Hello, and thank you for waiting! I am back! It feels good! Where’ve I been? What’ve I been doing? Oh, y’know, in the snow A little of this, a little of that!

My last post was kind of a doozy. I talked about leaving Substack (tl;dr: Substack unabashedly amplifies nazis!) and why you do, in fact, need to keep your brain and heart open to people in your life with political ideologies that confuse and frustrate you.

For my first Friday Monday dispatch since that winter break, I wanted to break from the format I’ve used for past dispatches (all of which are available in my beehiiv archive, by the way, along with all my old Substack posts!). I didn’t want to breeze in with a listicle of Stuff to Buy or Not (though if you’re just here for What I Did Not Buy This Week, don’t worry. I am keeping it). But I also didn’t want to write something too heavy and harsh, because last time we talked, I basically lectured you for 3500ish words and then disappeared.

Then, I had the idea. I knew the perfect introductory topic for this week’s dispatch:

Death!!!!!

A side note (not footnote). Tobie Milford is a talented musician, and I saw him in person approx. 10 million times when I lived in Phoenix. He has a song called Death!, and every time I think about death I think it Death! capitalized and exclaimed, with a soundtrack. Please, listen to the above video while you read.

So, Death! That’s a fun thing to talk about on a Monday, right? I had the idea to make this my topic while very sick with strep throat, alone in bed at 8:00 PM, while my husband drove my mother-in-law to an out-of-state funeral. I thought “Death! That’s what I’ll write about!” What do I hope to accomplish by infecting the internet with this?

I hope to say: of course you feel bad. Of course you still feel bad. Death feels more than ever just out of view, in the corner, in the room and probably right behind you.¹ If it makes you feel any better, I feel bad about death! I think about it all the time!

Every few years I cycle back into the “oppressive and paralyzing fear of death” episodes. This is normal, I think. It started up really badly last winter, when I was newly engaged. I was onstage all the time, I was writing so much poetry, I was planning a wedding and constantly being celebrated or going to concerts or fun events, and I was so, so damn happy.² And meanwhile, all around me all the time, people are losing lives and loved ones in [insert any type of violence here].

I am not a stranger to death or violence. Last week in casual conversation I mentioned that, um, at least three of my friends have been murdered in the last eight years? And that feels like an abnormally high number? Especially when I explain that those three murders are part of a broader 14 deaths, in just eight years, of friends from the same city? And that’s not even getting into the family death stuff, and that’s not even going back further than a decade?

I genuinely did not realize this is not the universal norm. A couple of years ago, in a group of my fellow youngish adults, I said something like “Well, I guess your mid-twenties is when people you know start dying en masse!” and another girl looked at me, horrified, and said “...No?” More recently, two friends, in their mid-40s and early 50s, offhandedly said they were lucky because no one they’d been close to had died except their grandparents. What???????? That’s an OPTION?!

I’m approaching this with a fairly flippant attitude, because it’s death, and I tend to treat death like a parking ticket. Annoying, but that’s on me, for being alive. And for a not-insignificant chunk of my teens and twenties, I wanted to be dead! Or I thought I did. But, actually, I had depression, and the desperation I felt, while legitimate grief, did not come from legitimate desire. I was clinically depressed, and thanks to a lot of therapy and a lot of antidepressants,³ I am no longer clinically depressed! I’m just obsessed with death, the normal amount.

Anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway. I’m writing about this now—death, and my fixation on it, and my fear of it—because, holy shit, everything everywhere is so death. It’s hard to come back to writing a newsletter when my last newsletter was about how our government is sending death squads to U.S. cities, for nebulous and unsatisfying reasons. Our culture is so centered around death, without talking about death. And, for clarity’s sake, let me say that I’m not bashing the news media here. Along with all that Personal Death Stuff mentioned above, I was also, for a while, a night-shift breaking news reporter, which meant when a mass shooting happened in the U.S., I was the one who called the local police station every 30 minutes for an update. It sucked, and also, it was work that really needed to be done. I’ve known death for money and I’ve known death for free and, hard and ugly as both things are, I’m also very privileged to have some bona fides in this area.

The other thing our culture loves, besides death, is Know Everything Never Apologize. I talked about this last time; people want so badly to be correct, and people want so badly to know it all, that they end up not knowing anything and not trusting anyone. This, and all the death stuff, all because the U.S. culture is allergic to fear. We allow ourselves to get close to death in mass violence and in war, but we don’t talk about how scary death and dying actually are. Because to do that, we would have to admit we really don’t know anything about death!

There’s the weird cynical response to fear, the stiff-lipped straight-backed false embrace of death, the “Nothing matters and we all die” or the “I’ll protect my family and everyone else can get fucked” attitude. I’ve spent a lot of time like this, turning toward death, a flower in the sun. Death is blinding, and awesome, but it’s not warm, and nothing can grow there.

The other common response, I think, is head-in-the-sand, a refusal to discuss death and maybe even suffering. When you go this route, the fear stays in you but attaches to other things. You get anxious. Fear sneaks up on you and you have big reactions to small things. I’ve been here a lot too.

Alright, what the hell am I getting at?

First: If you’ve felt weird and overwhelmed lately, you’re normal, and the first thing you need to do is let go of your guilt. There is nothing more paralyzing than those “I’m not doing enough” and “I’m not doing the right stuff” voices, which absolutely will not compel you to do More of the Right Stuff.

Second: I am going to share some very basic things that sound stupid and are helpful. They’re particularly helpful when you find yourself in an Almighty Loop of Fear—mine are about death but perhaps your brain loops differently!

And also, if you ever get in a death loop, and you don’t really want to talk about it, but you want someone to know you’re feeling scared and weird, you can always tell me “I’m feeling scared and weird about death!” and I’ll say “Oh no!!!” It won’t fix it, but it will probably make us both feel better to think Okay, it’s not just me.

I started reading The Conditions of Will with absolutely no knowledge of its plot/theme/contents. The cover showed this strangely yassified holy mother, a Madonna’s Madonna, who seemed to be luring a phalanx of children into the mountains?

Okay!

I’m a sucker for a weird, ominous virgin.⁴ So I downloaded this book without ever once looking at the marketing copy, or even learning a single thing about the author, Jessa Hastings. By page six, I was hooked, not because the preceding five pages were magical but because page six is the first mention of a character named Hattie (MY NAME) and so I was compelled to continue. Spoiler: Hattie is not a major character. She is rich, bisexual and British, though. Yay!

In negative reviews for The Conditions of Will, the primary complaint is related to the narrator’s highly-specific references to the facial action coding system (FACS). The protagonist, Georgia Carter, is a body language expert, so she is constantly cataloguing action units (AUs) in her family members' faces. AU18, lip pucker! AU15, lip corner depressor! etc etc. These show up, no joke, every other paragraph, sometimes in every sentence, and you either get used to them or you don’t. They didn’t bother me.

I finished and enjoyed the book, which is a testament to the story and the characters. Because I was very bothered by the seemingly total lack of localization, if we can call it that. I’d never read a Jessa Hastings book before this one—from what I understand, her very popular Magnolia Parks series is set entirely in the UK. Per her bio(s), Hastings is originally from Australia and now lives in either California or Tennessee, and spends much of her time in London. Our main character, Georgia, is from the U.S. but has lived in London for 10+ years when we’re introduced to her.

The Conditions of Will is set in Georgia’s hometown in South Carolina. I have a hard time believing that Hastings has been there, or met someone from there! Immediately when I started reading, I noticed that all of Georgia’s internal dialogue is written like a non-U.S. English speaker. “I mightn’t like my parents, I mightn’t like what they stand for,” Georgia tells us. And I mightn’t write like that if I were from the American south! There are a lot of sentences that are constructed with a very British or Australian grammar, and it’s hard to describe. But, BUT, I reasoned, maybe this is an accent thing. Someone who’s lived abroad for ten years is entitled to have an accent, so, I thought, “This is just Georgia’s voice, and other characters will sound more like…Americans.”

Then an American man who has lived in South Carolina for 35 years made a reference to his “mum” and no one batted an eye, and I confirmed, yeah, this is a whole-book issue.

There’s also a very obvious lack of copyediting throughout. A particularly emotional scene is undercut by ending with this sentence: “Mom said he was a heretic because God is all good all the time, but I wonder where his goodness lands her today, when her husband dead.” Sigh.

These minor headaches aside, The Conditions of Will reminds me a lot of the movie Home for the Holidays, which is a feather in its cap. There’s a lot of textured, realistic-feeling character and relationship development—especially between the four siblings who are the heart of the story. The love plot is, I think, believable, though it mostly exists to create additional friction for Georgia’s character arc. I don’t mind! I think this is a great standalone novel, with a satisfying ending that was not all sunshine and rainbows, but a healthy dose of sunshine and rainbows for characters who went through some pretty heavy stuff. IN CONCLUSION, read this book if you want a really “juicy” read over a weekend, but check all the trigger warnings first. If you have ever experienced some flavor of hardship in your life, it is probably represented in this book! But not in a trauma porny way. Maybe a little in a “reality TV” way, but for the most part, it’s raw while still being respectful.

Every two years I am reminded that I don’t care much about the Olympics (SORRY TO MY GOOD FRIEND SYDNEY WHO WATCHED EVERY SINGLE MINUTE). The spectacle of it all is very up my alley! And I have some jock-like proclivities. It’s not the element of sport that disagrees with me. It’s the public disappointment, and grief, and shame, which seems to happen with extreme frequency, and, typically, after someone has extended tremendous amounts of effort, maybe even given their best performance ever. Yes, I frequently quote that VERY annoying and VERY accurate chestnut from ol' Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the second-greatest Star Trek character ever.⁵ “It is possible to commit no mistakes, and still lose,” Picard says. “That is not a weakness; that is life."⁶ But man, it still freakin’ hurts to watch! And that’s the part of the Olympics I can’t deal with, watching people Still Lose, over and over, after traveling to a different country and being put on TV, for weeks. Seeing someone get knocked off the podium? I want to THROW UP.

But…but. 

We had the Olympics on in the background throughout the games’ duration. I mostly didn’t pay attention, and trusted Myles to call me over when, say, the biathlon was underway, or a random dog named Nazgul showed up during the cross-country ski. Y’know. Something cool!

Then, last week, I got home in the evening and as I put my things down, Myles said “The skater with the cool hair is about to do her routine!” I knew the Cool Hair One was Alysa Liu. Whichever feed we were watching was on a delay, so Liu had won her gold medal hours earlier, but I was none the wiser; the most I knew of the olympics was that one of the girls had cool hair this year.

I hurried to get my coat off and I sat on the floor in front of the couch as the opening strains of MacArthur Park played. I’ll be honest, my eyes started welling up immediately, because I had the feeling if Alysa Liu picked a Donna Summer medley, she was going to do something melodramatic and animated and exciting. Then I kept crying, because throughout that whole program, she is clearly so, so happy. I saw a few commenters on the video say that she enters a “flow state,” and that’s accurate; I don’t know that I’ve seen it depicted with such clarity before. The whole thing, but especially from, like, 1:45 onward, that’s a flow state. That’s what it feels like when the years of practice and the irregularly-timed bouts of passion and inspiration finally all align, and it’s easy and it’s natural. You can tell by her smile, that what we see on the Olympic stage is exactly what’s been happening in Alysa Liu’s imagination. There have been a few times I’ve felt that onstage, a great many more when I’ve felt it while writing. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t feel like that. Right now, for example, with 75% of my brain in action and the other 25% bogged by stress and strep, it feels hard!

A longtime friend recently posted on Facebook, confessing that it had been months since he’d played music. He’d been playing several paid gigs, and got burned out. Then, he tried doing it with friends, just for fun, but got tired of the scheduling headaches, and stopped. He said something like: “If I’m just playing for me, and sometimes my wife, what’s even the point?”

And I said something like: My friend! You are the point!!! Doing it for you is the best excuse! Doing it for the joy and the glimpses of magic and the chance to enter that flow state, that is why!!! You don’t do things for an audience. You do them for the slim chance that, eventually, for a few minutes, you will get to feel like this:

And that is the opposite of death.

Christ!!!! That was so much! Thanks for going through it with me.

While I was all sicky, I went on a “shopping spree” in my Libby app. So I did NOT buy a lot of books this week but instead borrowed them. ❤ yay.

And along with all those books, here’s what I did not buy this week:

Okay! Well, that was 4,000 words that I didn’t realize I was holding in my guts! These will be…shorter…going forward. The Dispatch will be on Mondays because my life is now structured in a way that gives me writing time on weekends, yippee!

Thanks for continuing to read, subscribe and share. You’re good friends and good readers and I hope my words provide you with something of value. Writing them helps me a lot and I never want to stop doing it.

Also, I love you. Thank you. Happy March. Goodbye!