Weekend Catch Up

Hello friends!
I hope June has been gentle with you so far.
This week for me has been one of death and rebirth broadly, if my life were a novel or some kind of creative non-fiction piece. On a rainy, windy Monday I met one of my last ‘disappeared’ cousins as my aunt’s urn was interned in her final resting place. If the first law of thermodynamics is true, then I hope she likes the geese and coyotes that visit that cemetery- I’m sorry I couldn’t get closer to horses-and that she isn’t alone. On Friday, I signed one of the last pieces of paper that I need to do for her estate. Hopefully sooner than later it will be finished.

I never expected my 30s to be so full of family death, but I don’t think anyone is truly ready for their own mortality to become so apparent. However like most occurrences, this is cyclical-there are fallow seasons and there are fruitful seasons, rot and decay is needed for soil and we see this with forest fire season. Fireweed is one of the first plants to grow after a fire, possibly it’s a fireweed season for me.
I hope your co combined gay wrath and Indigenous history month is going well.

What I've Been Watching

My lit seminar has been taking up more time than I thought it would, so I haven’t been watching a whole lot lately. I am excited for future things though.

I finally wandered around more in Drumeo’s videos when I was procrastinating and it was the perfect rabbit hole for me. Music is so intensely personal, and I love hearing how people figure out things, especially in this series where drummers figure out their part in a song. Dirk Verbeuren seems like a neat drummer (I don’t really care for Megadeth) and this was a beautiful use of 10 minutes.

It’s getting closer to the 20th! Which means Rite Here, Right Now is happening soon. I absolutely expect nothing from a Ghost movie but ridiculousness and I hope it delivers. I love how Tobias Forge has been able to finally(?) get to a point where he can be as theatrical and indulgent as he wants for what is admittedly unhinged premise.

And then a week later, Never stop Blowing Up from Dimension 20 comes out! I am so stoked for all of the players (yay Izzy and Iffy) to just completely lean into this season, especially with it being a homebrew Kids On Bikes system (which isn’t a bad system, it’s just kinda weird, one day I’ll write about it).

What I've Been Reading

See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again.

What are the things that nourish you? What are the things that help you grow or feel like a warm cup of tea on a cold day? One of things that brings me nourishment is reading about writing or writing craft from authors like Ursula Le Guin. This piece is hosted over at lithub and it's beautiful. I enjoyed this week because I’ve been feeling like an imposter in terms of writing again. So I follow her advice, I write and become my own small despot.

I no longer understand straight people. I’m not trying to be cute here: I used to get it. I used to be it, albeit awkwardly. Just a few years ago, I more or less knew the rules and aesthetics that governed heterosexual couples, and how to behave when you were trying to be in one. Now, when I watch movies about heterosexual marriage, I am flabbergasted.

Jude Doyle normally writes about horror stuff, so this new series is pretty snazzy. This was such a clever essay on Indecent Proposal of all things. There are so many clever bits, and their voice is hilarious. I really enjoyed The Tragedy of Heterosexuality and this counts as part of pride month.

I came away recognizing that these students are embodying everything I’d ever taught in my classes, everything I’d written about in my books about resistance and generative refusal. My therapist was right. They had built the alternative, and while nothing is ever perfect, the People’s Circle for Palestine is glorious and a phenomenal achievement.

This weeks pick for Indigenous history month, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is brilliant human being and this is a beautiful piece on solidarity, and a possible world. Some days it's hard to be an academic in the current political climate. I’ve really enjoyed her academic pieces Dancing on Our Turtles Back (2011) and As We Have Always Done (2017), her non academic collections such as Islands of Decolonial Love (2016) and This Accident of Being Lost (2017) were uplifting in a different way. Back to this piece, it is such a balm to my reluctant academic soul to have someone in the same discipline to say something wonderful about the encampments, about Palestine, and for it not to be deeply embarrassing.

I have dedicated my whole life to this book: validating, verifying, magnifying its entries. I sell snippets of my experiences to shady magazines and fly-by-night journals to support my travels. Over the years, I have acquired a small, zealous readership. People live vicariously through my stories. A few attempt to follow my footsteps; fewer still make it back alive.

Over at Uncanny Magazine, Rati Mehrotra has written a brilliant short story Markets of The Otherworld about markets, purpose and ultimately death. This story felt decadent to me, I loved how Mehrotra uses little tidbits of journals, book entries, and letters throughout this. Go read this, it’s like finding a rare book at a second hand bookstore, or the fancy honey at a farmers market.

Small Mammal Update

June is a busy month- Yaga’s gotcha day and Potema’s gotcha day happen sometime in the next little while. For Yaga, she feels like she’s been with me forever and she’ll always be here, this is her 13th gotcha day. It’s like how did this even happen, one moment she was a kitten and we lived over the punk/metal bar and now we’re both so much older and live in a house.

For Potema, I can’t believe how much her mask is starting to grey. She has the starts of a white chin beard, and her whiskers are coming in white now. Time doesn’t feel real anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do when she has a completely greyed in face.

What I've Been Working On

I wrote about This is How You Lose The Time War here.

I’ve also been doing more grad writing, which has been a fucking slog, and I don’t think I understand how theory or words work anymore, so thank you for reading all the way to here!