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2026, July 1, 11:43PM —

For starters, the food salvage mutual aid group I help run moved 1,000 lbs of stone fruit in June and >16,000 lbs of fruit over the past year and a half (since my friend Laura and I took it over). I picked 16 times in 30 days, and that’s not counting all the times I did back-to-back picks. So yes, my dreams have been sweet as of late—but also tart, bitter, salty, earthy like fine showers of leaf dust being shaken out of a tree whose branches are breaking under the weight of all its sudden quivering abundance. My place in it all, laughing, branches and broken pieces of yard pallets crunching underfoot, dark smears of blood purple juice dried to unsavory stains on pants I wore more than one day in a row. Strangers dropping into strangers’ yards, leaving with buckets of split fruit and the physical memory of a tree, a space, a time, a season, the people who show up, lured in by the open hand, the open heart. Lured in and laughing in a mad kind of love, a sugar rush, a… well… sweet dream.

What I didn’t do while I was picking plums and apricots (and some lemons, and two apple and :) avocado :) sidequests): I didn’t lift for two weeks and I still haven’t run in a month (!), though C did recently find my missing ear bud while searching for something else under the bed.¹ I felt the lack of physical exercise in strange ways; it wasn’t as though I ever reached a point where I thought, “Geez, if only I’d worked out a few hours this week, I’d be able to lift this box,” but that my physical body, pushed in long sustaining stretches instead of deliberate releases, manifested in malicious ways. At one point, I would crawl onto the couch with my dog and nap in twenty-minute stitches of time to basically cope with the fact that my every waking moment was spent dealing with my not-actual job, my actual job, and my actual life’s work.

During June, I wrote maybe 1000 words of something that, if I’d continued, would’ve been evil, over the course of 2? 3? nights. This right now is the first extended writing I’ve done since then. In lieu of working with language, C and I have been processing plums, mostly into shrubs (which I first learned about from Leah, a now long-time volunteer) and over a gallon of Chinese plum sauce.

When I write “evil,” what I mean is: I was writing toward a cliff, an ultimatum, a moment of rupture in which suddenly everything would fix neatly into permanent stakes. My publishing career? I would have one, despite my blood-on-the-pages second book (in terms of visible publicity, reach, and sales too though I don’t ask or look for that info) splattering like a cherry plum against concrete. My mentions? Adoration, awe, glee. My opportunities? ^{(Opportunities for…who what where when?)} Endless, an infinite scroll of invitations, offers, requests.

Every person has their own unique forms of self-torture. One of mine is, I flip past the title page, the copyright, in any given book by any big name author and stare down their back lists. If I feel like being generous, I consider how many books they wrote before they broke out. If I feel like pouring salt in the wound, I fantasize about somehow hitting with just the right debut, starting over in another strata of publishing—²

The reason why I let myself get lost in the (plum) sauce is simple. It’s fun to pick fruit and make fruit a part of my identity.³ Taking a meeting at a partner site and sharing a flat of perfectly ripe apricots—biting into a plum too ripe to move and spitting the pit back into the earth—sharing the fruits of my labor with people who immediately understand what I’m giving them and why our collective work is worth doing. And these are just my private joys. To do all this while meeting people I never would’ve encountered if not for our shared appreciation of a world that we all agree is a world, not an abstraction through a screen or a second-hand opinion, is a real reason to keep it moving, fruit and otherwise.

The plums come and go. The writing and the music are, at least for now, forever. The goal, more than ever, is to strike at something true. Sometimes true is a sun-warmed apricot that tore lusciously, dare one think lasciviously, on a fruit picker’s tines. Sometimes it’s an idea for a new first draft that won’t become the book that changes your life, but could be a book that you actually finished writing. And sometimes it’s a playlist that takes you through a summer’s night through dawn through day through dusk again, again, again.

— 1:35AM, July 2, 2026

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Tasting notes:

• I’ve been listening to a lot of Faye Wong lately. “Sing & Play” especially but “Be Perfunctory” has been getting a lottttt of recent play and will be represented more heavily on the next mix, which I’ve already started working on.

• On that note, I’m aiming to put out two megamixes a year, once around the summer solstice and once around the winter. Timestamps, a theme I plan on carrying through for these newsletters since I love structure and in fact can’t write without rigid ones. (To my detriment often, but never mind that…)

• The pacing/mood throughout the mix swings pretty wildly but I’m trying to release the idea of perfect transitions to instead focus on capturing specific and even surprising moments of time, threading together artist encounters from new releases, newsletters, interviews, friend recs, and most importantly, personal whims. THAT SAID…NO I CAN’T SPEND ANY MORE TIME ON THIS.

• B2B highlights:

  • 27 “Cavity” / 28 “Vampire in the Corner”

  • 34 “Do All Things With Love” / 35 “Like a Motorway”⁴

  • 95 “童” / 96 “Connjur” / 97 “Eden” / 98 “Stereo Boy”⁵

• Credits: Lisa for Locust, Ceci for the new Tove Lo, 3/13!Kevin for “My Candle,” C for getting me Caribou-curious and thus leading me to discover the aptly titled song “People Eating Fruit.”

  • The megamix cover image comes from The Vision of Escaflowne (Sunrise, 1996), which surprised me in a good way for a few reasons, including its extensive reliance on major arcana imagery.

    

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Thanks for "listening." Stay tuned...!

♬ xoxo Lio
⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆𓂃 ོ☼𓂃