013: Wintery Mix

First, COMPILATION.
Remember that like 6-month period in the '90s where Cat in the Hat hats were SUPER COOL?

Watching the Rifftrax of Samurai Cop and all I can think of is "This guy looks like you stunned a guy on Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!"

This is your periodic reminder that the US healthcare system is actually absolute garbage (unless you're rich) and literally every dollar you spend on it would be worth nearly three times as much if we just had universal healthcare. And it would be a lot faster because you have one actual department to deal with.

Trans Visibility Week. Here I am. Parenting, grad school, migraine, ADHD, depression, transcontinental relationships, pandemic measures, PTSD... nothing is as hard as summoning the energy to perform femininity. The alternative is living a fraction of a life. The choice is not "being trans." The choice is enduring a life of repression of self. The choice is whether or not to sacrifice an entire inauthentic world in order to create another one--still inauthentic, but intentional. Striving to be who I think I am and failing. Better than striving to be who others think I am. I might be fake, but at least it's my fake. If only having perfect nails and a feminine figure were as easy as trading my soul to the devil. I'd have found that crossroads decades ago.

We are VERY SLOWLY going through X-Files, and we just finished season 2 (the episode "Anasazi") and I've seen it literally once (when it aired) and I remember almost every scene from it. Fuck this show was good. And I remember that instead of, like, "important" shit.

I have been informed that my tone is arrogant. Not quite as good as being informed that I lack tact, but still up there.

My favorite part of Thanksgiving with ADHD is having pre-meal-prep irritability. We're gonna eat at a normal time, but fuck if I'm going to be comfortable at any moment before that.

This is the first time in three years I genuinely regret living with the L directly in the back yard, because they're using so many air tools and it's 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday. Louder than the fucking train somehow.

One of my favorite things about being me is having a book with the subtitle "Resisting the Attention Economy" on my wish list while catching up on twitter through TweetDeck, which I specifically use because I can't consume everything all at once. Being Terminally Online is a lot more painful than it used to be, and not because the world has gotten worse, but because my spine is trying to collapse on itself, even in an $800 chair specifically designed to avoid spinal collapse.

Everyone keeps asking if I'm going to turn my Fiero into Not a Fiero (usually some kind of body kit, like those ridiculous Ferrari kits), and the answer is Fuck No. I bought it because it's a Fiero.

Second, VAPORWAVE TIME COMPRESSION.
I'm sitting here listening to Lo-fi Hip-hop Beats to Chill and Relax To, while one partner frantically hits mouse buttons playing Torchlight 2 and another naps on the couch. We've decided that we're tired of food prep and IKEA plant-based meatballs (IKEA food is the new tradition) and so we're going to order dinner tonight. I don't know what it will be. The cats are all sleeping. All in all it's been a pretty low-key weekend, after I got the rigamarole of cooking done on Thursday.

Today we got a new windshield installed on the Subaru. It was legitimately confusing sitting in it for the first time in a year and a half and not having to see the rock chips, the dual cracks, the gravel abrasion, and just having a pure, clear piece of glass in front of me. During the time that it was being installed, partner and I went to Occult Books (always nice to see friends' writings on the shelves in places) and picked up a couple books: one on mystical symbolism which I expect will come in handy for writing, and one on Gnosticism. A fair amount of my work, and especially those I am influenced by, have been described as such. It's a little jarring to me, inasmuch as I have never once actually read historical Gnosticism. So I'm gonna jump backward for a bit there. I put this all in one paragraph for a reason, and it's not just because it happened today.

Tomorrow we plan on going to the Art Institute of Chicago to renew our membership and see the Barbara Kruger exhibition. Personally, I'm going to be reconnecting with the Ando Gallery, which remains my favorite space in the city. (It's dark, it's quiet, and it's pretty much always exactly the right temperature. I would live there if I could.) One thing the pandemic really did was fuck up my sense of belonging to the city, to people, and my goal for tomorrow, then, is to attempt to rectify that.

Longer term, I still need to chew on what I'm "doing." My therapist mentioned during my last appointment that what I'm going through is possibly a sort of Samhain culling--that I'm searching for ways to trim excess from my life so that other parts can flourish. And maybe that's true. On the other hand, I just want to sleep forever. I'm tired of culling. I'm tried of growth. I just need a very large rest. One big enough to repair the world.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Finished House of Leaves. Here's the review I left on Goodreads, in its entirety: The spooky bits were absolutely diluted by the Professional Experimental Writing bits. Skimmed large sections. Appreciate it as a project; misses widely in the execution. Smartest book in the room, with all the caveats that entails."
- Started my first Virginia Woolf novel, Orlando, which is dedicated to Woolf's lover, Vita Sackville-West.
- Mastodon's newest album, Hushed and Grim, has come out, and I need to make a trip to the record store to pick it up on vinyl. I have no idea how it's already been four years since Emperor of Sand.
- After and extended detour playing Need for Speed: Payback, I've returned to Gran Turismo Sport, with more emphasis on driving online events. So far my "favorites" are the ones where you drive a shitty street car on a race track and everyone else with their shitty street cars shove you right off the track so you stand no hope of making back your original position.

Fourth, PROMOTION.
This one isn't going to be a collection of links, but it's gonna be just a single plea: share this and/or my book with people. We little indie folk don't have anything but word of mouth going for us. We don't have marketing, or agents, or anyone else looking out for the business of selling our work. If you have a copy of my book PLEASE take a minute to pop onto Amazon or Goodreads to review it. It means SO MUCH.

Finally, THE OUTRO.
A lot of communicational pieces that are very, very late, will often open with "Sorry this is late, but..." and that's cool, but in all honesty, I'm not sorry. My mental state has been in shambles since before the last couple newsletters went out, and I've mostly needed time to recharge. I don't even know that we're "back" in any meaningful sense of the word. As it is right now, between holiday stress and other shit, I'm just barely holding together. Writing in general has been difficult. And friends say to just free-write through it, which would be great advice if I could even get down to that. But it's genuinely difficult to even write this newsletter in a coherent, linear fashion; considering the whole point of this dang thing was to consolidate messages over multiple platforms for ease of composition, I'm not doing a very good job. I'm trying to value my rest time, and trying to believe that my distractions have been helpful rather than harmful.