been fascinating living in such a different world, and leaping to vastly different stages of a single writer’s career.

one good thing

All fall I am extremely dedicated to our good friend the apple, and in the late winter I make do with various Costco sized bags of frozen fruit, but the dear sweet days of summer have finally arrived, and with them the fruit stands.

There are a bunch: the cherry pop-up stands farther up the Guide, various berry farms a little farther out in the county, but I have the great good luck of a proper produce stand right in my neighborhood. I’ve been going every few days, buying cartons of raspberries, which I eat with extreme promptness, big boxes of Rainier cherries that I keep in the fridge so they’re cold & sweet, a whole bag of apricots that have been coyly ripening one at a time, so I keep bending over the wooden bowl I put them in, prodding inquiringly with a fingertip to see if it’s time. I temporarily relax my somewhat stringent food budget, because the season is short, and must be enjoyed as much as possible, which means heaping bowls of fruit at all times.

I owe several of you emails or postcards; please forgive me for the lengthy delay. I am hoping to become a good correspondent again now that I am slightly less addled, but it’s been a bit of a climb out of the pit of delayed obligations, and I’m still hauling myself up that rope.

Thank you for reading, as always. You can email me anytime at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, may your fruit bowls be full and your fingertips stained with raspberry juice.