I recently went to the thrift store for the first time in months and found an authentic novelty burger phone but did not buy it
was that a good decision or a bad decision do you think
“A peanut butter sandwich. A recipe may produce breakfast, but / I am not nourished by”
Hello:
The arc of my adult life is: I fell in love and now I’m unemployed. The day after the equinox I lie in the hammock, drift slowly back and forth. Sometimes it feels like a political act, to drift like this, and other times the same but in the opposite direction. There are a few small bugs on me that I’m pretending not to notice. It seems better for all of us that way. The sun through the leaves of the pergola is creating a dappled shade so gorgeous that sitting in it makes me feel like I’m about to be evicted. Deragh was just here with me, in the backyard; I’m teaching her about poetry for a movie she’s working on. This was our first lesson and for some reason I thought we should start with the technical stuff, which was of course a terrible idea - both of us just sitting there pressing our pens into the printer paper, trying to figure out if something’s trochaic or not. The whole damn system is trochaic! is a joke (?) I kept thinking but fortunately did not say out loud. It’s actually really hard to scan a poem, I’d forgotten. Stressed, unstressed, stressed. All of the rules seem only sort of real.
Lately I have been practicing this breathing exercise the new therapist gave me where you count four, hold seven, let it out for eight. She sent me this video of a doctor doing it at a podium in front of an invisible audience and I was right there with him the whole time until he explained that it could cure heart arrhythmias and digestive issues and then I got nervous about the new therapist. All taking care of yourself is crucial and daily but lately it feels like if you go too far in any direction you can fall off a cliff into someone else’s endless darkness. She also told me about the window of tolerance. Do you know about the window of tolerance? is how she introduced it at the beginning of our first session, and now I say that exactly the same way to people when I’m explaining it to them, like I’m asking if they’ve ever met this guy I know. Everyone starts off shaking their head and kind of grinning and then by the end they are nodding very slow and serious. Think of a fresh hill of snow, she said, and you’re tobogganing down it for the very first time. You can go anywhere, steer yourself in whatever direction. But what happens when you go down the 10th time? The 20th? When Deragh got here there was something very disgusting on the ground near the gate that looked maybe like cat barf even though the cats have not been out here today and she said I guess that’s the thing about having pets, they’re so lovely and beautiful and they add so much to your life but also they’re so gross. And I said no but, because I wasn’t sure it was pet-based at all, but what I should have said is yes absolutely because in fact this has been the guiding issue of my life in the month since our old roommate left us with Minky, her beautiful perfect cat who rumbles like an ancient truck every time you touch him and puts his little paw softly on your leg when he wants to eat your food and whose face is literally always covered in fresh wet goo and old dry crusted goo he cannot clean himself. This crust is a force steadier than time inside my life; it is my sunrise and set, marks the beginning and the end of every day. I wipe it off his eyelids with a makeup pad dipped in warm water in the holographic projector light before an episode of Seinfeld at 11PM, 1AM, 8AM, whispering softly, trying to trick him with the brush. The question of how much crust is acceptable to leave on another being’s face over the course of a given day is a thorny philosophical issue I now contemplate daily. Like: yes of course humans made him this way, but not, like, me specifically, you know? I often find myself staring idly at the beautiful golden folds of his terrible fuzzy face and wondering if I can get a q-tip in there without him noticing, which is an interesting way to think about another living creature.
Anyway. Later I was telling Deragh about what enjambment does and then I was showing her William Carlos Williams about it and she was into it so I said wanna hear my favourite poem by this guy and then I read her Danse Russe and she said Wow, what a psychopath, grinning, which is the correct response and proves she does not actually need me to teach her anything, though I am still grateful for the excuse to hang out. I have been trying to do the breathing exercise first thing in the morning and last thing at night, after I deal with the crust. I am a little skeptical but also afraid of its power, since that video. It is hard to tell if it is working or not, or what that might mean. A lot of the time the first few attempts are going to be awkward or feel kind of fumbling, she said, but the practice is what matters. This is something I have been thinking about a lot.
Another thing is this outdoor show I went to a couple of weeks ago. It was in the park and the weather was absolutely beautiful, the last real summer-summer day. They set up the microphones in front of this huge wall of trees and there was a breeze that would lift the leaves up in waves, show their silver undersides while the performers were playing or speaking. It was maybe the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, the best day I have had in forever. The host was wearing an outfit that was all bright red, head-to-toe, and once I saw her I noticed that almost everyone else in the audience was wearing a piece of bright red clothing, too, just by coincidence, no one had told us to do it or anything. I wondered what had made us think of it. I thought about how together we made a collection. I wondered how we looked to the men playing soccer behind us. Every time the ball gets close I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, the woman next to me said. We are here to see how much happiness we can give you to take into the rest of your week, the host explained, and I loved hearing her say this but didn’t really think about what it might mean in practice until the next day, after I had spent a beautiful afternoon with my grandmother at her apartment and was gliding back down Bloor along the curbed-off bike lane, marvelling at the movement of the city, and realized a magic trick had been performed on me.
Dorothea was the first act and I cried the whole time she sang and I think she cried a little too, because her songs are beautiful and her voice is beautiful and hearing her sing was like drinking water for the first time in forever, and also because I was outdoors in a group in this beautiful late summer afternoon and seeing, from a safe distance, all these people I hadn’t actually seen for like six months or more, so I was already a little tenderized and full of awe. I kept thinking, holy shit, when this is all over it’s going to feel so crazy to do anything. Doro said all her songs were good virus jams because they were about being lonely and aware of your body. She sang the one I always obviously love where she says soon this will not matter soon this will not matter but this time the song that really hit me in the chest was the one where she goes:
Do you try to fix it or do you leave it behind?
Do you try to hide it or do you learn not to mind?
Do you learn to love it and put it on display, and pretend it was never any other way?
I try to respect my body in the shape that it takes
I try to respect my mind in the patterns it makes
I long for a body closer to mine
But I don’t want to seek, I just want to find
The second performer was a poet. They came up to the mic and they said they were feeling nervous too, and raw, and then they launched into one of the most amazing long poems I have ever seen performed live. I cannot even begin to describe this poem to you, but I can tell you that there was this one part where they said they had a brother who died and they had never gotten to know him well enough to know what their relationship was like. They had been waiting, they said. Don’t wait. Then they locked eyes with someone in the audience and said it again. Don’t wait. They looked at the person next to that person and did it again. Don’t wait. And then they moved through the whole crowd like that, making contact with every single one of us, saying it again and again and again. Don’t wait, don’t wait, don’t wait. It never lost its urgency. It meant something every time. When they got to me I felt the feeling and I have been charged with it ever since, even if my day-to-day behaviour has not been radically altered. I have been letting it dissolve inside me, letting it roll around the corridors of my brain, make changes I can sense but not exactly name yet.
When the show was over, we got sushi and those enormous Sapporo beers that make you feel like a tiny baby when you’re holding them and Deragh spotted me the money because I didn’t have any and Carlyn and I talked about how all money is basically imaginary anyway, that comforting refrain. We went to the courtyard in front of the high school near the park and sat and ate and talked against the beautiful pale pink sunset while people walked their hilarious dogs along the path. The city around us felt like the city but also like some kind of different, communal thing. The air had that charged, chaotic vibe. Like summer camp, Doro said, like something everyone’s doing together.
Everybody asked me what I had thought about the beautiful long poem, which is a funny thing about being the only person in your friend group who reads or writes poetry - people think you know something. I was distracted because I’d been thinking about all the time I’d spent in the exact same spot where we were sitting now back in January, when I was writing about this high school’s basketball team. I would leave work at the bookstore and run to the subway and book it into the gym before they locked the doors and feel strange and intrusive and conspicuous, drinking my mint tea out of my bright orange thermos and taking notes on the sidelines, trying to get these teen boys to talk to me, and then I would exit into the freezing cold slushy nighttime feeling exhausted and thirsty and like I had done a day’s worth of real actual work. I felt that past layered on top of this filmy perfect summer evening, the strange chord they produced against each other, the unpredictability of everything. I told everyone that Rachel Zucker thing I love about the long poem, how it produces a relationship between you and the poet that both transcends time and is entirely about it. Everyone knew what I meant. We had all felt the same thing, together. This was weeks ago, and yet it’s still happening to me. Don’t wait, I am thinking each day as I drift in the hammock, Don’t wait, still, and each time it means itself new.
Hey so:
You may have noticed I recently moved this email to Substack. I did this in part because of a few conversations I had with my brilliant friend Yanyi about the amount of work that goes into writing a thing like this, and if/how that work should be compensated. I have been thinking about ways to maybe turn this newsletter into something steadier, but we're still a long way off from that, if we're ever going to get there at all. In the meantime, money sucks. I got laid off from my day job at the beginning of quarantine and it has been hard to make the math work ever since, but this month in particular has been tough.
There are many, many, many causes that urgently need your resources right now and I feel weird about putting this here at all. But if you like this newsletter and you are in a position to comfortably send me a tip, you can do that right here. I will continue including this link but this will be the only time I give you a whole long thing about it, I promise. Whether you can or not, I am so grateful that you are still here reading this. Thank you.
&&&:
Donate to the Toronto Encampment Support Network + send their list of demands for immediate action to your counsellor
Carlo’s basketball corner:
Jalen Rose live on ESPN yesterday before they abruptly cut to commercial.
One last thing. (Thanks, Naben.)