Scenes from an October
Driving to pick up my youngest daughter from dance one evening, I saw a car on fire. Pulled over to the curb on the opposite side of the street, it was fully ablaze, with flames shooting up out of the open windows a good five feet above the roof. Two other cars were stopped nearby, and several people were standing around looking at it—not on their phones or taking pictures, just standing on the sidewalk a prudent distance back from the fire and staring at it. Just as I thought to myself "I should pull over and call 9-1-1," a fire engine turned the corner, lights flashing.
*
A few weeks later, she got invited to the Balboa Park Haunted Trail by one of her friends this year. I decided to take the whole family along, thinking it might be a fun thing to do out of the house. It turned out to be pretty scary, so much so that my older two kids wanted to exit early. Fortunately, my youngest was happy to go on with her friends and their parents, so we just took the emergency exit and waited for them at the end.
I think the thing that surprised me the most was how relatively calm I was through the whole thing. I don't actually like haunted houses. Nor horror stories, for that matter. Usually it's enough to get quite an adrenaline response out of me. And this was a pretty scary one—to me, anyway. Even between the jump scares, the company did a pretty good job of making the grounds very creepy. It felt like wandering around in a nightmare, but even though I did jump a few times, I was pretty steady throughout.
Part of it, I think, was being there with the kids. I knew that they needed a calm presence with them to help them feel safe, and that must have helped keep my nerves in check. But I wonder how much might have been just the fact that I have been so on edge for such a long time now with thoughts of impending social and political and climate collapse, that being in a fantasy of a horror actually felt a little tame. And in some ways, terror—the jump scare and the fight-or-flight—is an easier kind of fear than dread—the anticipation of danger that hasn't yet appeared.
*
I took myself out to lunch a couple of weeks ago, to my favorite bakery. Now that I'm single again, I'm trying to do some nice things for myself and get out of the house at least once a week. In any case, the place was packed when I got there and there was no seating available on the patio, so I took my sandwich and iced tea to go. Liberty Station has a bunch of nice tree-lined, grassy promenades with benches and tables, and it was a nice day out.
The table I finally sat down at was next to a small fountain that was set into the ground with just a single layer of brick bordering it. While I ate, four different toddlers wandered up to it and, of course, tried to get into the water. Each one was gently foiled by a watchful parent, some with a word, some by being picked up. One parent simply stood between her child and the fountain, nonchalantly interposing herself while she talked on her phone. Oddly enough, none of the kids got particularly frustrated by being thwarted thusly.
*
I usually eat outside when I'm at work, which is partly because I'm still masking at the office and partly because our building has a nice courtyard. A few weeks ago as I was headed out to lunch, when the elevator doors opened to let me on, a small dog ran out and into our suite.
She was a cute little doodle-type dog, wearing a pink collar, and was clearly kind of freaked out. I got down on one knee and held out a hand to her, trying to gently get her to come over to me so I could check her collar for a contact number, but she didn't trust me. Within a few minutes, four or five of my coworkers were trying to coax her in, but to no avail.
Finally, the elevator dinged again and a man I didn't recognize stepped out. "Are you looking for a dog?" I asked, and his face—worried at first—relaxed into a relieved smile. He called to Moxie—that was her name—and she came running around the corner, jumping up on him and whimpering with joy. They left together, reunited.
*
I went out to lunch with my friends Y and T last week, two women I met and worked with during my time as an activist, and who I admire a great deal. It had been a while since we'd all gotten together, so we spent some time catching up on personal stuff before the conversation turned toward political stuff and, of course, our anxieties about the election. T mentioned that she would be going to DC in January no matter what happens, and Y asked if she would go to the Women's March.
"No," T said. "That doesn't do anything but make white women feel good about themselves." Mind you, T and Y are both white women. But T went on to say that she wanted to spend her time on things that actually make a difference.
One of the things the three of us spent a lot of time and energy on during the Trump administration was meeting regularly with our centrist Democrat congressman and trying to get him to take action, to move him even a little bit to the left. I don't even know how many hours I spent on policy research, legislative vote monitoring, bill tracking, let alone during the actual meetings. But for all that, I'm not sure how much impact we actually had with him. On the other hand, the canvassing and postcarding and phone banking that T has been helping to organize are things we know move the needle.
The week before, I'd been at an ACLU phone bank, reaching out to ACLU members to give them a push on three of the ballot measures this year. (For the record, the ACLU's position—and mine—is Yes on 3, Yes on 6, and No on 36.) At the beginning of the session, the coordinator asked us to tell the group about someone who inspires us. I said T.
*
I've been thinking a lot lately about what comes next, as I'm sure we all have. And there is a lot of fear in the not knowing. I have stepped up my own work to contribute to the grassroots electoral efforts, but I don't know if it will be enough. And there will always be the question of whether I could have done more. (The answer is probably always yes.)
But in the end, whatever happens will happen. The work will have been enough, or it won't. Whoever wins, there will be difficulties and probably violence. And after that, there will be more work to do and more fights to fight.
But I guess I'm thinking, too, about all the lives each of us touches, whether or not we notice. I'm thinking about the ways that people do help strangers for no reason other than that it's the right thing to do. I'm thinking about the phone calls and text messages and meals shared with friends and family. I'm thinking about how none of us gets through any of this without a web of support so big that we can't ever see all of it.
I don't know what's coming. I'm grateful to have the knowledge that, whatever it is, I won't go through it alone. And neither will you.
Reaching Toward the Light
What I've Been Working On
Keep the Channel Open
I am always so happy when I get the chance to talk with Sarah Gailey. They're now officially part of the Four Timers Club on KTCO (along with Rachel Zucker), and I couldn't be more pleased about it.
For this latest conversation, we talked about Sarah's new novella, Have You Eaten?, which follows a group of four young, queer friends as they traverse a collapsing America, and which asks the question "What does it look like to take care of each other in a time of crisis?" It's a question that feels so urgent right now, and for a while now. Sarah and I talked about the experimentation in fiction, vine-ripened tomatoes, cooking as an act of care, and what apocalypse means. And in the second segment, they almost made me cry by being nice to me (though they would vociferously deny that "being nice" was what they were doing, and fair enough), and then we talked about sin-flattening and high-control groups, and the necessity of interpersonal repair.
Hey, It's Me
(CW: cancer, grief)
One of the strange things about making this show the way we make it is that Rachel and I record these episodes months ahead of when they're released. It makes each episode a bit of a time capsule, the versions of us that you hear not yet aware of what I already know is coming. When we started making Hey, It's Me, we didn't know that this summer Rachel's son would be diagnosed with a rare cancer. But that's what happened, and the show has finally caught up to when that all finally hit us.
These episodes are different from our previous ones, in form and in content. They’re kind of hard to listen to—though, at that, not as hard as living through the things Rachel talks about. But if this show is about us, then this is where we are right now. Or, at least, it’s where we were at the time we recorded these episodes. Life continues to proceed, often painfully, sometimes with spots of peace or joy or levity. We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re doing our best.
What I've Been Reading
Featured Read: How Far the Light Reaches, by Sabrina Imbler
The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened when I was five years old, and growing up in that area, it became one of my favorite places and really one of the only "touristy" places that I really loved. I worked there for two summers, once as a volunteer in high school and once as an intern with the Visitor Presentations department when I was in college. I often say that it was the best place I ever worked. All that is just to say that I have been fascinated with marine life for about as long as I can remember, so it makes sense that I would enjoy an essay collection where the central metaphor is based around the ocean and the creatures that live in it. I do know a fair amount about sea life but there's always more to learn.
What I did not know and never would have thought of on my own is just how potently marine life works as a metaphor and vehicle for examining queer love, mixed-race identity, family history, body fluidity, and self-knowledge, among other things. Yes, this book is intelligent and insightful and beautiful. Yes, it is moving and affirming. What most surprised me, though, was that while reading it I experienced recognition and joy not only for other people—which I did expect—but also for myself. It's not to say that I need to see myself in a work of literature in order to appreciate or be moved by it. I don't. It's just that I wasn't expecting to see pieces of myself in this particular work of literature, and yet I did.
As always, if you have thoughts on this book or any of its essays, I'd love to hear them. And if you haven't read it yet, here are some purchase links:
Everything Else
- Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner. This is the book that won Anita Brookner the Booker Prize, so I figured it would be a good place to start with her work. The story is about a middle-aged romance writer who takes an extended sojourn at a Swiss hotel to sort of wait out the aftermath of a tumultous event in her personal life back in England. While she's there, she meets several other guests of the hotel, including a somewhat mysterious but charming man, and has some realizations about herself. I suppose you could say it's about love, or regret, possibly, but I'm not sure if that's quite right. The characters are all well-drawn, and the narration is often funny in a dry, judgmental way. I'd say that I enjoyed it and found it interesting as an example of craft, but I'm not sure it moved me, exactly.
Mattered To Me
- In her essay "The Death of the Fuck: Neopuritanism and Commercial Fiction," Emily Lynell Edwards discusses the growing squeamishness of both critics and readers when it comes to the erotic in fiction. I'm not sure that I completely agree with the essay, mainly because I'm not sure that what professional critics or BookTokers have to say about literature is necessarily a good reflection of how the reading public thinks about these things. But I did find it an interesting read, especially in light of many of the discussions I've seen (and participated in on one of my shows or the other) about the general trend of moralism in our culture.
- Sarah McCarry's newsletters come pretty infrequently—only six times in the past three years—but I invariably find them moving when they do arrive. Her most recent was about crying at a Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, but mostly it was about the impossibility of reconciling what is and what should be.
- Solmaz Sharif's poem "Social Skills Training." "History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner."
- I hadn't seen Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand's 1963 duet from The Judy Garland Show in decades, but it got shared around on Bluesky recently and so I took the occasion to watch it again. It’s always given me chills, but when I was younger I wasn’t quite able to grasp the dynamic between them. It’s so much more ready to hand, that feeling, now that I’m the age I am. Watching it now and seeing Garland's fragility, how it touched every part of her except her voice, knowing that I'm older now than she was then, and almost as old as she ever got to be; well, it got me really choked up.
Take care,
-Mike