Dispatch From The Mundane 020
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember
Hey Loners,
“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember” - Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Sammie’s dog got a new chew toy, and it quacks through the speakerphone.
Got the blues and the aches and a covid negative test, but like many, I’ll likely test again because what else could it be? Why do I feel this way? I bought three tangerines from the market. I cut in the flesh with my thumbnail and pull the fat tissue from the skin. The watery tangerines are the size of baseballs, and the skin is almost green. It’s late. I’m listening to Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo."
Haven’t made my birthday cake yet.
It’ll happen when the desire to celebrate myself manifests. It was there for a moment, and then it faded away. I kept saying robotically “this is to celebrate” or “this is because I am happy,” and it felt artificial. Is this a muse? Am I alive right now? Or am I just nervous? I have the picture in my head of the cake and I’ll make the cake and I’ll eat it alone. Maybe I’ll do it in 100 days.
Tired of bad news but when I get good news it hits just like the bad news did in which I try to digest it while staying afloat. Tell the group chat good news, but it mostly reads as if I’m reading a eulogy. I’m watching a YouTuber take me through her day, and she announces she’s going to get a jump on 2022 by starting her will, and she’s got a great app for us to try. Told my boss she could have the sweater. Jesse encouraged me to buy from that thrift in Williamsburg, and Adam will get the letterman. There’s an app for everything. There’s a YouTuber to walk you through everything.
Tried to tell my parents the good news, and my mom said that I’d recorded better, happier voicemails. I loved to make ones that sounded like I was at a party or on a trip. It’s all very “it’s a birthday party, happy birthday, darlin’” and I’m happy to tell you that you’ve reached me but because I’m so cool and famous, I can’t pick up because of the sound of the parade thrown in my honor as a cool and popular fixture in town.
Permitting myself to think of the new year without envisioning a mushroom cloud or curling up in a ball and hearing "we've got a winner" while Clint Mansell's "Lux Aeterna" plays. I rewatch the movie on Christmas. It’s been on my mind since X. calls me at early morning and says “I’m out of my mind on ketamine and I want to hear what your voice sounds like.” So I tell X. a story and X. falls asleep but not before promising that they’re testing everything. Everyone’s talking about it like new Covid strains— I think of the new year and I just think of how tired Atlas’s arms must be holding the Earth up. Clint’s soundtrack on The Fountain better than Requiem For A Dream; “Death Is The Road To Awe” is red wine on a hot pan; it releases the searing hot muscle of my heart from the iron and reduces me down.
Two days before Christmas I am engulfed in the Quaker solitude of grief; the commitment of silence and rememory of someone you love— speak if you want to, sigh if you need to but silence is for everyone. A man tells a story about how my grandparents were the first people to invite him over to eat after six months without seeing anyone. I recall last year and the first time I asked Reese to hug me at work.
Every year for Christmas my grandparents always gave us the gift of a donation in our name— sometimes we’d be giving a lamb or a cow to a family. This year my donation was to help village women receive therapy and self-help classes. I am sobbing underneath my mask and the tears pool into my nose and drip onto my knuckles that are clenched white because I want to stop crying. Christmas day I pack up an old suitcase I have and filled it with old blankets and sweaters and I dragged it down the road to a houseless neighbor with a fresh order of Chinese takeout. Saw on my walk home that the wheels on one of hers were broken. On the way home I buy some folks subway and hot coffees and I say it’s from my grandma, it’s her donation. Merry Christmas.
In the next year I’m hoping to exfoliate more but don’t worry it’s a metaphor. There's a soft crepe-like film on my skin that I've been rubbing off since early this spring of ideas I can't use anymore. I will shed it regardless if I want to keep it. I'm tired now but I’m thinking about how any day now and it’ll be summer again because that’s life. The only lesson I learn every year and fail to do is to let it go. I used to open shows by asking the audience if it was all right if I took up space, and now I enter the room, and I'm hoping someone asks to carry what I've got in my arms.
Can I hold that for you? I've got the door.
This year sure was something.
Did a show recently, and typically, my brain turns off when it comes to an end. I forget to preserve myself or save any energy. Anna hands me a drink, makes sure my hands find food, and that I get on the train home. Anna chides someone softly and says, "they don't like that," and I'm not sure what preference she's articulating, but it dawns on me how well I am known. I awake in the morning, safe in my bed, ready for work, and imagine the world where I stayed.
Is permission enough to self-actualize? Can I take up space? Is there space for me?
Turned the light off in the kitchen. I've been reorganizing the pantry.
There's a whole shelf of sugar—jaggery, panela, coconut, turbinado, powdered, brown, and three types of honey. There's local, and there's raw. I've got a jar full of mixed nuts from all the nuts I almost ate. I have been in bed for a few days because chronic and seasonal, and it's the new year, I don't feel any different. I'm older than when I wrote to you last, and in some ways, I think it but not in the ways I want to.
At TJMaxx, I cringe at a glittery mug that says adult-ing is hard and can't recall if it's supposed to be funny. Reading it irritates me. It's not that I've lost a sense of whimsy: I'm wearing an old PBR Christmas sweater that F. won in a pinball tournament, and it's become like an ugly depression robe in the winter. Every time I put it on, I tell myself to text F. back, and so maybe by telling you, I will.
And it's not as if I'm above questioning or wringing my hands about being an adult or that I have any fucking idea what I'm doing, but some things were a thing for such a long time, like saying "vicious" or "off-the-chain" and one day you wake up and the words don't fit in your mouth. I stared at the mug. Chipped, dusty, and deeply discounted. I feel tired. I'm panicked because now I understand what a Roth IRA is and that I don't have one as I hurtle through adulthood I've been in denial about for some time.
I'm not good at planning.
Never known how long I'm staying or if I can get comfortable in my own life, but I'm trying. Been wiping off jars and shifting around, and taking inventory of my pantry. My eyes are droopy as I taste a dried prune, once plum from this summer. Recall sitting in the backyard at a hardcore show talking the whole time. I kept thinking I'd go inside, but I liked it there. Mosquitos, the explosion of light and sound behind me, my shoulders hunched forward and I’m listening. Every time I’m in a group of people it feels worth writing about— I think oh, god, it’s been a while. In the next dispatch there will be food. I’ll think of 5 goals for 2022. I’ll tell you about the good news that sounded like bad news. I’ll peel all the cold tangerines. I’ll think of 10 things I’m grateful for and I’ll say it like a prayer as I turn off all the time. My body still hurts from the blues and the aches.
My grandpa tells this story. There was a beautiful spruce tree outside of his window. Right in front of the desk he often sat and wrote. He’d look up periodically and fix his gaze upon the tree. He’d seen the spruce through all sorts of seasons. He’d seen it in spring, in winter. A few months ago he’d noticed it’s needles shedding and appearing weak. Something took hold of the beautiful spruce tree and it grew stricken with disease. One day men came and unearthed the spruce tree. My grandpa said my grandma had been that spruce tree. A sight he’d fixated upon in every season for 60 years and he could mourn she is dead but instead he chose to celebrate that she was.
The last year sure was something.
Thanks for reading a dispatch from the mundane in 2021.
Godspeed loners,
Kx