this one's kind of a bummer but i DO need you to get to the end so we can talk about the depth of the meow
Freddie Gibbs, The Alchemist and Rick Ross - Scottie Beam
"Many major things are not interesting. Things perhaps not interesting / include the drugs that we take, the decade"
Hello:
I am currently, right now, typing this out on the front porch of my house. I came out here to write a to-do list of ways to give my life more structure, but instead I am watching a middle-aged man in cargo shorts + baseball cap loading an assortment of stuff into a mud-splattered navy blue Silverado out in front of my house. I am straining to see what's in the pile without looking like I'm looking. It's an interestingly personality-free assortment of things, everything very functional/generic. Bike pump. Large blue suitcase. Battered white sneakers. Single pillow. Cooler. Bike. Sleeping bag. At some point his wife comes, and then his daughter, who I think is the person being moved. She looks maybe my age and is sort of helplessly watching as he straps all of her stuff down into the truck bed.
It is incredibly boring and better than TV. Watching someone move gives me a scrambled hit of the feeling I love and miss more than anything else in the world, which is looking at the inside of people's houses, examining their decor and belongings, seeing how and where and what all their stuff is. I am still a bit starved for this feeling, the same way I was for eavesdropping a few months ago. It's easier to listen to people now, obviously, as they move more and more of their lives outside. I have also been feeling apprehensive and twitchy about the future lately, trying to appreciate what's out there while it lasts and twisting myself into knots over whether I am doing it right.
Right now going to the park feels particularly good. It's a nice way to check in on how people are doing, what's on their minds. You get a larger sample size than just on your block. Last night while my friends got up to get the food I volunteered to stay behind and watch everyone's stuff, and there was an enormous group behind us that I listened to like radio for maybe 15 minutes. A group of young professionals, maybe 10 or 12 of them, sitting side by side, all maskless. A very tinder kind of group, extremely podcast. Many of them had beautiful, compact dogs. All the men were wearing patterned collared t-shirts. From the vibe I would guess that they were mostly all coworkers. Two of the men were having a loud and spirited debate about privatized healthcare. They both sounded very passionate, but the longer I listened the harder it was to tell who was on what side. There is no reason for me to hoard a conversation like this but it felt very important to write it down in case I forgot. Storing up provisions for the winter.
We have been to this park a couple times now and it really attracts a particular demographic, which is the one to which we all belong. There's the craft beer place across the street and the burger place next door and the pizza place a block away and this park in the centre of it, open and hilly. A big dog parade-type park. Lots of nice families there, some very gentle light. The neighbours have put up extra garbage cans to catch the overflow and at dusk kids roam around the park collecting cans.
It's a cat-heavy neighbourhood - far enough away from the big big streets that I guess people feel comfortable letting them out late at night. On our way home we saw two other cats kind of meeping at each other from opposite sidewalks and one of them, the one who walked in front of me, looked so much like a fatter, gentler version of Lowry that my brain glitched a little when I looked at it. I have been thinking about Lowry a lot lately, partly because of the defiant growth of the raspberry bush in the back left corner of the garden, and partly because of this thing that happened a couple of weeks ago. Carlyn and Doro and I stayed late in Sorauren and this collared black cat wound between our legs and trotted alongside us as we left the park, following us all the way up to the Dundas overpass and then trying to follow us over it, thinking every time I tried to chase him back down to the safer street that we were playing a fun back-and-forth game, and even though it was like 2:30AM and everyone was tired and wanted to go home I couldn't get back on my bike until we were sure he was actually back down there, safer, away from the big road. Cats have their own politics, their own complicated lives, Doro said to me later, not unkind or annoyed, just telling the truth, the same way Carlo says it when we hear the neighbours calling for Smokey, who loves to hide from them in the garage, or when I see that skinny ginger stray who hides out under people's porches.
I have been wondering a lot about whether you are supposed to process it in a line or in a circle. Sometimes it's like I can feel the feeling breaking down into Grief Mulch in my mind and other times I wake up feeling the nothing that indicates a much deeper issue. Last night Tess was saying that she felt like she had recently adjusted her expectations about how long this was all going to last, and the realization that it will be long was actually very useful and kind of freeing, that adjusting her expectations from "exception" to "norm" had proved really fruitful. She reorganized her apartment, for example, to make it more comfortable as a place to eat and sleep and work, to shake out the feeling of temporary, accept the thing for what it is. I admired this and I envied it. I felt like I had a similar revelation very early on - had in fact, maybe been mentally preparing myself to realize it since the day in early February when I laid down in a yoga class and felt a clear shimmering wave of total panic wash over me as I thought about the news. But somehow lately I have fallen out of the linear progression of acceptance, out of the slow climb of steady growth. Instead, I have been feeling a kind of borderless discomfort pretty much all the time, which I know is probably just the precursor to accepting it again, maybe more deeply, but whatever it is I'm not there yet. I feel very unwilling and unready to see things as they are and so I am stuck in a kind of limbo, not writing this newsletter, not writing anything, because I do not want to look too closely at the details, do not want to have to notice what anything is or consider what it means. Too much looking.
It's still basically impossible to have a bad time outside, though. The little curl of moon was enormous and bright bright bright right there in front of us. We saw a guy go past on a longboard, piloting a remote-control monster truck in front of him, and we watched the bar switch their twinkling lights off and then for a while we were the only people outside until a lone skateboarder whispered past us with his wheels, gently ollieing into the night, white t-shirt rippling in the breeze. A white cat with ginger spots appeared on the periphery, took two lazy laps around the perimeter like a security guard, then disappeared back into the night. Biking back home felt lush and fortunate, the air against my arms. I love the summer so much and yet all I do is worry about wasting it. This one is maybe not so different from the way it always is.
Just in case you haven't seen this yet:
Ravyn Wngz speaking at the BLM Toronto press conference this week.
A picture of Minky waiting for me at the top of the stairs:
&&&:
Carlo's basketball corner:
I am once again writing this while Carlo is in the middle of a work meeting & unable to provide a Corner, so I hope you will accept my humble submission, which is Hassan Whiteside singing "Jessie's Girl" as he walks through the halls of the NBA bubble hotel.