Dead Letter Department #11

(did you miss dead letter department #10? catch up here!)

strangers

I used to ride a lot of busses and trains, and I think I also maybe used to have the kind of face that made people want to talk to me, especially if they had the kind of pressing problem that could get you boarding a train at a strange hour, headed towards a place you weren’t entirely certain you should be going. I was really lucky, mostly, in that I hardly ever ended up talking to creeps, just people that were so full of whatever they were experiencing that it was spilling out in every direction, something so pressing that they just had to tell you about it on the 7:45 from Brattleboro to Bridgeport.

There was an invisible threshold I crossed some years into my corporate job when I was so locked into the daily track from work to chores to early morning writing and back again that I almost never spoke to a stranger. I also grew out of the face, to some degree: I think there’s a certain openness, or maybe an optimism, that I don’t possess anymore, don’t project. And then, of course, over the past year and a half of the pandemic I stopped meeting strangers entirely because somehow so very few of them ever seemed to appear suddenly in the middle of my apartment.

Keeping my head down & my eyes on my own paper is a hard habit to break but I’ve been cracking away at the edges of it. Just this week I talked to a glamorous lady in a blue polka dot jumpsuit, a homeless veteran reading H.P. Lovecraft, and the charming owner of a tiny chihuahua named Elf. “He’s never met anybody he didn’t like,” the guy told me and indeed Elf appeared to have been waiting his entire life to make my acquaintance, which does make a person feel pleasantly popular.

Best of all, I went to the little pop-up Pride Parade, pushing through the enormous anxiety I felt about even being at the edges of a crowd. There were no floats this year, no corporate-sponsored employee groups from Bank of America & T-Mobile, and very few campaigning politicians. It was just people: walking, skateboarding, riding bikes, wheeling along, and we were all just so fucking glad to be there—adorable teenagers proudly holding each other’s hands, tiny children wearing extravagant rainbow tutus, older lesbians talking to all their friends, and a wide variety of startled dogs in Pride paraphernalia. Betty Desire was there, of course, as the linch-pin of local drag culture, and I was thrilled to spot my personal favorite stranger, the zebra striped crop-top wearing bad-ass on roller blades who usually accompanies the derby crowd.

I read and heard a lot this year from queer people who don’t care for Pride: they’re over it, it’s too corporate these days, or just too corny, it’s constitutionally not for them in the same way that Dan Savage is actually really for straight people. There have been years that I would have said a lot of the same things, but this time around I felt incredible tender and grateful. My city is pretty blue but you only have to get about four feet outside of it before you start running into Trump flags & violent bumper stickers & the cold stares of people who think visibly queer people shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t exist at all. It was good to have a day where I could watch kids with “they/them” written across their chests marching up the street surrounded by their friends; it was good to stand in the sunshine & cheer the asexual flag capes, all of us occasionally getting pelted by handfuls of candy.

things I’m not reading

Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price. I think it’s probably really good—the first chapter was, anyway—but the prospect of reading something so sharp and insightful about burnout and the crushing weight of expectation was too much. I’m in too deep at the moment to let myself stop and think about it so I had to send the book sliding back down the metal chute into the depths of the library.

things I’m eating

The fruit stand in my neighborhood has been doing right by me: first it was apricots and raspberries, then cherries, and now we’re into peaches and melons with a strong side game in nectarines.  A very sharp looking lady popped out of the hair salon bus and came over to look at the enormous pile of produce I was buying on a recent visit. “What are you baking with all that?” she asked. “Nothing,” I had to admit. “I’m just eating it.”

An old friend came to stay last weekend so we stopped at the shellfish farm when we were down in Skagit & picked up a dozen oysters & a couple pounds of mussels. I made a tomato mozzarella salad while they diligently & expertly shucked the oysters, and then we steamed the mussels in white wine & shallots & garlic. With a loaf of crusty bread to dip into the broth it was the best meal I’ve had in months. The oysters tasted exactly like the ocean.

one good thing

I took myself to the beach this past weekend, brought my water shoes and an iced coffee and said hi to a bunch of dogs including an ancient, grey-muzzled lady who reminded me so much of my own old man the last year of his life: trotting slowly along to sniff all the things, utterly ignoring any sort of recall that did not align with whatever the hell she was going to do anyway. The tide was rushing out, sweeping over the sandy flats so I shoved my backpack behind a log and walked until I was in up to my calves, seaweed sloshing against my ankles. Small fish zipped around in the cloudy sand at the bottom, and crabs whisked down the streams out of the tide pools and into the sea like it was some kind of crustaceans-only water slide.

write back

I hope your summer has whatever your equivalent is for getting a handful of candy hucked directly at your person by an enthusiastic homosexual. If you like the Dead Letter Department, please share it with a friend. You can email me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here again!