thank you notes 8/9

i'm thankful for the song "the mountain" by heartless bastards, even though the released version isn't good as an early mix of the song i used to have that i think i downloaded from the band's myspace (!) page. i'm thankful to remember the galaxies of weird/bad design on myspace. i'm thankful for the most popular piece of content i have ever created, which is a song where i set the letters page from nylon to music and which they posted on their myspace page, where it was played (iirc) tens of thousands of times. i'm thankful for cory kennedy, a person whose existence i had forgotten and whose poignant wikipedia entry lists here as a "a former American Internet celebrity." i'm thankful for all the sad young former american internet celebrities (and to hope that they aren't sad).

i'm thankful for the excellent visual poetry that claire donato has been posting on snapchat and instagram, which feels like a fluxus happening at noma. i'm thankful for the materiality that her lines of poetry take on when they're printed on strips of paper freed from the flatness of the page and mashed into jam and vegan butter, covered in black rice, carefully garnished with sprigs of foraged plants. i'm thankful for the way that the hand of the artist becomes not a metaphor, but a thing we see, fingers lifting the words from a container, cleaning debris from them, and placing them gently in our field of vision.

i'm thankful for the beautiful leftovers you get when you scrape paint from a palette. i'm thankful for "the makings of you" from curtis/live!, "the joy," and a song i hadn't heard until last night, "the makings." i'm thankful for curtis mayfield's cover of "we've only just begun" and sonic youth's cover of "superstar." i'm thankful that though i've had trouble falling asleep the past few days, the silver lining has been more time to read. i'm thankful for break in case of emergency, which was a great book, but thankful to have finished it and so been able to climb out of the too close to home discomfort and unhappiness that the book embeds you in for most of it. i'm thankful for pond, which so far seems more placid and banal in the best ways, like a literary benzo.

i'm thankful that when i couldn't meditate, i did breathing exercises instead and they helped. i'm thankful for 4-7-8 breathing (in for 4 counts, hold for 7 counts, out for 8 counts), which i think i've mentioned once before but which i myself had forgotten about until yesterday when i couldn't meditate. i'm thankful to try to remind myself to breathe better during my workday, which will hopefully help me not to feel so chewed up and spit out. i'm thankful that yesterday evening after dinner, i gave in to my exhaustion and collapsed onto the bed and let myself lay there, wallowing in self pity. i'm thankful for the occasional wallow, which i always avoided (like i avoided my emotions) when i was younger, thinking if i could evade bad feelings for long enough, they would stop coming after me, like a game of hide and seek, but thankful to have the occasional wallow now, which i think is healthier.