notes & things | 6/14/2020

There are some years that seem to fall into a crack and never quite make it out.  This morning I was organizing some files in the dgp archives from 2012--amazing chaps from so many authors, and as I was flipping through their pages, snippets of laying out, designing and assembling those books come back to me.  If you'd asked me what I was doing in the summer of 2012, I'm not sure I'd be able to imagine it.  The years before and after are a little clearer. 2011 was spent mostly chasing romantic dead ends in a South Loop bar--a pursuit that consumed my summer, at least in memory.  The end of the year brough BLP taking on girl show. 2013 had bright spots--new books and chapbook, trips to Wisconsin. 2012 though is foggier. I did drink a lot of tequila that year..lol..so maybe I'm just missing chunks.)  There are glimpses--working on chapbooks with a new printer in Rockford I'd had delivered there while Max, still kitten sized,  attacked the paper.  The Printers Row Book Fair, where I landed a free table and spent the day eating fruit cups from the 7-11 and people watching. Making copies of shipwrecks of lake michigan and reading from it all that summer.  But a lot of these things are in my blog or on facebook, or otherwise I might barely remember them.

This weekend, I have been going slowly through things I have been putting off (tax final calculations to fill out my schedule C , organizing dropbox). It's chilly outside for mid-June, but bright and clear. I keep closing the windows and running the space heater near my desk intermittently as I work. Tonight I am making chicken soup, largely because I am trying to use up the mushrooms I bought at least a couple weeks back before they go bad in the fridge. And I've been sleeping a bit later since I have no one to answer to this week but myself and it's kind of glorious. The news, of course, still increasingly depressing and I feel like in a sort of helpless freefall in which I realize how absolutely hopeless and stupid humans are.  And becuase we are all so interconnected, their stupid is bound to have a direct or indirect effect on my personal safety and those I love. Someone posted something today about their being two pandemics at play--corona and institutionalized racism, and at least, it's beginning to look like we can--through reform--begin to do something about the latter.  As for corona, the answers seem to be even more simple (social distance, wear a mask, cancel and avoid the sort of super-spreading hot zones. )  But apparently these solutions are too much for the chest beating MAGA crowd.  It terrifies me to have watched while people I know buck against the restrictions and frolick mask-less in bars (some of them working in the health care industry, and should know better.) 

Nevertheless, I am struggling to control the things I can control and let go of those I can't and this applies so much on all fronts of my life right at this given moment. Meanwhile, I am learning to think and nap like an indoor cat that is only let outside for short careful pursuits. .  It's all I, or anyone,  can do.