It's the end of June and we are 1/3 of the way through summer. It's the end of June, and I am finishing up a final-ish draft of the EXQUISITE DAMAGE series. which is running at about 22 pages. It could be longer, but I think I've covered everything I wanted to. I'm not sure if there will be a visual component to the project, or what that may look like in the end, but the text has been wrangled into something like finished. I'm still not sure what to categorize it as..it's memoirish, but also contains non-memoirish vignettes and directly addresses the reader. It's a mix up of horror movies and gothic novels and the concept of middle class fear. I guess it would fall into the lyric essay category, but there is some more imaginative made up stuff in there. But then again, there's a line
"Ultimately, I am not to be trusted. I once read too many
novels and now I'm very twisty with the truth."
I might be sending some pieces out for submissions, but you can get a peek at the rest if you subscribe to my Tiny Letter.
It's hot the past couple of days, hot enough to stay close to the fan and not move around too much. We're coming up on the 4th, and while the days of family picnics and fried chicken are probably over forever, I'm not sure what they will be replaced with (it's midweek this year anyway, so it doesn't exactly matter.) I think there might be some festivities in the city with friends, but part of me just wants to stay home. Maybe it's the weight of extended family weirdness, or maybe it's just I'm not very proud of being an American the past couple of years. Last year, I was home for about a week around now and it was the last time my mother was mobile and in good spirits. The last chunk of time, outside of hospitals and nursing homes that I spent with her--her usual self. Already the sickness & infection that would take her was settling in though, and before I left, she would have the first of the confusion episodes that became more frequent through the end of the summer, having fallen asleep mid-afternoon and convinced, when waking, it was morning and not dusk. This happened a couple times before things got much worse.
When it gets apocalyptically hot and doesn't cool down at night at all, I like to start watching apocalyptic movies, mostly pandemics. The first half of the STAND is a favorite. Plagues, zombies. I'm not sure why--maybe some weird perversion of extreme temperatures. In winter, when it gets cold, I start bing eating grilled cheese and watching Grey's Anatomy (which I have no desire to watch the rest of the time), so maybe it's just a comfort thing.
