#46: Not the cheeriest issue, I'm afraid

Actual updates

It’s been a rough month, and most of you already know why.

A friend passed away - cancer, as ever, is a demon - and while we hadn’t seen each other in person in a few years, I miss her presence in this world. She was one of the most keenly alive people I’ve ever known.

It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a shock, if that’s something that makes sense: we knew that her condition had taken a turn, and of course intellectually I knew that having a terminal disease means it’s only going to end one way, but it still hit like a ton of bricks when I got the news.

There’s not so much else I can say that hasn’t been said better already, and this isn’t the first time I’ve experienced loss and death and grief, even as an adult, but when it’s someone who is a friend and a peer1, it lands differently. I’ve reached the point in life where endings are starting to outstrip beginnings.

I don’t want to tell other people’s stories without their consent, and I don’t want to list everyone I know or have known who is left or leaving, but it’s an older feeling than any kind of aches and pains can engender. It’s older than watching your kid stretch upwards, all legs and long bones, and knowing he’ll be taller than you in 5 years. It’s older than realizing you have adult friends, with jobs and apartments and responsibilities, who are younger than a pair of skis you own.

I’m going to move it back over to Kara here quickly, with the absolute lights-out classic video from her, and it’s not one of her performances, although those are all worth looking up, too. No. This is what happened one night on Nationals weekend in 2014, in Kansas City, when she effectively drunk-history’ed Star Wars:

I’ve also been thinking about losing friendships, not just the human being who is the friend. Partly this came up on its own, partly it’s down to that article that made the rounds by someone who routinely ditches her friends when they become parents, you know the one2. But I was looking at my life and realizing that I knew exactly which friendships would dissolve away once I wasn’t in the same city, or working at the same job. I’ve already discovered which ones would fall apart if one of us went and had a kid (me). And most of the time this is okay, this is the way things go, adult friendships are often circumstantial!

And every now and then you get a glimpse into the fact that all your friends in a certain group have more in common with each other than with you, and that while nobody dislikes you, they’ll all carry on very easily once you’re not around. That hole in the friend group’s fabric will seal over, seamlessly, and they’ll remember you, maybe even miss you, but they won’t think about you most of the time.

This sounds sad, and I guess it is sad, but it’s also normal. You can probably think of the hanger-on of one of your friend groups, someone else who this would happen to if they ever happened to move away. You don’t dislike them! They’re just not as close as the other friends, for one reason or another.

That segues only slightly awkwardly into something else that happened this month: forget a friends breakup, great swaths of my skin decided to stage a breakup with my body3.

This started with mosquito bites.

So, I’ve always been a mosquito’s favorite food, and I had a few bites from going outside at various points in the summer, but they had all behaved normally so far: little pinkish bump, itchy, then it fades away in a reasonable amount of time. You’ve had mosquito bites, I imagine. You’re familiar. But then we went camping.

We didn’t even think mosquitos were the main insect problem on this camping trip! There were bees - first, quite a lot of them at our first campsite, and then when we moved to another one, just a couple of really persistent ones - and since my job in this family is Critter and Small Varmint Management, and also because I’m not scared of bees, on more than one occasion I had them walking on me while the guys sat in the car with the doors shut. I was considering letting them both sting me; bee stings are unpleasant but it’s fine, I’m not allergic so it’s just a bit of pain and then a bunch of itching, and I can handle both of those things. They did not, ultimately, sting me; once I got the fire built, they mostly didn’t bother us, and then the sun went down and they went, thankfully, to bed4.

But everyone knows that sundown is when mosquitos really wake up, so I was about to get devoured. And I was, which was annoying in both the usual way and also in the sense of having to let them bite me sometimes, if a bee happened to be around and I didn’t want to make a sudden move. But I still thought this was normal! I would be suffering and itchy for a few days, and then I’d be fine!

Instead, the bites split and wept (without me scratching holes in them! I want to be very clear that this wasn’t my fault!) and crusted over, and the scabs took a long time to complete their process, and beneath them was new skin, pink and shiny. A few are still looking like that; one that had been an inch-and-a-half long line (above another bite - an exclamation mark5 of itching and scabs) on the inside of my left wrist is still a livid red blob. One, which actually pre-dated the camping trip, on my upper leg, was in such disarray that it could have more accurately been called a wound or a sore: it initially looked like some bug got the meal of their life by biting me where I already had a scratch or cut, and then it became clear that the “scratch” was part of the bite complex as both areas scabbed, broke, merged, scabbed again, rinse and repeat, as they were surrounded by livid red skin that eventually flaked and calmed down. The bites/sores themselves had to grow some new skin, and eventually they did. It’s still one of the most obvious places that something is still healing.

This led me to many searches online to see if I had actually been bitten by something different and worse, but nothing I looked up sounded like this. It did, however, bring up one of the oddest set of search results and suggestions ever:

“Best bug bites”??? There’s a best?

Anyway. I’m fine now. I think maybe I had some kind of bad reaction combined with the stress eczema that kicks up on me occasionally, but I’m in no hurry to get any more bug bites.

One thing contributing to my stress needn’t have: Porchfest. We signed up with about a month to go and rushed through learning half a dozen new songs (and relearning a couple old ones), and I agonized over whether to be the annoying friend who always asks people to come to something they don’t want to go to, got encouraged6 by Matt to invite people anyway, invited them, and then it rained that day and Porchfest was cancelled. Across us and Matt’s real band, we couldn’t make it on the rain date, so that was that!

What am I reading

A couple issues ago, I was reading the second book in the Green Bone saga; now I’m reading the third (and final) one. I won’t retread the synopsis of the universe and setting, but this book goes further into the next generation - the characters who were young and up-and-coming in the first book are middle-aged and established now, and their kids are out there doing the same things they once were.

One thing I surprised myself by enjoying in this book is that it makes liberal use of time jumps - it starts a few years after the events of the previous book, and then jumps by years at a time from chapter to chapter. This can feel disjointed, but in this case, it didn’t - it just served to underline how some wars are slow-moving, and on a day-to-day basis not much is happening or changing. Plus, while people’s evolutions within themselves and in relation to the people around them can take time - documenting the incremental differences from day to day and week to week doesn’t move the story.

I’m about a third of the way through, and this is a brick of a book, so there’s a lot of story left - I’m pacing myself so I don’t run out, as usual, but I’m gasping to know what’s going to happen with the Kaul family. And one character, dear to my heart, had better get a damn date somewhere in this book, and not with an extortionate creep, that didn’t count!!

Some links

It’s kind of The Americans in real life, although rather less interesting - surveillance rather than wigs - but there IS a secret tunnel, and that’s cool! Also, the guy who owns the house now is super cagey, in a way that probably implies something. The Spy House Next Door

This starts out like a typical scammer piece - this guy is acting like he is super wealthy and getting money and connections because of it7 - but it takes A TURN. Kyle Deschanel, the Rothschild Who Wasn’t

Shipwrecks are cool! I wanted to know more about this one, but some things are always true, it seems: this particular ship didn’t sink due to a catastrophic storm or anything like that so much as just plain old neglect and cheapness on the part of its wealthy owners, who didn’t put much money into needed repairs. Historians Discover “Remarkably Intact” Shipwreck, Undisturbed Beneath Lake Michigan for 142 Years

Tragically, this isn’t an Olympics of eating cheese, at which I could medal. Training for the Olympics of Cheese

My attitude towards this can be summed up as, “Capes: why not more?” This Old Thing? T&C Reviews: The History of Capes

Extremely good chocolate: why not more? Well, because the trees that produced those beans were thought to be extinct for many years, and also because a bar of it costs hundreds of dollars, but this article details the work to solve for the former problem! The Quest to Save the World’s Most Coveted Chocolate

I’m old enough to remember when Google didn’t suck, and this article goes into more detail as to what happened and how Google set their search up for failure. The End of the Googleverse

This headline is a series of words!! Murder at the Tiki Palace: When Swinging Went Sour in the 70s

Oh, my goodness, this is beautiful. It’s a remembrance of the author’s time training as a ballet dancer in New York in the titular year and it’s so well-written it makes me want to scream. 1978

I didn’t expect a deep dive on dust to be so compelling, and so wide-ranging, but it is. Completely unrelatedly, do not look at my house (ever). Empire of Dust: What the Tiniest Specks Reveal About the World

Once again, something that sounds crazy enough on its own turns into something even crazier by the end of the article. Imagine if your job was “fake cricket player.” The Wild Quest to Create a Fake Indian Cricket League… That Was Just the Beginning

Smell is memory, and some smells are only memory. This is poignant. That 1980s Bowling Alley Smell

I know what you’re thinking: how can an article about presentations, the boring things we have to sit through at work (or, if we’re particularly unlucky, to create and give at work), be interesting, but trust me. Presentations blew people’s minds when they were first invented! They were huge deals, requiring huge amounts of infrastructure! And then, PowerPoint. Next Slide, Please: A Brief History of the Corporate Presentation

This is an article about the higher end of this phenomenon, but a couple of years back, Matt made several hundred dollars selling his old band tshirts, including a Nirvana one which went for quite a bit, on Ebay. In other words, can confirm. Vintage Nirvana

And honestly, good for him. How a Man in Prison Stole Millions from Billionaires

This is a … prose poem? about plumbing. You need it. Trust me. Man Called Fran

Dealing with adolescence was horrifying enough in the paleozoic era when I was that age, when there were suddenly chat rooms full of strangers A/S/Ling you all over the internet. It is so, so, so much harder now. Who even knows what it will be like in another 7 years when Hap hits his teens. Being 13

Aside from the required Uniform for his employees, which is creepy culty, this is a fascinating piece. I personally don’t think his work suits me8, but it’s an aesthetic I often enjoy looking at. How Thom Browne’s Gray Suit Conquered American Fashion

Prisons can’t be “reformed.” They are designed to be a hole into which we, as a society, throw people away. Get ready to be angry. Inside the High-Security “Black Site” Where Leonard Peltier Is Incarcerated9

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

Just a really, deeply accurate song. Plus it gets stuck in my head.

For the Porchfest that wasn’t, this is one of the songs I learned, which means the world missed out on me singing about a vacation town in Idaho (which we looked at on Google Maps… looks dusty) where, if you’re lucky, you may see a boob down at the beach10.

I did not sing this song for Porchfest, but I could have! It’s been one of my classic dishwashing songs for years.

This month’s top 5: Halloween decorations (that we have)

We may, as a family, go a bit overboard for Halloween. And I say this as someone who doesn’t have a costume this year, because I was too stresso and depresso earlier in the year to come up with one - but I feel like that’s still on brand, because I can’t half-ass one quickly at the last minute. Also, can we really claim to be Halloween Decorating People if we don’t have a 12-foot Home Depot skeleton? And yet we do not (and will not). There are a couple in the neighborhood, though, and you better believe Hap knows exactly where they are.

1. Skeletons of things that do not, in real life, have skeletons (like a spider)

2. Hammock Guy: a skeleton/ghoul thingy that swings in a hammock on our front porch

3. All of Hap’s skeletons dressed as things (so far: one cowboy or hobo, one mermaid, one jail guy, and one king, who must be announced, dramatically, as The King of the Skeletons)

4. Skeleton Gary

5. The spooky scarecrow animatronic guy, our one big splurge, who sits on the bench beside our front door with a bowl in his lap. If you reach into the bowl, it triggers something, and his head snaps up and he starts screaming and howling11

Dishonorable mention to all the little (tabletop-sized) skeletons that play a song when you push a button. We have 3 of them that play 3 different songs, and they’re all so loud and obnoxious! Give a bitch a volume control!!

Okay. Actually, wait. There is one more thing I want to say, on the topic of land (and land back), being as it was just Indigenous People’s Day, and it’s something I heard - or rather read, because let’s be honest, I read the transcript instead of listening - on the Movement Memos podcast12. I don’t know if, not being indigenous myself, I can lay any claim to this feeling as well, but I can’t help agreeing with it:

Everywhere I’ve ever lived has been somewhere that was, historically, invaded and taken over; nowhere I’ve lived was a place where I could speak to deep roots beyond a couple of generations, which marks me as descending from the people who did the invading and the taking over, as well as being from people who were forced out of other places where they did have deep roots. But as an individual I can say that I am from somewhere, and that thought is something I return to often: the place, the land, where I’m from, is a part of me. That’s a contradiction we all need to get much more used to, because shouting out a land acknowledgement before kicking off a conference or whatever is a half step up from doing nothing. I don’t know if any land claims me or knows me. I’d like to hope it does, a little, as one individual, but I’ve been in enough unrequited relationships to know better than to get my hopes up. Still, it’s something to work towards.