there are chives coming up in the backyard already and they're so so so green
Lee Dorsey - Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky (From Now On)
“Soon you will be old and you will still be this childish.”
Hello:
I have been putting this newsletter off because I feel too porous, too small, too jumpy and swamp-brained to be thinking or talking in public. In the grand scheme my life is very okay and fine and normal and fortunate but still like everyone I am worried about a lot of things and one of them is that if I try to tell you a pleasant story you will see the real mood on me and trust me less. We have been watching the Ken Burns documentary on country music in small half-hour snatches and there's this part where they talk about the Carter Family doing performances for the deranged billionaire's million-watt superstation across the border in Mexico, a while after A.P. and Sara have basically become estranged. He's so miserable she won't take him back that at one point station management has to pull him aside and threaten to take him off the air. They tell him that his mood is broadcasting itself into the homes of millions of people, that he is literally transmitting his sadness to innocent listeners through the airwaves. That's how they phrase it: not "you're bumming people out" or "it's depressing to listen to you sing," but literally your sadness is vibrating its way into the minds and bodies of human beings across the country and for their health and wellbeing you have to stop it.
I do not want to be A.P. Plus, unfairly, my own sensitivity makes me extra-frustrated when other people display their own. Like can't you see I'm trying to encase myself in plastic over here? Maybe you are feeling this way too sometimes. I am trying to be good about it but sometimes often I find myself clenching and bracing when people talk about their feelings, can hear the clock tick louder in my brain. This is no way to live, and yet for the past few days I have been living like it. Last week I was grateful to have projects but now I am afraid of them, resentful. Avoiding the book, avoiding the title, avoiding the stack of other people's poetry I am supposed to have opinions about. Just the idea of a poem raises my brain-static to a screech. You want me to feel something with you? Are you fucked? But the better brain still calls up from the bottom of the well, faintly. It says: if I am receiver enough to catch stray moods out of thin air, to let a single outside thought bend my whole day backwards, then maybe I can let something else in. Whether or not I can feel them, the things that made me feel lit up last week are still all around: sunshine, Jeopardy!, Drake's beautifully, charmingly, irritatingly predictable instagram post about staying positive, neighbourhood flora and fauna. Thank-you signs in people's windows. The brand-new adult skateboarder studiously practicing her craft for hours in the abandoned parking lot up the street. String all of them all together and you get a song that says all process is process, this too is a wave like the others, everything moves and moves and moves. I am singing it over and over, trying to broadcast the feeling back inward towards me. I am hopeful about the potential of this method. It is older than I am, than all of us. I'll let you know what happens.
Something longer to listen to:
Kathleen Hanna tells a good story.
Pets, Interiors:
Visit @apartment_poem on instagram for more, or to submit your own.
Roommates:
(submit petty gripes about the people you share space with anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
My roommate found a couple of cockroaches in the middle of the night (that came in probably because it was raining), and she trapped them in two glass jars in our kitchen. She texted me a photo of them at 2am and left the jars for me to find in the morning. When I asked why she didn't just flush them herself, she said, "In case you wanted to see them!" No. I never want to see them. Ever.
for the last year i have provided toilet paper for my apartment, which i procured for free from my employer. the stack in the bathroom has slowly dwindled and we're down to the last roll. i refuse to purchase any, since i've provided all the toilet paper for a year, i feel like it's someone else's turn... but also i realized today there might be no toilet paper to buy anywhere. worrying that my game of toilet paper chicken has backfired.
Dreams:
(no new dreams! please please please submit dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com, I love them)
Gentle reminder:
You don’t have to go on Twitter. It's not bad if you do, but you don't have to.
&&&:
Carlo's basketball corner:
Steph Curry dribbles Chris Paul into the floor in super slow-mo