Curiosity Roving : V. 27 : Grinchmas
Curiosity Roving
The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen
V.27 : Grinchmas
in which we commit to the afterlife
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Greetings and Salutations! Welcome to the twenty-seventh volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. It is a truth universally acknowledged that an artist possessed of a great despondency must be in want of a project. Reader, here I am.
New subscribers, welcome to the jungle and I hope you enjoy the show. All past volumes of this newsletter (since 2019!) are available in the Tiny Letter archives: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive
back in businessThis particular letter is my grandiloquent year-end recap, and it ain't much more than that, because I just found out that my distribution platform will be discontinued in February of 2024. It's unfortunate; Tiny Letter has always worked for me, and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to engineer a new production routine. For now, I'll probably let Curiosity Roving gracefully ascend to the fine company of the 27 Club and take January to safely file away the aforementioned archives and my list of subscribers. I will consider whether I want to migrate and evolve the offering of this newsletter, or if I would perhaps prefer to do something else. Smoke 'em if you got 'em and pour one out for the homies; like every good beginning, it turns out this is also an ending. Yesterday, before I found out that I was losing Tiny Letter, I had already been down to the frothing ocean to share my beer with three very thirsty ghosts. The internet can't hurt me.
For the tl;dr crowd: why yes, this letter is quite long. The first half is heavy and the second half is light. They're both hilarious. Scroll to the part about making a list if you'd rather skip over the dark spots. For the rest of you: length is a promise, never a threat. If I've caught you at an inconvenient time, please come back later. I'll be right where you left me.
make it spaciousI put Curiosity Roving on pause back in May, because I had experienced a series of bizarre life events that served me a fascinating buffet of contingent emotional and psychological scramble, so I wasn't really able to Do Things. I wasn't able to Do Things for a long time. I took a complete hiatus from creative work and instead I performed labour, and I drove my car, and I lived my life without observing it or mining it for content, and I gave myself a free pass to go absolutely batshit crazy.
Have you ever heard of Kamikaze Fun Mode? That's when you're trying to kill yourself without the whole dying part, or maybe trying to die without the whole killing yourself part, so you start having as much fun as possible but instead of sparking joy it mostly just feels like a savagely raised middle finger pointed straight at the cosmos and the mirror and also everyone you know. I switched my settings to full-blast Kamikaze Fun Mode around mid-July. Imagine wrapping your lips around a firehose and telling your tonsils to duck; that's where I've been living. Lately, I'm trying to dial that intensity back a bit, but I don't really know where I'm going with it next.
make it crowdedIn case you didn't get the memo, let me just get this sentence out of the way: I was in love with someone, it was mutual, we were having the conversation about whether or not we would be spending the rest of our lives together, and then he died on my birthday while I was waiting for his phone call. Seven months later, I can tell you that there are many things that are terrible about surviving this kind of tragic and clichéd twist of fate. One of the worst is that silly rom-coms and soap operas and Korean dramas, with their over-the-top plotlines that should be a source of happy escapism, are now going to remind me of the worst week of my life for the rest of my life - or until something happens that is even more surreal and potentially worse. Another thing that is really, really lame is that I now have to produce The Sentence all the time because I realize that I'm acting deranged, and not only is it the easiest way to simultaneously excuse my behaviour and stymie further questions, it is also the plain truth, albeit a somewhat an ugly truth, and I'm still wearing it like a badge, because it really just ties the whole look together.
self-portraitI don't want this very unpleasant story arc to become the most interesting thing about me, but to be blessed with my practiced fluency and choose to say nothing would be miserly and dishonest. I'm acquainted with two other women who experienced something similar; they appear to be just as insane as me, and as far as I know, they didn't write about it. I wish they had. We don't have enough writing on the pure lunacy of grief. We don't have enough common ritual around grief. In Western culture, we spend our lives alternately fleeing from and in combat with the aging process, death, pain, loss, unhappiness, and the entire raging cohort of the abominable; always in stubborn refusal to acknowledge that all of these are important. We are estranged from death and we have stigmatized and cheapened grief with the capitalistic narratives of progress and improvement, and that is why modern people are so damn stupid and useless and delusional about it.
I keep getting well-intentioned personal recommendations from fine, lovely, highly motivated individuals about what I should "do" to "feel better". Nobody has ever asked me if I want to feel better. What people don't talk about, and what I have never seen in print anywhere to date, is that in the profound and permanent absence of someone irreplaceable, grief can become the last bit of raft that we cling to, because to let it go is just unthinkably lonely.
I keep getting well-intentioned personal recommendations from fine, lovely, highly motivated individuals about what I should "do" to "feel better". Nobody has ever asked me if I want to feel better. What people don't talk about, and what I have never seen in print anywhere to date, is that in the profound and permanent absence of someone irreplaceable, grief can become the last bit of raft that we cling to, because to let it go is just unthinkably lonely.
portrait of an absenceI beg your pardon for the sound of my eyes rolling back in my head throughout those last two paragraphs, but frankly, I feel entitled to my commentary on this dark matter, because I think I can tell you about it more stylishly than just about anyone, and I think you deserve to know. Still, I'm not going to squander more than half of my word count pouring highballs from my open bar of personal hell; it's December, let's make a list!
In the time since my last newsletter, I've been a cleaning lady, a riverside kitchen wench, a spare part for various processing facilities, an audio technician, a professional cat cuddler, a trash fairy, a workshop facilitator, a DJ, a filing assistant, a farmhand, a background actor, a part-time girlfriend, and a substitute teacher. I continued writing, but only mechanically. I spent the summer on the West Coast; an enchanted kingdom that numbers among the world's finest regions in which to drive your body like a stolen vehicle. In October, I finally pulled a long-awaited trigger and bought the flight to Taiwan. I'm writing to you today from the north coast of the island in the village of Qianshuiwan where I am subletting a charming seaside apartment from a friend who has stepped out to see the world.
home-for-nowThis year has seen the refinement of a niche societal role in which I serve as a responsible medium-term babysitter for adult lives. When I untethered myself from the maypole of the mainstream in July of 2022, I wanted to work with the magic of being available. I know myself to be competent and versatile, and I wanted to see what assemblages of life would arrive if I provided enough space to welcome them. As it turns out, there are plenty of fully-fledged adults who want to flit away from their obligations - pets, jobs, plants, rent - for a little while, and I am usually well-positioned to casually fill in until they get back. In the last twelve months, I lived with three dogs and ten cats in eleven different spaces on three different continents. I bought my groceries and did my banking in Spanish, English, and Mandarin Chinese, and somehow sustained my own goofy existence under twenty different job titles. I just checked and I've been living in the wind for a little over five hundred days now; small wonder I've been feeling a bit tired.
common Box Kitty in its natural habitatWhen new acquaintances inevitably ask what I "do", I have three standard responses. The first is, "I'm in the business of this and that." The second is that I have a desk job with the Bureau for International Women of Mystery. The third is that I'm currently reviewing the terms and conditions of my deal with the devil, but it's taking a long time because the whole contract is written in Gothic-Cyrillic-mirror-lettered-invisible-ink and the font is really small and his advocates are dead tricky. All of these are equally true. Sometimes I also call myself God's Favourite Clown or talk about being a full-time silly goose or tell people that I'm LARP-ing some form of employment in exchange for cash, but on those occasions I am usually being facetious. When I have to do paperwork, I call myself an artist, because that is not a lie and the word fits in the box.
I touched on a similar theme for my post-COVID reboot in V.18 : artists have a different bargain in this lifetime. We're not really allowed to avoid the art. We can't not do it. Not for long. There are too many consequences. We eat ourselves alive without it. The art will and must look different from one season to the next, but we absolutely have to create it, if only to throw some tinsel and blinky lights on the great seething emptiness that is the horrifying fact of existence. This is our basic agreement and our sacred duty.
okay fine if u say soI've been watching a Taiwanese TV series on Netflix called At The Moment. In the seventh episode, the female lead is leaving her husband and her home, packing keepsakes into cardboard boxes, bathed in the blue haze of a Taipei afternoon. She says, "What we don't want to face is the happiness that we once promised. In the end, only endless patience is left." Then I read a tweet that defined the language of loss as "the dictionary". As all of my ESL students already know, if you can still point to a thing, you don't need a word for it. Anything for which we have a word is something that someone at some time has lost and missed and named and screamed for in a desperate effort to recall. Then I read an interview with David Byrne in which he discussed the Western cultural emphasis on individuality and suggested that free will might be more dictated by social context that most of us are willing to admit. He examined curiosity and said, "there's a growing sense that lots of different things in the world are related to one another and connected in ways that we are still discovering. It's not quite religious, but it is amazing." And then I wrote this paragraph to let you see what I see, because that's one-twentieth of my job.
look at itLife can be framed as a long series of "before-and-after" snapshots; we undergo processes, and we eventually become. Sometimes it's so gentle that years go by before anyone notices, and other times it's a full-scale pyrotechnic pageant of the phoenix that stops whatever we thought was important exactly where it stands. Each of us is poised, at all times, on the honed and glinting edge of a chance that we might, at any moment, abruptly go through the looking glass and enter a new reality of "after" that obliterates our access to everything that defined "before". I'm only thirty-three so I don't actually know much about anything, but in my experience, this much is true. Life is a dynamic place to live.
he would knowI've spent the last few months watching myself surface slowly and carefully from the birthing cauldron of transformation into the harsh prospect of another "after", and now I'm relearning how to operate myself. This version of me has deeper frown lines and a vicious new smile to showcase her sharpest teeth. She is categorically undateable. Her desires are few, obscure, and highly specific. Her patience is infinite but her tolerance is selective. The labyrinth of her heart defies direct approach. She says "no" a lot. She is more bitter and more cocky and so much more evil and so, so much funnier. Her commitment to the bit is as firm as it is demented. She wants to be scary and disliked and notorious while also being sweet and absurd and desired. All of her extremes are now more extreme. She is equally more fragile and also stronger. She keeps a terrifyingly dense black hole in her lap and enjoys its cold company. The black hole is also a fuzzy little kitty; it purrs. She craves structure to support the interminable complexity of Things. She is experimenting with feeling entitled. She will tell you that the opposite of grief isn't joy; it's forgetting. She still laughs the hardest with the people she loves the most. She hates Christmas but she adores the Grinch, and she is at peace with the reality that the one necessitates the other.
noodle will always love youReader, if this proves to be the end, thank you for being here with me. Special thanks to the 42 subscribers who have been with me since May of 2019. It's nice to meet you, still and again, in this latest quotidian theatre of all that is myriad, mystifying, and malleable. Thank you for joining me on my magic carpet made of words, each of which you may read as a summons and a prayer.
Tiny Letter is dead; long live Tiny Letter. I may see you in the spring, but we all know that it will never be the same; nor should it be. If this is your season of celebration, I wish you massive happiness with your treasured people. May your fun feel like fun. Pour one out for your thirsty ghosts and then pour one out for me.
Until next time, stay curious.
-- Rose
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