Letter #43
Hold it in glass
Well folks. It’s happened. The sorry, sad-sack, shit-water state of this nation has caused a return to the ur-self, that is, the self of shoveling popcorn and berries and chocolate by the fistful into my mouth at lightning speed, procrastinating on the twelfth hour of work I’m doing for the day while ‘writing,’ in my head, aka psychoanalyzing self w/r/t world around me while asking when will you break through your own bullshit? When? *Sucks vape.* I’m quitting weed tomorrow … I’m definitely quitting digital grade vape weed during the weekday tomorrow. The self that cannot actually bear to pretend otherwise. The self that is being a little toooo self at work. Grimacing into the webcam when I hear a bad idea. Braless on my couch while I still can be, daring anyone to come at me, bro, cause I’m ready to rip.
Drafts for this particular letter, #43, have for the past year and a half accumulated like snowdrifts, the same way my Clock app looks on the phone screen, like: 8:00 AM, 8:10 AM, 8:20 AM, 8:30 AM, 8:40 AM, et cetera., apply to all hours of the day, repeat.
Basically, I just felt, for a spell, that nothing I had to say was valid or necessary. First in a shy way, then in a What is the point of art? way. Then in a Who gives a fuck? way. And then in an Is it still worth it to dream? way. Is it?!!! She asked, on her Substack.
But here myself I find. Beckoned once more by the siren song of semi-anonymous self-expression. Unshowered, for an hour too long, scalp both flaky and greasy from steady pangs of Pre-War radiator heat. Existentially single, unerotically celibate, after months and months of relentless external political and socioeconomic turmoil and simultaneous fundamental personal progress, actually (more on that another time), back to the self who woke up in the middle of the night in deep distress in late 2020, to say some stuff into the void.
Stress dreams that drifted in and out of open windows during peak pandemic were foreshadowing, it seems, for the pressure of our current state. Nervous chattering as the windows of America are busted out, in a fire sale put on by the most impotent freak losers we have to offer as a country. We don’t have any time to try to help; we have to work. Too many directions to look. Too many people to save. As they bomb babies in Gaza and gobble up our shared resources, our dignity. We make memes about recession indicators and ignore the ticking clock.
That rusty ol’ scaffolding of civil society is effervescent now: static, poof, byebye! Falling down all around us.
If I may: ohhhhhmyfuckinggod.slkdfjksdhgfjskjfldgsfjshflsjf!!!
By 35, I was supposed to have been an unusually magnanimous former child prodigy who turned out to be an era-defining novelist whose prose strikes the perfect chord of rare genius, underground irreverence and aesthetic charm who through a series of lucky breaks and smart business decisions went onto own a modest but arresting midcentury beachfront property in Malibu with her partner, a tall, sensitive, dryly funny caretaker type of equal but different intelligence, and at least one dog and maybe a beautiful wise daughter before the world ended.
Of course, I only have myself to blame for not being a tenth of that before I’m conscripted to the Power Point section of the gulag. (If I’m lucky enough to not get drafted into The Geriatric Birthers caste, who then retire up to the Aunt Lydia Master’s program, a brand partnership by Hulu x MAGA x Woman Workers of Raytheon).
Time has firmed up now; it’s menacing. And the crude lines of reality threaten to obliterate my imagination, my delusions, my belief in astrology. Some for the better — for example, I don’t even have the energy to conjure up an ill-advised, emotionally fraught eight week long romance from the bottom of the Internet. No, In this economy I need something stronger than synthetic weed and synthetic limerance.
But yaaaa. I’ve seen what this city has to offer, partner-wise, and it ain’t happening, so. At the very least I need to look at this orb for a full minute.
As the room darkened, the lens shimmered greener than green in an affirmation of presence and power that felt, if not human, undoubtedly animate. When the overhead lights began to rhythmically rise and subside, the object dematerialized before my eyes. Upon Pashgian’s signal, I refocused my gaze, causing a fluorescent pink corona to surge around what was left of the disc, emulating a total solar eclipse. A rosy nimbus whirled around the periphery of the space. Not until I heard myself audibly gasp did I realize I’d stopped breathing.
What I need to do is listen again to The Telepathy Tapes, which reminds me that there are entire pools of consciousness that some of us can’t, won’t access. There’s a lot of backlash to the podcast, you can read that too. For better or worse, the scientific method is the only thing we have to measure the immeasurable. Especially when such phenomena arises amongst children and their mothers, teachers. Caregivers who spend so much time striving to protect and understand these children that they find new ways to hear them. Mother and son, teacher and student, and their thoughts that are a third pool of consciousness between them. And then between their peers, another ripple. Then another, and another. So strong of a force that it creates the Hill, the Hill immaterial, where they meet, and learn, and love each other in words that have their own realm. You can read the debunking, you can listen to the counter-arguments. It’s all out there. You can ingest both poles and then decide: Do you believe?
I write here as a way to reach my hand into the pool of belief — suspended disbelief? — and trail my fingers through it. To keep finding it worthwhile to wrap my mind around the works of other minds that bypass what we can see and get to the fleeting, otherworldly light, the novels that imagine whole new planets just to best say exactly how we — imperfect, wretched, earthbound folk — are.
Like the great Brontez Purnell says in his IG bio, “I write because I have to.”
Like the great Helen Pashgian says, “Making art is like a divine itch.”
I write to you here as a humble vessel amongst other humble vessels, who when we find love and beauty in the same spot should declare that we saw it, we held it there in glass, despite all of the craven attempts to banish it, along with all other signs of life and progress from this planet.
Even though the dumb fascists are sending Katy Perry there, for some sort of branding exercise or something, and other such ugly facts that mar our healthy pink perfect consciousness.
They will fail. We will succeed. Because we have to. I have to believe it.
More to come soon, & love u,
Delighter
ilysm