#56: The Dead of Summer

Actual updates

It’s August, the height of summer¹, plants are in lush leaf, the world is loudly, sweatily alive, and so as you can expect, I’m going to talk about death.

Well, in a second I’m going to talk about death. First I’m going to talk about plants. Bad plants. Plants that are my enemy. It’s going to be a dramatic newsletter, you guys.

To begin. There are three known enemy plants in my yard: Norway maples, which are a perfectly fine tree but they grow like weeds and crowd out other plants and trees; ivy, which is picturesque but will absolutely choke a bitch (the bitch here is “trees,” but also anything else) or pull down a fence or ruin the wood on your house; and accursed black swallow-wort. This last one is really very bad! It’s invasive, it strangles plants and steals their resources, and it isn’t even useful for pollinators - in fact, it’s dangerous to butterflies! So I don’t want any part of it around, and nor do I want either of the others.

So on the 4th of July, I had the day off, so I decided to go out into the yard and take up arms against these foes. I started in the front yard; I finished in the front yard too, because it was one of the long string of super-humid days we just got out of, and I was sweating to death. The back yard will just have to wait. That evening, I noticed with some ruefulness that I had come back from camping, in the literal woods, with just a couple of mosquito bites, but apparently the word had gotten out in the mosquito community that I would be out in the yard on this day, since I had several bumps, beginning to itch.

But that was just the beginning.

Like last year, the bites (or “bites”) seemed to spread and multiply, and grow, and soon to blister and crack and weep and scab over and blister again. Unlike last year, it expanded over more of my body than just what was exposed to the elements. My hands were a bubbly mass of blisters, my forearms end-to-end rashes, and more spreading down the sides of my torso and onto the front of my thighs. The itching was prodigious. Calamine lotion brought some relief and so did ice, but nothing was getting it to subside. Finally, I capitulated, and went to the urgent care².

The nurse came in, took my vitals, asked me questions, and left; the doctor came in, took one look, and declared I had poison ivy.

I got a prescription for steroids to knock it back, which I’ve just finished and it’s working fantastically, and that’s one little horticultural adventure over! Although I do have some doubts about where I got it: we’ve never seen hide nor hair of poison ivy or any of its three-leaved brethren in our yard, front or back - but Matt thought he saw some shiny-leaved plants along the side of a trail we walked along briefly in Vermont, up by his mom’s place. So maybe it just took a while to kick in? Anyway! Nature! It’s out to get you!

Ok, now as we’re going to go from life (too much!) into death, let’s have a nice little break point here where I… encourage the visitors among you to subscribe, so that you can more easily hear me talk about death. Yeah!

So last month I shared an article on death doulas, and how their goal is to help provide people with a “good death.” Various people in the article gave their thoughts on what constituted a good death, and one common thread was that they wanted to be at home or someplace meaningful to them, surrounded by family, friends, or whoever was important in their lives. That’s not too revolutionary or anything, but it’s notable to me because of the way it went when my grandma died.

She got most of what she wanted, by this rubric. She got to be at home, in her own bed. She hung on until everyone in the big family had gathered at her house. As far as she knew, she may have thought everyone was there in the room with her. And that’s what’s really important! She’s the one dying! She’s the one who should be made comfortable! I’m about to complain, but let’s be clear that I know who this is actually about, and it isn’t me!

On her last day, I kept trying to join the family in her room, so I could spend some portion of the last moments with her, or say goodbye. Every time - three times, in total - one particular aunt sent me out. I wasn’t there at the end. I hope my grandma didn’t realize it; we were close, and I flatter myself that she would have wanted me there.

My aunt didn’t. I have some speculations as to why. I think she was trying to make sure that her daughter, my cousin, who is fantastic and has nothing to do with this, got (deserved!) credit for doing a lot of the caregiving at the end. And I wasn’t! I was living in Boston by this point, 3000 miles away, and so was no help at all. I’m not sure whether it was to punish me for not doing enough, or to make sure I didn’t, by my presence, steal focus (somehow?), but this aunt did not want me in there, and she got her way.

After that, I didn’t go home for a few years. I decided that she could have that time zone if she wanted me out of the way so badly. I went back for my brother’s wedding, barely said two words to the offending aunt, and came back to my east coast satisfied that I wouldn’t have to see her for another few years. My parents came to visit me, I didn’t go visit them. Granted, my grandma being gone made it less worthwhile to go home as well; she was one of the people I loved the most, and - when I did the calculation, back in high school, the only person I could think of whose life would not be improved by my not being in it. She loved me - and all her grandchildren! - without caveats or asterisks or exceptions; she didn’t follow up her love with a but and an if. I didn’t embarrass her or cost her money or let her down. I’m writing this and trying not to cry, and she’s been gone for over a decade now.

So, did she have a Good Death™? I assume she did; if a death doula had been present, they might have had some conversations with the family and averted some interpersonal friction, but as for how the actual person engaged in dying experienced it, I guess… yes? I hope so.

And of course it makes me think about what my own “good death” would be. I’ve maybe spent more time than the average bear thinking about my own death, with more of a “planning” lens, if you get where I’m coming from, so I definitely have ideas. I want it to be on my own terms. Don’t freak out, I don’t only mean that the way it sounds. I don’t want to inconvenience or bother people, I don’t want to bum people out (standing around someone’s fluorescent-lit bedside in a hospital is a bummer!), and I don’t want people I don’t like there. This all seems pretty standard!

I have a great-aunt who wrote her own obituary; this seems very wise to me and I’ll be doing the same (that way no one gets left out, everyone’s name gets spelled right, and no one tries to imply you were chummy with someone you couldn’t stand). Unfortunately I don’t think I can instruct anyone to go chuck my body out in the woods where animals can eat it and trees can grow between my bones, because when you do that people tend to think you’ve committed a crime, but if I could arrange to simply drop dead out there… well. Anyway. Good deaths. May we have them.

What am I reading

Ok, so it’s been a sec since I last got new books, so I’m back on the reread train, going through my shelves in order, and today we land upon Anthony Bourdain’s collection of short pieces he wrote for various publications, The Nasty Bits.

This type of book always screams “contractual obligation” to me: bang out another title without writing a whole book’s worth of new material. The clip show of books, you could say. That doesn’t mean it’s no good - just that you know what it signifies.

To be fair, not all of it is good. The way you could talk about people in 2006 - my god, the contempt he had for regular people (American), how they looked, how they dressed, how he assumed they had never eaten anything interesting in their lives and lived on McDonalds. Of course, regular people in other countries were fantastic, vibrant, maybe eating simple food or making do with what they had but in a delicious way. I guess he assumed regular people in the US didn’t (couldn’t?) read books and wouldn’t see him talking shit on them.

But when he gets going on a subject that makes him happy - being in Vietnam, for instance, or eating freshly-killed seal with an Inuit family, or going to some really ritzy restaurant or a no-shoes-required beach shack, that’s where he really lights up on the page. You ever feel like some people got the idea that the best way to showcase how witty they are is to rip something - wittily! - to shreds? It isn’t true, not usually, and when someone who has the skill to eviscerate something they hate turns that skill on praising something they love - well. That’s the stuff. But… the early 2000s. It wasn’t a time for unashamedly loving things. It was a time for taking aim at the butts of society’s jokes (fat people! “bimbo” celebrities! vegetarians!) and everyone would laugh and applaud.

Some links

Motels that aren’t ratty and depressing are great, actually. I’m here for motels. For me, the association isn’t so much “no-tell motel” as it is a cross between “road trip” and “criminals on the lam (positive).” Motels Are Having a Moment

Ok, normally I wouldn’t post an article that’s basically “look at this rich person’s cool house,” but this one stood out a bit because (apart from its own interesting merits) it gives big Isabella Stewart Gardner vibes, albeit without the heist. Specifically I mean this in the sense of being a fancy house filled with art, arranged according to vibes and the whims of the owners, not “all the Renaissance guys are here, all the Ming Dynasty stuff is here,” etc. This one has more freaky mannequins, though. Life in an Art-Filled Former Palace in Italy, Accessible Only By Foot

Salad wars! Honestly this mostly just made me want a really good Caesar salad. The Century-Long Saga of the Caesar Salad

I’ve always been interested in skydiving, since I’m by nature a jumper³; I even know someone who got big into it and now instructs, although he too had a bad fall (and lived!! but he was grievously injured and had a long recovery). I never went and did it, though. The Skydiver Who Survived a 14,000 Foot Fall

The Olympics!! Sure to be in full swing when I publish this, but how do the athletes get their stuff there? (One answer is “horse plane,” but there’s no such thing as “javelin plane”) Horses, Guns and Swords: How Cumbersome Equipment Gets to the Olympics

More Olympics! I have a lot of opinions about holding the surfing in Tahiti just because it’s a French colony⁴ but this, about how the wave they’re doing the surfing on there behaves, why it acts that way, and how it’s different than other waves, is really interesting! It is a wave that can kill you, or shred your skin against a reef; it’s less a showboating wave than a “can you do it at all” wave. Risking Life and Limb for Glory: Olympic Surf Competition to Be Held on World’s “Heaviest Wave”

Even more Olympics! I just watched the women’s beam finals the other morning, and it was completely insane!⁵ Some of these very leotards were in evidence! Inside the Creation of the US Gymnasts’ Paris Olympics Leotards

It’s almost unforgivably hacky to put a “nevertheless, she persisted” reference into a headline at this point, but if - big if! - you can get past that, it’s an interesting article about how women got to be allowed to compete in the modern Olympics at all - since obviously when they were first restarted, women doing sports would have been a scandal. Since this IS in the New York Times, I kept expecting the article to veer in a transphobic direction or start Just Asking Questions about who counts as women in terms of sports, but somehow they managed to rein it in and not say anything stupid. They Called It “Improper” to Have Women in the Olympics. But She Persisted

It’s really interesting to think about how revisiting loci of memory can be helpful for people with dementia, although as this essay makes clear, the logistics of actually doing the visit can be incredibly difficult. Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything

Ok, we all agree it’s bad to import wild animals to a place where they aren’t native, and then just let them run loose, and I know hippos are a dangerous animal and this is a very tricky conservation problem to solve, but: objectively, just as a concept, this is very funny. Pablo Escobar’s Abandoned Hippos Are Wreaking Havoc in the Colombian Jungle

Did you know you could make money off buying struggling brands - not their stuff, just their brand - and then reselling that name? Well, you can, and this one guy has made quite a bit. It comes off pretty parasitical, I gotta say. The Zombie Mall King Doesn’t Want to Be a Bottom-Feeder Forever

An interesting look at how humans seek out controlled amounts of fear (scary movies, roller coasters, etc) and how that works, or doesn’t. The author explores this via her own fear of heights, and the times she has done something that involved being up high anyway - that particular fear doesnt obtain, for me, but it’s got me ready to soapbox out about the high dive at the UBC pool that my friends and I chucked ourselves off of innumerable times, now gone, and how in the state of Massachusetts, it’s actually illegal for a pool to have a higher diving board/platform than 1m, unless it’s a training facility for real divers⁶. Fear As a Game

This is a terrible tragedy that I had never heard about: one of the first major Black models in the US was killed, and somehow this hasn’t moved into the popular memory. Sepia Model Murder, 1969: The Slaying of Bani Yelverton

This is nominally about the kidnapping that the author’s family friend survived, but it’s really about the author’s traumatic labor and delivery story. It was a horror to read. I didn’t have a traumatic birth, especially - it wasn’t fun, and I’m glad I never have to do it again, but it was nothing like this - but for other reasons this resonated so hard it was hard to breathe. The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape

I find it hard to be mad at this lady and her group of fellow fake drivers. These companies are known to be horrible for their employees, and getting one over on them is good; also, you need to have some way to make a buck, and if you’re locked out of most forms of “legitimate” work due to not having papers, what are you going to do? The risk, of course, is that someone will be a bad driver or a bad person, but we take those risks with actual, non-fake drivers anyway, so… She Made $10,000 a Month Defrauding Apps Like Uber and Instacart. Meet the Queen of the Rideshare Mafia

On a scale of one to ten, how surprised are you that governments (including ours!) are deeply involved in terror activities towards people who oppose their environmental policies, including extrajudicial murder? The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Activists

Did you think you’d be reading a firsthand account from someone who stood on the sidewalk outside the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and saw the fire and its effects? Do be warned, it is grim. Eyewitness at the Triangle

This is so cool! And it’s really neat to think about how different ends of a trade route think about each other. A Buried Ancient Egyptian Port Reveals the Connections Betwen Distant Civilizations

Indonesia mentioned!! But also, wow! Stuff like this makes me want to throttle anyone who cuts arts and art education funding. We’ve been artists as long as we’ve been people. World’s Oldest Artwork Discovered in Indonesian Cave

Humongous scientific bummer!! The Odds that Aliens Exist Just Got Worse

Hopefully you won’t need this primer. But if you do: How to Survive Jail

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

Winner of the best song title competition for this month.

Hap got into this song, I forget how, and we watched the video together (sorry about the humping scene!! whoops) and it is 80s cocaine dance fever.

Get it? Death? Because… death??

This month’s top 5: things that have cost me money lately

I mean a lot of money, not like, groceries. Imagine all of these more or less back to back.

1. Re-siding the house, which cost more than I make in a year

2. Replacing the heater/switching to gas

3. The vet bill for saving Marty’s life

4. Reflooring our bathroom, which has abruptly become urgently necessary

5. Summer camp for Hap

Ok, time to sign off; I leave thinking about the handoff of Dem candidacy to Kamala Harris and how everyone got so hyped up by it that Biden has to be feeling pretty lousy about it (good; people didn’t like him much for a very good reason… unfortunately Harris is also pretty bad on the same reason⁷).

I think she’s got a good shot and I’m glad she’s not so hidebound by tradition as to value civility over pointing out that the current Republican party is a bunch of freaks and sweaty creeps, but that doesn’t mean I’m uncritically all in on her! She’s still a cop! She still said some heinous things about families struggling to pay bail for their imprisoned relatives, her record on sex worker rights is NOT good, and then there’s the whole “locking up trans women in men’s prisons” thing. There’s some argument online over whether that was just something presided over by her office, and her own personal views are significantly better, but when this rebuttal was making the rounds, every cis person I followed online was like “great! case closed. we are now cool with her.” and every trans person was filled with doubt.

I don’t know if it’s accurate or what, and I know you have to find some way to reconcile [person who took a stance I disagree with] with [person I need to vote for], but for some folks this was an easy box-check that let them go on with their lives feeling unconcerned about the future, and for other folks - people who would be directly impacted by bad policy or opinions here - it’s not that simple.

I’m still going to vote for her! But I’m not going to be uncritically thrilled about it.

_{1 sigh. once again i am neglecting all those southern hemisphere subscribers i don’t have}

_{2 incidentally, i hate the reframing of what is REALLY a walk-in clinic as “urgent care.” like please calm down. the emergency room still exists. this is the clinic! you’re going to the clinic.}

_{3 this means what you think it means}

_{4 the opinions are 100% negative outside of “wow, Tahiti is beautiful.” Imagine acting like your colony is the same thing as your country, just because your country took it over by force, and being completely unapologetic about it on a world stage in front of athletes from other countries that are or were colonized. In 2024. Just appalling behavior from the French}

_{5 Featuring a balance beam that is definitely haunted and may have been cursed by a witch}

_{6 needless to say, i think this is dumb}

_{7 unfortunately, The Internet’s Dad, Tim Walz, is also not great here. He seems convinceable, maybe? But also, everyone calm down about him, if he becomes VP, what’s he going to do? set policy? please be for real}