Dead Letter Department: Geese & Freezers

weather report

It is the time of year to notice trees. Dark mornings, heavy with mist, the low-hanging clouds ringing the hills on the horizon, and in the early arriving evenings there are long hours in which to see the stars. There are drifts of leaves on my usual walks, delightfully crunchy underfoot, fleets of spiky fallen horse chestnuts and the busy rustlings of squirrels stocking their larders for the winter. The true rains haven’t really started yet, but you can feel them coming, just around the bend in the river.

It’s on my list to put the vent covers in and take the hoses off to store in the garage, which is packed full of shit that needs to go to the dump before winter, to move the hummingbird feeder close to the back porch steps so I can take it inside on freezing nights for the birds that stay all winter, though we already have fewer hungry visitors, with the migrators winging away. I have seen a few flocks of geese, calling out overhead, tipping my head back in parking lots and on trails to watch their shifting patterns in the sky and wonder how they decide who flies point, setting the destination, and when they switch out. Is it a heady experience, being the first in that long, surging line of wings?

I keep forgetting to bring the sunlamp in from the garage to add to my morning routine, but maybe writing it to you will help me finally remember. I’ve rearranged my entire working area, like I told you last time, so I have some more writing space, started a new notebook since the last one was finally filled up, and a physical reshuffling is always a good ramp for the other kinds of sorting too: of projects & priorities &, in this case, the to-read pile, which was actually beginning to encroach upon my leg room at the desk & has now been moved to its own bookshelf in the bedroom. I’m egregiously behind on taking notes, part of the whole working problem I’ll be writing to you about in a (secret) Dead Letter soon, but my reading itself has picked up quite sharply since I decided to do a bit of a social media detox for the a couple of weeks.

At first it was almost shockingly difficult. I never quite see how I’ve let the phone fill in all the stray corners of my day and not just the lightly dissociative times until suddenly some asshole (me) takes it away. The genuinely anesthetizing quality is only noticeable for me when the anesthesia suddenly wears off, and there I am, rawdogging reality again.

“What did we used to do with all those little moments we spend on the phone now?” J asked, when we were talking about this the other day.

“Just, like, looked at shit, I think,” I said, and I have been looking at shit more. The birds pecking in the undergrowth in the backyard, the gardens in the neighborhood around the senior center where I walk when I take my mom for her workout a couple of times a week, the small undone projects around my house that usually evade notice. The paint in the bathroom, which is terrible, and definitely needs to be redone. I’ve been listening to music a little more consciously, not just slapping at the usual playlists, bringing a book everywhere, even if I’ll only have to wait fifteen minutes.

It’s a cycle, of course: I’m completely off phone-based social media today, but one day soon there will be some genuinely good reason why I have to download it again, some community event I need to find or friend’s project I want to support, and then I’ll set some very reasonable limits, which will gradually erode and erode until one day I look up and realize that it’s eating far more of my life than I want it to, and I’ll have to start all over again.

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, which I read a couple of years ago, was extremely useful for me in understanding this cycle for myself. It’s so easy to think of this particular problem, like so many, as being a personal failing, and I really did, felt like I just had weak willpower, was unusually susceptible to the seductions of the scroll. But I will remind you that there are literal billion dollar industries whose whole focus is to keep our eyes locked on our feeds, on our phones, on whatever advertisements they can shovel into us, and that is not a problem of personal willpower. You cannot grit your teeth hard enough to extract yourself from enormous, overwhelming social problems and suddenly, explosively, solve the whole business for good, even if it’s just for yourself.

You can, however, take a break from it all, even if it’s temporary, and start training yourself to look again.

one good thing

I have had a semi-broken fridge for a ridiculously, perhaps painfully long time. Not badly broken, but the freezer was not in good shape, leaving me to spend more time than I would prefer chipping blocks out ice out of the upper shelves and the door. This is a messy process, using an old butter knife to hack at the ice, leaving shards of ice that turn into slippery little puddles all over the kitchen, and it also meant I couldn’t really ever have ice cubes in there. Because the food did stay frozen, technically, I put up with it for too long, probably, until the things in the back of the fridge portion also began to be effected. The last straw was a little tub of beautiful castrel vetrano olives, sharded over with ice, that I had very much been looking forward to.

So I finally went through the whole research rigamarole, with the price matching and the review reading and then the sudden awareness of just how astroturfed to hell and back all the usual review sites are these days, which led to several more research rabbit holes. The guy at the store explained a whole thing about the change in laws in 2012 that were meant to make things more energy efficient but instead have just contributed to the tissue paper like quality of appliances today, compared to days of old. Since I cannot time travel for my kitchen equipment, I simply did my best with what was on offer and now the new fridge is here—I just got up and took a soothing look at the inside of the freezer, which has no blocks of ice at all except for the ones in the ice cube tray—and it is already improving my life substantially. It’s so new I keep having to dust little particles of styrofoam packaging off the front of it.

The guys accidentally dinged it a little trying to get it in the back door and felt terrible, tried to give me their own money to pay for the white paint pens I guess you can buy, but it’s such a tiny scratch, barely visible. And anyway I think there’s something kind of lucky about that—I don’t have to worry about the first dent or whatever, because now it’s happened already.

More soon—mail for the Real Mail readers is on the way—and in the meantime, may whatever scratches and dents you acquire be of the lucky variety.