Belt Loops in the Planetary Jeans
Four twelve and twenty fours ago...(indistinct mumbling)...that potpourri shall not perish from the earth.
Jauntingafornia
That's sung to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda." I am currently on a jaunt to California. This edition of Marzipan Potpourri was written and scheduled almost a week out and assumes I have not succumbed to Boeing-related shenanigans.
Big Roses, Little Daisies
Those gerberas are down to the last clean bits of stem, but still lovely as ever. The orange roses caught my eye, too—I'm not the biggest fan of roses, but vivid color is always appreciated, and lately it looks extra vivid.
King's Road
I've now watched six films by King Hu and I feel comfortable calling him a visual genius and one of my favorite directors. The rest of his work is tougher to track down, but I'm on the case.
Compost Your Old Snakeskins
I'm processing some emotions left over from leaving one of my online communities a little over one year ago. At the time I needed something to fill the space and this newsletter became one of my main outlets, and I remain committed to and grateful for it.
It's hard to leave a community to which you felt a strong sense of belonging (compounded by a pandemic), because it forces you to reckon with paired truths: (1) that I was not always my best in that space and (2) that the space was not always the best thing for me. Fostering connections in real life is much, much harder for me than it is online, because being in my body is no easy feat.
Northrop Grumman is Building a Train on the Moon
Not passing word-whimsy, but an actual news item I heard on the radio today. We should write more sci-fi about humanity being a threat to alien worlds, rather than the reverse.
Post Script
Hi there, Dara from the more recent past here. I ended up canceling my trip to California because I'm having some very challenging stress levels and my coping mechanisms were not adequate to the task. So some of this newsletter is from a pocket dimension that never came to be and instead went slowly to tatters in the cosmic denim. By way of "showing you the newspaper in the time-travel movie," here are the mums I bought to console myself—tenuously coexisting with the orange roses.
Take care of yourselves, kith and kin.
(Post Post Script:
I separated the roses and mums into their own vases. Everything deserves its fair chance to thrive.)
—Dara Khan