#71: Cold/comfort

Actual updates

The big question is whether we’ll have put the heat on by the time I send this¹ . We hadn’t, yet, at the time I typed this paragraph, due to reasons of stubbornness and also of cost, but it’s getting pretty hard to type in here (it’s routinely below 60 degrees² inside) and I have my doubts about how much the alleged warm-up next week is going to make a difference. Plus, nothing dries - my shoes got drenched taking Hap to school in the rain, and that all but guarantees they’ll be damp for the next several days. But there’s always going to the library to work, I guess.

In the meantime I will keep myself warm with, in order:

• artistic fulfillment(?)

• petty annoyance, and

• exciting news!!

Artistic fulfillment:

I’ve started writing again³ (got a cool idea, from a viral shitpost of all things), and at the end of October, I led a little session at work about writing horror. Now, I do feel a bit weird about that - who am I to say how to do it, after all? - but it’s going to be less “here is the right way and here is the wrong way” and more “here are some things that, according to a bunch of people who work in the genre, you may want to keep in mind. Also tell me what scares you, and also let’s do a quick writing exercise.” Mostly it’s just an excuse to make people do the exercise. I want to read your writing! I’m a snoop and a nose!!⁴

Semi-relatedly, at least in the sense of writing again and possibly doing something with it in the future, it is awfully nice to go check out the masthead of a publication you think might be a good fit and discover an author you admire handles copyediting for them. Which tells me she might read a submission, if it was good enough! I could (COULD) write something she would read! Even if it went nowhere, knowing that would be pretty cool.

Petty annoyance:

Ok, so the kiddo has joined Cub Scouts (my thoughts on that are basically that it’s fine, he’ll have fun with some friends and learn some useful skills, but I could stand to lose the religious notes in the little mottos or pledges or whatever), and since there was a neighborhood parade recently, his group marched in it. He had a whale of a time, waving both-handedly to everyone, running off to the sidelines to greet no fewer than 10 friends, but that’s not what annoyed me pettily.

Rather, before we got started, we were waiting around in a staging area, and as usual with a parade, we were waiting around for a while. We were with a bunch of other scout groups, including the older teenager kind. Behind us, a truck pulling a trailer with a sound system on it was trying to unpark itself, but the trailer had a wooden frame superstructure that was getting tangled up with the branches of a small tree. And it took the truck driver and his colleagues several minutes to get it sorted out - but not a single scout hopped up and went over to help. Isn’t that the point of scouts? Aren’t you supposed to help little old ladies cross the street and help get parade floats unstuck from trees? Well, that and all the knot-tying. But: what do these teenagers think they’re doing this for?

Exciting news!!:

A story I submitted to NECKSNAP Magazine was accepted and is being published! “The Cordon” will appear in issue 2, which is coming out in the next few weeks! Stay tuned everywhere else you follow me; I’ll share the link as soon as I have it!

Did I bury the lede? Alright so I buried the lede. A bunch of you already knew about this and I didn’t want to beat you over the head with it!

Also, it has become embarrassingly clear that I’m starting to age out of spinny amusement park rides. We went to a little carnival in a nearby town this month, and most of the rides were of the Whirl-N-Puke variety, which normally holds no threat for me - rollercoasters are my favorite, all sorts, but I’ll go on your dizzy rides any day without hesitation. I am fortunate to have a kid who likes the same thing, and we were going on one after another, over and over. Eventually, I started feeling Bad. Yes, in a “might throw up” kind of a way, but also in a “sickly sinusface feeling” kind of a way, and also the sides of my hands went all pins and needles. I looked it up; this can result from the combo of dehydration and g-forces, and when am I not dehydrated? So, maybe I need to take precautions now when I’m going to the fair or what have you, and drink lots of water to avoid feeling, as the book says, unpleasantly like being drunk⁵ . But this has never happened before! I used to be able to rotate indefinitely with no ill effects! Old age comes for us all, unfortunately, and apparently it means those rides whose sole goal is to send your inner ear into an uproar now hit harder than they ever used to. Let me just climb into my grave.

What am I reading

I’m just finishing The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock; it’s a sort of companion volume to his earlier Knockemstiff (which I also read, but it’s been a long time). It follows various interconnected mean little people in this tiny Ohio town in the middle of the century. Some of them are crazy on religion, some on violence, some on both; no one’s got any money except for the one character who does, and he’s out of the picture soon enough.

One thing I don’t really get is one of the blurbs on the cover, which refers to it having a “pressure-cooker plot.” No it doesn’t. It’s several small plots, none of which are a pressure-cooker, although a few of them involve murder. I was halfway through wondering when the pressure was going to start ratcheting up, and that question remained unanswered. But plenty of people died, several gruesomely, and some even deserved it.

It’s not a book that will cheer your troubled soul, that’s for sure, but it’ll keep you reading if only to find out if some people get what they’ve got coming to them or not.

Some links

This is full of interesting visual aids, not least the one that shows the areas vulnerable to heavy rainfall and you realize you’re looking at a map of where there are hills and where there are valleys. It’s all very useful in terms of solutions but New York is a rich city that’s been rich for a long time. They have the ability to do this stuff. The same fixes are needed in other places that aren’t going to get them. New York Is Going to Flood. Here’s What the City Can Do to Survive

I found this piece very useful in thinking about the way media has changed, and I say this as someone who absolutely does half watch things while messing around on my phone or on my old beater laptop. The concept of the one-eye show is a very real one! But in seriousness: the televisionification of all media has far-reaching implications. One of the best reads this month. Everything Is Television

Chilling shit, not least the fact that one of the normies who got surveilled was a woman who turned a guy down for a date. When will they invent a man who will be normal about women not being into them. The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You

I saw some video where a guy’s mother rails against these weird little guys and now I have to pronounce it the way she did: equal emphasis on every syllable, an implied exclamation mark at the end. A Journey Into the Heart of Labubu

I find any kind of deep-sea activity very interesting, just because it’s such a completely alien environment right here on earth, and so dangerous - so in that spirit, this is a great read. Of course, the reason these folks are down there risking life and limb for the dollar is of course an awful one; I don’t appreciate the fact that we have oil rigs drilling into the sea floor in the first place. But I do appreciate that the people doing it have figured out what it takes not to die in the process. What It Feels Like to Risk Your Life as a Deep-Sea Diver on an Offshore Oil Rig

An in-depth exploration of the hunt for who was stealing Russian first editions all over Europe, and why. Pretty cool. The Pushkin Job: Unmasking the Thieves Behind an International Rare Books Heist

To this article’s credit, it recognizes the difficulty in deciding whether this is a good or a bad thing. The guy is trying to rebuild the neighborhoods destroyed by the fire, but he’s not giving them away or anything, he’s legitimately trying to make a buck. Still and all, if you’re a billionaire, the best use of your time is getting rid of that money to the benefit of others. He Won the $2 Billion Powerball. Now He’s Buying Up Lots Burned in the LA Fires

If you’ve ever found yourself bemoaning how we’re not only being run into ruin by the evil but also by the stupid, this article will explain so much. Stupidology

You’re definitely familiar with these, but were you familiar with how they came to be? How Linen Postcards Transformed the Depression Era into a Hyperreal Dreamland

This is good advice, whether you’re trans or not. Social media isn’t private, so neither are the networks you’ve built there. The Return of the Trans Underground

This headline makes it sound like it’s real secret-squirrel spy stuff and it’s truly not; it’s the solution to a cipher on a sculpture out front of the building. But people have been banging their heads against it for years, and boy is there an active solving community with strong feelings about this! Lawyers are involved! A CIA Secret Kept for 35 Years is Found in the Smithsonian’s Vault

Bump-Its of yore!! Ok jk it isn’t a bump-it and it doesn’t do the exact job of a bump-it, but it’s still neat! A Rare Medieval Hair-Styling Tool Was Found at Scotland’s Eilean Donan Castle

Well?? How?? How Did a 2nd-Century Roman Headstone Wind Up in a New Orleans Backyard?

Further in “how did this old thing get there?” - this time, the there in question is, of all places, Chilliwack. Someone Donated These Mysterious Artifacts to a Thrift Shop. Experts Think They Might Date to Medieval Times

Ever since starting to watch the soap opera about car go fast which is Drive to Survive, I’ve wondered where the women were. Women can drive a car fast just like men can, and everything’s customized to each driver so body size and shape aren’t the issue. There didn’t appear to be a women’s version, and as this article informs me, women can compete alongside the men - there’s no prohibition against it - it just doesn’t happen often because girls who get interested in the sport rarely have the support and funding the boys do, and you need a lot of support and funding to get to a high level (and even then, there are only 20 seats, so most of the boys don’t make it either). Anyway, this might be about to change. Alba Hurup Larsen is Racing to Break F1’s Glass Ceiling

Climate change and colonialism combining to rob native communities up north of the food they need to survive. Worth reading as, here south of the border⁶ we’re seeing SNAP and WIC benefits expire and throw millions into hunger. Food-Security Expert: Nunavut in “Worst Hunger Crisis” She’s Seen

Relatedly. Another Way Out: Hiding and Obedience Won’t Stop Fascism

I can’t remember when I first heard about Grey Gardens - college? - but the article is right, it’s had a hold on me ever since. The Immortal Influence of Little Edie Beale

I knew it!!! It wasn’t just me and my bad luck! Also, this validates sellout theory: it’s no longer in vogue to feel this way, but when things are mass-marketized rather than staying niche, they usually get worse! Even if the reason the mass market liked them in the first place was the way they were different! How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

We ran into an old friend at a birthday party. I’m trying not to give out too much info on the guy, but he’s the neighbor of another old friend, and got an appellation to match. Sidebar: I think part of the richness of your life can be measured in how many people you know with a widely-used nickname, and I don’t just mean like “Ben” for Benjamin, I mean like “Other Andy Mac” or “Skinny Mike,” who are two real people whom I happened to see at a show a few months ago. Anyway, this dude of whom I speak once spent an evening bursting into our friends’ house singing the first couple lines of this song.

I had this in my head during a whole Cub Scouts meeting (we heard it on the way over) so while the kids were wholesomely packing bags full of dog treats and cat food and making chew toys out of tennis balls and old clothes - for Pawsitive Pantry, a pet food pantry - my brain, and sometimes my mouth, was going “CALL ME UP 877-HOT-TUB”

So I ran my little writing session and had some ghosty tunes playing in the background; this one was running during most of the 5 minutes I gave people to do a quick exercise, so it’s been in my head since. Mostly the chorus, but I’m not going to ignore “Times Roman in the streets, Wingdings in the sheets.”

This month’s top 5: Most popular kids’ halloween costumes this year

I’m compiling this list based on trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood, kids who dressed up at school, friends’ kids’ costume choices, and the Cub Scouts Halloween party.

1. Rumi from KPop Demon Hunters

2. Rumi from KPop Demon Hunters

3. Rumi from KPop Demon Hunters

4. Zoey from KPop Demon Hunters (little siblings were universally assigned Zoey, it appears)⁷

5. There were also 2 kids who trick-or-treated our house dressed as peacocks, for some reason? They weren’t together, either.

But you know what wasn’t a popular costume around here? Cops. Every year there’s usually one or two tiny police officers; this year, zero. Nice job, neighborhood.

Well, that’s it from Capitulation Nation for today. Yes, I’m still mad about it. Also still mad that so many nightmarish abuses were apparently common knowledge among various members of the press and they just kept their mouths shut - although if you have to ask why anyone would enable or look the other way about that kind of thing, you already know why.

But, uh, don’t forget to read THE CORDON when it comes out! I’ll share it everywhere so if you follow me anywhere else you’ll get that link shortly!⁸ God, it feels weird to be happily promoting something when I’m in a foul mood about the general state of affairs, but I am happy about that thing, and I do want you to read it!

1  yes and it’s amazing (although i’m freezing right now)

2  15 C

3  well. i haven’t worked on it in a few days

4  this is not a term. who says that. what on earth

5  if you know this reference, please come to the service desk to collect your prize

6  that means the US, for my american friends who think that means mexico

7  where are the Miras. justice for Mira

8  actually, i might do a special edition of this email to share that and only that, if it comes out between-issues