i'll let you know when i get there
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
prospects
Sunday, March 16, 2025
all systems
was going to
meditate . finish citizenship application . reach out . start strength training . budget better . put effort into marketing . meal prep. write a letter . edit those photos . consider other sources of income . read those saved articles . plan future trips . touch base . commit really commit to a regular art habit . save for retirement . start a book club . clean the blinds . learn a language . start putting care into my aesthetic .
but
head cold . someone else needed something . rain . dishes and laundry . trade war . delayed flight . the irreversibility of time . dental emergency . it is calm and cozy and known here in this small apartment . repulsed by what social media has done and is doing to us . cats . lack of space . screens . aging . weather events . lack of funds . needed a nap . surveillance capitalism . a likely recession . out of social energy . trash tv . the possibility of WWIII . why
...............................................
Falling asleep to Joscha Bach telling me to stare at my face in a mirror until it disappears. A few weeks ago I saw my name spelled out so many times it became utterly strange that it had anything to do with me. The letters all lined up together like they'd been my whole life, but fell over at the slightest nudge, attached to nothing.
And that outside something calls. That floating. That knowing. That going.
everything else:
programming
Thursday, February 20, 2025
the sum of it
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Tuesday
I contemplate this in the sandbox, decorating cakes.
Hard to imagine what it might look like. The first floats vaguely in the mind. The second more clearly, of course. I've been to the museum. Read those books, always imagining it was quite a long time before when really, grandma was 16 years old when it started.
(How many of us can name all eight great-grandparents, let alone name a single thing about them?)
So this is what it feels like.
I remember hearing how even in the second, it wasn't as clear-cut as you might assume with the privilege of hindsight. There may have been people, even in your own family, that thought what would now seem unthinkable things.
A breeze catches my face in its hands and I think this must be one of the things the astronauts miss. What must it be like to see it all from a distance, small and vulnerable and precious and almost nothing?
Will it start on a day? Is it happening already? It is Tuesday and it is hard to know. What will Tuesdays be like when words are weaponized but also hollowed of all meaning? When faith begins to more boldly conflate virtue with violence? The pen has dropped and no one knows who will write the next chapter.
Small bird on a bare branch. I wonder if, months from now, I will be able to look at even a small bird with such polite wonder. Will everything change?
I imagine this time the fear will be more to do with numbers. Energy. No, not crystals. A more literal power. So how do you really prepare to live with the lights off? How do you get ready to do without that tie that web that net that grid that unavoidable convenience that at some point began to bind us all?
Sign out. Look around. Write it down.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
what it will be like
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
facts
Sunday, December 15, 2024
divinity
Saturday, July 13, 2024
as seen
Saturday, March 23, 2024
what is happening
Thursday, January 11, 2024
what you do
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
at the end of a tough year
Saturday, September 30, 2023
more comfort than courage
Monday, May 15, 2023
years of it
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
bike camp
Friday, April 21, 2023
first infection
Sunday, March 19, 2023
nostalgia
Saturday, February 25, 2023
the panic, twice
It's been, what, a week or so now and it seems distant again-
unless I check the news.
Twice in the span of a few weeks,
looking down to see the words ACTIVE SHOOTER
alive on my phone.
Once was the first thing I saw in the morning,
and I stumbled out of the room mumbling about it in a hushed, incomprehensible tone, doom-scrolled for ten minutes before the picture became clear, and then promptly fell back asleep.
"What were you saying about his school?" he texted later.
"OMG" he replied.
Hoax.
It had been a hoax phone call. But the kids had been locked down and dismissed and they parents remained actively rattled.
The panic came back to me in strange ways throughout the day.
Needing to pause to catch my breath at odd times. Muscles tightened for no reason.
All that, and I was steps removed and an entire country away.
Imagine.
The second I was attempting to make my first carrot tartare,
carrots cooked and ready to be diced
chives and capers-
(the way I'd been craving capers-
just the thought could elicit a physical response)
and it was all coming together.
But this time it was not a phone call
and there were real bodies emptied
and no followup outcome article
because the shooter was still at large
and people were hiding in their apartment showers
and new information was not being shared
but conspiracies were all over screens
and in between dicing carrots I was
refreshing my phone
and reaching out to a friend who worked at the site.
She was not at work, but home,
grinding egg shells for her worm compost
and exchanging frantic texts with me about
the strange disconnect of this
very domestic moment
in a terrifying world.
Sunday, December 18, 2022
xmas
gosh the holidays hurt with expectation
hopes wrapped too tightly
santa is not real
not in the way we talk now
and no one has any idea what they are doing
and everyone's too busy to ask
wouldn't the magic
come more honestly
if it had less to do with
this
stuff
Sunday, December 19, 2021
actual
People were here that aren't now.
Celeste.
Theresa.
Who knows the names to come.
I remember a cacophony of gentle and unkind things I thought and said at times- thinking we would go on being people together forever I suppose. The beauty I witnessed in them. The things I judged. The weight of that now. How heavy the petty can be.
It's just not time yet.
What is any of this, actually?
done
I need to tell you something in a hushed tone
about the man in the wheelchair
with only one shoe
hunched over
openly weeping in the rain
and how I walked by him.
What do we do? What can we do?
How is it that a whole crowd of us can stand and wait for the light to change and pretend not to notice a human being openly weeping only ten feet away?
What must it feel like to be the person in that chair- invisible. Worse than invisible.
And at the same time-
What can be done? What could I possibly do? And if I started doing something, would it ever end?
Sunday, October 24, 2021
when
When it's very cold outside
but warm inside
and I'm a little bit sad
but safe.
That's my favorite part of living.
Thursday, October 7, 2021
waves
did that happen?
did I almost drown in the ocean,
unaware that I was at risk
until the lifeguard was swimming toward me?
do all of the contents of your life feel more and more like this as you get older? like a story that happened to someone else. like a scene from a movie, remembered hazily? near death experiences remembered apatheicaly through a fog.
where does it go-
the feeling of living?
Thursday, July 1, 2021
dear diary
Sometimes when I'm writing something,
a letter or a text or a post or a newsletter that only like 10 people read,
I think "what if something happened to me and these are the last words that people would scrutinize and dwell on, reading them over and mining for great meaning in every possible symbol and sign?"
Then I remember that my mom, after watching Ladybird with me, didn't see us there at all. Instead, the whole thing reminded her of her and grandma. Missing the point entirely.
(or did she? It hardly matters. I can still feel my quiet, resigned disappointment at her reaction- twisted like a dull knife)
I guess the point is, there's no guarantee that anyone in this life will actually understand you. Not even if you share blood or a roof or trauma or years.
Sometimes- most times- you're just writing for yourself.
Thursday, May 27, 2021
stop not
What if, instead of becoming paralyzed whenever I think of starting to write more again, what if I just stop not writing? For some of the most important years of my life, I couldn't help but document. The need hasn't gone anywhere. It's been channeled and diffused, but I still feel compelled to slow living down in order to look at it and mold it... to see it instead of just experiencing it. What if I got myself a little notebook? The physicality of those little notebooks might have been the link that kept me red blood alive.
When I considered the disconnect between me and mom the other day (moments before drifting off, naturally), I felt a flash of fear that maybe she would give or throw away the crate of my journals and diaries that have been kept in her basemen for twenty years. She's hinted at what a nuisance my storage has been for nearly as long... and has even given some of my old things away without asking. Who's to say someday it wouldn't be my journals... in a fit of spite or daffiness or who knows what asinine reason there might be. She believes in Qanon doctors, for chrissakes.
At this moment, I feel more urgency to recover those journals more than I feel the need to build any bridge across the enormous gap that exists between the two alternate realities mom and I exist it.