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After Deciding to Stay
Maybe coming up on my first Saturn return next month at the ripe age of 29 is a bit early to jump to any sweeping conclusions, but having gotten out of the woods of one foundational existential crisis (for now), I wonder if this next stretch of years might be less about deciding to stay and more about remembering.
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Spinescent
I still have a scar on my left index finger from an off-target attempt to pick a ripe blackberry back in September. It makes me think that maybe there’s something to this blackberry brand of spinescence — leaving a mark on contact and bearing good fruit in season.
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Serotiny
Maybe I’ve been waking up on the right side of the bed lately, but I’m finding it easier to center the miracles in mundanity rather than the seeming inevitability of full-on ecocide for a change. And I guess it’s easy to feel a sense of solidarity with that stuff because it underscores the value of an ordinary life, and certainly makes me feel a sense of belonging just by virtue of being here to participate and bear witness to it all.
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The Strange and Unusual Afterlife of Self-forgiveness
For much of my life, my brain would do this thing where it would make a quick jump to thoughts of self-annihilation whenever I sensed abandonment. It seldom happens anymore, mostly because I have made a point in recent years to cull out vampiric friendships and be hyper-selective about who I trust. It also doesn’t hurt that I have reduced my level of expectations for human behavior to a misanthropic low. And I probably can’t discount the fact that, besides not really trusting anyone, I’m otherwise healthier overall than I’ve ever been. Even so, if I’m in A Mood®, I’ve…
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Piss & Vinegar
There’s this thing that happens to me about once every few months where I get mistaken for service staff while I’m patronizing a restaurant or brewery. That it even occurred with some frequency through a pandemic — where I was only in such places once every few weeks, and generally only long enough to pick something up — suggests that it would happen even more often if I spent any more time in public. It’s probably something that’s been happening throughout my post-pubescent life, but I only started keeping track after a notable experience in 2018. Ever since then, I’ve been completely…
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Embracing the Apocryphal
For a pretty sublime 12 days this month, I got to take up residence in a cottage on Whidbey Island. How I came to be welcome on 48 acres of erstwhile farmland on Puget Sound’s northern shores is a bit of a story. But the short version is that I volunteered a fair amount of time at the end of 2020 with an organization that runs a retreat out that way. As a show of appreciation, they generously offered a while back to put me up for a stay in June. I knew it wasn’t something I could reasonably turn…
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A Radical Mutuality
Last month, I resurrected my on-off relationship with horror genre to get acquainted with The Conjuring movies. These movies aren’t exactly hot off the press, but somehow they’ve only really been on the periphery of my awareness for about a year. And for whatever reason, watching them never rose to a level of urgency even though a lot of writers and podcasters whose taste I trust had only glowing things to say about them. Anyway, watching them was overdue and I rectified all of this at the beginning of April. I guess enough content I was interacting with around that…
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Grave to Cradle
A few months back, I got sucked into a reading streak about the legacy of extractive industries. It wasn’t exactly calculated. It all started in February when I finally broke into Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town, a book I’d been wanting to get to since it came out in September. Then I broke into Jane Little Botkin’s Frank Little and the IWW, another book I’d been meaning to read after hearing it referenced and touted frequently throughout the first season of a podcast called Death in the West. While one is closer to memoir and the other is more like a…
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Healing in Public
I’ve recently had a streak of experiences that I can only describe as abnormally enjoyable sensory attacks. What’s stood out about each of them is how mundane the inciting stimuli have been. Two, for example, happened on the same day and were entirely because of coffee—at that, the same damn coffee I’ve been drinking every day for the better part of two years. For some unknown reason, there was a day early last week where it was like I was tasting my morning cup of pour-over for the first time ever. I think I even whispered a satisfied damn to…
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Belonging — with, not to
Something really wonderful graced the internet last month. It was this trail camera footage from December 4 of a wolverine spotted outside the northernmost developed area in Yellowstone: I don’t know more than any member of the public about the precise location of that trail camera. My final tour as an NPS seasonal in Yellowstone — when I might’ve learned such inside info from a coworker or old friend working among the wildlife biology ranks — was over six years ago, and all reporting on the trail camera system that captured the wolverine indicates the primary aim of that motion-activated surveillance…
