S’up Loners,
Lately I’ve been thinking about wanting and how I never know what I want -- not the object, the desire. It’s not unlike me to find myself between prayer and plea bargains but I want the energy. I want to feel the fire in my belly and it compels me to do something wild and crazy like organize my sock drawer or grab oxyclean and do the laundry. I’ve been learning guitar and how to make sounds and that’s a delight. It brings passion back and it makes me feel capable. Searching for chords and digging fingers into nylon to find the chords because I want the noise and the melody. I used to want to be bathed in sound and now I want to be Neptune and control the waves. Funny that, power.
It’s like I’m trying to solve a crime about passion and Sherlock Holmes peers over at me and says “You see you can’t kill something that was already dead, my dear Watson.” Earlier I was under the bed collecting hi-chew and manuka-eucalyptus wrappers from last week listening to Claire Rousey Mended Dreams, My dollar store earphones crackle and pop when I move a foot from my phone but I want to move my bed to a different wall. I want to see if the dim western light hits me just right I’ll be new again in the morning. I’m collecting candy wrappers and can hear the voices of the transmission fade out and my earphones are crackling and popping and it seems to go with the show and then very clearly I hear a voice from a song I hadn’t heard in a long time begin: May all your days be gold, my child. I deserve another chance at happiness. There’s that what I want. Maybe.
Recently read Larissa Pham’s Pop Song and something that lingered for me was the essay about crushes. Who doesn’t love to elaborate the fleeting chaotic madness of crushes, the body high of infatuation. You can take a read here. I don’t know when it happened but I haven’t been chasing butterflies but longing for something pious, deeply rooted like Joshua trees, Redwoods. Larissa is painting an intimate new beginning, an evening of yearning and art thoughts/thots, and says the Greeks likened Eros, the God of love and horniness, to melting. Oh, the yearning, oh my limbs, oh, I was born molten and confused. Do I really want the lush sovereignty of the woods or to be devoured by flames? What’s a crush anyway? If a tree falls in the forest, if I scream for God and no one hears, etc, etc, etc.
Jiro Inagaki & Soul Media - Funky Stuff (1975) & Elia y Elizabeth - La onda (1972) These are things I bumped on a night where I closed my mouth and didn’t open it again until the next day and went about digging into grout and folding laundry. Sometimes these things don’t happen all sunny and fresh linen but it was overdue. The quiet came for me suddenly. I felt the usual fatigue of being too much, the overbearance of existing. Perception comes with a clammy film that sits on the skin. Wiggling around to funky Japanese jazz and this airy album from Colombia helped a lot. My friend Augustine sent me the latter and I am grateful.
There, There by Tommy Orange & listening to Eichmann In Jerusalem. I found There, There inside of one of those used book shares on the side of the road. I walked past but I knew the cover well. It was on many coffee tables and bedspreads a few years ago and I decided I want that for myself. I wanted to have a beautiful book on my table to look at fondly while I consume other media. To the latter, this has been a project that I interrupt because I’m genuinely a wimp when it comes to processing atrocity and so I pause and pick it up and pause and cry and repeat. I have heard many quotes from it but there was one in particular that stuck with me:
What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality—as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
It’s lingering in my head because it seems topical. I read this NYT essay by a professor of philosophy at the New School and he pointed out that “Many liberals are perplexed that when their fact-checking clearly and definitively shows that a lie is a lie, people seem unconcerned and indifferent. But Arendt understood how propaganda really works. “What convinces masses are not facts, not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part.”
This also seemed topical. It’s relevant but it’s from 2018 and not 2020 or even 2021. Not so long ago but hits different.
There’s this thing Arendt exposes in Eichmann about the worst actions are from those who can’t decide what’s good or bad, not the outcome of moral failing but the inability to decide the function of good or evil. We’re fumbling carefully in the dark and hands out attempt a caress and coming in like a punch doing more harm than expected, intended. I won’t pretend I’m smart enough or that I don’t have fifty burgeoning hobbies that I can barely afford on minimum wage and that unravelling cruelty and the morbidities of mankind is something I can do on my commute but I’ll pop my earphones in and try and fail and try again and fail and try one more time to understand.
On Instagram I asked y’all about ingredients and what to do with them! I’m sorry I’m not there now but there’s more chords I want to learn on the guitar. I’ll be back to showing you what I’m cooking soon.
I love to fantasize about food apparently— at first I thought no one would respond and then when people did— the feverish delight that seized me. Upon being asked what I’d do with partially frozen chili oil-- I would shred potatoes, onion and carrots and throw it in a tempura batter to make potato pancakes. I would slather the oil on the cake. Chopped scallions. Sour cream. It made me smile to know that as someone with ADHD I can have a clear vision.
X. wanted to know what to do with two cans of coconut milk. Save one for a pumpkin curry. The other can I would say to water one down with two cups of water. Add dried chamomile and put it on the stove. Boil. Cut off heat and let sit, steep, cool down. Add vanilla and sweetener. I would froth the beverage in my blender and pour it out and sprinkle it with cinnamon and cloves. Drink before bed.
I’ll leave you with a poem. I want to leave you with a charity or organization but for now you have resources, constant streams of graphics and limited streams of income. Instead I’ll implore you to do what I am going to do tonight. I’m going to close my screen and do this body scan. There is also this guided reiki scan. I’ve not done that one but it looks beautiful. Let me know if you do either or neither or maybe you won’t make to the end of this and that’s okay. Often in my old yoga community Kim would regularly guide us through our bodies and I have been nostalgic for it? Hungry to acknowledge what is hurting, what isn’t working.
This body is wanting and I want to know to know that want.
Godspeed Loners,
Kelly
alone in my room is a once defunct and maybe weekly dispatch from the mundane from a local ficus. kelly is a writer, food himbo & serial hobbyist. you can support a hobby or buy soil for a plant here.