Marathon

Life, Looming Terror, and Law & Order

Seasoned. Wizened. Reasonably outdated.

Where to even start? It’s one of those lucky weeknights I happen to catch a block of Law & Order during a good season (6, second only to season 5) so it’s Briscoe & Curtis all evening with the dogs snoring and frost crystallizing. Besides Fallout I honestly haven’t been watching anything, except Sevy walking off Finland one snowy block at a time, which helps as it’s nearly always too cold to walk myself.

This is the year of all the Big Things, big changes, a year so big it seems impossible to speak it into being. I feel like a ghost from my own past when trying to reconcile that it’s 2026. Twenty years ago when I got married, eighteen years ago when my son was born, ten years ago when my parents turned 60, the year 2026 was still impossibly far off. We talked about this year’s high school graduation when the kid started preschool.

Bowie’s been gone ten years. The Covid year is receding into the less-immediate past. I’m closer to 50 than 40. My dogs that I knew as puppies are almost freakishly elderly. Some of the best people I’ve ever known or will know are dead and there’s no more times with them coming.

A minute ago, when my son was small, he was in Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus. “Virginia” and her husband are expecting this summer.

Beth and Kelly will never read anything else I write.

And still, for some fucking reason here I am. Trying to talk to you. Trying to tumble down these rock walls as fast as I can build them up. Staring at the birdfeeder for an hour turning a two minute piece of conversation a year ago into a lode-bearing fictional scene. Ordering ice cream cake. Doing laundry like the sky isn’t falling.

Just keep feeding the fish

I’m in kind of an existential crisis, and the reason, or part of the reason, I’m having such a hard time talking about it, even to myself, is because it’s so confusingly equal parts terror and exquisite joy. So I’m trying to wrangle with one more massive life lesson about the futility of even ground, about love and all of usness and turtles all the way down; it’s just hard in January when everything is so profound and everything feels important or an indication of things to come and I’m still half-dumb and heavy with leftover Xmas sentiment and my brain is filled with sand and The Shining and I’m afraid even more time is slipping on by without me feeling it.

Or feeling it enough. I’m half-remembering my dreams, maybe I’m slipping there, too. Or maybe dream-me is moving slowly on my behalf. Holding those moments long or fast forwarding them with no regard.

Into bright blue winter mornings when everything feels like a wound.

So anyway, happy new year. I think I do enjoy my own terror too much.

I wake up sweaty some of these days, my hormones are getting crazy. Wake up hot, activated or ready to be, like still angry they missed perhaps the only opportunity they’ll ever have to actually cast 13 Lashers, each hotter than the one before, on this mind-bogglingly terrible Mayfair Witches adaptation. Talamasca sucks too, another victim of trying to make a different show and cram it into existing popular IP, so instead of a show about spies we get a show about supernatural Anne Rice spies. Comparatively speaking like how Renaissance painters wanted to paint orgies but had to do by biblical scenes so it’s all just angels with their dicks out.

Y’all that read this blog and not my fiction are gonna be shocked by how gay some of it is, based just off all the straight observations of this blog. I think I’m just more comfortable objectifying men at this point in my life. Women have feelings.

Britney is dancing into Little Edie-land. We probably did that to her, us and her dad, back before we knew women had feelings around Y2K. I didn’t have feelings then either. I was saving them for later, for when/if it was safe.

Let’s not pretend this is organized. Not this, the first post in the year that I didn’t remember had any years after it, 2026. This is just the shrapnel of last year’s thoughts, and the ghosts of thoughts to come.

If I hadn’t turned on the TV when I got home from GG night the title of this blog might’ve been different

The last 30 minutes of Stranger Things gave me what I wanted from it, and for it. I’ll take it, even with the Will bungles and endless expository dialogue. In my greatly diminished down time I’ve also watched Landman with Eric. I got very nervous and very upset with Taylor Sheridan for a minute (not over the assault and battery, a hot gal hadn’t gotten the beat down all season so you knew someone was getting it) wading into the pronoun discussion seemingly for no reason, but I was surprised and touched when the show swung around and embraced a queer character, in a fair and real way even. There’s a lot of dumb shit in this show but the good far outweighs it.

Law & Order Season 6 was airing exactly 30 years ago.

Do kids watch tv anymore? I was shaped by PBS and prime time tv, I never thought I’d get to a place that I considered that quaint, but in the age of YouTube, I do. I had Mr. Rogers. Thank the lord for Ms. Rachel. She’s a light in the short form content dark. She’s an actual real person.

How do we keep connecting?

This world is lying to us and saying we’re not all jelly and that neither is anyone else, and we are, and we have all this love and emotion and we think there’s nowhere to put it and no one will take it and whatever anyone is offering can’t be true.

But it’s all true.

The world is hard every day, and we know too much about it. And we feel too powerless.

But.

Have you seen this life? If you just keep working at it? Improbably, impossibly, even with all of this, all of the human bullshit, people just keep making and doing. Even with all this bullshit, there’s still a sunset now and then that wipes your brain clean of all that.

If I painted instead of wrote, all I’d paint is the side of this white house on South Street, that holds all the colors of the western sky between the branches of the tree on that wall in the front yard. The library plate glass window is turning me into Andrew Wyeth. It’s all of everything, passage of time and bigness and smallness in the light on the side that house. Everything is a microcosm. Everything that is one thing is also something else.

Do I change shape? And do I always or ever have to pick, if I don’t want to end up in a scary shape?

These thoughts and more, written in the frost on the windows.

I owe Craig an email. And my notes need a thorough sorting. But I’m breaking it down, breaking down the pieces, breaking down the walls, moving through January 2026 and all Januarys, past the end of time and into the following years. Into the next stories.

Tonight though, it’s all memories, and old stories. Me and Briscoe, and these other old dogs, we’ve seen it all.

-Amanda G.

P.s. Next post will be less about old white guys and lamentation, more about new fiction and even newer fiction, and probably more Fallout and Anne Rice adaptation-related opinions. Thanks for showing up and keepin’ on keepin’ on.