thank you notes 10/7

i'm thankful that the hurricane was more whimper than bang here. i'm thankful that the worst that happened was us losing cable for most of the day and power for most of the night. i'm thankful that even though we lost power, the refrigerator stayed cold enough for the milk not to spoil. i'm thankful for the moment in the middle of the night when the light suddenly flickered on, along with the air conditioning. i'm thankful for hurricane shutters, which are very effective as blackout curtains and made it possible for me to sleep later today than i have in a long time. i'm thankful that though our vacation is almost over, we still have a whole weekend ahead of us.

i'm thankful to have played video games with my parents when the cable was out. i'm thankful for the campily garish fatality animations of mortal kombat xl., which my parents were eager to show off to me. i'm thankful for my dad's joy at beating me after i beat him several times and my mom's joy at beating him. i'm thankful to remember the last videogame that my dad loved, which was the similarly violent soul calibur on the dreamcast. i'm thankful that we also played the motorcycle crash-a-thon trials fusion and that they were impressed with my control and skill. i'm thankful they showed me a bit of unraveled, a game in which you control a little man made of red yarn as he traverses through memories captured in photographs. i'm thankful for the beautiful bricolage of that game, for its attention to color and texture.

i'm thankful that yesterday afternoon, we watched the movie green room, even though it was even more violent and disturbing than the purge: election year. i'm thankful that we followed that by watching the first two episodes of high maintenance, which were so lovely and which felt like what louie sometimes aspires to but can't quite reach. i'm thankful for the scene where two guys who met on grindr are fucking in a kitchen and thankful to have made a silence-breaking joke about game of thrones (which i tried for a long time to convince my dad to watch by telling him that there was lots of sex, which he would then complain about the absence of once they actually started watching it). i'm thankful for the clever comparison of the costs that people and drugs can make us pay. i'm thankful for the sequence in the second episode where a college girl who is a muslim gets high while listening to music on headphones on an apartment building's roof under a perfect sunset, which felt like it captured everything that's magical about weed.

i'm thankful for this story about a woman who recreated her best friend as an AI bot after he died. i'm thankful for the way that how we use language can capture something about who we are and what it is to be with us that you can't get from images. i'm thankful to be reminded of a ghost story i wrote in grad school, which was inspired by the malevolent presence of the telephone in raymond carver's "a small good thing." i'm thankful to acknowledge how obvious it is to be influenced by raymond carver in a creative writing MFA program, but am still thankful for his story, for the sentiment in its sentimentality. i'm thankful to remember how the story i wrote was destroyed by my peers in workshop, which made me feel sad and angry, even though now I can see the ways that it's flawed. i'm thankful to remember the workshop leader, who was also my thesis advisor, who loved the story and disagreed with everyone but who also thought that the main character was a robot (he wasn't). i'm thankful for the metaphor i came to describe my frustration with fiction writing at the end of grad school, which was that it felt like the writers i loved could make fine, precise lines with pencils and ink but i was stuck trying to draw things like them with dull crayon and magic marker, no precision, blunt and obvious. i'm still thankful, though, for the way the not-robot story ends, which i think is a less obvious place than i would have taken it to before i went to grad school.

i'm thankful that the james turrell room at ps1 is reopening, even though i don't know how i feel about the renovation. i'm thankful for these descriptions of how images in terrence malick's voyage of time were made. i'm thankful for an article i read in the local alt weekly about bespoke dishes and glasses being stolen from local restaurants. i'm thankful for the description of a drink called "giggle water," in which "gin, champagne syrup, and tonic are blended and then strained" and "the libation is served in a miniature porcelain bathtub decorated with roses — a nod to the liquor distilled in tubs during prohibition." i'm thankful that i will never again let myself get as drunk as i did at mai kai, a kitschy polynesian restaurant mentioned in the article. i'm thankful, even though it was an awful experience, that i had it and can remember how awful it was and never relive it. i'm thankful to have talked about the article with my mom, who is the most honest person i have ever known but who once a couple of years ago, in a fit of drunken brio and egged on by peer pressure, stole a pint glass from a restaurant. i'm thankful that we can all make small mistakes but that we can look back and maybe learn from them. i'm thankful for the gift of that knowledge, which makes it possible to look back on bad times with fondness.