fifty-four: because people are good / whisper it under your breath
This month’s title track, found one Saturday evening in late July after a week in which the air was thick and noir in an L.A. fashion, a week when the river flooded the city on Tuesday and the internet crackled and sparked on Friday, when the open windows smelled like tomato leaves as the wind carried them through, and I lived mostly in my head, drowsy and dreaming, and cancelled everything just for the privilege of lying flat on my back from sunrise to sunset and doing more dreaming. So it was a week when the air sang with an appropriate amount of inexorable and unscheduled magic.
And this rather felt like the taste of it: because people are good / whisper under your breath / people are good / keep fooling yourself. The part of me that lives submerged in the fabulist dreaming mode and the motion of the river and the delight of the Situation rose up, its nose flaring, and said: yes. Yes, that’s the right plan. I will.
That dive into the proverbial still water lasted about a week and a half, and carried me through an August I’ve spent doing some pretty great and probably-important-later stuff and mildly resenting all that great stuff because it wasn’t letting the clocks run to thirteen and drafting and dreaming. Portal fantasy problems, my friends: Everywhere you’re at, there’s always somewhere you aren’t.
But the heap of doings this past month was pretty good on the face of it, and of course we have to start with:
la mer
I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting.
After all that, I didn’t get to go swimming proper: I was deeply wiped from the flight when I went down to the sea, not unlike a supplicant, and realized that they don’t call it Wreck Beach because of the shipwreck, it’s actually because it’s 300 steps down a cliff and then 300 steps up again, and whoops, how’re you going to feel afterwards? Womp womp. But I did some afternoon wading, and brought home one rock: small and milky-white under the action of water, with a particular creaminess that when I saw it, my brain said: pick up an egg. It’s sitting on my desk now, next to the beeswax candle and the oddly Victorian wildflower-painted Malaysian tea tin I’m using for a pen cup. It seems comfortable there.
The conference itself was wonderful: a really generative, interesting collection of academics, data analysts, climate advocates, artists (performance arts, musicians, writers, game developers), students, and organizers just throwing what we’ve got into the soup. I wasn’t quite sure what room to expect, but the room was deeply positive and generous: a lot of people who’ve reached the same general island from a whole variety of ports and are trying to chart the terrain.
The quality conference action did cut into my tourism time: I spent every evening cutting and recutting my talk as I figured out a little more about who the room was. I am re-realizing that I absolutely need to calibrate to a room when I give a talk, almost as Step One. There needs to be some sense of context and conversation. So I reshaped a lot of the same material, and ultimately, in a wandering way, a lot of what the final edition came down to was moving generously and with trust, and rethinking on a cellular level these ideas about the outgroup. I probably could’ve just done it in one word — ahimsa, there you go, any questions team? — but generally that situation can stand a little unpacking and demonstrated application.
The last time I was on the West Coast I came back and radically changed my life afterwards (still living the tail end of those ripples, really) and this edition’s still rattling around my head a touch: a world that’s at least a hundred years sideways in time from what I’m used to in its relationships with fishing/logging/oil, where the lines run differently, where the forest is so big and everpresent you want to drink it in and also are fully aware that it’d eat you without a second thought.
I came home after a day where there’d been record storms here, flights were delayed, people crabby at the airport on landing, and I’d resigned myself to not getting through the door until about 3:00 am. I spent that night dreaming about the extra slide, the one I never made: That thinking about any problem too narrowly, letting others define your range of options, locks you into battles where you have to push through one thing or lose everything, and I was telling people (myself): but the land is wider. What else could they be doing? Over, under, around, and through. And then, awake, stumbled up in the humid early afternoon (had to sleep that all off) to put on some music, scrounge a snack, and think about my Sunday: back into a city whose failure modes are that we’ve mapped too hard, become too codified, where the constants ate the variables, and what’ll eat you isn’t the wild and indifferent forest but the rigid and indifferent processes that took it over.
There’s a path somewhere between those particular extremes: the disparate weird little world where we’re not sure where we’re going, or how to find the way. There’s a balance in this (we all spent a few days hoping, saying, reaching for). I’m sure of it.
The talk itself will go up at some point on the conference YouTube. Not as of this writing, but I will mention it again once it pops up.
Swedish desk cleaning
Around the conference, this month was an absolute frenzy of clearing my desk out, and clearing out my head.
It’s telling how the hard deadline of going somewhere is focusing. This used to be easier pre-pandemic, when travel was usually three-four times a year. I think it was a form of maintenance; I built up less work-cruft. And then it’s telling how the idle time in airports, when I can’t do much else, really, focuses the brain. There’s no optionality and no distraction: just clear out that thing in front of you.
So before I left for Vancouver, I buckled down and blew through the community climate grant slushpile (and then a whole other grant slushpile during the flight home; I’m last-minute jurying for the Speculative Literature Foundation this year and we’ll have grantees at the end of the month). The meeting where we hashed it all out was last week, and it was just as informative as last year.
Whilst respecting the confidentiality requirements: There’s some real clustering around a few issues this year, which tells you what’s on people’s minds, or what they feel is in reach. In one case, I think an issue cluster was a real aggregate comment on how well the City’s delivering or missing certain services: People don’t try to organize community interventions on union responsibilities if that department’s meeting its goals.
There were a few amazingly elegant projects in there, and I love sharing air and public space with the people who live in this city; and it’s always better to be sincere in these things than try to be impressive. Both slushpiles underscored that, really: smart and sincere will beat out impressive, manipulative, performative every single time.
questions of structure
Along these lines — sincerity and performance — this month I closed out an interesting and somewhat long-delayed project: I finally got a formal ADHD and autism spectrum evaluation.
The results? I have whatever is the opposite of ADHD and autism.
A complex set of screeners and the good word of three of my oldest friends (hi) gently informed me to fuck myself right back outta town with that idea. Apparently I am, yes, struggling with executive function, but it’s in a set of mismatches that implies I frankly just have way too much that needs done and way too little help doing it, which, put gently, ain’t news. And yes, I absolutely think orthogonal to a whole lot of people, but — y’know, I have always been suspicious you’re all up to a lot more in your heads than you’ll claim to be, for one, and I’ve rather deliberately and persistently trained this head for a particular set of skills, so perhaps this is just the universal condition of having an operant soul.
Which leaves the fact that almost everyone I am emotionally close to — friends, former partners, everyone — has ADHD an interesting and persisting mystery. It’s a lot of why I went to check. At a certain point that pattern is an indicator, although — nobody says of what, and apparently that’s a right question one’s got to ask here.
It did seem rather telling, though, that the scales which measure executive function — the life they described as baseline read, as I went on, as such a monotonous, obligation-driven, pleasureless poverty of a situation. I found myself muttering at the little clicky boxes: “Okay, but what if I value some agency here?” and “What if there’s more to life than this?” It’s a strange feeling, to be diagnosed against an way of living that I’m convinced is objectively bad (and also extremely culture-bound, and also a structural haunting, I’ll say more about that one if anyone’s actually interested in the hauntology piece here), and I’m quite seriously uncertain grants joy to anyone subscribing.
But it’s been interesting, having this “Do I or don’t I?” lens in my head for a summer. You look at what people around you do, thinking, Do you sit easy in your life? Are there little burns visible where the structure of their lives hits skin and blisters? And how about mine?
When I look up close: I’ve arranged a whole life not for structure and routine but the flex to embrace spontaneous conditions, because — and I was thinking about this, rather heatedly, at one point — who knows when the art is going to hit? If the art shows up in my head, if I have a week like that one above or a few days early/mid-August, where all of a sudden I am at full flood with dreaming and there is poetry falling out my mouth at the slightest provocation, I have to have the give to hand myself over to it. I mean, what if I dropped it?
So in some ways it probably surprises no one that my whole life is built around the art as a sort of tidal phenomenon: living by the river, in expectation of flood. But thinking deeper into this: There’s an inherent idea of what successful adult life is in there (routine, stability, obligation, predictability, emotional hyperregulation, social and physical performance) that is just — foreign to me, and not in a way that has anything to do with political theory, grievance, The Man™, or the word should. It’s just that everything I care about is missing. There was so little talk of satisfaction, nourishment, generosity, intellectual fulfillment, functioning intimacy, the tensile strength of your community relations, curiosity, hunger, ambition, novelty, adventure, or ease. I’m not sure where it leaves space for listening to your environment; for questions of seasonality, adaptability, self-awareness, and flex. I wasn’t sure what sense of operational fitness it meant to be modeling, because the thing is: I’m not getting an army medical right now. (Am I?)
So longtime friends are probably laughing their asses off right now, because yes, it is thoroughly the most Me thing in the universe to take a neurodiversity screener and fundamentally reject the terms. I will buy y’all a drink later so you can tell me what an asshole I know I am. But I’m not sure if it is actually a functioning adult life without infrastructure and skills for growth and change and a vision of the world you’d rather have and lovingkindness and big-M Mystery: frequent, sudden, or for the better.
Sum result: What gives with my brain? Not in this philosophy, Horatio. It’s the home the tenant’s got, though, and it makes up for the trouble it gives me in massive, inexplicable vastness. I don’t get bored, and I’m a decent host for the art stuff. Maybe right now, that’s enough.
words, consumption of same
And having blown hard that much: Hah, man, did I do any writing this month? Ohboy.
As alluded to above: August is usually a dreaming month around here. It’s sort of worked out that when I was in school, it was the month I could check out and draw the blinds and draft furiously; when I was working at the Legislature, it was quiet season and same same. The habit’s deeply ingrained. It still showed up that way for me in spaces when it found the opening, but in a lot of ways this turned into Too Much Fucking Work Month. Or let’s be real: Someone made a bunch of commitments that needed to be followed through upon. We’re all looking for the guy who did this.
When that sense of breathless dreaming came through, though, it was insistent and all-consuming: something nameless holding me in its hand, the lines of its palms like rivers. The kind of late-night, single-candle drafting time where everything you look up and I swear, didn’t actually know in advance, somehow lines up like magnetic filings into the thing that is trying to be said, as if it was just sitting there waiting. I legitimately never know what to make of that. It is uncanny and miraculous.
Food for words this month included: Handmade beeswax candles left to run wax across my desk (desk lovingly stained from years of this, nice to be back to that); a silent cross-continent flight home by night where the full moon sat outside the window, reading poetry over my shoulder as I chose a better word; Moist’s “Low Low Low” on slow repeat; the smell of forest loam on a Sunday morning; a bee, sleeping, on my window at two in the morning.
I always take it personally when bees sleep over — usually on the screen door, for grip, but sometimes on the window glass. I have created an environment that lets something small and strange to me know, even unlanguaged, that this waystation is sound. It’s read my adjustments and trusts me. It feels like, despite everything, having done something right.
I am thoroughly frustrated about that lack of wordcount. And also trying to remind myself: Okay, well. Only human.
that said
That said, I’m going to leave this shortish (heh) for this month. Next month should have some reviews publishing (at least one, I’m told?), maybe a modest Word on the Street haul, winter garden plans, actual writing, etc.
I hope you’re all into a September that’s going somewhere good. Circle back to all this noise end of month, my good people.