The Dead Letter Department #4

(did you miss dead letter department #3? catch up here!)

calendar page flip dot gif

Well, I don’t know about you but I rang in the New Year on an extremely extra playlist, a solo kitchen dance party, & an instagram live concert with the most goddamn wholesome comment section I’ve ever seen in my life. Crying, people kept writing, & thank you john, & we’re all together even though we’re not together! Plus, of course, all the knife emojis (see dlp #3 for the song if you missed it). I made the only cocktail currently recognized under my household flag (bourbon & ginger ale) & went to bed early, only to be awakened like an hour later by every other neighbor setting off a giant pile of fireworks.

Some years the fireworks really bother me, but this year I just lay there under the covers feeling sort of unexpectedly fond of all my fellow idiots, trying so hard to make this shit year and this subdued night something to celebrate. Good luck, loud neighbors, I hope you drank lots of water and were making bad choices within your household only!

reading room

I didn’t intend to start re-reading The Once & Future King. It’s more than six hundred pages long & I went through a pretty intense King Arthur phase as a kid I wasn’t sure I really needed to revisit as an adult, but I was berating myself for how little I’ve read lately and someone had just given me a lovely hardback copy that was sitting nearby when I was lecturing myself about how I just needed to start reading something again, anything, it didn’t matter what it was, and now here we are 254 pages later with a lot of intense feelings about Merlin having to live backwards.

It is racist, in the way so many of the things I read uncritically as a kid are racist, peppered with thoughtless slurs and painful characterizations, & the only remotely tolerable woman character so far is Maid Marian, as all the rest appear to be vain, lusty witches. Obviously I love vain lusty witches, but T.H. White does not, & that is quite clear in the text.

But Merlin is magnificent, perplexed and hilarious as he tries frantically to give Arthur enough of a moral education to rule, and the descriptions carry you off into an England that absolutely never existed where Robin Hood must send an innocent holding iron in his nervously sweating hand to rescue Friar Tuck and the poor Questing Beast will die of a broken heart if King Pellinore ever leaves off hunting her through the Forest Sauvage.

everyday I write the book

I’ve always been kind of weird & secretive about the larger writing projects I’m aiming towards, and I don’t really see that changing any time soon so I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not too specific when I tell you about them here. There are four or five at the moment, which is actually too many; my mind works substantially better when I have a singular devotion, & I keep hoping I’ll get myself oriented at one, but it’s been difficult for all of the pandemic reasons. Sometimes, when I’ve been working hard & have also been very fortunate, the whole thing comes alive & starts moving much faster. I keep hoping that will happen; at the moment it feels like I’m chipping my way forward out of a block of filthy ice; progress is distressingly, unsurprisingly slow. The distress only slows me down further & I turn into some sort of horrible self-hating ouroboros, unable to get my tail out of my mouth.

The only thing to do, of course, is keep going, and sometimes stop in here and complain to you about it.

the only good thing

The local food delivery service I use has started offering root vegetables & garlic, which is excellent because I eat more garlic than any single human should & am constantly trying to persuade myself to include more vegetables in my life. The first one to arrive was the most spectacular, & personable, daikon radish I have ever seen. Obviously I made it a hat.

It’s clearly very nearly ready to set off on a Miyazaki-style adventure, carrying only a little bundle of its most important belongings, ready to fall in love with a wizard or set up a delivery service, or perhaps both. My sister suggested a version of Bridgerton made with stop-motion radishes & I for one would love to see it.

other windows

The children next door got a trampoline for Christmas which I discovered at 8:15 on Christmas morning when they vaulted out of the house and began flinging themselves up and down on it and shouting “DING DONG DING DONG” at the top of their voices. This sounds like it could really go either way but was genuinely hilarious & the ensuing shrieking and yodeling as they attempt to yeet themselves into the treetops has actually been kind of refreshing. I realized, when I was telling this to my sister, that it’s because it’s the sound of actual human voices engaged in actual human activity in proximity to me, not just podcast voices and phone voices.

I stopped to get drive-through coffee & (only good thing alum) croissant sandwich on my way to the beach again yesterday & the barista asked me about my New Year’s plans & told me in all her blessed, youthful sincerity that now that she is twenty-four entire years old she really needs to chill out on the hangovers so she had some meatballs in a crockpot at home and was planning to hang out with her boyfriend. I was absolutely RIVETED. Tell me more about your meatball recipe, & your responsible partying choices, young person. Give me another shot of that delicious small talk, I miss it so much!

write back

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