#70: One thing after another, forever

Actual updates

I know I’m not blowing anyone’s mind by saying this, but man, time moves fast. News moves fast. When I started this draft, about a month ago, I opened with saying there were things going on in the world that I couldn’t talk about, and it would have been very clear just what I meant. Then, a week or so later, I changed it up because something happened in my life, and I went to saying that there were two things I couldn’t talk about, one for bad reasons and one for good reasons. And now, it’s barely relevant to talk about the bad-reasons thing at all. Well, no. It’s not exactly irrelevant. But the rush to root out and attack people for expressing Unapproved Opinions online has faded in favor of other horrors. One thing after another, forever.

The internet is public, okay. I’m not trying to make money off this newsletter - I’m just giving in to my deep-seated¹ Need to Blog, updated for the current era - and I wouldn’t want to lock it down to just subscribers anyway. But that does mean sometimes I’m going to tread carefully. You all know what this is about, anyway, and I imagine you can guess my feelings; they’re probably a lot like yours.

OVER TO THE MUNDANE STUFF (we’re acting like the other stuff is not mundane, but it is, increasingly, and that is also very bad!).

Porchfest! It happened! It went all right, I messed up a couple times, and it was just sheer bad luck that it was on the most embarrassing one to mess up on (HookerClops’s biggest “hit”) and also on another one, specifically in a part I consistently nailed in practices² . So that part wasn’t great but in general it went all right. Friends came, Hap made a pile of money selling lemonade (a very smart move!), the weather was good, the porch didn’t collapse. I’m calling it a win.

Here’s where I would talk about my piece of good news, if I could; instead, stay tuned next month, and also of course stay tuned at the other places I say stuff online (I imagine I’ll become at liberty to talk about it sometime between this issue and next).

Speaking of places I say stuff online, I’m - ugh, this is embarrassing to even talk about, but - I’m on this one niche microblogging platform, and it’s been pretty good to me! I’m fairly active there, I follow a bunch of people, a bunch of people follow me, the usual; since it is or was relatively small and niche, it has also had its early-Twitter moments where I’ve gotten to have nice little normal interactions with authors I admire or people who are well-known for this and that. I tried to get someone a job at my work once (didn’t work out, but at least I had the ability to try). One could argue that the good news I got that I can’t tell you about came about because of this platform - I wouldn’t have known to even try the thing that ultimately succeeded, if I hadn’t heard about it there. I’ve kept up with some old friends and made some new ones (I hope they would agree)! I’ve gotten to learn a lot about some communities that I’m not a member of, or that I’ve historically only known through a couple friends. I’ve seen a moderate number of boobs. In short, it’s done pretty much all the things you might hope for from a niche microblogging platform. Hasn’t been perfect! There’s been a few high-profile problems, but I can’t expect this not to happen at all.

But lately the high-profile problems have been both bigger problems and higher profile, and because it’s not clear that it will remain an enjoyable place to be, I’ve been exploring other options. I don’t want to lose what I’ve been fortunate enough to have here; the other options are either markedly worse or don’t have all the buddies on them or aren’t ready yet. This would not be something I needed to worry about if people could just act normal!

It tires me that I even have to talk about this!³ It is embarrassing to care about a social network! Can we talk about books now?

What am I reading

I’ve just started reading Heartwood, by Amity Gaige - which, sidebar, it bugs me when I get a book through a friend’s recommendation and then it turns out to be on some daytime tv ass book club (this time, Jenna Bush’s one). I am not in the Jenna Bush Army!⁴ I’m not reading this because a blonde lady with a talk show told me to!

Anyway, it’s about a middle-aged woman disappearing in the gnarly Maine part of the Appalachian Trail, and the people who are investigating her disappearance and trying to find her. I’ve just started it, I’m barely more than 50 pages in, so I haven’t got a lot to say about it other than two things: it talks about the closed-in, dense, heavily understoried forests there as if that’s the unusual type of forest, and a “normal” forest is sparse hardwoods where the sun reaches the forest floor. Not to me, it’s not.

The other thing about it is that someone refers to the particular type of disorientation you can get out there where all the surroundings look the same as going “woods queer.” And I know they didn’t mean it that way but let me tell you, I’ll go woods queer any day any day. Does that mean queer in the woods? Sure! Yeah! Does it mean queer for the woods? Yeah! Why not! Look, I’m not convinced the entire biome of “forest,” be it temperate or boreal, is gay, the way the ocean is gay and also specifically the moon is gay, but there’s something going on there. Different forests, different deals, maybe. Anyway, you get me. Woods queer.

Some links

This one is gross, just so you know! But really fascinating. The Human Stain Remover: What Britain’s Greatest Extreme Cleaner Learned from 25 Years on the Job

I had no idea that venus flytraps existed only in one stretch of North Carolina! I also had no idea they were so rampant there. They’re so cool. Saving the Venus Flytrap: How One Woman Rallied a Town Around Its Weirdest Attraction

This is fun - but in what world, in WHAT world am I not the most quintessential Gemini⁵ . I am the yapper of yappers (yes, I know astrology is made up but many fun things are made up). Anyway. What are you really, apparently? I’m allegedly a Taurus! Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date

I’m not sure about the male-vs-female framing here - did a team of women succeed where a mostly male team did not due to innate feminine qualities? Seems doubtful! They just made some different (better!) choices than the first group did, but probably not because they were using their magical woman powers. She Vanished on a Colorado Mountain. 19 Years Later, a Mysterious Dream Helped Rescuers Find Her

It is absolutely criminal that private wildfire fighting companies don’t have to cover the medical costs of their employees for the diseases they can get from inhaling that smoke for months on end. This is the story of a young firefighter who got cancer from it, and it’s true; it also rings awfully similar to this story (which is fictional, for now) by a guy I follow online which is set in the near future. So I guess we’re there now. “If I Live to 25, I’ve Lived a Good Life”

I remember hearing a bit about this when it happened - another in a string of yacht disasters, the planet seemingly revolting against the megarich’s favorite toy. This one wasn’t orcas, though, but rather a freak storm. The Superyacht, the Billionaire, and a Wildly Improbable Disaster at Sea

I do not have anything against LED bulbs as long as they’re a warm color temperature - which is possible, despite what the two upsetting light fixtures in my house would have you believe - but I love that there’s a niche-possibly-illegal lightbulb guy, and this is that guy. The Lightbulb Hunter of East 58th Street

This sounds like the title of a book with superflat cover illustrations and Live Laugh Love script for a font, but it’s actually about a very different book: a hit man manual that a Florida woman wrote, which was then used by an actual killer to actually kill people. The author of the book had a fairly dramatic and troubled life, as well; this isn’t the sunny remake of Goodbye Earl it sounds like. The Florida Divorcee’s Guide to Murder

This is about facelifts, and before you click in, be warned that there are some immediately-post-surgery photos and recovery photos that are a little gnarly, but there are no photos of actual surgery. With that disclaimer out of the way: wow. Look. It’s your face and your call what to do with it, and it’s also your tens of thousands of dollars, but honestly in the best of these examples I didn’t notice a difference to her earlier face. The worse examples, well, we’ve all seen them. The part of the article that really grated on me, though, was the author’s husband telling her she’s “blind” if she doesn’t notice her wrinkles. He sounds like a jerk. Maybe the more helpful surgery would be to cut him out of her life. The Forever-35 Face

Thirst Aid Kit⁶ remains the only podcast I’ve listened to with any regularity, and it’s nice to see it get its due here. Thirst Aid Kit Went Deep on Female Desire

Your feel-good story for the month. That’s right. You get one. Stowaway Italian Kitten Finds Forever Home in N.S. After Transatlantic Voyage

Why did you move to the woods if you didn’t want to look at any WOODS? Whether they did or didn’t commit the heinous tree crime, I don’t care for these folks and hope a tree root pierces their plumbing. Did a Brooklyn Couple Kill a Neighbor’s Trees for a Better View in Maine?

I have loved Robert Munsch since before I was able to read, and I’ve made sure to pass that on to not only my own kid but the kids of others (I always give one of his books to any American friends having a baby; I assume the Canadian friends already have a shelf full). I had an idea he was ailing, but I didn’t know he was actually born in the US, or spent some years living here in Boston, working one neighborhood away, or that he essentially workshopped his stories by telling them to children. Or that he had a Drugs Era!! I don’t care! He’s an international treasure and you should put down the computer and go pick up The Paper-Bag Princess⁷ immediately. When Dementia Steals the Imagination of a Children’s Book Writer

I saw this obituary shared elsewhere and first of all, a booze archaeologist is a heck of a cool job to have, and second of all, if I asked you to picture the kind of a guy who would be in that line of work, your mental image would pretty much look just like this guy. Patrick McGovern, the “Indiana Jones of Ancient Alcohol,” Dies at 80

The Burning-Man-ification of the Salton Sea, man, I don’t know. This doesn’t make the art group holding events there look too great. The Last Resort

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

I listened to a playlist that someone made based on the songs her dad had sent her or mentioned to her, and it was of course very dad-coded in a lot of different ways, but one song on it was this eternal banger, and that installed it in my head for several days.

Here’s one from Porchfest that I didn’t screw up, and in fact I think I did a pretty great job with it:

After reading that Shane MacGowan book last month, I obviously went on a Pogues/Popes binge, so here’s one of them.

This month’s top 5: Close calls I’ve had lately

I don’t know what’s going on the last few weeks but the universe is out to get me, and I don’t mean it in the sense of “I’m being thwarted at every turn.” I mean it in terms of barely missing grievous injuries or worse.

1. Almost falling down the stairs and just barely catching myself

2. ACTUALLY falling down the basement stairs (just the bottom two steps, though, and I sat down hard on the last step and hurt my buns, insult to injury, or rather insulting injury to injury)

3. A close enough call with a knife while chopping a green pepper that it did strike skin and I kept checking it over the next ten minutes to see if it was going to bleed (with my lousy circulation, sometimes it takes a while for a cut to an extremity to actually get started bleeding)

4. A car that blew a red light while I was crossing and made me jump back to avoid being run over

5. And just the general state of being alive!!⁸

Ok. Try to stay alive, everyone; I know they’re coming for us all in one way or another, but we need you here. Yes, you. Especially you. Is this funny coming from me, someone who’s had a hard-on for dying for over half my life? Yeah! Kind of! But against everyone’s wishes, including mine, here I still am, and I’m not letting some two-bit dictatorship make the decision for me. I recommend you don’t either.

1  not “deep-seeded,” i swear some people have never read a book

2  hmm… awfully similar to the way i messed up on my driving test on a part i had been consistently good at in lessons

3  you do not HAVE TO talk about this, camille

4  i’m not linking to the song since it has aged kind of poorly, but it did spring instantly to mind

5  in this world, apparently!!

6  that’s a link to the earliest episodes

7  or I Have to Go

8  if you’re thinking this looks like i forgot the 5th thing i was going to put here, you are correct!!