Prosaic Ponderings

Although they are of equal length, January somehow felt longer than December. January always feels like the come-down month from the holiday season; the long, gentle runway back into our routines after the holiday hysteria that is December. In this dry, frigid month of reflection and reinvigoration, we also find ourselves in the wake of an election year, where nearly everyone's gaze is fixed, like the eye of Mordor, on the incoming administration. It makes sense: elections serve as a place to direct our hypervigilance, ennui, and vague sense of 'something's not quite right' every four years. (Making a mental note to myself to talk sometime about the interesting timing of our national elections with the holiday season/winter.)  I know we were all starting to wonder if January would ever end, but the long month at least gave me an opportunity to slip a blog post in more or less in time to make my monthly posting goal. Although it's been a significant month in the war ...

The crackling sounds of Dean Martin's Silver Bells signals the start of another hauntological loop of Christmas. Five a.m. at the Seatac airport two days before Christmas and I take the caffeinated road more traveled after an hour of getting through security. An ever-growing queue of people form a bottleneck at the entrance to a row of empty self check-in kiosks. Bleary-eyed families side-step dog shit as frazzled airport employees scramble to place caution signs around the trail of poop while racing down the terminal to catch the dog owner. A cheerfully commanding Alaska Airlines employee who is ON this morning jumps in to direct the flow of traffic. I spend $34 on a breakfast burrito and a sandwich to go. The annual Christmas pilgrimage has begun. Christmas has an unstoppable momentum like a carousel that, once activated, must complete its cycle. Come November 29th, tree-topped cars adorned with antlers and red noses jam the highway, everything from candy canes to Tostitos is dy...

If I were to make a word cloud from people's social media posts around the 2024 election, grief would be one of the biggest words. So many people are sharing how they're feeling right now and a prevalent feeling across the generations seems to be grief. To which I say "Bless your hearts."  The mood going into election day in my social media bubble was anxious, near hysterical, even nihilistic.  The mood since the results were announced has been one of deep grief.  "...right now I feel only grief" The title of this email was "A Poem for these Times" I know the posts will die down soon but, all the same, I wish we could skip this part. I find it to be overly sentimental, precious and, ultimately, missing in any kind of power/class analysis that is sorely needed both inside of and outside of election cycles. Really, I'm not intending for this post to turn into a commentary on our political system; I mostly want to challenge folks to build communit...

Thousands of bloggers across the Northern Hemisphere are pressing a cup of coffee to their breast as they record their seasonal reflections and I am stepping up to join their illustrious ranks. October, flame spout of color and summer's glorious end, electrifies the senses. Summer had its light times as well as its dark but we are transitioning now to something else.  This is the time of year where man and beast alike root around the forest floor collecting their bounty and to go more than two weeks without being offered foraged mushrooms by a friend is highly irregular. In the Pacific Northwest, our unusually dry fall has come to a muddy end as we near Samhain. The blue, wind-whipped skies with jellyfish clouds slowly give way to a domineering grey, but the weather each day is still anyone's guess. The fierce weekend winds which blew the crisp brown leaves off the trees have died down to a gentle, persistent rain as I write this. Every weekend this month feels precious. I feel...

Visiting my aunt in her idyllic coastal community in Western Massachusetts in late summer is infinitely lovely. There's the early morning walks along country lanes lined with quintessential New England rock walls, the boat-dotted Westport River bordering the family property, where you can see approximately two hundred shades of blue reflected in a given day, falling asleep in the room upstairs watching the lights on the fishing boats as they go out at night, waking with the sun as it slices through the curtains and the feeling that you're in a sunny, salt-scented library with all of my aunt's dusty books and family heirlooms... in short, it's heaven. There's always the requisite cousin barbecue and family gathering while I'm there. My aunts like to say that I'm their favorite niece to which I like to reply, "I'm your only niece." It's endearing because they say it with a lot of pride. All of my cousins on my dad's side (the only side I ...

Caretaking is something I've been thinking about more and more these days, but have been reticent to write about. I have some hangups with imposter syndrome; I feel like I shouldn't write about something if I don't have much experience with it. Something writing has done for me is it's forced me to seek honesty with myself and will often help me arrive at insights I feel are worth sharing with people because I realize I do have something to say. Since my mom got Alzheimer's, I've done two significant caretaking stints with her to give my dad a break. A friend of mine, who incidentally does some caretaking for her partner, recently said that if a topic feels hard to write about then that means it probably needs to be written about. I want to spend time engaging with this topic more so that I can connect with my dad on some level in his mostly lonely and isolating journey as a full-time caretaker.  It's been deeply unsettling watching two different people'...