Log 3
Testing out my new selfie stick the night before
Highway flowers
Regret not buying the buc-ee’s bikini
Paying my respects to Ms. Pearl
Feeling bummed out in Austin
Gelato and Blanco State Park with Ania
Stargazing
Log 2
Roadtrip starts tomorrow. My mom and I deal with travel nerves the same way… by buying everything we could possibly need for a trip. We enable each other. I knowwww gross capitalism and consumerism and all of that and I’m working on it, but for now I have four kinds of supplements, more books than I could possibly read, 3 new outfits… I think I can declare myself ready. My mom is outside triple checking the car I’ll be driving.
My dad taking a photo of my route
Vinyl 20th anniversary of Evanescence’s Fallen at Target… I’m old
Developing a “Found my soulmate in Texas” sticker concept
Fav bookstore in Houston
Log 1
I landed in Houston yesterday. My parents keep the thermostat of my childhood home at a balmy 76 degrees F. I’m swimming – I don’t feel a temperature difference between my skin and the air. They have two tyrant dogs that run the house, with barks so piercing that I'm forced into fetal position. I bought their love by feeding them rib eye steak and roasted sweet potatoes off of my dinner plate.
Kid Naj original pottery :’) She was talented
Pap pick of me and the tyrants
<3
Claire Keegan's So Late in the Day
Intro in “The Long and Painful Death”:
“It was three o'clock in the morning when she finally crossed the bridge to Achill Island. There at last, stood the village: the fisherman's co-op, the hardware and grocery, the chapel of reddish stone, every building locked and silent under the dimly burning street lamps. On she drove along a dark strip of road where, on either side, tall rhododendron hedges had gone wild and out of bloom. Not one person did she see, not one lighted window, just sleeping, black-legged sheep and later a fox standing fearsome and still in the headlights. The way grew steep then rounded into a wide, empty road. She could feel the ocean, the bogs; immense, open space. The turn for Dugort wasn't marked – but she felt confident in turning north along the uninhabited road that took her to the Böll House.”
Chills! Keep thinking about this. Just effortless.
Finished All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt today, the second book in my Irish Writers series. The memoir weaves his history, relationships, and inspirations into a story about queerness, not quite coming into one's own but getting to place where moving forward is a possibility. The writing is slithery and detailed yet warm. He is a poet after all. I wasn't sure if I enjoyed it at first, but Hewitt has a way of writing about Big Feelings like desire, fear, love, shame, grief that left me moved. The descriptions of mental health episodes made me feel like I was in there experiencing them too, as his partner Elias, as Hewitt himself, and as myself carrying my own experiences.
Passages that resonated:
“For most of my life I had thought that all I could be sure of was the past. I think I had seen memory as a sort of route, a pathway, which stopped off at all the significant events of my life, and formed a narrative, explaining how I got to where I am, and how I got to be who I am. Like stepping stones across the river Lethe, there were some memories I held on to. Over all that river of forgetfulness – into which experiences, thoughts and words dropped every day – these memories made a crossing, some solid ground I could traverse. All those years, it was as though time were blowing through me and taking form, being winnowed into narrative.”
“When we buried him, we planted flowers on his grave, and every time I visited I saw that those flowers were my father, were made out of him. He was being born again into the earth, in a new form, and it wouldn't be long until all of his atoms were dispersed across the village, then the country, and then the world, carried off inside birds, growing into plants, and into butterflies. What was the garden, then, if not heaven, if not a place made up of everything that had been lost to us, if not an afterlife? After that, the whole world could be heaven to me. Still, it seems like the most simple, the most beautiful way I can think of looking at life. Everything, all of it, is mimicry.”