A Good Year for the Roses
Crowded thoughts on Springing
My shadow is already 80 yrs old
When I need to think or not think, when I need to get out of my head or cheer myself up, one of my favorite things to do is drive around. April is in Full Bloom along the streets and roads, full horny spring with her best pinks and whites and yellows in all the yards of all the houses of all the lives stitched up close to each other. I leave town and take the long way home and there are birds chattering here and frogs chirping there and everything, everything is that pale light Spring Green of the crayon that never looked that color on paper.
A few days past I was driving through town and by the park, just in time to see the children of all shapes and sizes in white and pastel preparing for the Easter egg hunt. The “hunt” is different than the word would have you believe, or as I saw it myself in days past. Much the way trick-or-treats at Halloween have evolved from a dusky and rewarding trek through the handful of decorated and participatory neighborhoods around town (from unattended bowls of twizzlers to werewolves with defanged chainsaws guarding the foggy path to the snickers) into the less exploratory experience of a parking lot trunk-or-treat (vehicle-sized themes and not much mystery or meandering), Easter has also morphed. To me, with the cast of sunset, nostalgia, and honestly seriously just pure memory from childhood, it was the Hundred Acre Wood, rolling green church lawns and daffodils around gazebos. Now it’s something completely different: literally, literally garbage bags of filled plastic eggs of uniform size and contents spread like seed or feed across the community yards of the park, with children ranged in size and sorted small to large along the edge of the sidewalk, til the Starting gun (there’s no gun it’s a whistle I think). The children then descend in a swarm on the eggs, crossing the fields in an unbroken and moving line, like locusts, eating up the pastel and leaving bare green in their wake.
It’s fucking spooky. Way spookier than trunk-or-treat, or even anything at honest Halloween. And I know how old this makes me, for the holidays to be different today than they were not only for me but for my kid (he did both, for the record. He hunted the eggs that were harder to find in the church gardens and he fed in the park with the others, because community is important). Change is spooky, maybe. The ghosts of who we were getting stomped on, right there in the sunshine.
Anyway, they made me think of zombies, and how before nuclear weapons they were pretty much a mind control monster, used with spells and things, and the radiation fear and disease fear (contaminant fear?) absolutely transformed the cultural zombie forever.
The first White Zombie
I also think the Atomic Age transformed the idea of Forever. It destroyed it.
Children were changed by the mental occupation of nuclear weapons. They never believed in Tomorrow. The fate of their Earth has always been exactly as fragile as the egos and dreams of human men that won’t concede the possibility of humanity and critical thinking skills in the enemy (or opponent, it’s sports to the Leaders) and think it would be a dangerous disadvantage to allow those things in themselves. It was a fragile childhood built on bare knees on cool tile floors, the miraculous protection of a school desk to shield their spines and nervous systems from the white swallow, gulp of a mushroom cloud. How could these grandparents not be fine with wavy halls and bulletproof backpacks, with skies black with wildfire smoke and tornados swirling? Everything has always been almost on fire. It has always been fragile and dangerous. The world can’t beat them, or outlive them.
Another speculation on humanity: is there a philosophical shift around interaction with children since so many of their interactive games are on devices? Do they now only crave interaction and no longer care if it’s positive interaction? Do they only think in terms of engagement? Is it changing for adults, too, the expectation of experience from interacting with other humans?
Spring being the age of new and small things, it’s worth remembering that children are impressionable. Their lives are tiny and important. Mr. Rogers and Days of Our Lives influenced me, it’s safe to say algorithms are now influencing children and the way they communicate.
Generations are real, if only because people are marketed to in sections.
I don’t really have a clear line on where I was going with the zombie eggs and the bombs and the algorithms, I’m tired. I know part of this is me positively swimming in nostalgia lately- 90s fashion is everywhere and I’m as angsty and lovesick this spring as I was in 1995.
My lilac had babies. The purple irises are blooming now. I still feel way far back in my head a lot, but I wonder if that’s just where I’m supposed to live, like maybe I’m allowed to be wherever in my head I want to be.
The blooms not the babies
Tried to avoid starting a new novel, because I didn’t (and don’t) know really what I wanted it to be, so I’ve continued diverting things off into chunks and unfinished short stories, but I think that’s not exactly what I want right now. I don’t know exactly what I want. I’ve got pieces but not enough of the right pieces to feel forward momentum from within the story itself. Right how it’s just me moving pieces around, waiting for something to wake up. Like a ouiija board.
Sometimes I feel like I’m in crisis, but it’s not a fragmenting crisis, it’s a condensing crisis, it’s my exoskeleton itching and a lot of times this does mean a new book, a new big idea. It has to be the right setting, the right vibe. A book is a pocket of time, a bottled feeling, a World to invent, a hiding space outside the most uncontrollable ceaselessly bearing onward with never a pause to catch our breath Real(?) World. So I can’t fall into the wrong one.
Inner space.
Remember Spring is also a closed fist. Every new leaf yet to unfold, every curled fiddlehead.
As far as the Old Book - old? Summerskin’s complete draft is late November years old but what have I done lately, if you know what I mean- I haven’t forgotten it. I want it to be available. The idea of writing query letters then sending chapters, then…ugh. It makes me want a Xanax popsicle. So maybe I’ll get help with formatting, buy an isbn myself, publish through Barnes and Noble or something, then forget about it and get on with my life and my new stories. Or if you’re reading this and want to publish it, you can have it.
I was going to use a clunky, “Speaking of getting on with my life” but I haven’t, in so many ways that I’ve mentioned (and ways I didn’t, like my forever love affairs with lip gloss, Christian Slater, and flannels), so instead here’s things I’m looking forward to, besides streaks of warm days, besides baby rabbits in the yard.
Little Shop of Horrors - music practice and blocking are underway. I’m out of my depth with the talent (and with the music part right now, honestly, imposter syndrome making me think maybe I need a clipboard? A beret, something that makes me look like I know what I’m supposed to be doing or if I’m supposed to be doing anything), but my anxious obsession with all the threads and trains of thought will serve me well once we’re in the thick of it. First weekend in August. Tickets: Markay Tickets
Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones - Blackfeet vampire tells his story to a Lutheran priest in 1912. Everyone I know who reads already has this on their radar so I don’t need to say a lot, other than 2 weeks left before my turn in Libby, and Hell Yeah.
She’s a Lamb by Meredith Hambrock - this will be the first book this year I’ve read purely without knowing anything about, just heard people talking about it on bluesky and since the main reason I went over there is reading/writing stuff I figured I better jump in & see if I’m on the right path. The certainty that fate is on your side, that you’re meant to be a star, is one of my favorite premises(esesis).
The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs - new season is the first Friday of every month!
I love The Ugly Stepsister so much already from just the trailers, I wish I had written it. And Him, come on. It might be perfect. Hoping to catch them both in the theater.
The Chronology of Water movie- everything Lydia Yuknavich writes both aches and soothes, and I’m interested (as a fan of both her and Kristen Stewart) how all those conjurings of big deep feels translate to the screen.
Harmony by name not reputation
Also, the best thing I’ve read about Severance, a take on the different receptions to the two female backstory episodes. I loved the Harmony Cobell episode, as both a fan of bitches and Patricia Arquette, so it was interesting to think about why different things resonate with different people: Affective Hierarchies: Viewer Bias and Female Suffering in Severance by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Jackson County Roots Festival - Speaking of the Markay, and worlds converging, some of the musicians that will be performing here are ones I first saw live from my friend’s grandma’s porch before we all picked through the woods up the creek to the waterfall, when we were still too young to drive. Tickets: More tickets, same site
Yes, Appalachians do lead charmed existences. We’re matter-of-factly and effortlessly magical individualists; diverse artistic and industrious weirdos that have always made the most beautiful things even when everyone else treated this place (and us) like part of a trash heap. That’s right, it’s terrible here, stay away, leave the lightning bugs and snowy pines to us.
Obviously got some time this afternoon post up like The Body in Weekend at Bernie’s and wait for the birds to forget about me and come back to the feeders, with just my legs in the sun to try to at least start some sort of tan since warm weather is here and the world has begun again and none of these human messes or hurdles toward always-inevitable destruction is going to convince me otherwise.
If you don’t believe me, let’s go for a ride.
- tragically optimistic, Amanda G.
By Edward Gorey