back to it
07/01/2026
No blog posts for pride month/grief month. I can feel the heat wave cooking my brain but Cat Fitzpatrick says write more so I’m writing more. I’ve been trying to take a break from reading bad books to only read good books, which I think has mostly had the effect of making me read less. When I’m reading something good I feel like I owe it more of my attention, and it can make it harder to reach for a book instead of my phone. I’ve been having a lot of trouble being disciplined. I have a long term fear that if I stopped pushing myself to do things all the time I would lose the ability to do it, and then I couldn’t push myself anymore so I stopped, and now I don’t remember how to do it, which is bad for applying to jobs. I guess the anniversary of my ongoing mental breakdown came and went and it’s still kind of happening but not in ways that are as obvious to other people. Progress! I said the blog wasn’t for oversharing but it seems inevitable to the form.
One of the good books I read was TOAF by Renee Gladman. This is the passage that has been following me the most, which is very early in the book:
“The books in all the stores were calling me. I had to get my coffee. My burritos. I had to sit on this step and lounge on that piece of grass. The lifestyle I adopted required filling up a day with pursuit and leisure, but at such a tempo it was difficult to say which was which.” (15)I like the use of “required” a lot here. I like the way she writes about occupying the city as producing certain rhythms of thought that are specific to the place she was thinking them. I like how cranky she is about cell phones and thinking about the novelty of encountering displaced conversations in public for the first time. I like how interested she is in her own failures. Reading it made me feel a little less like I’ve been running in place.
I guess a lot of the last year has been getting really disciplined about waiting. On the way to Loren’s show Ozzy called me and asked if I had any correspondence that meant a lot to me, and when I had a panic attack at the show I went outside and sat in my car and sent him my two favorite Emily Dickinson letters. I couldn’t remember their numbers but I got there by googling my favorite phrases. They’re both to Elizabeth Holland, her older and wiser friend, both written in winter. Here are my favorite passages, with the phrases I memorized:
“Dear Friends,and
I thought I would write again. I write you many letters with pens which are not seen. Do you receive them?
I think of you all today, and dreamed of you last night.”(26 November 1854)
“I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember. I believe my "effects" were brought in a bandbox, and the "deathless me," on foot, not many moments after. I took at the time a memorandum of my several senses, and also of my hat and coat, and my best shoes - but it was lost in the melee, and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” (20 January 1856)(the end of this one to me has always rhymed with my favorite Virginia Woolf phrase, “the lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes,” from A Room of One’s Own, even though they aren’t really thematically related)
I’ve been telling myself July is when I lock back in. I applied for four jobs today. Joyce gets here tomorrow. Lanterns out!!!!!
currently reading (in order of how actively):
listening to:
watching: