Welp.

Hi, everyone.

I wanted to get off social media to get away from the news, but, alas, the news still found me. I hope everyone is holding up okay.

For those of you not on Instagram (some of my most loyal readers!), I'm making some slight changes to the newsletter format. Mostly, I'll be posting longer pieces to the site itself (and shorter ones, too) but only sending out one email per month that includes links to my writing and stuff I've been reading.

A couple of weeks ago (I think), I wrote a big piece about getting canceled (possibly?) and what I learned from this admittedly shitty experience. I talk about something one of my favorite meditation teachers, Joseph Goldstein, says: "Don't waste your suffering." You can hear him talk a bit more about that in this great talk that I do not expect any of you to watch in it entirety (but he discusses suffering as a place of exploration beginning around the 16 minute mark – it's a winding discussion!):

Today, I published another piece, about volunteering at the animal shelter here in Portland and about not giving into the relatively easy rush of blaming everyone else for your problems and how everyone is incentivized to be depressed and anxious online and weirdly they are all very depressed and anxious.

Related: This piece from Jason Pargin, previously a writer for Cracked, about Bo Burnham's Inside. I have actually never watched Inside because I find this sort of performance of mental illness to be so insidious and self-defeating and annoying. Similarly, the need to constantly preface everything that is wrong with your life as being "because I live under capitalism." God, please don't be cutesy about your depression or act as though no one else has ever lived through unprecedented events or had to work to stay alive. (That said, I very much wish I were not living through the particular unprecedented events that are unfolding right now.)

Other news:

• Right after inauguration, I decided I wanted to wean myself off of social media, kind of like I did after Trump's first election in 2016 (in hindsight, an era of remarkable stability), and do more reading. I decided it might be time for a new e-reader, as mine's pretty old. But I also wanted to get away from Amazon. So I bought a Kobo Clara Color, which has very easy integration with Overdrive. (Update: I am sad to learn that the PPL does not use Overdrive.) I ordered it directly from Kobo to try to return to an earlier era of online shopping. And, well, it took 8 days for them to ship it. And, obviously, we've all gotten too accustomed to fast shipping. But...8 days? Kind of a lot of days! (Like, in that time, Elon Musk has taken over several key federal agencies.) Is it literally one person? I have downloaded Black Jacobins by CLR James as my first Kobo book and figured out how to check out e-books using Cloudlibrary, which is a bit more labor intensive than Overdrive would be but fine.
• To prepare for possible tariffs, I went to Costco (who has, mercifully, settled with the Teamsters to avoid a strike) and bought, like, $300 of non-perishables, to the point where they were trying to give me the hard sell on an executive membership. I had to explain that I am extremely single and childless and just preparing for the possible collapse of the American economy. An executive membership would be excessive!
• I also quit Spotify. Have downloaded Deezer, but may just try to get back to a more analog musical existence. (I did write a little narrative history of my Spotify Wrapped.)
• I was planning to quit Instagram, but I think I have realized I mostly just need to quit looking at or posting stories. I have been trying to defrag my brain and I think a key part of that is not engaging with these platforms where we are all shuffled together like a deck of cards. A few tossed off pictures from this person, then a few from this person, maybe some kind of video shared by another. I want to engage with things that are whole and more deliberate. And to be more thoughtful about what I share, rather than acting on whim. It all makes me feel sliced up into hundreds of tiny pieces.

Listening

A lot of music from Kiss Me Kate has been in my head for the past 24 to 48 hours, for no apparent reason. And now I pass that along to you:

(He's meant to be ass, please do not come for me about this song.)

Watching

I saw the Bob Dylan movie, and I don't know if it really needs to exist, but it was a pleasant two hours. My one note is that you learn little to nothing about Bob Dylan except that he was a terrible boyfriend and mostly full of shit, just a very talented little myth-making machine and musical and cultural magpie, and then consider that Bob Dylan was very involved in the production, so he is actively shaping this perception of himself as unknowable (hence the title) and enigmatic, and well, I dunno. I have a better appreciation for his music but my immediate reaction to his actual face is still "Shut up, Bob." He seems to arrive on the scene fully formed, and his genius is presented as a fait accompli. He never struggles artistically or seems to doubt himself, or maybe that's what Chalamet was trying to convey when staring blankly at himself in the mirror. (I found an interview with Joan Baez where she said she would take him out to clubs and defend him against angry crowds who booed him. There's none of that in the film.)

A ton of stuff was fabricated or embellished, as is always the case with these films, but it does call into question what the point of it all is. (I think most people can guess that Dylan and Joan Baez did not actually hook up for the first time on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis and he also probably didn't play her "Blowing in the Wind" the next morning. I think it's funny that, according to this Rolling Stone article, every song they have him playing at any of the festivals...he did not actually play at that festival. He was there. He just played different songs.) I really liked Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, though that may be partially because I am less familiar with Pete Seeger's mannerisms and so it's less weird than watching Timothée Chalamet purposefully never move his jaw. I thought the guy who played Johnny Cash was putting it on a bit thick, and the letters he and Dylan exchanged seemed less like human connection and more like two dudes performing their renegade personas for each other, but perhaps I am ungenerous. Everyone feels smoothed down from their real-life counterpart, hairless Barbie dolls with more symmetrical faces and tighter asses. (This perhaps adds extra frisson to the tension between Dylan's shape-shifting and the equally constructed "authenticity" of Seeger and Alan Lomax and the Newport Folk Festival crew. Norton's Seeger might be the only one who comes off as real in any way. His obvious decency is in stark contrast to Dylan's ambition, opportunism, and casual cruelty.)

I went in knowing absolutely nothing and started to wonder about halfway through when they were going to cut things off, and then, as he started experimenting with new sounds and instruments, I was like "Oh, yeah, it's going to be the electric performance at Newport." And it was. (The movie is based on a book called Dylan Goes Electric.) The plot didn't have beats so much as it had hits, with "Blowing in the Wind" and then "The Times They Are A-Changing" and "It Ain't Me, Babe" and "Like a Rolling Stone" to close it out and give us Title. (Also, the RS article notes that Alan Lomax, et.al, did lose their mind at the electric performance, but that Pete Seeger did not, in fact, consider using an ax to cut the sound and...that feels like an important detail? Like, having your worldview challenged to the point of violence is one thing, resorting to ax-wielding to make it stop is entirely another.)

My emotional investment was primarily limited to Seeger (and ailing Woody Guthrie, whose illness I thought was used as a sentimental prop) and Dylan's long-suffering girlfriend, Sylvie (played by Elle Fanning). I was like "GIRL DO NOT GO TO NEWPORT WITH HIM. WATCHING HIM SING WITH JOAN BAEZ, A RICH AND FAMOUS WOMAN YOU KNOW HE HAS SLEPT WITH AND WILL SLEEP WITH AGAIN, WILL ONLY UPSET YOU. STAY HOME AND FINISH YOUR PAINTING." But she went. (Though not in real life! Which, again, why even call this a biopic if nothing is true?)

Anyway, I hope everyone is holding up okay! The sanctimoniousness of our "holding space" culture can get really grating (You are valid!), but things are incredibly scary and bad and I hope you're finding peace wherever you can. (I myself am making a lot of oatmeal.)