Let's Give Them Something to Talk About

Shortly after encountering these stairs for the first time, I send a picture of them to Chris Battaglia.

“Ominous!” he texts back.1

These stairs are a stone’s throw away from a place known by some as “Point No Point” in Hansville, Washington, on the Kitsap Peninsula where I spend a week visiting an old friend. Point No Point is the site of the oldest light house on the Puget Sound, and as the very light research I’ve done tells me, this land has also been known as “Hahd-skus,” or “longnose,” for a much longer time. It’s also the site of where the Point No Point Treaty was signed in 1855, but I didn’t know this then and I don’t know much about it now other than what I’m sharing in this footnote.2

During my time away under/among the Douglas firs and not too far from this lighthouse/these steps, a ceasefire is announced, Leonard Peltier is pardoned, and Tr*mp “becomes” president. During my time under/among the Douglas firs, I experience a number of things I realize I’m not going to get into here as I am still learning the ridges/fault lines where privacy, relationships, self-expression, and art collide.

I’m still off Instagram for the most part and generally speaking, I’m taking less pictures than I usually do, perhaps in part because I’m thinking less about sharing pictures online. I’m thinking about the relationship between the way I experience life and the way I process it through writing and/or social media (which can also be art) or conversation (which can also be art).

I love having “something to talk about.” I love the way in which one can gain perspective(s) through sharing whatever our “somethings” are with others via various channels. I recognize that putting words to an experience before we’re ready can cheapen/flatten what we need it to be in order to process it in a productive way and that it’s important to consider why we share what we share. And, that overthinking can also imperil us. I recognize we are in a cultural moment where many folks are reckoning with their relationship to social media and the “consumption” of media at large and that I am not alone here, there, or anywhere. And that this new “president” is reinstituting the use of plastic straws, among his more innocuous but arguably not innocuous at all actions. Meanwhile, I keep seeing this headline about how it’s possible that each of us has a spoon’s worth of microplastics inside our heads alone.3 Giddyup.

I fly home through Washington-Reagan the day after inauguration day. Return flights to Bangor the previous evening were reportedly canceled due to congestion from the large number of private jets that had flown in/out for the inauguration. I sit behind a man who was in DC for the inauguration who works in municipal government. He tells the person next to him about how “antifa” had threatened to protest outside his home because of a policy change he’d been instrumental in implementing. He threatened to shoot all of them. Matching sequined MAGA jackets board planes home, back to their (our) expensive groceries. I buy a pack of gum and arrive home in the middle of the night (thank you, Dad).

My children climb in bed with me in the morning and I recall the notion that the first documented use of the word “flanked” may be in The Odyssey but I could be wrong. Am I? You can tell me. I was flanked, regardless, by the two warm bodies I’d missed terribly while away. I make coffee, sliding my fingers along the inside of the smooth metal grinding chamber to remove the finest grounds, while watching a video of a coyote being pulled by their tail out of a fridge inside a grocery store by two cops in Chicago. Is this the video to which my partner referred or is there another, a better one, one with a better POV, with sound? Am I missing something? The tail is an extension of the spine, it hurts to remember this.

I make the coffee, I drink too much of it. I tell my therapist (who is about to stop accepting my insurance because they are a pain in the ass to work with and unreliable about payments) that if there is an edge to what I’m saying, it could be the caffeine.

'“Does that edge help you?” she asks.

“No,” I say and am served a video featuring a man running into a herd of seals making their way into the ocean on one of the platforms I’ve been using in an attempt to wean myself off of social media.4 The caption is something like, “Two lives were lost that day” and I have to stop watching before the end because it’s too painful to watch this man wrestling a seal for unknown reasons.

Sorry I’m having trouble staying on track—having or giving people “something to talk about” on the one hand, and, all the superficial and/or material/circumstantial distractions5 that make it so difficult to sink into what might actually help us to rebalance. Maybe this newsletter showcases this point, maybe it fails to meet the mark, maybe I will hit send before I overanalyze/overthink. Probably. Thanks for reading, nevertheless. ♡

Eels

I got so hungry on my way to Washington that I nearly fainted (all the flights were late coming in, and I didn’t pack snacks or have any time to purchase food en route) as I boarded the plane to Seattle. A good samaritan handed me a bag of barbecue potato chips that I inhaled on the jetway, shooting crumbs out of my mouth as I exuded gratitude for his forethought. Seeing my still pallid disposition, the passenger I was seated next to held up a bag of donut product. By then, I’d calorized back into some semblance of equilibrium (I was no longer crying, for example) and didn’t need the donuts. This fellow passenger and I, we talked for hours. At one point, she asked what I write about. When I said, “eels” she thought she’d misheard me.

“Eels!” she said, “Well, that’s cute.”

While I do think eels are cute, they are also much more than that.6 I know this for many reasons, including because I spent hours last Monday with eel godfather/professor emeritus Jim McCleave who may have visited the Sargasso Sea more than anyone else on earth looking for their spawning grounds and many more hours dissecting yellow and silver eels last Wednesday with DMR biologist Jason Bartlett and looking at eel otoliths under a microscope.

There has been some discussion amongst myself and my eel colleague, Eli Kao, about starting an eel newsletter—an outlet for our individual and collective eel explorations. Would you be interested in such a thing? Comment below or drop me a line to get the Eel Gazette or what-have-you, should it come to fruition.

Business News

My schedule is fairly full between now and say April (Torchlight mentoring, content writing, a family oral history project, eel documentary work, etc., in case you’re curious) but I’m open to projects after that (and could probably fit some smaller, discrete projects in before then).

(Live footage from my laptop.)

Currents

Allie is baking made-to-order bagels and they are really good.

Made in Frankfort by an excellent baker and human.
Options: plain, salt, garlic and onion (topping), everything, sesame seed
Singles: $3.00 Half Dozen: $12.00 Full Dozen: $20.00

Raffle for Mohamed and Family

My friend Shannon Burns says:

I met Mohamed last May through a group called Makers for Mutual Aid when I was looking for places to donate the proceeds of my Palestine t-shirts. His family was one of a handful of families the organization was in touch with and trying to help. I connected with him because he was a young elementary school teacher who made me think of Jacob. After I donated he reached out to thank me and we started corresponding and became friends. Before I met him, his family home had been bombed, destroying it and killing three of his brothers. The rest of his family, including Mohamed, were injured in the bombing, and they spent the next year trying to heal from those injuries and subsequent ones without adequate medical care. Mohamed was eventually able to evacuate to Oman, but some of his family remained in Gaza, and Mohamed struggled to keep raising money for them and trying to support himself in Oman with the few tutoring jobs he could find. He’s one of the sweetest and most generous people I’ve met, always asking me about whatever nonsense was going on in my life while he was dealing with unfathomable pain. So if you have a few bucks to spare to help him & his family try to rebuild and move forward it would mean a lot.

Here’s the link to donate: https://www.chuffed.org/project/115409-help-the-brais-family-to-survive-the-unimaginable

And, if you’d prefer to enter the raffle for a pair of made-to-order, hand-printed linen pants made by Shannon herself, simply make a donation and send Shannon your receipts—$5/entry (to shannonameliaburns@gmail.com). Open February 4-11, 2025.

Take the Medicine to the White Man: A “Native American Church” without Native Americans

by Sierra Crane Murdoch in Harpers’s Magazine

A beautiful, highly nuanced, compassionate, sensitive yet principled first-person narrative that explores history, resistance, cultural appropriation, restraint, and healing. This story made me want to pick up everything Murdoch has ever written, including her much-anticipated book, Imaginary Brightness (coming out in 2025, I believe). There are some poignant AF lines within the story but keeping them together, in context, is more powerful. Please read.

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

I arrived early at the Seattle airport. I was flying standby so this was necessary but also I had arrived at the airport having read all the books I’d packed and was feeling anxious/thirsty for books. I’d been meaning to pick The Berry Pickers, so I did and I don’t regret it.

Working Families mass call notes - Jan 23, 2025, from adrienne maree brown

A friend passed along these notes from adrienne maree brown, notes from a Working Families Party call. Very well organized/structured, and helpful as a reference/for perspective/to not sink into despair while honoring the real challenges of this moment, which, let us recall, was not created in a vacuum, nor does it exist in one. All hands on deck—and take care of yourself, in the meantime.

FKA twigs - Room of Fools

I like this song because I like it when FKA twigs sings “it feels nice.” It’s an important reminder that we must find things that make us feel nice in these times—and always. She sings this refrain four times—the first time trepidatious, a question; the second, a statement; the third time, referencing the trepidatious question (is it okay for me to feel nice?); and by the fourth time, confidently sinking into how nice it feels for something to feel nice. The fourth time is a charm. Things can and sometimes do feel nice. Remember that.

Thanks for reading!

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