Better Living Through Literature

It was another long weekend of cleaning–we did the 21-day re-spray for bedbugs after vacuuming everything again and checking the baseboards and the closets. I’m feeling hopeful that chemical warfare did the trick!

But wow, everything still feels like such a struggle: the extra cleaning, the everyday living, the elderly cat, the future. Maybe this explains it?

It’s probably a long weekend for most people for the Fourth tomorrow. America, I’m sorry your party has been crashed by assholes. Hang in there (said to America and also to all of us).

1. Incredibly sobering read on the “immigration enforcement” budget in the spending bill:

America is about to fund and build a huge secret police force that will, I promise you, be used to attack and imprison and exile the president’s enemies, of all sorts. Better to look this fact square in the face than to continue to kid ourselves as long as possible as we march down the road to the gulags.

2. It’s funny cause it’s true:

3. Maybe gorillas with helicopters can save us?

4. How being alive feels right now (“that’s awful”):

 

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This newsletter from Cheryl Strayed arrived this week as I was getting news about company layoffs (I’m not affected but I was RIGHT to be worried) and wow what a good reminder (emphasis mine):

Every time I’ve made or done something, I’ve felt better. It’s a fact I’ve returned to over and over again in these past months/years/decades in order to save myself or toss a lifeline to someone else. Action and creation are a salve, a balm, a cure.

Perhaps making and doing things is so powerful because in doing or making you break out of stasis. Even if only fleetingly, you get unstuck and, afterwards, have proof of that. Something exists because you made it. Something happened because you did it. You baked the cake and decorated it attentively and inexpertly. You showed up at the protest with longing in your heart and a smile on your face. You shot and edited the footage and now you’ve got a movie. You stitched the scraps of fabric together and ended up with a quilt. You put the seeds in the soil and eventually a flower bloomed. You put one foot in front of the other and then looked back and realized you’d covered all that ground on your own steam. Your troubles were not over. Your problems were not solved. But you had something. You did something. You could not deny that. You made it this far and making it this far meant you could keep going.

Keep up those hobbies, friends.

Compared with “maximalism” or “bro summer” of the last couple years, this summer’s word is shaping up to be “unsettled.” What’s unsettling me? A list:

• Bedbugs (although I haven’t gotten a bite in two weeks!)
• My job security (not a great time to depend on public health funding)
• Thinking of moving and spending money, because job security
• Toby aging
• Thinking of moving and upsetting Toby’s routine, because aging kitty
• Millcreek Canyon being under construction
• Living under increasing fascism

Other than re-spraying insecticide every 21 days and calling off the house search, I really can’t control any of these things. I can’t even go touch grass/wade in the stream in my preferred canyon spot. Even MORE unsettling!

So I’m trying to just sit with it (ugh) and get myself out of the house when it feels TOO bad. Even a neighborhood walk has delights:

I’ve had a pair of the lightest blue summer jeans cut out since May, then I tabled them to make a couple of pairs of gym pants that didn’t fit. I finally started them right before B-Day (the day of the discovery of bedbugs) and now I want to abandon them again to make a waterproof beach tote.

I know I will love them and wear them a lot, but I guess the jeans sewjo just isn’t there yet. Oh well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯