I don’t know when I started to run on fumes. My last post was September last year (about the delightful Star Wars Visions, which has a second season coming later this year). I’ve had a bunch of blog post ideas since then. I thought I had followed through with at least one, but no.
Life got in the way, as it does, only this time it was a jack-knifed semi-truck blocking all lanes of traffic.
Has it been long enough to talk about Star Wars on the internet?
My feelings about the sequel trilogy – The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker – are more complicated than the polarized love/hate of the entire sequence that crystallized just after The Last Jedi was released.
Well, perhaps not so complicated. I adore The Last Jedi, but was deeply disappointed in The Rise of Skywalker. This was in part because of its choppy storytelling, but also because of how reactionary it was, undoing every novel thing that TLJ introduced, seemingly as an act of spite. I can recall so many vivid sequences from TLJ, but TRoS exists in this haze. I couldn’t even remember what the MacGuffin was that Rey and the others were trying to find.
Sometime in late March, I contracted the SARS-COV-2 virus. I don’t know how, where, or exactly when – maybe at the office, where hygiene standards had grown lax, or just in passing at the grocery store. It doesn’t matter, and even if I knew for sure I wouldn’t say.
Two weeks later, I had a cold that morphed into the worst case of pneumonia I have ever had. After a night of nausea so intense that it literally knocked me out of bed, I went to the clinic, where I got my official diagnosis. I went into quarantine for two weeks, got some steroids, and waited it out.
When I fell ill, I was just a week away from getting the first shot of vaccine.
If you’re familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ve heard of Vogon poetry: verse so stilted, so cliché, that is tantamount to torture for someone to hear it recited.
Anyway, I took down my recent poems. Pretension doesn’t become me. 🙂
(CW: suicidal ideation)
As I was closing on my house in October – amidst tribble-like avalanches of paperwork, hands squeezed with white knuckles as everything almost fell apart up until it miraculously came together – I was already preparing for an extended break from social media.
I was already emotionally exhausted from the interminable presidential election, months of lockdown and squabbling over whether the very real COVID-19 was a hoax (it isn’t), and things were nearly coming apart at the last minute as closing day approached. I had stepped away from Twitter, but Facebook was always there – where I could gloat about some small victory, or quietly envy my friends.
It was a no-brainer: I would need a break after closing, to give myself time for packing, pre-move renovations, and moving day itself. To make the house livable would take a bit of effort – new light fixtures, flooring, etc. I needed every second I could spare.
That’s the term JRR Tolkien invented to describe a terrible event that ends well. The climax of Lord of the Rings (when Sauron falls, not the scouring of the shire or all the loose ends) is a eucatastrophe. Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star is a eucatastrophe – because while the weapon of mass destruction was itself destroyed, nearly every pilot in his sortie was killed, and the rebellion had to retreat before imperial reinforcements arrived.
From my last trip to Brooker Creek Preserve many years back, I knew that there would be standing water on the trails. I should have known better. I did know better.
And yet I still wore cotton socks.
Brooker Creek regularly floods during the rainy season in Florida, which is any month you don’t need to wear a sweater. Portions of the trails close depending on how bad the flooding is. Last Saturday, when decided to visit, most of the trails were closed, except for a short ~2 mile loop.
But while I was drenching my trail runners and ill-chosen socks, I noticed some white petals on the ground. The magnolia trees nearby were blooming.
Angry? Me too.
Here’s a list of things you can do to help.
And here’s why identifying how you participate in white supremacy culture is only the first step.
Edit - 6/5:
Project Implicit - Unconscious Bias Test. One of the first steps is seeing how white supremacy culture has affected your unconscious bias towards black people and other POC.
11 Black-Owned Vegan Businesses. Support black businesses always, but especially now.
Shortly before my departure from my church last year, I asked for counsel from a good friend about this decision. She suggested I make a sign that said “choose health,” put it somewhere I’d see it frequently, and follow its advice. In that context, it meant prioritizing my mental health over the demands of a toxic congregation.
Now, as I’m practicing social distancing – working from home, living with just my cat, going out only as needed – “choose health” has a very different meaning.
Like many teenagers, I wrote poetry in high school. I cobbled together a journal from spare ruled notebook paper and a used binder, hand-sewing and gluing the spine. The pages were deckled (not intentionally) by my inability to cut straight. I filled this upcycled journal with confessions, story snippets, and poems.
I wrote far more fiction than poetry in the years between, but I indulged on occasion. I used to post Wednesday poems on this blog some years back. I’d mess around with metaphor and meter in my stories, but not to great effect. (Rhyme was always hard for me.)
Since my writing block last year, I’ve struggled to find ways to put words to screen. I practically reinvented my writing process twice, but that didn’t seem to fix things. Even blog posts have been difficult and sporadic, though to be fair my topics have been difficult, deeply personal, and met with a great deal of hostility.
Earlier this month, unsure of what day exactly, I started writing poetry again. The first poem was excruciating to write, like turning a rusty nut off a threaded bolt, but the threads caught and subsequent poems have been easier.