everything grows in the dark
bibliomancy forecast for the week of april 21
this week, the knight of pentacles and an excerpt from Frontier by Can Xue:
The two of them squatted down and looked at the bird. The bird looked at them, too: it wasn't at all afraid.
“Where is it hurt?” Little Leaf asked.
“In its heart.”
Sherman found a large cardboard box and put the bird in it. He pushed the box to a dark spot under the bed and said, “What it needs now is time.”
the aleatory
I haven’t said much about the fire that burned down my house lately—which is funny, because as a writer, you would think that I might make use of that kind of material. It is so Big. It is the kind of thing that draws a stark line across your life. But it is also a thing that must be survived in small, daily ways that are not very remarkable.
At first, surviving something is easy because any act of forward motion is impressive. I remember drifting around the Stater Bros. in Lake Arrowhead the day after evacuating, trying to figure out if I was buying groceries for a long weekend or like, replacing everything. It seemed like an insane thing to try to to decide in an aisle of low-carb tortillas. It’s funny, the choices you make in moments like that. I recall the last time I went to Costco before everyone understood how disruptive covid was going to be—aware of the impending uncertainty, I bought a huge jar of pesto and a 36-pack of Shin Black ramen.
As time goes on, the expectation increases. I don’t want to “just survive” forever—and in some ways I feel like that’s still what I’m doing. But I also have a history of inflicting unreasonable expectations on myself, and oddly enough, unreasonable expectations of oneself are so exhausting that just surviving them has taken a lot of effort.
And I also hate the muddy wallow of the grief that other people expect me to feel. I think I have resisted writing about the fire because I hate the tolling iambic pentameter of pity, the Brene Brown brave space bullshit sharing. Hand on heart, cry face, foregone conclusion of o this terrible world. Which is funny, because I’m so good at that. It’s like a foreign language I learned to speak before I learned my own words, and for almost a decade, I practiced it in countless AA shares. It met with a lot of approval. Nobody but me knew that it was a lie. And when I left AA, a lot of those people didn’t even believe that the funny-humble-self-effacing smooth talk wasn’t me. They didn’t want to know what was on the other side. They wanted my Brene Brown bullshit back.
Which reminds me of an inane aphorism from one of those one-day-at-a-time daily readers: “Nothing grows in the dark.” Dude, that’s not true at all. Everything grows in the dark.
the forecast
Make note of everything you have destroyed: hunger, thirst, silence. Nitrogen? An egg? A joke that you explained? A familial curse? A blank page? A debt? Make note of the destructions that come before something new.
writing prompt
Write in a dark spot on a laptop with the screen brightness turned to zero. Use enough time that you forget where you started. Do this long enough to let some roots grow in the dark.
a chune
“One More Time” by SOPHIE
The girlfriend of one of our neighbors at Maiden Lane (RIP) had a white Honda Civic with a pearlescent SOPHIE sticker on the bumper, which in a genius way made the car seem like a Honda SOPHIE. We never met her (our neighbors were mostly anti-social and weird) (don’t ask me what that means about us), so we called her Sophie also. As in, “Do you think Sophie broke up with him? I haven’t seen her car in weeks.” He moved out right before the fire. After, I got a call from the LA County Coroner’s Office; they had found human remains in one of the garages in our bungalow court, the one that used to belong to Sophie’s boyfriend. I was half-convinced it was a scam, but I looked up the guy, finding him quoted in endless LA Times articles about bodies washing up in San Pedro etc. And then, for a terrible moment, I wondered: what had become of Sophie?! I later called the apartment manager to ask what the hell that whole thing was about. She got very flustered, and told me it was “fine,” and it was “a private matter” (hardly private if a county coroner is calling me to ask about human remains, but I digress). But Sophie is fine, I think. RIP to her namesake, though. This record fucking rips.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Frontier by Can Xue
SOPHIE by SOPHIE
dear diary, I don’t know what it is about that Stater Bros. in Lake Arrowhead but I always get into trouble there. Last week, in the parking lot, a man in a truck called me “a fucking idiot” for having the nerve to inconvenience him by walking briefly in front of the parking spot he wanted. I got in my car and drove up to him. “What did you just say to me?” I asked. He put a shit-eating grin on his face and played dumb. Then I said, “I heard you. I heard what you called me.” The smile crumbled into a scowl and he said “Well if ya heard me, why did you ask?” Because I wanted to prove that he was a little bitch who wouldn’t say it to my face. That’s why. XS