magic perfume

"In 12 Dates of Christmas, the protagonist has to go on a date with Zack Morris every day for 12 days because she is sprayed by a magical perfume, which I’m assuming is how Ayuhuasca works. She repeats every day, Groundhog Day-style, thinking that if she just finds out what she is doing wrong, the time loop will stop. It takes her about ten days to realize the only reason she became obsessed with marrying her ex-boyfriend is because her mom died. At this point, yes, I cried. I, a 29-year-old man, watching a holiday movie with magical perfume, cried. Because this happened to me, and because it caused me paralyzing anxiety in real life, because grief makes you do things you normally wouldn’t, because grief makes you weird."

How Made-for-TV Movies Help Me Survive the Holidays by Daniel Zomparelli is funny and good and made me feel better today. I greatly dislike Christmas and Christmas media which is why the descriptions of those movies added a particular tension to the reading. My thing is watching British police procedurals, granting the characters/actors nicknames and getting real weird about it.

I miss my dad.

memberships

Before I was a member of the Dead Dad Club, I opened a one-woman chapter of the Dead Brother Club in the city where he is always supposed to love you back. Now I got membership cards spilling from my pockets, tripping me up and buffering my falls.

"The Club has burdens. You can’t bring it up, if you’re young; people get far too uncomfortable and sad for you. If circumstances force you to tell someone about the death, you must immediately be reassuring about just how fine and over it you are. You must act like the death wasn’t tragic. You must act like your relationship with your father was healthy and conventional. You must not be visibly annoyed when people cry and complain and mourn the loss of their grandparents or great-grandparents or their fucking dogs and cats. You must not speak of the Dead Dad Club to a non-member. You must not bring someone into the Club if they are not ready. You must not let membership to the Club visibly taint your relationships, lest you become a girl with D-word Issues. That is the worst fate of all."

Eventually, We All Become Members of the Dead Dad Club by Erika Price with beautiful illustration by  Kara Y. Frame.

YES YES YES.

"If you’re ever interested in feeling as if you’re on the verge of losing your mind, you need complete only a two-step process:

1. Find a way to give someone you love deeply a life-threatening disease, and
2. While your loved one is at home battling death, stand in a restaurant line behind a person complaining loudly that their burrito came with sour cream, even though they asked for no sour cream, and they guess they’ll just eat it with the sour cream, even though the calories, but maybe they should get a discount now, or, like, a soda?"

From On Kindness by Cord Jefferson, a beautiful essay on being someone's child and coming to grips with suffering.

This is especially poignant to me now, as I grapple with roles I am not good in, doing jobs I wasn't made to do for people I am both grieving and raging against.

Be kind, lovelies.

remain ragged

The constant struggle: "... I’ve found that working with words all day — whether at home or in a proper office — doesn’t afford me the time or headspace for the writing I really want to do."

And that final deadline: "Just two weeks before she died, Maggie [Estep] wrote about her own tendency to procrastinate. As if there were time for that. I’m now quite certain there isn’t."

Sari Botton on the Billfold: An Elegy for the “Non-Creepy” Realtor, aka Maggie Estep

I am nowhere near a place in my career where I can even laughingly call myself safe and I think about these things all of the time.

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 How to Write a Personal Essay by Leslie Jamison

"I’m interested in essays that follow the infinitude of a private life toward the infinitude of public experience. I’m wary of seeking this resonance by extracting some easy moral from the grit and complication of personal particularity: love hurts, time heals, always look on the bright side. Instead, I’m drawn to essays that allow the messy threads of grief or incomprehension to remain ragged, to direct our gazes outward."

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As my father's illness progresses, I have to travel more and more out of town to care for him. We are still looking for a foster/adopter for out lovely foster dog, Dottie. She has been a great joy to us, but we have to focus on my dad and working for the time being.

Please pass on her info!

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"I will listen to my goddamn body. I will close my eyes when I am tired I will sit when I need rest I will eat when I am hungry and I will not, I cannot be the woman I was, the woman I have always been. I need to surrender her. I need to give her up because she is gone."

The Hell of the First Trimester by Sara Finnerty over at Mutha Magazine is about pregnancy but it might as well be about what is going on with me right now. All the fear, the resignation, the weirdness and the desire to do the right thing this time is there, and written fiercely.

Recent good things

This Rumpus essay on poetry, presentation and (not just) pie by Kate Lebo is tops.  It made me think about Sylvia Plath, who I've sort of skipped over when looking for idols. Seeing her words interspersed with Lebo's made me want to seek Ariel.

Great interview with Karen Joy Fowler by Carmen Maria Machado: "But mostly I believe that we shouldn’t do things we are unable to look at."

The David Brothers interviews at Inkstuds. There are some audio quality issues with some of these, but, as you know, here at try harder, content is queen.

And, of course, this comic from Anne Emond pretty much sums up this whole season.

Winter pallor and complaint: Photo by Pete

I'm sorry, Paul

This year I picked up no leaves to tuck into the pages of my journal. I love doing that for some reason, but this year I missed it. Not totally, of course, the trees are still raining down colorful bookmarks, but I still find myself thinking more about doing it than actually looking at the ground for something pretty.
 
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This is how you interview an author. Kameelah Rasheed balances familiarity and interrogation well while talking with Wendy C. Ortiz and the end result makes me want to read more by both.
"I have the courage in my late 30s and now at age 40 that I did not have in my 20s. To be honest, some of it—maybe most of it—is a feeling of what do I have to lose?" 

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An excellent dead brother essay by Karen R. Tolchin.
Like a pervert poised to cop a feel, I looked around to make sure no one was watching and then I put my hand on Paul’s coffin. It looked as if it had been buffed smooth as a river rock but felt rough as a cat’s tongue to my fingertips.
“I’m sorry, Paul,” I whispered, rubbing my finger across the grain. “I miss my brother."

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I greatly enjoyed listening to this story about alien abduction over at Clarkesworld: "The Aftermath" by Maggie Clark, read by Kate Baker.
Mostly, you recall, you were left in a garden of some kind—communal, or just large—and you could not tell the owners’ children from other pets allowed to roam within. 

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Oh shit this is a great essay about reading and grieving over at Bookslut: Magic and Loss: Reading Akilah Oliver by Mairead Case
“My grandma died,” I’d say, or “I had a family emergency,” or else I just wouldn’t go out. It is impossible to talk about everything a person is, or everyone they were to you. Especially right after they go. Once I told my doctor I was late because the alarm was working wrong, which was a lie unless you count my brain as the alarm.

ruined people

I've been dreaming of my friend Sally. I dream that I tell people about my dreams about her. I dream that I ask my ex if it makes sense for me to go to her house, let myself in and "wail into the carpet." I wake up before there are any answers.

As I've tried to do since my brother died, I think of ways to turn these dreams, this grief, this reality into something else.  I churn with stories unwritten; I am worried that they are all the same story.

But, enough about what I've been up to. Read this essay, Grief Magic, by Emily Rapp.
"What do ruined people do? Weird shit."

your public face is broken

One of the things that I promised myself when I started this blog was that I would never be afraid to write about the complete shittiness of depression or grief. If you are wondering why I would be afraid then you have never applied for a job knowing that you will be Googled. Or maybe you've never has so few good days that you don't want to ruin one by thinking about why you have so few good days.

Here are two amazing pieces, posted yesterday, on what happens when life is something you suffer through rather than live. Improvising a Bone Graft by poet Nikki Reimer is deft examination of public grief and private pain. Let's just say that I identify: I loved my brother with a fierceness that is not ashamed to stand howling and naked in the middle of the road, and what I miss is the material essence of him. The only thing in the world that I want, and can’t have, is my brother’s arms around my shoulders, his infectious laugh, his shit-eating grin, his middle finger pointed at me in response to sisterly teasing. His “jerkface!” in response to my “jackass!”

Depression Part Two by Allie Brosh is both a hi-lar comic and the most apt description of chronic depression I have ever read: Months oozed by, and I gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing I got to feel anymore. I didn't want anyone to know, though. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!

You might want to read the first part first. Check the dates of the posts to get a sense of the cyclical devastation even those who are treated experience. Wait, that doesn't sound funny at all! I promise you will laugh (or at least approximate the sound with your mouth).

lady friends

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington is a celebration of unstereotypical womanhood, the freedom of aging and the power of friendship. I reviewed it here. I loved it, loved the experience of sharing it, loved the avenues of research it led me down. I especially loved Carmella, the narrator's best friend, and her easy relationship. I never realized that, while the narrator was the author's projection of herself as an impossibly old woman, Carmella had a real-life counterpart as well: artist Remedios Varo.

The women were both artists. They were both muses to cranky Surrealists. They both ran from the war and ended up exiled in Mexico. They were both held against their will--Carrington in a mental institution, Varo by the French police. They both had spectacular, hard lives, and probably found some comfort in the partial reflection of that reality in one another.

I learned about Varo in the great essay, How To Be Old: Two Women, Their Husbands, Their Cats, Their Alchemy, by Carrie Frye over at The Awl.* The essay focuses on the biography of the two women, how they intersect and how their friendship appears in each's writing, mostly The Hearing Trumpet. I called Carrington's language in that book "precise [and] pulsing;" Frye calls it "a kind of glissading bumptious kangaroo splendor." That assessment endeared her to me, along with her assertion that the writing in The Hearing Trumpet seems to impart the desire to make people happy, instead of to impress them.

All of this is to say that I want to read more of Varo's writing and see more of her amazing art. You should read this essay and follow what it makes you want to do.

*(But why is the title of the page "A History of Cat-Loving Women?" That is the worst.)

some good things

"Attached to the box was a label that said: "Do not open until war is over." Which war? The Civil War? The War of 1812? What he discovered was a box filled with disguised anti-Nazi tracts hidden in packets of tea and shampoo and concealed in miniature books both popular and scholarly."
I always forget about the NYPL's blogs and then there they are, pointing me to amazing object, books or trains of thought and inspiring great ideas.

New plants are patented each week. Who knew? Here are some color pictures of them.
Additionally, prison libraries are covered more than I expected in a few of the blogs.
Also, a bunch of pictures of Christopher Walken!

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I really enjoyed this essay on book reviews, the desire to hurt/ignore/erase any "girl who fucks" and this: "I don’t want to write about rape anymore. But here we are." Trigger Warning by Sarah McCarry

These essays at The Rumpus on mental illness are necessary:
Sick by Amy Butcher
That's Life by Seth Fischer
Through the Cracks by Sue Sanders

And these interviews with people who make things are very different and very interesting:
The Rumpus Interview with Natalie Dee by Jory John
The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with George Saunders

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Sometimes you order Breaking & Entering by Joy Williams from the internet and end up with a Lemony Snickett book but nothing else is wrong right at the moment.

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The only thing that makes the cancellation of Saturday delivery by the USPS not entirely heartbreaking is that it will make Mondays somewhat more exciting.

Let's all make someone's week's beginning better by writing them a letter. (New slogan possibility? Send check to P.O. Box 170293, Times Plaza Station, Brooklyn, NY, 1217-9997)

My young pen pal is on the list for this week; who is on yours?