5.09.2025 - Weekly Digest
5.05.2025
New lodgings include a washer/dryer stack. Accounts of laundering in public on hold for now. I could describe what it's like to wash my clothes here but not quite sure what the angle would be. Could also just go sit at some random laundromat for no reason. Overcommitment to the bit.
The hosts at my last place were generous and made me feel part of the community. This unit is comfortable and just as dark or light as I need it to be. Bottom of an old building and the sound carries but it's mostly quiet at night. The windows are at sidewalk level and through the slats I can see the figures of other tenants, their dogs, what I hope is a squirrel.
Construction work going on right outside as well. This is also like like being part of a community. The workers yell in Spanish mixed with local French. They laugh a lot and punctuate their jokes with loud machines.
News from old friends over the weekend. Fun and intense conversations. Some good, some sad, some shared anxiety. Some of them seem proud of me and this feels unfounded.
I don't have much of a plan, I assure them. No idea where I'm going next.
So many people at home going about their lives, functioning, convincingly domestic. Impressive and courageous and kind of insane.
5.06.2025
Utopian self-bullshitting. My sickness insists I can survive with a wood fireplace, a wife, dogs, a garden, and a landline for emergencies. If a neighbor comes by they'd better at least have some seeds for sale.
Instead of movies I will stream original comedies by shadow in the firelight. The dog will learn to make us popcorn. The dog will be useful or she will be sent to the city to live with the rest of the unskilled animals.
We, the wife and I, we will try each mushroom that pops up after a rain. Just a nibble at a time, taking turns in case the other one gets sick.
That's what the rotary's for.
One night when we're good and messed up, on the giggles, our faces distorted by flame, I will admit that I kept a cheap cell phone this whole time, charged it in the sun, hid it in a watertight box below the rim of the well.
It's the music streaming app, I plead. If I can't block the world out with an endless playlist of wordless songs I go useless. Why do you think it takes me so long to chop wood? And also the podcasts.
I can totally believe you lied about that, she says. Then she orders a Lyft to go be with the dog.
If there's no one here to hear me say I'll write to you what's the point?
5.07.2025
Committing the sin of trying not to bothered by everything all the time.
This morning I woke up when I wanted, made the bed, had some coffee, turned on the little sun lamp panel I've been using since I got here, never knowing how much light I'll have and wanting to control at least that much. Slatted blinds either don't work or put me face to face with other humans walking dogs or checking their mail or filling color coded waste receptacles just on the other side of the window, designed to make me feel like I'm being watched and for them to feel like I'm watching them (I am).
Read a few pages each from five different books and now I'm typing this out while I listen to instrumental music and the hell of it all is I actually feel bad for consciously resisting the urge to check the news and see what form of shitfuckery is flowing from the taps today. Like the act of observing changes the state of things. I think I used to think that's true. Weaponized guilt is a helluva drug.
And if Gaza and Ukraine are my fault because I've avoided exposure to every detail of those horrors well fine, that's on me, and it will be on me if things go further South in the U.S. and I don't stare intently enough at the atrocities in Louisville or Syracuse or Colorado Springs.
Yeah I don't know why those places either.
5.08.2025
I think a cool idea for a TV show set in Chicago would be to have a character who just stays in one apartment and every episode the neighborhood is completely different. Like they go outside and some things look familiar but the locals are speaking a new language and there’s a whole new dynamic and style to everything.
That’s how it felt from 1999-2015 anyway, wherever I lived or worked in that city. Since then I’ve been a lot of places and what they all have in common is that everything feels always in flux.
Wherever I show up the locals are all, hey you should've been here two weeks ago when it was authentic and we all had needles sticking out of our shoes. Then they charge me $90 for a coffee and tell me I’m ruining their neighborhood. If I protest that I’ve never had money and I didn’t know where else to go they tell me I should have stayed home. Then I get called a carpetbagger and I remind them that unless they can trace their lineage back to the fucking Clovis their people came here from somewhere too and now the air is bad and it's time to pack my bags again.
If you want to avoid criticism, you stay in the exact spot where you were born. I could return to Alma, Michigan, roll out a sleeping bag in the neonatal unit, bug a nurse for the wi-fi password and I bet even then someone would have a problem with that.
Anyway nobody in Montreal gives me shit for being here. At least to my face or slowly enough that I understand.