Distractions
On grief: It’s the two year anniversary of my friend’s murder. The grief is like this: a huge whack of shock that stops everything. You want to know how it all happened, every stupid detail, because your body isn’t believing it. The best thing to do is tell everybody you know so that you can hear a familiar gasp of shock from them, an acknowledgement that what happened is crazy and wrong. Then the sorrow: snot running down your face, your face is a bubbler for tears (okay, Taylor Swiftian lyrics) and every other sentence is disrupted by some wail of pain. Then there’s the comradery with people who know: memorials that are pumping with this sad, nearly sexual energy. The posts. A year passes. And then another, and suddenly, you’re older than this person will ever be. The context you would have had to fill them in on, were they in a coma or something and not dead in the ground, is already too immense. Your relationship with them feels as though it’s sinking beneath the surface with their body, being swallowed up by the bugs, because suddenly, you are different, too. What am I supposed to do when I’m no longer the person he knew me as?
On flying: I flew to Los Angeles for my final tour stop at Skylight Books. I’ve been nervous about this flight for the last few months. I’m not afraid of crashing and I am not afraid of turbulence and I’m not even afraid of terrorists. A man stands up with a backpack and a hat on and I’m kind of like, “Let him rock.” The turbulence actually feels normal because I remember that it is. It’s just wind. It’s just the plane being rocked by the air jello. What I’m really afraid of is the whole idea of it: being strapped into a metallic contraption thousands of feet in the air. I had been prescribed beta blockers but was too scared to put a new substance into my mouth. Lemme tell you: I love beta blockers. What a blessing. What a miracle. The same thoughts came to me as I was watching the cars and the buildings get smaller and smaller. That’s not right, for example. That’s very fucked up we’re up so high. But my heart didn’t race! I didn’t feel like I was about to throw up! It was easier for me to be alright with everything. It made me realize how much panic lives inside The Body, and how The Body can be really smart but also silly, reacting to things it doesn’t need to. Really, I’m getting older and my body is in touch with the bodies that came before it, ones that never left the ground and were running from lions and shit. Those bodies are perhaps feeling how unnatural what I’m doing is, but I would to remind those bodies that I drink milk squeezed from oats, that a metallic contraption shuttles me underground to work, that at work I take an electric box to the 5th floor, and that every night before I go to sleep on a bed in a building I shut off lights. They don’t really care, is the thing.
I got to visit Jamie and Olivia in California. Is there anything better than being in a different state, talking to your friends on their couch with a cup of coffee in your hand, their sweet boyfriends in the next room?
WHAT I READ
Nobody told me this story was letters? Why didn’t anyone tell me this story was letters? After recording my audiobook I met Miguel for a cookie in Times Square. I asked him to grab me a book, any book, from his job. He came back with Frankenstein. This book fucked. It’s amazing how many iterations there have been of this book and how ingrained the idea of Frankenstein is in our culture. In the novel, she never goes into detail how the monster is made. We know Dr. Frankenstein is rummaging through grave yards, but we never see him stitch together body parts, we never see him push a lever on a grand machine. A yellow eye simply opens and the monster is simply there. It’s so strange to read something that you have a cultural memory of and that memory not being there. This is a book about the horrors of technology, the monster of work, and the existential nature of parenthood.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
This was a re-read for me. I’m teaching it at Columbia in my Visions and Voices of Childhood class. Reading this about ten years ago, I don’t think I registered that Mary Katherine Blackwood is a psychopath. I was distracted by how quirky she was and her sweet relationship with her cat, Jonas. A reason why, by the way, I have a cat right now. I read it happily next to Frank and Jimmy snoozing, remembering that I used to spend my precious days off from the book store just reading. Anyway, I realize now that the text makes us fall in love with Merricat and when it’s revealed that she’s the one who poisoned her family, we have to reckon with whether or not that was good or bad. (It’s bad). I love this book. It has one of the best opening paragraphs in history.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
On my TBR:
-The Secret Place by Tana French
What else should I read… tell me…
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