George Pérez | RIP
reading
My complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
self-respect / habit (being a conversational addendum)
A long-needed reunion chat with a great friend yielded a discussion on how I manage to find the motivation to get up every day and write whatever it is write for no one in particular: I'm not, after all, technically on any deadline - outside of my own self-imposed ones; I haven't been contracted or asked to write anything for anyone since 2017; but, over the last year, I've churned out more stories and essays and informalities and newsletters and podcasts to this space for no one's amusement but my own than I have in the last eight years.
My initial thought was that I had simply made it habitual to the point that I literally wouldn't know what to do with myself if I didn't. And that's very true. But I've also realized that I left one part out of it, a notion from the source of all wisdom worth having, Mr. Leonard Cohen:
I do what I do every day because it's what I do every day: it's how I refill my self-respect – it's how I make each day feel as though it was lived, so it does not, as Mr Cohen says, go down in debt.
Victor LaValle’s DESTROYER
Dove into this on the recommendation of a great friend whose track record continues unabated: a harrowing, stunningly-illustrated character study of the aftershocks of grief wrought by systemic injustice wrapped in a visceral transplantation of the Frankenstein legend into modern times. An absolute must-read.
Glad I found the rings my grandmother made me years ago. Feels like home to have them back on my fingers.
home/time
Long struggled with feeling at home: can count two, maybe three times that I've felt what could genuinely be considered "at home": my maternal grandparents' home at the lake (long since sold), my first apartment in Boston... and... I think (thought) that's it.
(What about when you were growing up, with, you know, parents? Pretty sure that the only times I felt like I was Home in that situation was when I woke up before anyone else and played with action figures under blankets and, later, when I was behind the drumset, making my stepfather's ears bleed.)
But, inside these feelings of Home is the revelation (to me, if to no one else) that "Home" is as much a time as it is a place – or, rather, it's a point in time inside a place, a place and a time at which I feel truly most myself without having to hide it or apologize for it: Home for me is, now, this first chunk of (The) Work, 530, give or take, in the morning, until about 0700, before the first insulin shot, the sweet sweet lifeblood of the first cup of coffee surging through my veins, The Sanctum lit only by a monitor light, a backlight, and the dark mode screen of white on black text to the tune of unobtrusive ambient music, Kirby snoring on the couch behind me, my still-too-emphatic pounding on the keyboard, and the scritch of pen against paper and, while the second, post-run, daylight block of The Work is great too, I do feel like I've gone to work – my day's run being my commute, a circle by which to come back to from whence I came and to see it, literally, in a different light.
For now, though, as of this writing – my adult form of action figures under blankets – I am Home. And Kirby snores on.