Scattered, Vol. 8

• My last grandparent died the day after Christmas. Misuzu Hamanaka Ellis, born September 29, 1926, died December 26, 2024. It had been a long time coming, and we knew it would be soon by the time the kids and I arrived on the Monterey Peninsula for the holiday, but somehow I was still surprised when I got my mother's text that night, letting me know. I drove from Carmel to Salinas, sat beside my grandmother's body with my mom and my aunts. She looked smaller than I remembered, even smaller than she had just a month before. She was lying on her side and her mouth was open just a bit. We talked about her, joked in front of the police officers who came, laughed a bit. I saw my aunts cry for only the second time in my life, the first time being when my grandfather passed in 1998.
  
  I didn't know my mother's mother well, not like I had known my father's mother. Missy was quiet, shy. Possibly autistic, which only occurred to me after considering my own likely neurodivergence. I remember her giggling a lot when I was young. I remember that one of the last people to really capture her attention, after she had largely stopped speaking due to dementia, was my youngest daughter, who was 3 or 4 at the time. I remember the way she always made herself a cup of genmaicha or hojicha after dinner. I remember the way she taped Star Trek episodes and movies for us when we didn't have access to cable or aerial reception. Sliced white bread with butter at every meal. Slender, nimble fingers, a seamstress's fingers.
  
  After the EMTs—who came to confirm that she had, indeed, passed—left, and after the young police officers left, we noticed that her mouth had closed. We wondered how that had happened. She looked at peace. She left this world with her daughters by her side. It's about all anyone could ask for.
• When I received the text from my mother, letting me know about her mother, I was sitting in the parking lot of a Starbucks in Carmel. It was about 10 at night, the parking lot was empty. It was the third day in a row that I had been in that parking lot, because it is the place where my kids' mother and I do our complicated little dance to exchange custody for each day of the holiday. I was still there in my car in a dark and empty parking lot because I was in the process of falling in love with a woman on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean.
• I'm in love.
• The world is on fire, in some places very literally. The day she flew into San Diego from Tokyo, there were two fires. I watched the smoke from the first one out my office window, rising just on the other side of the buildings to the west, no more than a mile away. That fire was put out in less than an hour, but the other one continued to burn for a week, eventually spreading over more than 6,000 acres before it was contained. Up in LA, friends of mine are posting about lines to get in and out of their neighborhoods, hazard signs everywhere. It will be a generation, at least, before those communities recover.
• And every day has brought a new shock, a new phase of what we can only call a coup, a constitutional crisis. Every day they take a sledgehammer to some new piece of our institutions, every day they implement some new harm not just to the most vulnerable of us—though, yes, especially them—but to the very fabric of our society, and all the while our elected representatives wring their hands and tweet about the price of eggs while voting to advance their legislation, confirm their nominees. It is breathtaking, to watch the speed with which it is all happening. Even remembering 2017, it is astonishing.
• And yet, I am in love.
• It feels ridiculous, selfish, even unethical to experience such a profound joy in the midst of such suffering. But what else could possibly sustain us through dark times besides love? What better to inspire our courage, our resolve, than to know who we need to protect, and who will be by our side through it all? If we must walk into the flames, how better to do it than joyfully, hand in hand with the ones who make our hearts sing?
• I learned how she makes her coffee. I started making it the way she makes it. I've been taking my coffee black since 1997. I make a coarsely ground pourover for myself on the weekends. She makes hers in a Moka pot, with sweetener and foamed milk. I made it for her while she was here, and now that she's back in Tokyo, I'm drinking my coffee the way she drinks hers, and it makes me feel close to her.
• There is so much work to do. So much more than I know how to do, or that I can even identify as needing to be done. It is daunting, to say the least. Impossible, maybe. And yet necessary, all the same.
• Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes talk in their book Let This Radicalize You about hope as a practice, rather than a feeling:

Just as patience is a practice, rather than a feeling, hope and grief are not simply things we feel but things we enact in the world.

When we enact grief with intention, and in concert with other people, we can find and create moments of relief, comfort, and even joy—and those moments can sustain us. As Malkia Devich-Cyril writes, “Becoming aware of grief gives us more choices about how to respond to grief and opens up possibilities to approach grief not only with compassion for self and others, but also with joy. Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference.”

Hope, too, requires us to reject indifference. And like any indifference-rejecting phenomenon, it demands effort in order to thrive. When we talk about hope in these times, we are not prescribing optimism. Rather, we are talking about a practice and a discipline … This practice of hope allows us to remain creative and strategic. It does not require us to deny the severity of our situation or detract from our practice of grief. To practice active hope, we do not need to believe that everything will work out in the end. We need only decide who we are choosing to be and how we are choosing to function in relation to the outcome we desire and abide by what those decision demand of us.

• I am afraid. I am heartbroken. I am exhausted. And I am in love.
• I hope you get what you need. I hope you can find the strength to do what you must do. I hope you will offer your care to the people in your life, and that you will be sustained by their connection to you. I hope you are loved. I hope at least three good things happen to you today, and that you can hold onto them. I hope we win. I hope, I hope, I hope.
• And I am in love.

Some Things That Mattered to Me in 2024

It's now February, long past the point when a year-end round-up makes a lot of sense. I had spent a lot of the past six weeks trying to write this list in the way I usually do, with explanations of what each piece meant to me. It's feeling too much to me right now and I can't finish it. But I thought perhaps it would still be worthwhile just to send you the list, unadorned. So:

• The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, a poetry collection by Franny Choi.
• The Impossible Us, a romance novel by Sarah Lotz.
• A song-a-day project on TikTok produced a silly one from the perspective of Punxsutawney Phil, and people built on it until it culminated in this first act finale.
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a science fiction novel by Becky Chambers.
• Sarah Gailey's appearance on Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Red Scott's podcast Failure to Adapt, in which they discussed Fifty Shades Darker.
• Ping Pong the Animation, an anime.
• The Book of Love, an unclassifiable novel by Kelly Link.
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, an anime.
• "I text my love at Old Mill Station," a poem by Andrea Josic.
• The part of episode 126 of my friend Rachel Zucker's podcast Commonplace where she and D. A. Powell try to remember the thing they'd heard Judy Grahn say, which was "That's what you do. You take your love over and over and over again into the difficult world."
• Run With the Wind, an anime.
• The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, an album by Chappell Roan.
• Scavengers Reign, an animated science fiction television series.
• The Greatest Generation, a Star Trek podcast by two guys who are a little bit embarrassed to have a Star Trek podcast.
• Season 7 of the podcast Scene on Radio, which is about the roots of Western capitalism and how it could be changed or replaced to help the world work better.
• The Saint of Bright Doors, a fantasy novel by Vajra Chandrasekera.
• The Sense of Wonder, an Asian American literary fiction novel by Matthew Salesses.
• Hanif Abdurraqib on loss:

• Have You Eaten?, a near-future dystopian novella by Sarah Gailey.
• "Miss You. Would Like to Take a Walk With You," a poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi.
• The Wild Robot, an animated feature film.
• Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand singing this duet of "Happy Days are Here Again" and "Get Happy."
• How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, a queer essay collection by Sabrina Imbler.
• My conversation with Sarah Gailey in October's episode of Keep the Channel Open.
• Danez Smith's conversation about their book Bluff on David Naimon's podcast, Between the Covers.
• This duet in which Avie Sheck sings Radiohead's "Creep" with his mother, who sings classical Indian raags.
• "Begin," a poem by Brendan Kennelly.
• December's episode of Keep the Channel Open, which was my attempt to maintain some sense of community with my show's past guests.

What I've Been Working On

It always feels strange to talk about my podcasts at times like this. But I have released several episodes since I wrote to you last, and I am proud of them. And maybe they will be of use to you.

Keep the Channel Open

• After the election, I was feeling a strong pull toward community, so I reached out to past KTCO guests to check in with them.
• For January's episode, I talked with painter Marisa DeLuca about the ephemerality of urban spaces, the spirit of place, and the importance of the commons.

Hey, It's Me

• For the first episode in December, Rachel and I discussed the sexual prowess of the men of Star Trek.
• Then for the second December episode, Rachel and I talked about the election.
• Finally, we only released one episode in January, but it was a good one. We talked about dating.

Listen, I always say this. I'm going to say it again anyway. I know you're doing your best. And I am, too. So, take care.

-Mike