it was fires, then floods, and now locusts, kind of—grasshoppers have swarmed the neighborhood, awakened by the warmest winter on record, again. the dog snaps at them as they blitz your ankles, but you still have to walk the dog.

i brought the dog back inside (poor dog) and enlisted a neighbor to carry the cat down the block, and found a pair of work gloves. i moved the mouse to a patch of ivy by the chain link fence. of course the mouse was afraid of me. the clumsy gloves dulled my grip, i couldn’t be sure i wasn’t crushing its paws. i wasn’t sure the cat hadn’t gotten its underside. what does it mean to do the right thing for something against its will? it’s a pervasive fear: that we hurt things more by handling them. our interference has caused enough trouble already.

in the ivy the mouse was very still. i brought it sunflower seeds and then walked the dog, and when i came back the mouse had crawled onto the lawn again, in the open, like nothing had happened. the mouse was stupid, or had maybe ingested rat poison and was going loopy before it died, which i’ve heard can happen, or maybe it was trying to go home, or it just really wanted to be on the lawn. of course the cat came back. i put the dog away again and pulled on the gloves, trying not to touch the palms with my bare hands, and the mouse squirmed away as i tried to pick it up and i wasn’t sure i had the conviction to force it but then matthias pulled up and i made him put on my too-small gloves and gather the mouse—he’s good at things like that—and we moved it to the blackberry brambles behind the garage, where there is plant cover but also grass (or a weed that mimics grass), and matthias lay a sheet of plywood over the entrance to the brambles so the mouse could get out but the cat couldn’t get in, even if the cat got into the back yard, and we threw away the gloves. he was moving around, i said to matthias, and he said, a head wound is a big deal to a wild animal. and i want to believe it lived, but also, it couldn’t be helped if it died. i just thought it deserved to die privately, instead of slow death by cat. i guess that’s the point—to preserve dignity. when i looked the next morning, it was gone.

last week i dreamed i had a general meeting about adapting the book and the development executive asked if i believed in god. (this is not a normal question for a general meeting.)

and i said, “you know when you’re hiking and you see a bison in the clearing—and it’s so real, it’s not only real but it’s natural, it’s part of the world. you are in the world together—but you can’t touch it. you’re not it’s favorite, you’re not the one who will tame it. that’s god.”

regarding writing, or the function of morality in writing, i’ve been thinking recently that even if you don’t know the shape of your god you still have to follow it into the woods. this feels important in the same way.

*

the hallmark of AI in visual art is imperfection—weird fingers, phantom limbs, patterns that come undone—but the hallmark of AI in writing is perfection. there are distinct phrases and patterns, for sure, but one major tell is that AI writing follows all the rules; no human writes with 100% correct grammar. i just love that, because no matter how representational AI gets, it’ll never have style. that’s what style is—how you break the rules.

*

i love valentine’s day. it’s quaint that we ever accused it of being a corporate holiday. what isn’t corporate? at least it’s a holiday. i can’t wait to have a kid so we can make doily hearts together. (picturing this in my mind, i can smell the purple glue stick.)

*

walking the dog today, i saw what looked from across the street like a child-sized wind chime. not for children, but the size of a child. it was suspended from a cedar tree in front of a neighbor’s house. i couldn’t get a better look because there was a dog in the yard barking at my dog—two frothing dogs on either side of a fence, that’s us on either side of this screen—but i swear the chimes were 4 feet long. how do you even get that into a tree? and what kind of sound does it make? you could stand under it on a windy day and have a personal sound bath, i bet your whole body vibrates. how exciting, in a world of haunting ambiguity, to experience a contained mystery.

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In celebration of Saturnalia/Yule/whatever, here’s a roundup of things that I cannot or should not buy for myself, but that I think someone would really love. If you do end up getting anything—for yourself or others—let me know! Allow me the gift of compursion. Happy holidays xo

I will never financially recover from this

Fancy gifts.

Lennox cream and sugar set

The Lennox spice village’s moment seems to have lasted years, but I think they’re the definition of timeless. This cream and sugar set is classy without committing to an entire metropolis. Consider also the matching coffee canister, or a whimsical carousel-themed set.

Wedgewood lighter & ashtray set

Soooo classy and under $20??

Hermes cirque scarf

I inherited a few silk scarves from my grandma, and have only worn them as slutty tube tops. But there’s time to change! I would let this one kill me Isadora Duncan-style. I think it would be cute paired with this 1980s guide on how to style one's Hermes scarf—though you could pair the guide with any vintage silk scarf or handkerchief.

French perfume that smells like morning dew

I recently ordered a bunch of samples from this parfumerie because I wanted to try the one that smells like a monastery, but this grassy scent was a sleeper hit. Arguably a homeopathic cure for seasonal depression, it smells like rolling around sun-baked grass—and, because it’s French, also maybe just a tiny bit like cigarettes.

Session with a psychic

I think this is such a fun gift because it falls under the category of “things people enjoy but find hard to justify buying themselves.” It’s also a pretty flexible gift idea in terms of budget and vibe—you could go for tarot reading, astrology, human design, energy work, etc. One of my chicest friends gifts her loved ones pet psychic sessions. If you don’t know where to start, I highly recommend my dear friend Chrissy Tolley, a Tucson-based medium who is both celestially blessed and an earth-plane delight.

A hamburger press

For some reason, this is also something I want but won’t buy for myself. I don’t know why—inexpensive and useful for grilled cheese, diner toast, and evenly seared meat, it’s anything but frivolous. Could be a cute stocking stuffer, or pair with a Kiss the Chef apron.

A trompe l’oeil soup tureen

Imagine putting your soup in this! I die! There’s a variety of veggie shapes on eBay, making this an easy gift to tailor to someone’s personality. I also like this psychedelic one that’s shaped like vegetables shaped like a pig.

A rotund puppy trinket dish

He sparks so much joy 😭😭😭

A butter dish

Who doesn’t like soft butter? This one is cute, or you can hunt around and find one that depicts dogs or bowling or whatever your giftee is into.

A Heath ceramic mug

Being in your thirties is funny because one night you’re sprinting to the uber with your shoes in your hands, and the next morning you’re extremely specific about mugs. This one is the perfect size, shape, and weight.

storms in LA are extra biblical. it only rained for twelve hours, but the sidewalk is riddled with palm fronds and bloated worms; it’ll take twice as long to drive anywhere all day because the city isn’t built for rain and neither are its drivers. petrichor, fecund and sensual, is the smell of mother earth in heat. i’m writing from altadena, under evacuation warning again—at risk of mudslides from the burn zone. we live just south of the danger area and are fine, but it’s hard not to feel like, fuck, it was fire and now it’s floods? what next, locusts?

i’m four episodes into Love is Blind: Denver, and oh my god. it might as well be Love is Blind: People Who Insist on Calling It X Instead of Twitter. everyone is into hustling and bio-hacking and the girlboss-to-tradwife pipeline. i thought denver was, like, backpackers and white dreadlocks culture, but maybe this is white dreadlocks culture now. maybe this season spawned from the mud at a burning man orgy, a plague unto itself. in reducing my screen time, i’ve really penned myself into one little cul-de-sac of the internet; i hear the distant sirens of mormon maha culture, but they rarely turn onto my street. sometimes the narrowing of my field of vision makes me feel old and boring. other times, as when i watch Love is Blind: Denver, i feel the shadow of pestilence has passed over my house. you either age into obscurity or die insufferable, i guess. i will absolutely finish the season.

i finished Love Island Games last week and all i have to say is that of the finale four, i think it’s fucking hilarious that the couple that won pulled it off. (i hated them the least, which is basically the same as rooting for them.) game-based reality shows don’t usually do it for me—aside from the occasional figure skating or dressage clip, i don’t watch the olympics—but i love watching stupid people strategize ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i’m like 1/3 into Chris Kraus’ new book, The Four Spent the Day Together, and very into it so far. like so many women, I Love Dick was the most identity-defining read of my early 20s, and while this book is obviously different, Kraus writes like a streetcar: it’s all linear efficiency on one level, but just underground the whole thing is pulled along by live wires and searing electricity. i feel like she and i are having two conversations at once when i read her work. honestly, i’m in a little bit of a crisis because i used to read all the time and now i just scroll dog advice reddit, reading my dog’s shit like tea leaves to divine potential food intolerances. i’m also writing a novel.

things i have cooked recently: spaghetti al limon, various attempts at grain bowls, air-fried salmon, an entire duck (again, i am writing a novel—i will do anythingggg not to do the thing i want to do most in this world), annie’s stovetop mac with frozen peas and cut-up turkey dogs. next is chicken soup with broth from the duck bones. the best carb in chicken soup, imo, is egg noodle. rice is a close second. spaghetti is upsetting.

happy fall x

aiden

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i had this whole ambitious rollout plan—a deep-dive into the cover art, a tie-in video for each essay, an eternal ouroboros of content that creates as it consumes, etc—and then life happened or kept happening, and it all started to feel very overwhelming and a little gauche, and the only thing worse than selling yourself is selling yourself behind schedule, and then… it’s almost september. acorns have started to drop on the sidewalk, even though it’s 90 degrees. this morning i saw a squirrel with a perfect pointy acorn in its mouth like i was in woodland creature central casting. i’m sorry i didn’t write sooner.

in exchange, though, here is something secret, something i have not put anywhere else on the internet. i got a puppy.

it brings me great joy to introduce you and only you to (shrimp) scampi <3

scampina bambina, hyena, appropriately afraid of the cats, perfection.

i’ve been sending matthias lightly traumatic animal rescue instagram posts for years; we take turns being the voice of reason in our relationship, but he’s really held things down in pet corner. and then the other night some friends and i saw freakier friday,* and before that we went to the americana-at-brand cheesecake factory, and outside the cheesecake factory some teenagers were selling doodle puppies out of a wagon. one cheesecake factory martini deep, i sent matthias some very desperate videos. later that night he affirmed that buying a puppy from a wagon outside the cheesecake factory is “sus” and “unethical” (🙄) but he called my bluff, finally, and the next day we went to the humane society. that’s the art of negotiation, baby!

scampi is about two years old, a stray with a mysterious past and an equally mysterious amount of energy for an “adult” dog. we took her home on a foster-to-adopt basis in case she tried to kill the cats; luckily so far it seems like she wants to play with them, but respects their boundaries. (mush impresses me every day with his insistence on jumping over the baby gates to hiss at scampi and assert dominance; puff, like an agèd diva, has taken to the bedroom. also he attacked me in my eyes while i was sleeping the other night, and shit on my little bedside rug. but i believe in growth!)

it’s hard to show in pictures that scampi is kind of tiny; she’s 34 pounds, like a chihuahua-shepherd mix? a miniature horse-pug? more pics:

you’re the first to know: that’s my dog! welcome, shrimp scampi! :,)

oh and book stuff: i’m really, really happy. it’s a USA today bestseller?? what the fuck how 😭 i feel really, really grateful and a little bewildered, and also a little relieved to have release month over because i have a complicated relationship with attention—like i crave it, but sometimes also feel like i’m being hunted. here are some of my fav articles/interviews:

• the washintgon post

• the new york times

• interview mag

• the creative independent

• lullaby machine

you have a new memory literally wouldn’t exist without you. books are different from other media because they require so much imaginative lift from the reader; rather than a passive creative-consumer relationship, it’s like entering a spell, or a collaboration, together. thank you for showing up. if you’ve read the book or plan to read it, i truly hope you love it.

x aiden

*which was exactly what it needed to be, and a delight tbh?? i laughed and i absolutely cried

first things first, a fun little thanks for subscribing to this newsletter: my publisher is offering subscribers 20% off all pre-orders of You Have a New Memory! Use code MEMORY20 at checkout, exclusively on the HBG site. thank you for being here and being you.

i used to write off spring as a fool’s season, too easy to love in any meaningful way. beneath that dismissal was a deep well of sadness: a conviction that i was not someone who deserved simple pleasures. i was too crass to be a bunny or a lamb, dumb in the wrong ways. i looked bad in pastels. and what if i did love spring—what if i submitted myself to something everyone agreed was good, and it was not good to me?

i think that same conviction is why i sometimes perform an act of low-stakes self-harm by denying myself emotional experiences—avoiding whatever movie or book or song because i know it’s going to make me Feel Something. what is that? that creative death drive used to haunt me, like everyone else was a genius artist who was constantly in conversation with everyone else’s genius art, and i was stuck inside at recess. i guess i’m just sharing this to marvel at how shameful and corny and thorny it is to really enjoy anything.

it’s not without horrors, but overall, i’m having a nice spring. jasmine season was short and early, but orange blossom season rages on. i had my first white claw of the year last week and it was better than i remembered. (classic black cherry, though i’ll drink any flavor except lemon, which tastes like hand sanitizer. if i say yes to lemon, call me an uber.) i go out less often than i like, but i think that makes me more interesting when i do see people. i’m recording the You Have a New Memory audiobook in the next few weeks so i’m re-reading the manuscript and circling all the words i don’t know how to pronounce, which is actually quite a few words because i was a weird lonely kid who learned most words by quietly reading them.

here’s what i’ve been into lately:

• pauline anna strom’s trippy celestial melodies

• “the bureaucratic nightmares of being trans under trump” - grace byron for the new yorker, a resonant exploration of a horrific regime

• taking 2 days to respond to emails

• horses with names

• companion (2025) - a fun campy not-too-deep HBO horror flick, “good for her” vibes

• clockwatchers (1997) - in particular the opening monologue, and in even more particular, the timing of the opening monologue

• the assessment (2025) - not to be “no one is talking about this” but i saw the assessment like a month ago and it was really good? and no one is talking about it? so many tropes that should feel overdone (midcentury future aesthetic, dystopian malaise) but managed to stay surprising and haunting. idk if it’s still in theaters

• strawberries + the third-cheapest dry white at the wine store

x aiden

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i’m over deadline on a writing thing right now. in the grand tradition of procrastinators, i’ve done the following: washed my delicates, updated my resume, performed candle magick, stretched my calves, washed my makeup brushes, applied an expired face mask, transcendentally meditated, scrolled reddit in the shower, folded laundry, cooked a smoky fish chowder that was actually really good, envisioned rescuing a puppy, flipped through my old notebooks to remember what i sound like when i’m not anxious about sounding like myself.

i’m always kind of amazed by how dread is just Part of the Process. i wonder whether everyone feels this, whether it’s something you get over or just integrate. to read pages and pages of fears and perceived failures from my younger self makes me sad for her, but there’s also something kind of beautiful in knowing that in the long run, dread didn’t prevent me from making things. we create a lot of art, apparently, in the presence of fear; it’s not impossible that i might do it again.

anyway here’s some writing advice from a past self, via a white pleather notebook, c. 2012:

• you can write a whole story in scenes, but you can’t write a whole story in summaries. give without giving away

• energy is activated in an enclosed space

• if there’s a conflict within you, it can be translated into writing

• ambiguous is good, confusing is bad

• be deceitful

• be more than friends with god

• life is a constant search for the One Right Thing, endless comparisons between idols and comforts, doubts, chances, suicides…

• never end a scene with someone going to sleep

• to destroy yourself and not feel it is totally fucking wild

• the divine voice is a machine

• make all established appointments, say no to everything else

• Do Not Ruminate. better late than never!!!

x aiden

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i am dusty and hoarse and lousy with vibes from my annual pilgrimage to the tucson gem & mineral show—i’m working on a longer piece about seeking salvation at the nation’s largest crystal convention, but for now, here are a few exciting opportunities to get your hands on you have a new memory!

barnes & noble is running a 2-day pre-order sale: take 25% off pre-orders with code PREORDER25, now thru 2/7. (this works for all upcoming books, so why not stock up? i recently finished haley mlotek’s exquisite divorce memoir no fault and recommend it, and i’ve been dying to check out the true happiness company by veena dinavahi)

goodreads is giving away an advance galley of the book. it’s free to enter and adds the book to your shelf, which is cute—and if you win, you’ll get your galley months before the book even comes out. chic!

x aiden

LA is more of the weird half-apocalypse it’s always been: one fire is nearly contained but two more erupted yesterday; we’re on week 2 of bottled water; we mask outside, which is funny because a few years ago the big thing was masking inside. we are lucky.

my love to everyone affected, i hope you and yours are staying safe. i talked about this a little on instagram, but my parents’ house, the home in which i grew up, burnt down early in the palisades fire. they took very little with them. there is so much fear and grief and paperwork, including the re-traumatizing process of meditating on every single thing you lost, to document it for insurance purposes. i don’t really want to talk about the house, or the fire—or, i can’t really talk about it. i feel irrationally resentful of everyone who has enough distance to narrativize what remains, to me, unspeakable. instead, i’ve been living in other people’s stories for the past couple weeks. here’s what’s held my attention:

• love island all stars, which started last week. i will watch these british idiots do anything. i crave their blithe toxicity, their sunny entitlement to a world in which good things roll up the pebble driveway, waving from a convertible, calling to them. i love them.

• perfume and pain by anna dorn - pure hot lesbian pulp, campy and engrossing

• american mermaid, by julia langbein - acerbic and silly and smart in equal measure

• the hearing test, by eliza barry callahan - i checked this out from the library, read a chapter, and then ordered it online because i knew i needed to underline it. beautiful, careful prose

• the telepathy tapes podcast - i know i’m a little late but oh my god. i’m fully telepathy-pilled. thank you to my friend nada alic for pushing me to listen—if you haven’t read nada’s book bad thoughts, it’s so smart and funny and demented in the right ways, and you’re in for a treat. listening to this podcast is an experience of weeping and wonder. more than anything else, its protagonists give me hope: hope that there is a world bigger than ours, that the terrible people “in power” actually don’t have power at all. it’s the paradigm shift i needed.

i’ve also been driving around looking for cheap home renovation tools—mostly windows—which compelled my to re-download facebook, for the marketplace. and look, i knew facebook is a toilet bowl, but i didn’t know it’s like this:

a horny engagement-baiting AI monster crafted from the primordial depths of my own algorithm (i love horses, my husband is a bread baker), and posted by a christian mega-page? i cannot express to you how upsetting this image is to me.

so anyway the social media-scape is now, unequivocally, owned and propagated by fascist losers. twitter, meta, tiktok: the big three! all of them! there is outer and inner pandemonium, ash in the air and doom in the feed. anecdotally, i’ve “lost” about 1000 followers in the last few days via deactivation/divestment—which, hell yes, be free!! but here’s the thing: i really like putting words on images. the process sparks joy, or at least a dissociative peace that is joy-adjacent. also, i like being online with you. the people i’ve interacted with through the internet have been 95% percent smart and interesting and lovely, which i know is a statistical anomaly, but idk, you all rule. thank you for gatekeeping me from your worst cousins etc.

i don’t know what social media will look like or feel like over the next few years, but i’m wondering whether it’s even possible to get back to a place of like, not whatever the fuck this is. i’m not leaving instagram yet, but i just joined blue sky, if you’d like to meet me there. setting up my profile today, i admit, i felt some “no one is coming to my birthday party” anxiety. what if no one follows me? wouldn’t that be shameful? but, like—what’s shameful about a tight community? isn’t it more shameful to bow to the golden calf of Engagement, to treat one’s little craft project with the risk-reward scrutiny of a stock exchange?

being cool on the internet is dead. it’s all cringe anyway, so we might as well choose the path of most happiness.

it’s kind of funny to start a new year in the cloudy pith of winter, when the veil is thin and what is day or night or work or rest feels particularly porous. apparently, the earliest roman calendars—on which the modern western calendar is based—celebrated the new year in march, when light leaked into the evening hours and spring planting began. in a nod to the power of their inscrutability, the winter months didn’t even have names.

gift guides, spotify wrapped, ins and outs: it’s the season of the social reliquary. ostensibly we’re looking back, but time doesn’t exist online; what do we need to return to? i love a list as much as anyone, but there’s a self-consciousness to public inventory, literally—the list is less a celebration of the artifact and more an assertion of self through listing. to stack the things we love or think we should love: to draw an outline in the dark.

my only black friday purchase was an infrared light panel, and most days i sit in front of it trying to emulate the saporous glow of a rotisserie chicken. the light is supposed to heal inflammation—i’m calling it: 2025 we’re all about reducing inflammation, it’s our apex wellness boogyman—and acne, wrinkles and indigestion, infertility and astigmatism. i love the idea of an omnipotent box of light, the obliterating orange through my eyelids. i love thinking goodness might burn through me.

some things i loved this year, even if i’m not sure i should love them: my red light panel, the inner skin of my ankles (always delightfully mysteriously dirty, even though my ankles are rarely near real dirt), diet coke, the spiders that weave webs between my car doors and side mirrors, chipped nails, the soft dimple behind my knee, scented candles (tragically basic), dollhouse-scale freeze-dried swiss miss marshmallows, shittalking people i have no real issue with, stuffing (should not be confined to holiday meals)

& my 2025 ins and outs:

whether tonight you’re engrossed in drugs or candlelight or canapés or reality television or drifting satellites, i hope you go all in. i hope you have a moment in which you undo yourself. honor the real essence of the season, which is liminal and illegible and strange. hold onto nothing; something new is coming; you don’t always have to take shape. happy new year!

thank you for being here and being you. if you’d like to read more about ancient darkness, here is the link to pre-order my book :)

the book is out 07/22/25! the cover is beautiful! it’s funny, a few essays from this newsletter worked their way into the proposal, but by the time we reached the manuscript phase they’d been entirely decimated, reconstructed, augmented; while there are echoes of my longer-form substack writing, this book could only ever be a book. the material is long and deep and different, and i am really, really excited to share it.

pre-orders really help authors out, and you also get the book hand-delivered to your door right on the release date, which is fun. so despite feeling like this when i suggest you pre-order

here are some links, should you want to do so: bookshop and barnes and noble

thank you for your support! i am excited to have a little more time to write newsletters :) also - would you like to know more about the writing process/publishing process/anything like that? if that feels exciting i can definitely talk about it, but i don’t want to overwhelm or pretend i’m an expert.

okay yes onto the links! here are some things from the internet:

• maybe it’s because i’m coming off a linear, goal-oriented project, but i’ve kind of enjoyed just wandering aimlessly but pleasantly around the internet—becoming a digital flaneuse, which requires a little more effort than doomscrolling but more purpose, too. are.na is especially good for this. here’s a collection you could start with, and then you just click around, as you would on wikipedia, from object to object and collection to collection with no end goal. i feel less nonspecific dread when i do this than when i go on instagram

• i’m savoring the experience of occasionally returning to the open tab of this 1997 amy hempel interview in BOMB - hempel’s reasons to live is a sparse, exquisite little short story collection, and hempel is so matter-of-fact and chill about writing—not in a blasé way, but in a like craft way. her voice is very grounding to me

• thanks to helen rosner’s food-themed gift guide, i have this perverse idea that i’m going to gift everyone i know homemade vanilla sugar in vintage glass jars. we’ll see how that goes!

• in my jar hunt i found this vick’s container and i’m loling at the thought of gifting someone food in it… it’s so sinister? but alsoooo kind of cute?

• okay but i did indulge in marissa zappas’ perfume advent calendar, it hasn’t arrived yet (and also bad luck to open before december, like opening an umbrella indoors, i assume)—but her perfumes are otherworldly, delicate and animal all at once. can’t wait

• here’s a tiktok about how to spot real antique art at goodwill

• it is time to dissociate with the falconcam

until next time xoxox

aiden

olivia nuzzi and rfk jr! lana and the swamp boat captain! something is up, or maybe something has always been up. women love making weird romantic choices—maybe we’ve been nurtured into deferent little empathy machines, maybe there’s horror in the familiar, or maybe it feels special to “get” someone kind of off-putting, like getting a wild horse to eat sugar from the palm of your hand. it’s libra season, it’s eclipse season, it’s a certain proclivity to conflate inscrutability with depth. or we are on the precipice of world war iii and powerlessly complicit in literal genocide; of course women want a recognizable narrative, containable chaos. or maybe this has something to do with weird being the insult of the summer—every pejorative has a period of reclamation. has the pendulum swung? is weird already back?

anyway, re: weird guys, i saw megalopolis last week. francis ford coppola’s passion project—forty years in the making, entirely self-funded, for which he sold off about a third of his namesake winery—is so impressively strange, it’s kind of a triumph. it’s a PBS shakespeare production of a play written on acid. the dialogue is wild. the CGI is wild. the wikipedia page is super long and includes 9-11 references and entire departments walking off set. coppola bought a motel and made the entire cast and crew live there together, and the cast was in character. aubrey plaza is the only actor who approached their part with any semblance of humanity—she’s amazing, actually. personally i love adam driver, and after recently rewatching girls, it was a joy to see his turn as the film’s protagonist because it’s exactly the kind of part adam on girls would land and then put his whole adam drivussy into. i didn’t know we were still casting shia labeouf, but he’s there too i guess.

like many on letterbox’d, i actually don’t know if i can assess megalopolis on a scale of 1 to 5, or good to bad. i loved the experience of watching it; matthias and i spiked our concessions sodas with fireball and our theater wasn’t afraid to laugh. on principal, if there’s no, like, bigotry involved, i have a gooey spot in my heart for any true passion project. let me see the inside of your brain! it’s so vulnerable, especially when the result is confounding—and if it weren’t confounding it wouldn’t be real, because at our core, aren’t we all full of contradictions and mistakes and self-aggrandized mediocre ideas? megalopolis is amazing because it’s so incredibly alien, and at the same time, its creation is so human.

it’s also a total mess. i know that the studio system drains the blood from projects, but megalopolis underscores the power of a second (or third, or fourth) pair of eyes. more than that, the pressure to create One Big Work isn’t just unrealistic, it’s actively detrimental to one’s art. it was a relief, honestly, to watch megalopolis and see firsthand how the “my whole life’s work” framing undermines what might be two or three or six solid projects.

be kind to yourself, artists: life is long and nothing is perfect. you’re putting the pieces of a career together one idea at a time.

rfk jr. and the swamp boat guy and megalopolis bring to mind what hannah horvath’s mom once says of girls adam:

“he’s odd. he’s angry. he’s uncomfortable in his own skin. he bounces around from thing to thing. i don’t want you to spend your whole life socializing him like he’s a stray dog, making the world a friendlier place for him. it’s not easy being married to an odd man.”

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we all agree that everything and everyone is unwell rn yes? there is sympathy for the tyrant and no sympathy for the children and dogs are burning their paws on the sidewalk and the last jasmine blossoms have turned crusty and brown and tangle in your hair when you’re just trying to walk, because walking helps things. we’re languishing under a taurean mars-uranus conjunction, zipping towards a full moon in capricorn—a chaotic flow, but at least on a cosmic scale we’re still just bugs.

last week i turned in a full first draft of the book (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and since then i’ve been micro-dosing the elation-relief-grief-anxiety rollercoaster that everyone says happens when you release something really important to you. i’ve been thinking a lot about how digital language is this condensed, straight-to-the-point thing (it has to be, to hold our fleeting attention), and how as a result i feel frustrated sometimes by the ways my brain struggles to play/expand/make connections within writing. this book is a lot of things for me, and in particular, it’s been beautiful to scare and surprise myself with language again.

anyway… i’ve also become mildly agoraphobic? maybe it’s the heat or the horrors, or how i’m trying to save money, or maybe i finally found that elusive artistic discipline—but i want to stay home.

in service of that sentiment, here are some nice, cheap, user-tested things to do by yourself at home this summer:

• watch a video about cleaning your window AC unit. commit to cleaning AC unit at some future date, maybe during your next agoraphobic episode. preparation is key

• read. i’m just finishing i’m a fan by sheena patel, super funny and feral and the unhinged british hot girl vibes feel very on point during this brat summer. on my nightstand: more, please by great writer and friend emma specter, all fours by miranda july, and margo’s got money troubles by rufi thorpe.

• take a deep dive into olive oil MLM tiktok. a heady blend of scamming, pseudo-wellness, and everyone’s favorite low-smoke-point lubricant

• pretend you are at the yard house with your southern belles

• watch a little dog play with some baby raccoons

• watch the bachelorette and also every iteration of love island. i think jenn is a lovely bachelorette; her men so far are…eh, but production feels very on the ball this season. full disclosure, i haven’t seen love island USA yet but literally everyone says it’s an incredible season. like normal healthy people, my husband and i are using a manchester VPN to stream the UK series five days before it hits hulu. if anyone else is caught up, please hit me up to discuss mimii on the terrace!!

• collage

• go through your closet aka try on all your clothes

• melt down your tunneled candles and put new wicks in them

• make elaborate salads. a good salad can take 70 minutes to construct if you’re brave

• wash your makeup brushes—they’re probably gross!!!

also don’t worry—this is not a cry for help, i swear i am appropriately social! astrologists will say it’s cancer season, everyone will say it’s crazy out there and also expensive so why not wash your makeup brushes. tonight i’m venturing outside to taix, LA’s historic camp french bistro whose name no one knows how to pronounce, for martinis and french fries with friends i haven’t seen in a while. preview of tonight at taix:

happy introversion to all who celebrate xx

aiden

happy gemini season! bad boys of the zodiac, it’s our time to shine!!

we didn’t get to visit the traumatized horse ranch last weekend because one of the horses was sick :( apparently they’re healing, but we have to wait a few weeks. (a small price to pay to not further traumatize a horse.)

besides that, i’m lost in the forest of my manuscript, in a good way; i drink a lot of those diet cokes that come in the little rich girl cans and i’ve been watching a lot of movies because that feels like intelligent leisure time, and i have a productivity complex :)

here are some i enjoyed:

challengers

the best film i’ve seen all year, sorry! i went into challengers expecting a campy sexy romp, which it is—but it’s also so much more. luca guadagnino’s direction is lush and exhilarating, the script is taut as a racquet string (sorry again), the story is thematically resonant but somehow paced better than most action films, the actors are divine, and trent reznor’s score is horny perfection. see it in theaters and it’s like attending a very low-stakes orgy, with popcorn <3

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hot girls who can read have saddled their silken ponies for the culture wars. there is an abundance—an embarrassment?—of compelling and compulsively readable discourse right now that asks what a literary it girl is and who deserves the title; discourse that pushes back and interrogates the inherent sexism in “girl” discourse; and discourse about how all we’re writing about is girl discourse:

many years ago, i ate acid and at some point—after playing hide-and-seek with god and spinning shapes in my mind—i decided to make spaghetti sauce. at first, cooking was comforting; it was a familiar task, an arrow shooting through the dark night of my soul toward solid ground. as i chopped onions, however, a nauseating anxiety overtook me. the world slowly contracted to the tight and sharp dimensions of the assignment: the onion, acidic and unpleasant; the knife; my hands on the knife, which would pixelate and float away if i didn’t pay attention. i had to get it right, and i hated that i had to get it right, and i couldn’t stop. i was trapped. and then i took a breath and stepped back and realized that i was using my tiniest cutting board—the kind for cutting limes—and i’d positioned it at the very very edge of my kitchen table. i’d brought myself to tears over my internment in an arbitrary prison that i hadn’t even noticed i’d built. the essays i’ve referenced above are thoughtful, provocative, and deserve as much recognition as any cultural or creative conversation—but this whole line of inquiry makes me feel like i’m back in spaghetti jail.

as helena aeberli puts it in “in search of cool” (also linked above):

There is no stable footing in the discourse. It is the morass which is left after a flood, a volatile landscape in constant flux, punctuated only by a few stable landmarks which we cling to. We try to grasp these trends whilst they are still above water and find ourselves in search of virality whether we want it or not, rehashing the same tired topics. Forgive me, I am doing it now!

i know this is a newsletter about the internet, and i am writing a book about the internet,* but i think i’d kind of like to try something new for the summer. i’d like to bring you more stories from offscreen. shall we touch grass together?

i’ve been thinking a lot about time. i got back from my silent ecclesiastical retreat a couple weeks ago; this isn’t the right letter to dive into all that, but in short, i thought i was going to live with some french benedictine nuns—i packed nail polish, deludedly, in case it was a slumber party vibe—but due to a translation error on my part i ended up in a carthusian monastery instead, which is like 10 times more intense. i spent ~14 hours a day alone in a stone cell and 3-4 hours a day chanting french psalms and the remaining hours i performed chores or built fires or wandered the forest. i had many delusions and anxieties and moments of unadulterated wonder. if the experience could be likened to a game with god, the game would be chubby bunny.

any new age or wellness guru, and many ancient gurus too, will tell you that the key to happiness is living in the present. we spend so much of our time in the past, and so much in the future, and so little in the now. apparently, this is where sorrow comes from. since i’ve been back, i feel especially sensitive to the strange and singular way that time works on the internet—i’ve written before about the collapse of time online, and have you ever noticed how some apps occlude your phone clock entirely, so you literally can’t see what time it is while you’re using them? when i scroll, i feel like i’ve slipped into something that is neither past, nor present, nor future. i lose hours like you lose a day flying to australia, like it never happened at all except the body is exhausted. i float above the world, dissatisfied and disoriented in the plasma of this secret fourth thing, this internet time.

i’ve been thinking about how i can give myself more time, and also—because i just had an immersive catholic experience, probably—how i can not waste yours. i want to send you letters that feel expansive rather than recursive or like you’re cutting onions on a tiny table forever and you don’t know where your hands are. did you know that jasmine season has melted into rose season? did you know that most library cards offer free or discounted museum tickets? (here is the LAPL website, but you can google your local branch and there’s a good chance they have a program like this, too.) did you know that tomorrow my husband and i are going to a rescue ranch for either traumatized people or traumatized horses, the website is unclear? there is so much out there! i want a summer break. i want to send you horse pics.

anyway, here are some things i’ve read online recently that haven’t induced hallucinogenic panic:

this essay by celine nguyen on agnes callard and the humiliation and utter necessity of aspiring:

There’s something uncomfortable about people who are trying too hard. We judge them for their pretensions; we feel embarrassed at the nakedness of their effort. The embarrassment is often a projection of our own insecurities about striving. If we managed, with heroic unselfconsciousness, to really commit to becoming a writer, an artist, a better person—then we would have to acknowledge that we aren’t that person yet. More than that: Striving means we aren’t that person yet—and we might never become that person. It’s easier to not try—and indulge in the subtle, self-lacerating logic of I can’t believe that person is trying so hard! I would never.

and this piece on rewilding the internet, by maria farrell and robin berjon:

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within… But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? 

and one IRL recommendation: because there were no phones in the cloisters but you still need to make it to morning prayers, i bought an alarm clock. it’s sleek and simple and ticks soothingly; because it’s analogue, you can’t really set the alarm to an exact minute. you live by approximation. (i thought this would make me feel less in control, in a bad way, but i like it.) at home, i’m trying to give myself more time by putting my phone in another room at night and using the analogue alarm clock to get up in the morning. i know it might not be feasible for everyone, but so much “log off” advice feels impossible (“just look at your phone less”) and the alarm clock is an affordable way to physically remove my phone so i can’t lose hours in bed on it. i recommend!

x aiden

*and girlhood! oops! although, okay, i have to say that to zoom out and work on a project that will (ideally) feel relevant and special in a year/five years/a decade has reframed a lot of the ways i think and write about the internet. writing in this deep, sustained way has its own stressors, for sure, but it’s also felt surprisingly healthy and exciting. i truly cannot wait to share this project with you.

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in long - i’m addicted to my phone and have a lot of social anxiety around social media in particular, so i googled around for some ways to detox from my devices and then i googled around some more and found a cohort of french benedictine nuns who would let me stay their abbey (in silence, perhaps with some manual labor? unclear) and now i’m in paris, on my way to the nuns. also all my ads look like this:

bonjour!

i’m gatekeeping the exact location of my retreat (if gatekeeping is good enough for saint peter, it’s good enough for me) but i packed my most modest apparel, my first communion rosary, and an analogue alarm clock so i can wake up for vespers and such. i arrived at my weird train station-adjacent hotel this yesterday afternoon, paris time, which i think is like 4am in LA. i took a 20-minute nap for 3.5 hours, and then i went to dinner by myself.

for those who aren’t ready to cloister themselves, i humbly suggest the annihilating calm of dining alone. i suspect that a lot of retreats function as some sort of altruistic self-absorption experience; we’re turning inwards, seeking a personal center. dining alone feels introspective in the same way, but deeply selfless—not as in generous, but as in, I don’t exist. in a world plagued by an abundance of main character energy, to eat alone is to be the world’s background actor.

when one removes oneself from the plot, squeezed into an afterthought table with a half-carafe of beaujolais, otherwise insufferable situations become downright enchanting. at dinner, the party of four across from me comprised a new york-based painter here for a show and his three friends, two of whom may have been a couple, one of whom was definitely a recently divorced forty-something man on a spiritual journey. the recent divorcee was mesmerizing in his Type of Guy-ness. he had unassailable opinions on everything from fish mongering (“all fresh fish in italy is sushi grade”) to neil young’s live tour (“i’m not gonna pay $250 to see an 85-year-old”). i ate leeks that had been poached in butter until pale and soft as tissue paper, dressed in vinaigrette, and let the thrill of voyeurism puncture the exhaustion of jetlag. my divorcee had been going to this restaurant for thirty years, and everyone needed to try the au poivre right now. no one in berlin was into ketamine anymore. he went to an invite-only—he emphasized a few times—burning-man-adjacent rave in new orleans last new year’s eve, and the rave was even more important for everyone to experience than the au poivre—though less important than the profiteroles, upon which he insisted.

there were a few moments when the personal podcast element of the experience felt restrictive, like when my divorcee couldn’t remember the name of and “an old producer”:

“he’s got a daughter in the office… jim’s girlfriend.”

“pam?”

“quincy jones,” i said at exactly the wrong volume, which was too quiet for their table but loud enough for two older ladies next to me to hear, like i was saying “quincy jones” for no reason.

i spooned creme anglaise over a cloud of perversely fluffy meringue and watched the men order more wine and tell each other they have antonio banderas hair. i paid my check just as the divorcee said he knows its wrong, and he’s sad they don’t get his jokes, but he wants to date “the young ones.” i walked back to my hotel alone. and now i’m here, walking to the train station in about eight minutes for a mostly unknown experience of silence and prayer. what a gift, to be the main character in a way that doesn’t implicate anyone else in your narrative. what a gift, to let someone else’s voice into your head.

i don’t have enough brain cells for a pithy little intro but hi :) hello :) it’s raining in los angeles, which always reminds me how ill-equipped i am for rain. i love rain patter and petrichor, but i dislike the way raincoats turn you into your own humid ecosystem, and i dislike being a short person with an umbrella because i feel like i’m always walking into people’s shoulders. i am, however, very happy for all those worm girlfriends who got to go out for valentine’s day :,)

here’s an assemblage of things that feel interesting to me as of late:

• i keep thinking about the phrase “humanitarian crisis”—as in a threat to the safety and survival of human beings, and also the corrosion of humanity within those who witness or participate in that threat. i find myself circling back to this jewish currents essay “the work of the witness” by sarah aziza. i urge you to read the whole essay, and i also want to note this excerpt:

AS LONG AS PALESTINIANS ARE ALIVE to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has observed, empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, put more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”

Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.

• my husband sent me this emily gould essay in the cut on the lure of divorce—i thought it was a thoughtful and interesting study of marriage, art, gender, and the real work of choosing to grow with another person. apparently there’s some discourse on twitter dot com in which people are angry that gould isn’t more contrite about her failings in the relationship; maybe i’m projecting a little because i’m currently writing a nonfiction book in which i am my own deeply flawed protagonist, but i think it’s fine for the author to be a little flippant about her own mental health crisis? her husband read the essay, he’s cool with it, he even retweeted it with a saucy joke. i’m sure there’s some valid negative criticism out there, but a lot of it feels like a blanket intolerance for any diversion from the Angel Mother Narrative, mixed with this sort of protestant media literacy trap where people feel frustrated that a piece of media isn’t useful to them. i actually do think i learned from this essay, but i see how a lot of people might find the piece less than optimized (no call to action, no overwhelming lesson learned, no life hacks), and that’s okay—i don’t know that that’s a failing of the essay itself, just evidence that media won’t mean all things to all people.

• AI videos are aesthetically the stuff of nightmares, and also might hinder our ability to separate fact from fiction forever, lol. somewhat related: do we think the proliferation of AI will end social media? i kind of feel like it will—and i’m not sure that’s a bad thing. i don’t know what will come next, but i do think that the addictive elements of social media are, however perversely, rooted in human connection, and when you take away the carrot of human experience/entertainment/validation, the spark of curiosity fades.

• i’m listening to the mushroom at the end of the world on audiobook right now, and so far, it’s a really nice balance of “easy to listen to while doing other things” and “smart enough so that i don’t experience a culture hangover.” the book explores post-capitalist collective survival via the supply chain of a rare mushroom, and yes, it has made me cry.

• this season of the bachelor is phenomenal. the story-telling, the drama, the casting of a bachelor who does not physically repel me… i’ve long maintained that the bachelor is less a show about love than it is a show about how we craft love stories, and i feel like the scaffolding of production is intentionally more apparent now than in previous seasons; the effect is a show that feels smarter and more in-on-the-joke. team maria!

• low stakes, high fashion tiktok drama, like the girl that ordered a luxury ashtray and received…something else instead, or the girl who got scammed by the realreal. is there anything more soothing than a solvable problem?

i love new year’s eve. put aside, for a moment, the scramble for plans, the coordination of ubers—you dress up in your most garish, glittery outfit to reckon with the march of time! that’s beautiful! i love the strange atemporality of a new year’s eve party, the nostalgia of champagne and auld lang syne laced with the future tense of anticipation. i love, more than anything, the countdown: our collective agreement to believe, for ten seconds a year, that the future is good.

i hate new year’s day. i’ve never done well with comedowns. the champagne sours into a headache, the thrill of possibility curdles into dread. the year stretches before you, blank squares on a calendar, expectations and anxieties and disappointments lying in wait.

the internet is rife with tips for avoiding the future. you can spend hours on r/30PlusSkinCare, discovering new problems with your pores and enlightening yourself on tretinoin, retinol, botox, juviderm. (some reddit commenter recently wrote that anti-aging was the new weight loss discourse, and while that’s maybe another conversation, i thought it was interesting.) you can scroll back in any of your social media feeds and wallow in how much funnier you were two years ago. you’ve probably seen the online discourse around the year of the girl and the question of regression—when we lean into barbie and bows, are we self-infantilizing as a rejection of girlboss politics? as submission to the male gaze? any which way, you could argue it’s been a big year for backsliding.

lately, i’ve binged almost the entirety of gilmore girls. i’d never seen it before, and it seemed as worthy a regression show as any—and it was! it’s just as quick-witted as everyone says, and so much weirder. delightfully bizarre choices abound, from casting (sherilyn fenn, who you may remember as audrey horne from twin peaks, is cast as two different characters in the series and no one talks about it) to editing (it’s hard to explain, but what is shown and what is not shown is super odd to me—they’ll be like, “i’m so excited for the party but i’m nervous about my big speech” and then the next scene they’re like, “i’m so glad my speech went well. also i’m glad we resolved that big argument. anyway!” like?? after all that build-up, why didn’t we see the party?!) to sound design (my husband pointed out that many scenes have no music or score beneath the dialogue, which is unusual for a sitcom and has this unsettling stage drama effect). also, we can’t get over how every surface in sookie’s kitchen is covered in feasts that wouldn’t be out of place in daisies. does star’s hollow not have a health inspector? where does anyone chop? i know that the entire show is supposed to be idyllic small town porn, but something about the abundance of unrefrigerated food is so lavish and perverse, i can’t stop thinking about it.

in gilmore girls, one of rory’s friends throws a 2002-themed party. my husband and i joked about having a 2019-themed party, and i was filled with so much sadness. 2020 was rife with horrors, but the thing that really kept me in bed all day was the possibility that we would adapt. that this would be normal. and it was. immersed in grief, people in my dreams started to wear masks, like how you dream in french after enough classes. it’s a sign of fluency. and now, days from 2024, we’re operating in the brave new world with minimal meltdowns. we’re paying our car registrations and buying vitamin c serum and chit chatting about the newest strain. we speak the language.

the thing, though—the terrible, beautiful thing—is that we can’t go back. watching gilmore girls in late 2023, i see a town of lovable weirdos, but i also see that lorelai’s happy-go-lucky freedom is selfish and sad and self-destructive. rory is clever and kind-hearted, but loses herself to terrible relationships over and over again. it’s an aggressively white and heteronormative show—in an early season, they even say that Michel dates women, which come on—but gilmore girls’ jaunty third-wave feminism feels especially disturbing. in the final seasons, i’m particularly horrified by the storylines of lane and sookie: after a single horrible sexual experience, lane finds herself pregnant with twins and has to closet her drum kit to make way for the cribs. after insisting that she’s done having children, sookie’s husband lies about getting a vasectomy and so she, too, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. it’s not surprising that gilmore girls wasn’t ready to tackle abortion—a relatively contemporaneous episode of degrassi portraying abortion was initially banned from american television, and finally aired two years after its initial release date—but it’s devastating to watch grief turn to acceptance for each woman over the course of a single episode. they are women with hopes and dreams whose futures have been leveled by unplanned (and, in sookie’s case, coerced) pregnancy, but don’t worry, babies smell good! they’ll get a party!

this is not at all to hate on gilmore girls or the people that love it. i love most of it, excluding the super sad pregnancy stuff! this is to acknowledge that i can’t watch gilmore girls as if i were watching it when it came out. gilmore girls has stayed the same, but it’ll never be 2006 again. for better or worse, we can’t eternal sunshine the past with a pink bow and a comfort show.

how strange, to see some marker of the past, the notch on the doorway, the distance between then and now. that empty, terrible feeling when we face the new year—is it some nauseating acknowledgement of how far we’ve already come? i don’t do well with comedowns, but i don’t do well with come-ups either—the eye of the needle, the anxiety before the rush of joy. could dread be the come-up to hope?

anyway: new year new me, whether i like it or not. if we must be burdened with knowledge, we should at least get some credit for it.

to talk about genocide as if i have any expertise or authority feels a little like tossing water into the sea of social media sorrow—a little self-serving, a little like i’m adding to a culture of desensitization via infographic. to not talk about genocide is to quietly condone visceral and devastating violence. as an american taxpayer, i am already quietly condoning violence in ways that should and do keep me up at night; it feels very important that i take any opportunity to condone that violence a little less. i will try to thread the needle here, with four suggestions for actionable resistance or aid initiatives that do not involve infographics or doomscrolling:

1. if you live in LA, the independent art space non plus ultra is hosting a comedy fundraiser for gaza next thursday, 11/02/23. tickets can be found here.

2. if you live in NYC, the poetry project is hosting a poets for a free palestine reading this thursday, 10/26/23. admission is free but registration is encouraged, more info can be found here.

3. if you live in chicago, hooligan magazine is hosting a halloween party/concert with becca mancari, featuring a raffle to support the palestinian children’s relief fund, this friday 10/27/23. more info can be found here and tickets can be found here.

4. if you live anywhere, jewish voice for peace offers a one-page Google Doc that links to several other organizations and provides instructions for calling one’s reps, palestinian-led protest info, and more.

and now for some unrelated recommendations. i have been:

reading: i just finished social creature by tara isabella burton and absolutely loved it. clever and gripping, a darkly funny victorian thriller/social indictment but set in the manhattan literary world in 2015.

i’m currently reading like 8 books at once because i’m on “book leave” and trying to research and write at the same time, but one i keep coming back to is to photograph is to learn how to die, a book-length essay by tim carpenter that interrogates the metaphysics of photography. it’s heady and (i personally found) easiest to absorb in small doses, but carpenter presents a staggering collection of insights from different artists and philosophers on creation, existence, decreation, etc. and veers into these smart, strange narrative tributaries that i’m finding useful as a writer. how this relates to social media/creation of content/creation of self/etc. hasn’t gelled yet in my head but there’s something there, i think.

watching: the golden bachelor, which so far is…shockingly good? a beautiful show about grief? i kind of want to do a whole substack on the golden bachelor but maybe britney spears’ memoir comes first, and i haven’t started that yet, so.

eating: all i want to eat right now for some reason is toast with goat cheese, olive oil, tinned tuna or salmon (decent quality but not like $16 a tin…in my unpopular opinion, fish wife is overrated, sorry! costco has some lovely sustainably caught packed-in-oil canned tuna!), herbs, salt & pepper. caveat: i looked it up and you’re only supposed to eat 1-2 tins of tuna a week, so i guess don’t go crazy :(

honestly even if you don’t want my dolphin-safe mental illness lunch, i generally recommend fresh herbs. i think a lot of people don’t buy them bc they seem fussy and extraneous, but they make easy, boring food taste and look fancy and delicious in seconds! also if you put a lot of them on something, that’s a side salad. put soft ones like parsley and dill in a jar of water, as you would flowers, cover with a plastic bag (don’t tie it, just shroud them), and they’ll last in the fridge for like 2 weeks. pull out sprigs and snip them with kitchen shears and let all your meals serve cunt. you can keep basil the same way (jar/bag) but on the counter instead of in the fridge, and it’ll last about a week if you check the water regularly. i’m at a loss with chives, which get slimy no matter what.

okay that’s it i hope we’re all doing our best x

I’ve been meaning to write to you about this since June, but I’ve been a little overwhelmed with earth plane stuff (such as, how do you write a book), and I don’t even know what to say right now except that I’m really, really excited. Writing is the only thing I’ve consistently cared about or felt “good” at; I’ve never been a prodigy or a one-track talent, but writing is an anchor and a north star, and to have permission to work on a long form personal project makes me feel something beyond language, in a good way.

YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY will be a book of essays. Some of the material and general themes will be pulled from this newsletter, but the vast majority of the material will be brand new. That being said—you, reading this, are an integral part of how I got to write this book. I’m so grateful to have a space to dump my ideas, to be messy and strange and occasionally very heartfelt, and to examine the thorny compromises and reconciliations we all make as very online humans. Thank you.

I’ll be writing this book for the better part of the next year (with help from my incredible editor, shoutout to Maddie). I don’t know what that will look like yet in terms of newsletter frequency. If you’re a paid subscriber and feel as though you’re not getting your money’s worth, I will not be offended if you need to switch to free and redirect your hard-won cash elsewhere. Generally, I’d kind of like to start including thoughts on authorship and what I imagine will be a wild and vulnerable and rewarding experience, but I could also see myself want to escape that and turning to this space with only my most unhinged and feral ideas. Remains to be seen, but I’m stoked for what’s next :)

Here’s the little blurb thing they do when you sell a book:

Secondly: in a post last October, I wrote an ersatz ode to my local dead mall, noting that its last bastion was its Macy’s. It is with great sadness that I learned last week that this Macy’s location is going out of business. On a visit to pay my respects and purchase deeply discounted earrings, I overheard snippets of a cashier’s conversation explaining that someone had purchased the entire mall and wanted that space for something else, though I can’t imagine what could take up such a gargantuan space besides Target, and the dead mall already has a Target.

At Macy’s, I wandered through the apocalyptic shoe department (why is the women’s shoe department always a locus of chaos and desperation?), running my fingers along the “Everything must go!” and “Nothing held back!” banners and halfheartedly picking shoes off the floor and placing them in the general vicinity of their other halves. I found myself in the formalwear department, and my death drive reared its head, and suddenly I was in the dressing room wearing a white prom dress with feather trim that was two sizes too small and had someone else’s foundation smeared across the front. I thought about the staff layoffs, the quiet screeching of display cases and clothing racks being dragged away, the vast empty space with its almost-museum-smell. Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” blasted across the speakers. I felt unable to breathe, tearful, stuck in a bewildering tube of spandex and bird remains, and the bird had probably not even been eaten or devoted to some other second cause.

“it’s stressing me out babe,” I texted Matthias. “why do I want to save the macy’s?”

I haven’t seen one of those “Millennials are killing ____” in a while, but I think that maybe I’ve internalized that rhetoric. On a grander scale, maybe we’ve learned to hold grief for corporations better than for ourselves. Or guilt, at least, which can be conflated with grief nine times out of ten. How much nostalgia is misplaced responsibility? Who’s afraid of a new department store?

Matthias, wise as ever, wrote back, “let it die baby. it wants to be dead.”