I never quite got used to the number 2023. If I still wrote checks, they’d still say 2022, which is a more cheerful number. And here we are about to throw all those numbers in the recycling bin and gird our nerves for a presidential election year.

 

And a year with a whole nother day to live through! 

 

To say I didn’t want to write this edition would be an understatement, but the syzygy of the last newsletter of 2023 and Displacement Blues Issue 250 is too rich to pass up. 

ALSO: Just in time for TinyLetter to cease operations, I cannot upload any photographs, and importing photos posted on other sites didn't work! Very frustrating. So no stills from the videos I described, no gallery of the best cats of 2023, and no super fierce selfie taken in a high school bathroom with a hardhat on. Next time, next platform, next year.

On to Issue 250!

 

🗑📆🔫

 

When I said in last week’s newsletter that I would be fine spending Christmas by myself and skipping all the various parties and gatherings so I wouldn’t catch any more colds or flus—well, I was fine eventually, and I know I made the right choice, but I felt more isolated than I did during my bout of COVID, frankly. When you’re sick, you can lie on the couch and tell people you’re sick, and then some of those people will offer to bring you soup. When it’s Christmas and you’re bored—or depressed, or angry, or triggered, or any of the other less jolly emotions—it’s hard to know who to call, because everyone’s celebrating Christmas. Even the people who don’t celebrate Christmas have their rituals of non-Christmas. 

 

(Thankfully, I did find someone to call, and Mr. Bunny had some great advice, as always.)

 

I did take advantage of the daylight this year to go for a hike with a friend out Heron’s Head and around the part of the Hunters Point Shoreline Trail that commemorates the activism against and removal of the Hunters Point Power Plant, built starting in 1928 and operated by PG&E using fossil fuels until 2006. 

 

The site area is a whopping 38 acres, some of which has been reclaimed (and remediated) as parkland, some of which is still power transmission infrastructure, and some of which is fenced off in a way that invites speculation. According to the Wikipedia article, assertions by the various power companies about number and size of the boilers and fuel storage tanks conflicted with contemporaneous aerial photographs of the location, so even in the 1930s, what the power company said and did were two different things. 

 

The other main event on Christmas was an AA meeting: Not that I was feeling driven to drink, but I know that no one knows the singular shittiness of family-oriented holidays better than a recovering alcoholic. Either they caused the problems, or the problems caused them, who can say. 

 

Christmas was never a fractious event in my family, but as I typed the words “Christmas was never a fractious event in my family,” I realized that I have to amend them to say “Christmas Day was not usually an especially fractious event in our house.”

 

I remember one Christmas season, for some ill-starred reason both of my grandmothers had gatherings at their houses on the same day, the Towers in the morning and my mother’s side, about 10 miles away, in the evening. 

 

My father’s mother had a sort of open house, where various people dropped by in 2s and 3s throughout the day for conversation and refreshments. The candy dish ever-present on the coffee table was heaped with things I eyeballed all day, including the filled hard candies wrapped to look like strawberries and filled with jam. I was either in middle school or, I think, high school, in one of the ages, 11 or 13 or 16, where I worked up the nerve to stand up to my father when he was clearly wrong. 

 

In any event, I was expected to participate in the party with people my parents’ age and mostly older, rather than hiding in the next room with a book. My brother was enough younger that he could still be a kid, doing whatever kids did in that austere house.

 

My father started the morning telling some sort of anecdote with statistics he’d read in Reader’s Digest, you know the ones I mean. 36 percent of Americans don’t know how to do something or don’t believe something or can’t afford something. I don’t remember the topic.

 

What I do remember is that every time my Dad recited this factoid, the number went up, so that with the first people dropping by some small number of Americans were stupid or poor or racist or whatever, but with each new crop of fresh faces, the anecdote would come into the room again larger than before, first like a toy poodle jumping through hoops, then a monkey riding a bicycle, then a clown jugging on the back of a miniature pony, then a trained bear dancing on its hind legs. 

 

The first part of the day came and went, a whole series of fairly staid people, some of them related to us and some friends of my grandmother. 

 

In the movie in my head, the film jump-cuts to nighttime, and we were over at the very different party at my Grandma and Grandpa’s house, where all of my mother’s 7 brothers and sisters and all of their spouses and children were in the room at the same time. The kids were running around, the grownups were laughing and gossiping, but both groups were loud, loud, loud, and I was someplace between them, a little too old to play hide and seek and, after a long day of socializing with adults, a little sick of adults.

 

At some point I walk into the living room and I hear The Anecdote come out again. I couldn’t help myself. “Gee, Dad,” I said, “When we started off this morning 18 percent of Americans didn’t know how to tie their shoes, and now that’s up to 74!”

 

I mean, I was right, everyone in that room knew I was right, and most of all my Dad knew I was right, and I think to head off having his in-laws, some of whom were very good friends, laugh at him rather than at his jokes or wit or knowledge, he told me to shut up, called me an asshole, and told me to get out of his sight. 

 

This is undoubtedly the most dramatic Christmas event in my family history. Was alcohol involved? Oh, almost certainly!

 

To be fair to my father, he’d had a Big Day. l wish we could say that to tired grownups and not just to cranky toddlers. I wish we could give people an out like this, in particular men, but also anyone hosting a party, but also, on top of that, anyone who is an in-law, or the boyfriend or girlfriend or date of a family member… I mean, why should anyone feel the need to impress anyone? Instead of “42 percent of Americans think bussing is wrong” or “27 percent of Americans can’t afford gasoline,” how about “Look, these are my wonderful children. As you can see, they’re still alive, we feed them adequately, and they have enough nice clothes to put some on for Christmas. They’re in school and if they want to talk about that, ask them.”

 

🎅🏼🎄🥃🤬

 

Ancient history, but this time of year memories bubble up like the champagne fountain at my Aunt Teresa’s wedding to my Uncle Charlie, one of the cool fellow-in-laws my Dad admired and wanted to impress. (Sorry, Dad, it’s true.) RIP Uncle Charlie, he died this year beloved of everyone left. 

 

But back to the present, on the brink of 2024: One way I surveyed the past year was by looking at the videos I’d taken on my phone. I don’t record everything and I’m much more likely to take a photo or make a voice memo than to “film” something. 

 

At least 4 of the videos were of 4 different cats meowing frantically or pawing my hair so that I would pet them, or keep petting them. One of these, videos, of a cat named Cleo, involves her favorite pastime. You have to twang a hair tie across the room so that she runs and fetches it, and then either brings it back orand cries with with desperation for you to shoot it again, or runs up and meows until you ruffle her fur vigorously. 

 

More than cats, most of my videos are of animated inanimate objects. I have no fewer than 3 takes of a metal trash can in a taqueria in Las Vegas. When you pushed trash through the door with a hinge at the top, the resulting swing sang a remarkable industrial-musical-animal rhythmic honking song, like a growling monster that’s also a washing machine.

 

Accidental music also made an appearance in my sojourn into the Santa Cruz Mountains in July. An enormous redwood had long ago fallen onto the narrow path overlooking the river several stories below, and the trunk had been sawn so that a perfect slice of tree, the size of a small boulder, braced the right-hand border of the path. As I walked by this trunk, the sound of the rushing water below bounced off the flat surface and bent into a narrow whoosh that sounded like a person imitating an ocean wave. The sound could be further dissected into segments based on how fast I moved past the felled tree, because the trees between me and the river also played a part in the pitch of the whoosh. 

 

From the same trip to Vegas and beyond, I have 15 seconds of Arizona desert shot out of the windows of the car my friend Susanna was driving. From stereo speakers booms Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds, a prog-rock fantasia of the radio play, starring Richard Burton as the narrator and featuring Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues as lead singer for the rock opera. The soundtrack features both a synthesized harpsichord and a live harp, synthetic orchestral strings in the mix with electric and acoustic guitars. Its primary musical theme was originally written as a Lego commercial.

 

Out the windows: The blue, blue sky; the desert, with its chiseled mesas, the sagebrush steppe achingly green above the ochre red earth; power transmission wires, the only manmade structures in sight aside from roads, road signs, and cars. We sped by an arroyo heralded by a yellow hazard road sign, the pictogram depicting a flash flood. 

 

🛸🌵🪨🌞🚗👽

 

At my house and at various housesits, I shot many different movies of water collecting in the white paint and dripping from above Victorian doors and windows, the leaks caused by the nearly unrelenting rainstorms of the first 3 months of this year. Also, a full minute of water running down the outside of the downspout where it comes through the upper foundation and into the garage. This one was to email to the contractors. 

 

 

Also caught on video: 

 

3 seconds of the wind at Pigeon Point Lighthouse

 

8 seconds of the driverless car depot, a block-long row of LIDAR arrays spinning like silent sirens

 

9 seconds of my own face illuminated by the changing colors of the Entwined Forest LED lights, not in their annual installation at Golden Gate Park, but at the warehouse in Hunter’s Point where they’re stored the rest of the year

 

10 seconds of Cyclecide’s 2-person Ferris wheel in action. Two strangers whoop as they pedal furiously in a loop up into the sky and back down, like a funicular. It’s not perpetual motion, but it’s still very Rube Goldberg. In the background, a man’s voice says, “I have enough pain every day,” quite cheerfully

 

10 seconds of “Cannonball,” the lead single from Last Splash by the Breeders, who toured playing the whole album for its 30th anniversary

 

14 seconds of a cat on a carpet being approached by the brush-roll of a stick vacuum, exhibiting all senses of nonplussed, both standard English and its opposite. He’s confused, he’s unperturbed, he’s discomfited, he’s annoyed, he nonchalantly gets up.

 

21 seconds of the Little North Fork of the Big River in Mendocino 2 days after a torrential rain in April. The creek bed is nearly empty most of the rest of the year, so I shot this for Elizabeth. The water is rushing; it’s too fast and high to cross on foot. My voice says “Say hi,” and Sequoia turns around and says, “Hi, Elizabeth.” We were there for a wedding.

 

26 seconds of a downpour shot off a redwood deck looking over a meadow, through the trees to the waterline. For most of the year, the river is low and languorous enough you can’t see it from the top of the hill. This was the first of several river weather videos I shot for Elizabeth, this one at River’s Bend in Philo on February 4. It rained, hard, on a weekend where we meant to burn things. 

 

28 seconds of daytime hail out the back door of a housesit. It’s heavy, it bounces. I involuntarily say “ooh!,” a sound that’s part impressed and part wince. 

 

38 seconds of an extremely loud and incredibly cool propane-powered fire sculpture by my friend Ryon Gesink at his art show at Seaport Studios in Richmond. It looks like a lunar module, but instead of landing softly with the aid of jet propulsion, it would tunnel into the surface as it expelled big balls of fire.

 

49 eerie seconds of the pipes above the hot water heaters in our basement. It sounds like the Wave Organ or another oceanic spot where wind blows across culverts or caves. I looked up the past weather on Time and Date, and at the time I shot this video, around 12:30 on February 21, the wind speed was 47mph and stayed there for 2 hours. At the end of the tiny movie, the singing pipes play counterpoint to the running water of a toilet flush passing through to the sewer.

 

54 seconds of hail hitting the window of the Ritual Room. I turned on the porch light and shot out the window, and the neighbors’ palm tree appears as an enormous, otherworldly shadow behind the frozen shower of light.

 

54 seconds of a rave the same weekend in the Woodlands as the rushing river. The groom is spinning records and the bride is spinning fire. 

 

Another minute and a half of rain at River’s Bend on April 4, where this fork of the river ran high and wild and rose almost to its banks.

 

You may be reading this when I send it out, on New Years Eve, on your way to a party or while trying to convince yourself to stay home or go out, or even on the toilet during a party while doomscrolling and bored. If so, it seems both redundant and necessary to remind you that drinking to so much excess that you lose track might feel like a fun way to ring out the old, but the resulting hangover is a shitty way to ring in the new. 

 

I’m going to repeat what I said at the meeting I went to on Christmas. I’m grateful I don’t drink, and I’m grateful it doesn’t feel like an option for me anymore. Although my clean date is June 1, 2007, it’s actually been more than 18 years since I’ve taken a drink of alcohol. 

 

Here’s why: It makes me feel stupid, and it makes me actually stupid. I’ve blacked out and woken up with a hangover so bad I wished time would stop. I’ve blacked out and woken up with a stranger. Moreover, I could get in an argument or escalate a disagreement to a physical fight. I could say things to people I love that I can’t take back. I could punch someone and go to jail. I could get behind the wheel of a car (I don’t own a car) and kill somebody. I could impair my judgment so much that I can no longer talk myself out of suicide. I could get lit and forget I don’t do drugs, or remember I’m no longer sober and do a lot of drugs, and that would compound everything else I listed. 

 

No matter how bad things have gotten, and things have gotten very bad! I haven’t had to pick up a drink. I remember sometimes that people do that when they’re stressed, and that for me, it doesn’t lead anywhere good. 

 

If you’re reading this after New Year’s Eve, Happy New Year! If you woke up with any new wreckage, don’t hesitate to reach out about what it would be like to stop. Even for a day. A day might be enough.

 

We have room for one more student in the witch class I’m teaching in the Mission in January, a core class in Reclaiming called Rites of Passage, which is about trance and storytelling and dreamwork. It starts January 7 and goes for 6 weeks. Email tarintowers@mac.com if you’re interested. We’ll also be working with the tarot. Elements of Magic is the prerequisite.

 

 

Devi Sridhar (The Guardian)

A quarter of Gaza’s population, or half a million people, may be doomed to die of preventable diseases in pulverized cities and in the UN refugee camps that Israel is shunting people to and then bombing. We’re talking cholera and other disorders of diarrhea, which cause severe dehydration and then death. More UN workers have been killed in this siege than in any other event in history. Most of the schools and hospitals are gone, and many of the territory’s medical staff were either collateral damage or assassinated by direct strikes on their homes and medical facilities. 

 

Vauhini Vara (Wired)

Some volunteer projects turn into more labor than love, and trying to monetize “community” has proved not only difficult but controversial, especially when the community is about exchanging free stuff. The Buy Nothing group I’m in has a lot of rules, and these rules are part of the debate and the future of the movement. 

 

Andrea Long Chu (New York Magazine)

 

Dan Hernandez (Longreads)

A fun investigation/personal essay about a stolen car and the mysterious VHS cassette that came back with it from the impound lot. 

 

Joe Eskenazi (Mission Local)

I had no idea what to expect from this story, but I did not expect to learn about indentured immigrants being trafficked to sell hot dogs on Fisherman’s Wharf. Street vending is either overblown or criminally overlooked, depending on who you ask, and the reporters on this piece asked everyone. 

 

Many thanks to Rose for the GrubHub gift card, and to Briana and Matthew for chocolate. If you’re still employed and liquid and you’d like to support my writing, look up “Tarin Towers” on PayPal or Venmo, send me a gift certificate for Instacart or Grubhub, or check my Amazon Wishlist.

Tinyletter No More: The Future of Displacement Blues Mailchimp is sunsetting Tinyletter and deleting the archive at the end of February. I’ll be moving to a different platform before then and importing the mailing list from here to there. More details in the covid issue.

 

Notes and Errata Looks like I averaged a newsletter every other week this year, and I’m proud of that since I traveled so much and skipped a couple because I was too sick or depressed to have opinions. Since TinyLetter is shutting down, I am going to take the first 2 weeks of 2024 to migrate my mailing list and my archive to other platforms. Let me know if you have advice and experience! I will not be using Substack. The company doubled down on it being good and cool to publish and make money off of actual Nazis. ALSO: I regret deeply not being able to post any photos for this final newsletter on the TinyLetter platform, but if you want to hear any of the super cool sounds from the video transcript of 2023, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

 

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D I S P L A C E M E N T B L U E S

Vol. 9, No. 26; Issue 250: Semiquincentennial

Find Issues 1-249 on my tinyletter page.

 

 

 

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Three-bean chili with acorn squash in which I accidentally added a tablespoon of celery salt instead of chili powder. I added the chili powder later