I’m back in the basement again
It’s a heat wave
It’s a wave of heat washing my country
my country tis of thee hot land of shitty heat
To ward off heat wave depression I got set up early. Put the card table in the nasty basement next to the pile of boxes and bubble tape I neurotically hoard; next to the laundry machines; with a lovely view of the gigantic OIL TANK that is normal to have in a New England basement as you learn to your horror and chagrin when you move here. I brought a pile of books and this very laptop and a pile of notebooks and an iced coffee and the dog bed and my yoga mat. I live down here now. The dog is lying fully on the floor NEXT to the dog bed, which is classic. But if I took the dog bed away he would pace and cry. He likes to lie next to it, specifically. He’s very stupid, as you know. He’s eleven! Lately he’s been waking us up all night long, by getting up and gently touching us with his snout over and over. We can’t figure out what he is doing. It’s so annoying and he is so bad. Will we make him sleep in the other room? Of course not.
We are watching the X Files because Gary has never seen it (!). It’s very fun to revisit a show that meant so much to me in college. It holds up, honestly, and is all the better for the added layer that living in 2021 brings: a pleasant nostalgia and feeling of delight about all of Scully’s outrageous pantsuits as well as the appallingly bad opening credit sequence, which makes us roar with laughter every time, and which, in Gary’s words, “looks like the loop that plays on an arcade game at a bowling alley in the 1980s.” The truth is out there baby!! As we were watching the pilot Gary firmly said “I would GREEN LIGHT this show if it came across my desk”
I guess the X Files is copaganda but at least it’s weird. Weird Cops
What has been happening?
I fell into my usual August canning hole where it’s like everything leaves my brain and for a couple of weeks I exist in this sort of incredibly peaceful netherworld where all I am doing is canning or getting ready to can, and all I am thinking about is numbers of quarts and lids and calculating when things can happen. It’s incredibly restful. To end a day exhausted and sore and having never had one thought in your head and yet there are 14 quarts of gleaming toms sitting on your counter, reminding you of how much you will enjoy opening them in January. Anyway the point is that I accidentally finished my tomato goals without even realizing it was happening! All of a sudden I had 65 quarts and it was like…..waking up from a fog. Huh?? I’m also done with salsa. All I have left is escabeche and then fall things involving apples.
Half the country is on fire / meanwhile the half I live in has been washed in totally unprecedented drenching downpours for weeks. You can’t win for trying! Anyway the rains washed all the nutrients out of the soil and several crop cycles were ruined and there’s been flooding and a huge sinkhole opened up in the town where we do the food distro and a car fell into it! And it’s been a big disaster in general although maybe it will help with the long-term drought we’ve been in? I don’t really get how the earth works. But guess what, our basement didn’t flood, and Gary’s weird anti-profit bookstore grift (which is mostly in the basement although of late it’s been bleeding out into the rest of the house in a way I am starting to find stressful) has as-yet not been threatened by the elements, knock on wood.
One thing I have learned is that having a spouse who doesn’t have a job is a lot better than having a spouse who has a job, and THAT would be better than having a spouse who has TWO jobs, one real and one fake in the sense of one bringing in income / and one (the bookshop) not bringing in income. Yes that’s right our Gary finally got a job: HE’S A MAILMAN. He’s an “associate rural carrier” meaning he subs in for regular rural carriers when they are sick or on vacation, which is apparently constantly. The job has a very set bureaucratic track you move up as you put in your time, so hopefully one day he will be an official carrier at which point he will get benefits and sick days and a pension plan. He’s very good at it as you can imagine (sorting, putting things where they belong, figuring out routes, and being completely alone all day: his four favorite activities). Now we are two anarchists working for the government! How do you like that?? But man it’s a drag because for like 2 years he essentially didn’t have a job (or had very easy part-time jobs) and he took such good care of the yard, the car, the dog, the house. And now the yard is unbelievably jungly and unmanageable, fallen apples cover the land, we keep getting rude notes from our annoying neighbor about how our hedges and the plot of Jerusalem artichokes we planted in the hell strip are making the sidewalk impassable, and unfortunately she is right, as sometimes people who are annoying are also correct, not just technically but even morally correct, as in this case, and I’ll be the first person to acknowledge it even though it is INFURIATING. Yesterday in a fit of pique I literally took a machete to the artichokes (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, basically if you stick a Jerusalem artichoke (or “sun choke”) in the ground it will almost overnight turn into 7,000 Jerusalem artichokes, each of which puts out an enormous (literally 10 feet tall) thing that looks like a sunflower. And then they get so tall they fall over and block the sidewalk and spill out into the street. And because you didn’t know what you were doing now you’re stuck with them forever because they’re incredibly invasive and hard to remove) and chopped about 3/4 of them down in a rage and it looks like shit out there now but at least you can use the sidewalk. And our porch looks like shit and we need to get the car inspected and we need to get the house painted etc and these are all traditionally his jobs but now he has two real jobs and anyway this is truly what people are talking about, about not having enough time in the day. How do you do it when you have kids????
Our good friend here is having a pre- midlife crisis and suddenly quit their job and is moving to rural coastal Maine to enroll in a bespoke handmade wooden boat-building apprenticeship where you have to live on-site and can’t drink or smoke and have to get up at 5 every day. It’s very sad but I’m also very excited, I love a massive life swerve where people just kind of say FUCK IT and go do something extremely different out of nowhere. It’s inspiring and fun. But I bring it up because they have three cars (not in a rich person way but in a weird emotional collector way, like they have a teal pickup truck from the 80s that is extremely unreliable and the steering wheel sometimes comes out while you’re driving, but they got it because it’s the truck Riggins drives in Friday Night Lights, this sort of thing) and they are leaving one of them with us due to the whole Gary-having-a-job-now thing which is requiring us to have a second car for the first time in our entire life together, so anyway our friend is leaving us one of their three cars, and it’s a “champagne” colored 1994 convertible Turbo Saab so that’s what Gary’s going to drive to work at the post office and I think that’s great. It’s literally the car I most associated with coolness and wealth and prestige in high school, and now it’s OURS, and it’s so ancient and clunky, it feels like driving a car from the 19th century. I’m actually not sure it’s street legal but we will find out soon.
School is apparently back in person in the fall (a.k.a. in 3 weeks) and I haven’t been thinking about it but just the other day I suddenly thought about it all at once and got really anxious and freaked out. I teach a class that has 150 students all jammed in together and I am suddenly like, wait, what? The university is refusing to allow us to teach online even for big classes so now I’m scrambling to figure it out. In doing so I learned that something I have been completely ignoring for years is actually really incredible, which is this crazy tech thing where all our classrooms are actually robots and you can simply program them to automatically record every class including a close-up of your powerpoint and it will do a split-screen of you onstage/the powerpoint AND it will do close captioning AND it will automatically upload the class to your course management website and I am totally stunned. As a grouchy Luddite specifically in academia you have to develop a thick hard shell of refusal around technology because they’re constantly spending all the university’s money on these stupid tech projects that are absurd and often just surveillance-state shit or gnarly capitalist shit (e.g. at great cost and at the expense of letting us have some much-needed space for additional classrooms they instead filled the vacated architecture wing of our building with 3D printers no one has ever once used; or like they closed the bookstore and now make students get all their textbooks through Amazon and it’s just relentless cheery emails about how great this “partnership” is etc.; or the nonstop propagandizing about the fake stock exchange floor they built in yet another new building they gave the business school which is called, for real, “the Innovation Hub,” not to mention the constant stream of third-party emails about cool programs you can use to spy on your students or like use algorithms to grade their essays so you don’t have to and this is supposed to be good for “engagement” etc. this sort of dystopian jack-assery is non-stop) and so you build up this shell of refusal where you just hear the word “iPad” or “streaming” or “lecture capture” or “course analytics” and you’re like NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOO LEAVE ME ALONE YOU GOBLINS but then (much like the annoying neighbor situation referred to above) sometimes it turns out technology actually is useful and you feel like a dork for emailing IT in a panic and begging “is there ANY way I can get a camera and a tripod with like some sort of wireless mic to record my classes so I can make in-person attendance optional please can you help me” and the guy is like “isn’t that classroom Echo360 ready??” and you’re like “what’s that” and he’s like, well, it’s this thing the university has been promoting and talking about and asking all of you about and begging you to attend workshops about for like five years and you are like oh
So the hopeful takeaway is that I can make attendance optional, which feels like at least it will maybe cut down on the number of people in the room, and also allow students who are covid-anxious to stay home. Teaching in a mask is gonna suck majorly though regardless.
I wonder if we will just close down after a few weeks anyway? This whole thing has been a shit-show (obviously for everyone and in every way imaginable), and my university has been handling it more competently than most! Still a shit-show. It feels so crazy that the end of the world is happening like this, in sort of like a long drawn-out fart sound filled with people still talking about progressive tax reform even as the actual land around them begins to burn and their skin begins to melt. And here I am in the basement planning some stupid class about [checks notes] MEDIEVAL PLAINCHANT which I will teach in a MASK because we are having our OWN ACTUAL PLAGUE even as we are learning about that old one from centuries ago. What goes around comes around! I’ve been thinking about the Black Death so much lately, for obvious reasons. But specifically I’ve been thinking about something that seemed exotic and weird when I first started learning about it, which is the extent to which people continued living normal lives while it was all happening. Like you read the Decameron and the characters are like oh dear the bubonic plague is here, let’s go to the country and party and tell stories. And reading that in college you’re like, wait, a plague was killing everyone in Europe and they’re just going out to the country to hang out and drink wine? This book is unrealistic!! But now it’s like……oh right. Like what are you supposed to do? Run through the streets screaming every day? No, you continue your business dealings, trying to broker a shipment of port wine to the navy, annoyed by the endless funeral processions blocking the street when you are trying to get to a meeting with your Lord Sandwich (Pepys reference). Or like in cities in Italy wineries had these little windows where you could stay outside but still get a glass of wine (handed to you through the tiny window), to prevent the spread of the plague. And at first you are like, wow, so the dang Black Death is happening and people are still toddling off to the bar for a large wine??? And the answer is yes, and actually apparently that’s just how these things go, at least in our shitty diseased culture. Have a large wine with your business partner and go home to find your wife and kids are dead (Wolf Hall reference). Everybody still going to work and having babies and worrying about fashion or whatever. I am very sad that this no longer feels “weird” to me, and that now I “get it.”
I have an article coming out about musical autonomy and uselessness and anarchism and how badly we need to collectively transform our political imaginary to something at least a little bit less homicidally psychotic. I submitted it to an online grad student journal because fuck it. I really don’t want to publish anything behind a paywall or whatever ever again, it’s such bullshit. Plus grad students are awesome, even though they are also often out of their minds. Anyway if you want to read it let me know. It talks about a lot of cool books you might enjoy reading.
In semi-related news, Gary and I decided to have a book club where we read Dune together. I’ve read it many times, although not as an adult. He’s never read it, and in fact he struggles with fiction in general. The fiction he mainly enjoys is the exact type of fiction I think most regular people including myself hate the most: the novel of ideas. Like, the Ayn Rand model of novel where it’s just pages and pages of somebody laying out a philosophical idea or having a political argument but somehow it’s fiction because it’s a “character.” Remember when he was reading Thomas Mann in bed and put the book down and heaved a contented sigh and said happily “this is the most boring book I’ve ever read”?? That’s Gary for you. So he was being a big baby about Dune. What is this/what’s the point of this/the planet is just sand or what??? We read the first 80 pages and then I tried to start the book club meeting by asking him “so what’s happened so far in the narrative” and he said “I don’t know.” And so I said “well which characters have you met so far?” and he angrily said “I don’t KNOW.” Then I finished the book the next day and he has never picked it up again, so I declare our book club a total failure. BUT what I learned from reading Dune this time around is that honestly it’s just not that good of a book!!!!!!!!!! I’m bummed OUT. I was so into this book as a kid. But it’s actually really fucking boring and the main character isn’t even a character at all. There’s no development or anything. It kind of reminds me of a Christopher Nolan movie, where there ARE interesting aspects (sandworms, this crazy eons-long Bene Gesserit conspiracy to control the universe, the sister who attains full consciousness while still a fetus and is weird and haunted by it, etc. etc.) but somehow it’s like the creator doesn’t think those are the most interesting aspects, and actually what’s supposed to be interesting is all the game of thrones political maneuvering and the boring-ass Jesus shit about Paul having the same inward monologue about managing his prescience for five years straight. I’m truly sorry if I am offending anyone as obviously I’m aware of Dune’s stature in the sci-fi/fantasy culture and I don’t mean to be a dick but I was just really disappointed. Feeling very alone! Anyway maybe the new movie will be good. Imagine the hubris of taking on a Dune adaptation and the denialism of me believing it might be good! It’s gotta be good this time….THIS time I swear it’ll work guys
I got a tattoo! A really rad 21 year old kid on my mutual aid crew does amazing illegal avant-garde free-hand tattoos and I wanted one so bad so I got one. It was so fun and such a great experience and I love the tattoo so much. It’s like an abstracted desert landscape that looks like it’s made of charcoal smudges. They also did this cool thing where they connected its two ends to the two ends of my terrible scar from my arm wound when I chopped my arm open on that Ikea bowl in 2011. It was so cool to hang out with this artist and learn more about them and their process, as we have known each other for a year but it’s mostly been extremely nuts-and-bolts problem solving stuff like moving 500 pounds of zucchini around and figuring out how to portion out eggs since we forgot to pick up enough from the donor etc. But this kid is an artist! They sit and ask you all kinds of questions and then draw on you with sharpies until they get the shape and movement right and then they tattoo it! It was so fucking cool. Their studio is in this sprawling abandoned paper mill building that’s now mostly inhabited by metal bands who practice in there. I’m so chagrined by all these cool young people I’m meeting in this work. At 21 all I was doing was playing in bands and doing data entry; I swear I didn’t have a thought in my head. It would never have occurred to me to get into illegal free-hand tattooing as part of a radical political praxis involving bodies and transitions and anti-capitalist beliefs. I feel like such a loser. I feel SO STUPID for how many years I spent obsessed solely with my dumb career. I can’t believe I did that. I even sort of knew at the time that it was stupid but I couldn’t stop! I fell into that wormhole and didn’t do enough work to resist it–indeed I chose to fall into it, I enjoyed falling into it. It makes me sad. Like, better late than never (re: waking up) but still, what the fuck?!
The things I appreciate about the wormhole I was in for ten years are that I have really enjoyed learning and getting smarter about some (not all) of the things I have studied; I have really appreciated having so much time to read and write; I have had some genuinely good experiences as a teacher where I felt like I did make a difference in somebody’s life; I strongly value not having a 9-5 job, which makes many other things possible in/for my life; and I do have to say that it’s been through all this reading and writing that I’ve awakened politically and I have to be grateful for that even though it’s an embarrassing way to politically awaken. But honestly you can only walk the path you’re on, I guess.
Another thing I am really hoping to do is to take the Wilderness First Responder course at the local community college. Survival skills specifically where you learn to do survival/medical stuff in situations where there’s no infrastructure or hospital or whatever. But it’s during the winter and its time commitment is gigantic and I worry I’ll never be able to make it work with my teaching schedule. I will find out in October. The other option is to get EMS certified over the summer which I’m less excited about but still might do. This is a crazy thing to do but I think I want to do it!!!! “From Bespoke Wooden Boat-Building to Abruptly Getting Certified as an EMT: Freakouts From The End Of The World”
What else is going on??? I had a great trip to see my family in June. Just talking to my brother for hours and hours and hours, on all these great hikes my mom planned. I was so pleased to find I can still hike 10 miles, even with my shitty old beat-up body/hips. I was very sore by the end but I could do it.
I successfully made a banana cream pie as a surprise for Gary who has been asking me to make one for years, but I am afraid of custard so I’ve never done it. But then two days ago out of nowhere we got a priority mail package from my brother in Hawaii and it was full of bananas from his jungle property. Such a fun surprise! So I made the world’s fanciest banana cream pie and it turned out GREAT. It turns out custard is EASY. Why was I so scared of it? I feel I must have had a bad custard experience at some point but I can’t remember what it was.
I also made my first lasagna, which is called “Garfield pie”
My bread practice has been shitty, it always is in the summer. Whatever!
The same day I got the tattoo I also got a FITNESS TRAMPOLINE which is good for OLD WOMEN WITH BONE ISSUES. I fucking LOVE IT
