Moon Memo: Crying for a dead boy
Good morning from the frozen wastelands of Portland, Oregon. It is Saturday morning, and the snow is coming, and the wind is howling and cold. My cold weather friends, from places where snow and ice are a part of the winter story, are laughing as usual, in their older and older puffy heavy parkas and snow shoes. Meanwhile, my kids are out there in their tents in hooded sweatshirts, and I'm worried about them. I'm worried about them. I'm so worried about them.
This week has been pretty uneventful. Some work stuff. Prep for the foul weather. The endless cough that seems to be with me forever. Never tested positive for Covid. Feels like the never ending dehabiliating chest thing that everyone warned about. I don't think that's how it's going to work.
Pulled out the little space heater, which is doing its thing. Smells of burning dust. Of childhood bedrooms in Southern Oregon, where the space heater's exposed coils were a danger every morning of the long frozen solid winters. There is a line on my shin from touching the coils when I was getting dressed one morning in the bird room (my bedroom was once a place where my grandmother let her finches fly freely. I found a corpse of one of the birds mummifed in the back of my closet once, when I was in high school. The room was 6 feet by 6 feet. That's all I had. Big window cut into the door, so granny could look in at her beautiful birds. I sometimes wonder if she was mostly disappointed to see her awkward masturbating child in there instead.).
Here's the poems I wrote this week, along with some quotes that I'm carrying in my heart. Maybe some reactions to them.
## Poems
## every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves.
There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.
– Simone Weil
## enshittification-word of the year
The American Dialect Society, in its 34th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected “enshittification” as the Word of the Year for 2023. More than three hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.
The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog.
I'm experiencing my own experience of that enshittification. I go to facebook and see nothing but shitty memes. I go to instagram and see the shattering misery of the current war against Gaza. Mangled bodies. The indifference of others. It makes me miserable. So I am away from it. And frankly, I don't think it matters much. Smaller world. Better world.
## What to share and what to write
I do have this bit of wisdom about writing for you, though: Always remember the difference between what you need to share and what you just need to write. And try, if you can manage, to remember that difference before you click the “Publish” button. I am glad that I wrote the post — the topic would have nagged at me until I finally broke down and addressed it — and very glad that I deleted it.
Alan Jacobs
## Obsession
I have become obsessed with watching a movie, and I must do it, and it involves going to the video store. And I am very excited for it. Because sometimes you want to find yourself in a movie. And I think I can find myself in that movie.
This is the movie in question:
"Wild Side" is a 2004 drama film directed by Sébastien Lifshitz. The story follows Stéphanie, a transgender sex worker, who returns from Paris to her small hometown to care for her ailing mother. She is accompanied by her two flatmates, an Algerian hustler named Jamal and a Russian soldier on AWOL named Mikhail. French. Experimental. Beautiful. Not streaming. At Movie Madness.
Here is the opening of the film:
And I know that its a problematic starting point for a film. I had a long talk with a friend about it earlier this week, over text (sometimes the worst place to have a conversation, where you can't see the face of a friend that you love, can't be more tender in your responses). What I see here is a trans body, and a singer (who is not yet out as trans, but is in fact, a trans woman) singing a song to the part of her that is dying, the dead boy that a lot of us carry. We have what we call deadnames, that identity that we murdered so that we could be ourselves. It's ok to mourn that dead boy. Especially for those of us that spent more time perceived as that boy.
Anyway, I have never heard of this film, and a film with a trans actress playing a trans character from 2004 is wild to me. I'll give a full review.
## outro
I'm going to make coffee and read the rest of the day. Listen to wind. Try to stay warm. Be safe out there, my loves. You are very very special to me.
Love and stuff,
Misha Lynn Moon