She wants her cup of stars

Zoom Book Launch Dates & Patreon Updates

My Facebook account has been permanently deleted for over six weeks now, and I haven’t used the site at all in over two months! It feels like an eternity, especially considering everything I’ve done during that time and all the habits I’ve developed to take its place. I fell into this sort of natural rhythm as soon as the account was deactivated where I sat down, wrote a list of all the things I wanted to do for the rest of the year (as well as more long-term goals) and slowly folded each desire into my daily routine until now they are an effortless part of each day. These habits involve: morning pages, a set work-from-home schedule for my day job, exercise, meals, and time for memoir-writing, reading, spiritual practice, and studying herbalism. With all the upheaval the pandemic has brought to our lives, I have found it helpful to structure my days as much as possible so that I don’t become listless and cynical.

I miss some of the friends whose social-media presence is mostly Facebook-based, but I knew that would be the trade-off in stepping away from something that has been a hindrance to my writing and my mental health for quite some time. And now a bunch of those friends have become email and snail-mail buddies, so I think overall it’s a win.

One of the benefits of no longer being on Facebook is that the writing energy I extinguished in that space is now going toward my memoir, journal, and things like this newsletter and my Patreon account (I just sent out my first batch of erasurescopes—horoscopes in erasure form) which were incredibly fun to make.

In addition to generating new material, I’ve had quite a time going through old journals and lifting out passages that can be edited and incorporated into the memoir. Things I thought I’d have to write from memory that I had already recorded in realtime. My favorite thing about revisiting these old notebooks is being confronted with memories of events I no longer recall, and remembering how I used to feel when those events were happening. I not only have a memory returned to me but an entire landscape of emotion as well.

I sometimes think I’ll be the old guy in Krapp’s Last Tape, sitting in a room filled with my own diaries on my 69th birthday, rolling my eyes and laughing at myself and sighing and getting misty-eyed and wondering about all the lives I didn’t live and hopefully not slipping on a banana peel and falling on my face.

ERASE THE PATRIARCHY ZOOM LAUNCH DATES

Erase the Patriarchy will officially launch with two Zoom events on the following dates with the following readers:

Tuesday, September 15 @ 5PM PT
Katie Manning, Joanna Valente, Abigail Zimmer, Caitlin Cowan, Tracy Gold, Tara Burke, Tyler Vile, Adra Raine, Ki Russell, Zann Carter, Kitty Stryker, Melinda Smith, and Caren Florance

Sunday, September 20 @ Noon PT
Marcella Prokop, Tara Campbell, Sarah Lyn Rogers, Rachel Neff, Krista Cox, Andrea Avery, Maggie Rosenau, Laura Desiano, Addie Tsai, and Kegan Gaspar

Readers will show their erasures via Screen Share and talk about their process/inspiration for the work. We hope you can join us!

Keep this link handy to join the events when they go live: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84106328517

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READ / WATCH / LISTEN

I was listening to an 80s synthpop/New Wave playlist yesterday and this song by Book of Love came on, and it reminded me of this band’s existence. Now I can’t stop listening. Book of Love is known as one of the first bands ever to discuss the AIDS epidemic in the lyrics of “Pretty Girls and Pretty Boys:”

strangers in the night exchanging glances, but sex is dangerous, I don't take my chances...

The Haunting of Hill House. My Shirley Jackson kick continues with this spooky classic. Eleanor has just arrived at the rotting mansion, and already this book is a million times better than the 1999 film adaptation I grew up with. My favorite passage so far concerns an encounter at a diner with a little girl and her family. The girl complains that she cannot drink her milk because it’s not from her “cup of stars,” the cup she drinks from at home that has stars on the inside. Her mother urges her to drink anyway:

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.

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