Moon Memo-A good week
Hello from Portland Oregon, where I'm hiding out in one of the old watering holes. I remember sitting in here and doing Beer Church, back in the Quaker days. Bearded men talking God over beers. It felt so rebellious then. So wholesome now. The leader of Beer Church is a woman now, I think. That's the word on the streets, anyway.
It's been a beautiful weekend. Time with friends. Fantastic Four (it was decent!). Good long talks with hot new girl, about boundaries, about poetry, about not being someone's mom. Playing with the new computer. Overall, really lovely.
I'm going to use some of the stuff that I wrote about this week during lunch as the root of this memo. I've been doing lunch notes. It's helped me to keep writing on the regular. So here is a Moon Memo, written over a week of lunches.
Godzilla will save us all
=========================
I need to remember the truth of my childhood: that regardless of all that I know, and all that I believe, the monsters I loved as a child will save me. We have a lot to answer for. We deserve to be buried under the rubble, to feel the nuclear blast around us. But at least we are blessed by the destructive power of godzilla, the king of the monsters, and are saved by Mothra and her girls. That we are the friends of Gamera, and he is our friend. That we are small, and they are big.
Morning Routine
This is the morning routing. This is the mourning routine. This is today. But it's representational.
Wake up at 4:50 a.m. for arbitrary, maybe-I'll-finally-sit-outside-this-morning reasons. Fire up the despair machine, like you have told yourself you never would. Read that the legislature is going to be going back in session because the roads are falling apart. Read that another trans girl is going to experience houselessness soon. Read that Buzz Osborne and Brian Eno agree that the best way to combat writer's block is to just get started. Just to do it. Put your phone aside. Sit at the big screen, and open up Obsidian.md. Open today's daily note, and start as bad prose.
Lately you've been starting with bad prose. Just dumping on the page whatever it is that you can bleed out. This morning, it's about getting up in the morning and letting your brain get taken over by the worms of news. It's about the article you read about Palmer Luckey, how he became a defense contractor to troll the folks that fucked him over when he was fired from Facebook. Remember that he seems like a lot of angry trans women that you know. Remember that Israel is starving Gaza, that a bunch of babies are going to be dying soon. Remember that you are a bad pacifist. Write it out.
Why do you go to 3 line stanzas? You started that in college. Counting beats, counting feet. Finding some structure to hang your words on. It works, so why change? Emily Dickinson wrote hymns, the same 4/3/4/3 stanzas for her whole creative life. Sometimes you stick with what speaks to you.
A dead trans girl shows up again. That seems to be all you are writing about right now. It's getting exhausting to keep scraping at that scab. That's how you get scars. But its also how you get calluses. Tough bitch blues.
Put on Mope Grooves Box of Dark Roses again. Hear Stevie say "stay alive no matter what." She didn't stay alive.
20 minutes? 30 minutes? First thought best thought. Get stuck? Lower your standards. You write nothing like Bill Stafford or Allen Ginsberg, but you've taken those to heart. You write mostly first drafts. Release mostly first drafts. You only want what comes next.
Eternity only comes for those that show up.
Print it out. Put it on instagram. Put it on the sadgrls. Ask desperately for help to find something else to write about that is not trans girls dying. Realize you broke a rule about posting a message to everyone. Hate yourself a little bit for forgetting the rules again.
Take a shower. Make coffee (you always forget to make coffee in the morning). Try to be kind to your husband. Today is an unkind day.
Go to work. Type this up. Put it in a folder on dropbox. Watch it send to the world. Send a link to E. because you are doing that right now. Try to be ready for the rest of the day. The writing is all that feels real. And it's time to think of something to write about that isn't about dead trans girls. The necromancy of it is starting to eat at your soul.
Sunday Morning
Woke up with the taste of a cigar in my mouth. J and I got a stogie after watching a movie. It was fun. A little bit of sin to share with my sweetie. We may make this a regular thing.
Thinking about the writing computer. I'm using an old Thinkpad X1 Carbon as my Fuck Around and Just Write computer. Running Ubuntu, running Gnome. You can get insufferable pretty quickly talking about your set up for Linux. I don't want to be that girl. But I think I do have it set up the way that I want it right now.
It's a poky little machine, with only 8gb of RAM. So there isn't a lot I can do with it. Watching video is out. Reading a lot of text is out. It basically runs Obsidian (my writing environment), the file system, Perplexity AI (getting answers to questions without opening a browser and sinking deep into that world), some cloud folders (the apple one so I can access my files from the other computer, dropbox for blog workflows), and Signal to communicate with people when I want to share stuff. Libreoffice for formatting poems. And that's about all. I have it set with 4 workspaces: Writing, answers, files, and communication. Keyboard shortcuts for all of these things.
I haven't loved a computer more than this one in a while. At some point, I may upgrade to one with 16GB to extend the useful life, but overall, as a fucking around with words and sharing, this is a great machine. ff
2025-07-29-Lunch Notes
I worry sometimes that writing poetry is unfriendly to the people around me. Every lover and friend will have to worry if they will show up in a poem after something hard or beautiful happens. They don't consent to be bricked up in words. That 20 years from now someone is going to read your experiences and judge them, and as Francois Matarasso said "Life is hard enough without strangers making it harder." And history has its way with poetry. But also, this is how I process my emotions. If you tangle yourself up with a poet this risk is there.
Vulnerability should never be held as a weakness. We have to be vulnerable, or we will never be able to be fully ourselves.
The afterplay is the play.
2025-7-31
The trainings are done for the day. All the paperwork that we ever devised is completed and filed away. We are all very tired and sweaty. We have done the work of education by setting up tables, doing the photocopying, laying out snacks, making sure everyone is comfortable. This is how we save the world.
I am reading the Smoky the Bear Sutra right now. Gary Snyder. A favorite poet from my young adulthood. He is probably a bit too manly for me now, but I still carry the idea of the Sutra in my heart:
He will put them out
Drown their butts
crush their butts
drown their butts!!!
I'll see if I can put the [Smokey Bear Sutra here](https://sacred-texts.com/bud/bear.htm) to share as well.
Outro
I want to say I love you to every single person on this list, in person, with all of my heart. Don't forget you are worthy of love.
Love and stuff,
Misha Lynn Moon