𓅯｡𖦹° 8.31.26 11pm on a monday night and all I want is to sit on a patio under starlight and eat some mussels from a restaurant in seattle that doesn't exist anymore but was next to my old bakery. I loved working in food even when I hated it because I knew everybody and also every restaurant used our bread; my friends comped my meals and the chefs always came by with an extra plate to say hello and I felt part of a messy party that involved both the glitter and cleanup at 3am. most days I cried in the walk-in and worked 14 hour shifts on 5 hours of sleep and had flour in every single pore, but sometimes I'd get off with my coworkers, all fellow queer freaks, on a random tuesday and we'd wander down to the brewery to trade bread for ale and sit happy and tired in the sun. how long ago all of it all seems now, and how fast—I realize, again and again—is a life. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.26.26 "Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community. All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way [....] In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It’s a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone. Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone. What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen." - Ursula K. Le Guin, from "Words are my Matter." ⁘ Went on a walk with J this morning to get coffee after her appointment; the streets were empty and humid and I was reminded of a similar walk we took right after moving here. How quiet it is, we kept saying then. How few people. I was surprised then at the flatness of all the buildings so low to the ground, at how much of the sky there was. When we left NYC and got off onto the NJ turnpike, the sky itself opened up to us as if it had been penned in by the city's skyline before and now had space to unfurl. Surely they were not the same clouds, I thought. I still haven't developed the film from that camera, two years later, but I remember what I saw. The sky today is blue and clear, the faintest wisps of clouds low on the horizon. The damp heat warps the air in some spots, shimmering almost like a tear in the world. You can feel the heat pressing upon you like a hand on your breastbone, only it's gentle. Some of our neighbor's flowers have migrated into our yard and erupted in between the frush of dead weeds. J opened the door to our house and nudged the swollen wood with her foot. If we're here next year, I said, let's plant all native wildflowers. ⁘ Second walk of the day to the library, my tote bag was heavy with evidence of my over exuberance on the way back. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.24.26 ⁘ weekend food prepped: ⚘ new batch of carrot kimchi ⚘ roasted chickpeas (x2) ⚘ marinated tofu ⚘ beet greens ⚘ roasted beets with sweet onion ⚘ roasted carrots with sweet onion ⚘ roasted potatoes with red pepper and paprika ⚘ ginger to freeze I love squeezing the ribbony carrots in my fists after their salt bath. The bowl fills with cloudy orange water and I end up with speckles on my shirt since I always forget to wear an apron. Afterwards I laid in bed in my big ZUZU shirt eating a peach and scooping up flecks of maldon with my fingertips from the small metal bowl. How wonderful to be worn out and showered, laying on clean sheets, drinking something cold. I'd cut J's hair in the bathroom that morning while we listened to 90s hits; at the end there was a whole cat's worth of hair on the floor. The light from the window this time of year is always green as it breaks through the leaves. All day we moved from shadow to sun, bright light, green cradles. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.21.26 "Aren't they glorious?" an older man on his bicycle called out to me across the street while I stood in front of a yard flush with scotch thistle and prairie ironweed and phlox and brilliant orange monarch butterflies lilting and flitting from flower to flower in a swarm better termed a murmuration, their black edged wings opening and closing, their flight looping through the air around me in the smallest wind. It's been so long since I've seen monarchs or butterflies at all, much less tens and tens of butterflies thickly and freely clustered, perched atop petal and leaf. I felt the beauty and pain of their presence. This must have been what it was like, this must be what it can be again. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.14.26 I walked to the library before the rain and closed my eyes as the wind pulled against me and lifted the damp from the air and I wished I could run, I wished I could escape into the current of sound that is everything after noise. Above me, the wind lifted the leaves and I passed underneath. When I came home, I drank a cold sparkling water from the fridge and cut an apple, peeled a carrot, made a wrap with extra harissa. I sat at my desk while the light from the windows darkened to the great green hue I remember from childhood. How it was: my mother and I on the cracked cement steps of our front porch, in the last house we all lived together. The clouds rolling over the tops of houses under the darkening sky and the rain, the rain a word on everyone's lips, finally tearing through. Until lightning lit up the green summer storm we sat on the porch listening to the rain. My hair curled around my face in wisps. I sat barefoot and never wanted it to end. Perhaps the center is that it never does. ════════════════════════════════════════════════ help, you're alive! - february 2025 playlist ════════════════════════════════════════════════ ⋆ Orchestral Suite No. 3 In D Minor, BWV 1068: Aria, The Swingle Singers ⋆ Strange Overtones, David Byrne & Brian Eno ⋆ This Is a Rebel Song, Sinéad O'Connor ⋆ Dreams, The Cranberries ⋆ Dance This Mess Around, The B-52's ⋆ The Whole of the Moon (2004 Remaster), The Waterboys ⋆ Tinseltown in the Rain, The Blue Nile ⋆ Empire, Bomb the Bass ⋆ Just Call Me Joe, Sinéad O'Connor ⋆ Hounds of Love, Kate Bush ⋆ Three Babies, Sinéad O'Connor ⋆ Only You Know, Cornelia Murr ⋆ Swimming, Maple Glider ⋆ Aurora En Pekin (LP Version), Marc Ribot ⋆ Falling (Album Version), Julee Cruise ⋆ Saturday Sun, Nick Drake ⋆ ..THUS IS WHY ( I DON'T SPRING 4 LOVE ), Saya Gray ⋆ Knockin' on Heaven's Door (Heretic Original Soundtrack), Sophie Thatcher ⋆ In The Pines, Smog ⋆ IV. Gayane's Adagio, St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra ⋆ Two Times, Blondshell ⋆ Pour Your Heart Out, Hildegard ⋆ DIZZY PPL BECOME BLURRY, Saya Gray ⋆ Decades, Wilma Archer ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.12.26 "It was time to look at what she had lost. To look at it and see it all. The sunset of spring over the roofs of the City, long ago, and his face lit by that glory—“There, there, you can see what it should be, what it is…” The dusk of the room in Southwind’s house, and his face, his eyes. “To live and die for the sake of the spirit—” The wind and light on Rocktop Hill, and his voice. And the rest, all the rest, all the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed." ⋰⋰⋰ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Eye of the Heron Read all of "The Eye of the Heron" yesterday (it's infuriating how good Le Guin is every time) and then stayed up until almost 2am reading Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park." Perhaps I am not making anything sharable in this period of my life nor great strides in my skills but I am nourishing my practice in a different way. I feel the happiest when I am in bed with a book at night, propped against a pillow so that my shoulder does not sublux, promising myself that surely, this will be the last chapter (and on and on). I want to write a clear thing, a true thing—not simple nor overwrought, but something that sound like a great bell being struck, and the air after. No deception from affect, no fear in simple, sturdy words, of verbs and nouns and the grammar of speaking plainly. Speaking plainly does not mean speaking simply. It is hard to say a true thing. It's hard and so I often seek new words, new phrasing, as if there is a way out of the trouble of trying to understand what it is I want to say. Evading the center is easy; how mortifying it can be to be misunderstood, or worse, to be understood and then exposed. "And they saw that they were naked and they were ashamed." Despite no claims to faith, I am comforted that the oldest stories have in them this confrontation with our nakedness and what comes after. All writing and art if it is true—and I speak not of the certainty of fact but of real things: birth, death, rivers, bread, sex, the history of language, handprints, moonlight, singing, birds—must unclothe itself. There is a singing in it when it comes but it doesn’t come without work. Even if I only write for myself, forever, it is worth it to write one true thing that cries out in its own naked voice. As I write this, there is a little greenish yellow bird perched on the ivy that surrounds my bedroom window. The bird comes every day to hop from thin branch to thin branch or nest in the shallow eaves of the overhanging roof. When my cat sees her, she leaps from my bed towards the glass while the bird, unmoving and undisturbed, blinks at her. There is another bird now, in the center of the window, craning her small head around and around, and staring directly through the glass at me as if she can see me watching her. Maybe she can. Her back tail feathers flick up and down. She leaps from the window in a great unfurling of wings and now the leaves shiver from the wind her flight made. The other bird is undisturbed, nested in the tangled copse of leaves, pecking at the trim edges of her perch. Now the second bird has come back, crying, open-mouthed, black eyes again seeking an opening through the window. Her back tail feathers are pressed up against the glass. She hops from one stretch of ivy to the next. They are both out of sight now, all I can see are the leaves moving. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.10.26 #e3001a - the tomatoes our neighbor brought over from his garden #3d0c75 - blueberries in the ramekin #279dda - one of the pills i take daily to keep my brain working #3f2d24 - morning coffee #ded66c - my duvet where zuzu's claws made indents terming august the the month of miserable sleep. "melatonin melancholy" and "melatonin up and moaning" texts between j and I after I woke and we commiserated on our nonexistent rem cycles. even our cat seems fatigued, though that might just be the summer heat and her tendency to nap all the day, as is her wont to do. i finished northanger abbey last night and found the pacing of the second half of the novel to lag and the characterizations to alter in such a way as to feel slightly askew, but austen brought it home with a satisfying close as always. i generally dislike when people bemoan the early death of an accomplished artist or writer for the sake of "what they might have made had they lived longer"—it feels reductive and coarse, as if we are the ones truly suffering for their truncated lives, yet i confess myself not immune to the same suppositions as i read austen. i wonder about how her craft would have continued to develop, i think about the novels she must have envisioned yet had had no chance to write, i greedily wish that i had more of her novels to enjoy. (this public disavowal of a practice—mourning a literary figure's death because of a hypothetical lost future canon—that i privately indulge in feels very austen in character!) one thing out of many i admire in her writing is how frankly she wrote of her character's vices and virtues, and how these initially unprepossessing depictions reveal gradually the multiplicities, depths, and contradictions in the natures of the characters instead of inuring us to fixed and attenuated impressions. in retrospect, considering how public our childhood was thanks to our mother, it makes sense that my siblings and I do not keep up with social media. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.6.26 i was trying to remember a fact from an anecdote i've known all my life, a story from my childhood that my parents loved to tell and that i've shared many times, and realized i could not fix the proper name to it, this story that has been one of my earliest memories, and i could not tell you when i forgot the facts of it. and then i thought about how i can't text my mom or dad and ask them who it was, and how time eroded the edges of that memory i once knew with utter clarity, that it's now blurry, the image smudged. how sad i am when i forget things; i worry that illness will keep stealing from me and i will not even remember to miss what's gone. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.6.26 took a walk midday yesterday to drop off and pick up my library books, red button up tied in a knot at my waist. i felt cool and collected until i accidentally ran into a branch in front of six construction workers. oh well! j and i did pilates after she was off work and talked through each exercise until our heart rates were too high for conversation. we'd planned to play the fields of mistria release together but i ended up working until nearly 11:30pm, after which i managed to draw (day 931) and then stayed up far too late reading northanger abbey (oh, catherine! to be seventeen again). i couldn't fall asleep, something about the energy this week has been too harried, but instead thought about how the most successful habits in my life are elastic—i need variety and sovereignty within frameworks i've set for myself, otherwise i begin dreading the very thing i was ecstatic about only days before. part of the reason my daily drawing habit or streak has been so fruitful these last few years is that it's unencumbered by constraints or strictures other than that i put energy and effort into drawing each day. i've even avoided naming a time commitment, which was initially difficult for my often didactic self—but having the freedom to do as much (or as little) as i want and can do within each day allows me to move with my energy and commit to a practice. i've painted before surgery and after er visits and during a cross country move and in the five minutes i have before bed and during meetings and for hours on the couch until i look up and it's midnight. last night i felt free and unconcerned about progress or exactitude as i did a gesture drawing session at 11:52pm. all that i followed was the line of the body and the flow of my hand. each angle revealed something, every space between limbs made another shape. understanding felt possible again because it was full of delight and attention and ease. i want to return to that feeling more. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.5.26 warbly in voice mail to e ⋰ cluttered desk ⋰ up too late, again ⋰ a kind of frantic energy, like a bee under a glass or a bird at a window ⋰ tight heat in my hamstrings ⋰ what energy is under all this movement? ⋰ trying not to lose the breath. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ say hello ⋰⋰⋰ yourworldoftext.com/~rhizomehaunt/ I archive these logs monthly ⋰⋰⋰ are.na/han-olliver/channels