Reading

Current Music: The Smittens, "Burning Streets of Rome"

I'm singing out this poem all the way back home

Tonight being Kittening Day Observed, Hestia was miffed that I would not let her at my olive-and-pepper-tinned sardines, but for the actual twelfth anniversary of Kittening Day, she was fed on lox. A dozen years she has been in our lives, the cat of legend. Her brother grows into irises. I still remember the soft musk under his ears. She lay warm and purring on my feet all afternoon.

Current Music: Quinquis, "Morwreg"

Pa vez o pellaat da vag, ha ma c'hoantaez c'hoazh?

For MerMay,

leecetheartist did me the great honor of using me as a model for a glittering mermaid.

After the hectic bloom of mid-week summer, the weather has crashed back into overcast, rain, and intermittently raw chill. The Bradford pear directly in front of my office window has been hedged around with sawhorses declaring it a threat to public safety and scheduled for removal next week. I was photographing its delicately clustering blossoms just a few weeks ago. It's full of green leaves. It hasn't been antisocial to me.

asakiyume sent me Thao & The Get Down Stay Down's "Temple" (2020).

Current Music: Wilson & Swarbrick, "The Ballad of Jack McLaren"

Take us roaming in the gloaming, your Ross rifle by your side

In other news of media of predictable interest to me, I had no idea that Cannes just premiered a queer romance set in a theatrical troupe on the Western Front of World War I. To this review, yes, concert parties of the trenches could indeed have flutes and clarinets and all manner of professional entertainment on account of the quantity of professional talent behind the lines if not on the front of them. I'm curious about the historical tunes alone. I know much less about Belgian soldiers' songs and sketches than I do about their British or Canadian counterparts. Local arthouses had better come through on this one.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Planting Tomatoes"

You've got to live the life you're fighting for

Thanks to the escalation in their heartbreakingly necessary work of bonding out people kidnapped and imprisoned by ICE and helping with their legal fees and families, the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network has depleted its bond fund in record time since the start of the year. There is no shortage of detainees in our profitably carceral system and no one in need should have more locks across their path. You got a sixpence you want, they are taking donations. It's actually Shavuos at the moment, but it is always a good time to open the door to the stranger.

Current Music: Erase Errata, "How to Tell Yourself from a Television"

I spoke of crimes and of my friends in the same breath

Hestia is sleeping against my knees. Earlier in the night she hopped onto the bed where I was reading, trampled my ankles, and curled herself into a gravitational field of black fur. At dinner she stretched forth her delicate paw and clobbered as her rightful prey a portion of

spatch's haddock. Out of this week's three doctors' appointments, one was objectively encouraging and I am acting toward its future which I cannot yet believe in. I have so many moving parts to keep track of. I feel like eighteen and a half plates in the air. In lieu of room in my life for real convalescence, I am reading a lot in the evenings, accompanied by cat, which is where she came in.

Current Music: Quinquis, "Blaz an holen (feat. Cerys Hafana)"

Neuial a ran dre ar ruzenn

The green salt smell of the sea and the tidal marshes flooded in as soon as I rolled down the windows on Route 133. On impulse and antidote to my surfeit of doctors' appointments this week,

spatch drove me out to Gloucester this afternoon. The clouds were stacked over the water like cyanotypes. We looped the dunes of the Boston Sand and Gravel Company and clattered through the industrial green trusses of the Tobin which currently seem to have been mummy-swaddled in tarps and chopsticks and filled out our summer's alphabet of states during slow traffic on Route 1. The Causeway discovered it had run out of fried smelts right after it had rung me up for an order and offered me fried cod cheeks instead, sweet solid dollops of whitefish which I ate across the picnic table from Rob and his steak-sized baked haddock at Stage Fort Park where local teenagers were sunbathing to music atop Tablet Rock. From the Avalonian granite of Half Moon Beach, we watched a duffel-green trawler chug in past the automated blinks of Eastern Point and Ten Pound Lights, one tower as red-and-white as a buoy, the other black-and-white as the common eiders bobbing across the glaze-blue bands of the waves. We saw cormorants in flight and fishing. We saw gulls balanced like balsa wood on the summering air. I tore my hand on some barnacles and the wind snarled my hair from all directions. When the light started to drain off toward sunset, we left by Route 127 just to see what its coastal views looked like when not obliterated by thunder-sheet rain and meandered somewhat after Manchester-by-the-Sea such that I remember admiring the whale-blue mural of a wave Hokusai-bubbling across the side of the Swampscott Department of Public Works and hoping that Prides Crossing is besieged in June. The neat white crescent of the moon came out in the ink-washed after-sunset and presently we collected ice cream from a slammed CB Scoops. I am not yet done with doctors for the week and this was an even more restoring break than walking by the Charles or North Point Park. My CD of Quinquis' eor (2025) arrived in the mail.

Current Music: Rachel Unthank & The Winterset, "The Greatham Calling On Song"

We have come to dance this dance to please the company

My day was overwhelmingly composed of phone calls and the rest of my week is doctor-intensive, but the mail brought me the original felt-tip-and-acrylic painting which

moon_custafer had done earlier this month of the Morris dancers at their local May Day. It arrived safely from Canada. Friends who make art are the best.

Current Music: Stars, "I Died So I Could Haunt You"

Thousands of ghosts in the daylight

Hestia sniffed my hands all over, but after some proprietary headbutting allowed herself to be petted with insistent slinks of her back and escalating purr. I had met two strange cats this evening at

skygiants and

genarti's.

We did not actually watch one of the several productions of As You Like It in

skygiants' possession, the notional goal of the hangout. We ate a bounty of deli from Mamaleh's—the bagel with chopped liver was successfully foraged despite the ravages of commencement weekend—and got as far as watching a 26-minute stop-motion Twelfth Night with a voice cast to die for, which turned out to be one of the Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992–94) adapted by Leon Garfield which I had been recommended last month. Then we were diverted by talking about books mostly of our childhoods and in the process I learned that prior to launching his nowadays much more famous career as a Nesbit-inspired children's fantasist, Edward Eager was a dramatist and lyricist responsible among other musical comedies for the Offenbach-in-English To Hell with Orpheus. It never seems to have made it to Broadway, but was one-shot premiered in 1953 by the irresistibly named St. John Terrell's Music Circus of Lambertville, NJ. I am captivated by this fact. I was also captivated by the strange cats, although Mina jinked out of any room I entered until very near the end of the evening, when she permitted me to stroke her very soft tuxedo-black head for about ten seconds before she headed for the refuge of the bedroom closet. So long as I didn't tower over him, Mr. Dash was more than content for me to attend to the covert white splash of his belly and his plush void back, although he seemed disappointed that leading me through the kitchen with a succession of soulful looks did not produce my feeding him. I had an out-of-season latke. It was an incredibly nice time.

genarti had made me a cup with the Uffington White Horse.

Current Music: The Clash, "London Calling"

And I live by the river

The trees were ghost-green in the water with the hard white shine of the LEDs, but

spatch photographed me in the stoplight.

WERS came out with the menacingly catchy drive of the Clash's "London Calling" (1979) while I was running an errand and it felt just a little unnecessarily Ballardian. Nothing else has happened to me particularly, but reading any kind of news feels like choking on the future. I can remember not being this sick, this poor, this pressed, which differentiates me not at all from most of the people I know. The exhaustion feels unreal and the last ten years like a sociological demonstration in the capacity of things always to be worse.

Current Music: Hen Ogledd, "Amser a ddengys"

Dyna oedd ddoe a dyma yw heddiw

The sun came out just in time to set and I caught a handful of pictures in its gold flare of light, mostly lilacs and shadows.

( Dyna oedd yr awel, hwn yw y corwynt. )

I baked cornbread tonight with dinner, which I may not have done for a year. I had wanted some for weeks. Any time things could get easier, just for the hell of it.

Current Music: Pylon, "Boom Boom"

What could be better? When will we know?

Because I had to give blood at a frankly stupid hour of the morning, afterward I took

spatch to Mike & Patty's. He likes breakfast sandwiches and my mother had heard a rave of theirs on the radio. I do not like breakfast sandwiches. It's mostly because I don't like fried eggs, or even scrambled eggs unless I make them myself. Mei Mei got around my aversion by wrapping their oozily fried eggs in scallion pancakes and pesto, but for years the Double Awesome was alone of its kind and I tended to order its ham-based cousin, the Porco Rosso, when I could. I am still not designed for the majority of American breakfast foods, but it turns out that if the egg is fried hard enough and layered into a Reuben-adjacent mound of pastrami, cheddar, and a slightly mustardier relative of fry sauce on a griddled English muffin, it does count as real food by me. Rob reports favorably on the slyly named McLustin', which did not obliterate its traditional stack of fried egg, bacon, American cheese, and hash brown with its tongue-nipping sriracha ketchup. We ate while watching a swan chase a Canada goose across a reservoir like a majestically petty pocket battleship. The latest episode of Widow's Bay (2026–) scored its local points with a background issue of Agni such as fetch up secondhand anywhere within reading distance of Boston University. I picked up several issues that way myself.

Current Music: Quinquis, "Dec'h"

Ne 'z in ket da gorolliñ

After more than seven months out of work, the degree to which I can afford anything above the bottom rung of Maslow has become truly minimal, but as soon as I discovered Quinquis' eor (2025), a shape-shiftingly electronic, primarily Breton-language album of mermaids and the sea, I leapt for it like it was mackerel. I heard first the all-night love-churn of "Morwreg" (2024), but the irresistible drag sirens of "Dec'h" (2025) sealed the deal.

The copy of Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld's Duck! Rabbit! (2009) which I sent my godchild for his first solstice was familially referred to for years as Baby's First Wittgenstein. I have no idea what Wittgenstein would have made of this cartoon, but I'm impressed.

I am not sure that I am much more than physically extant at the minute. I am clearing the refrigerator and the countertops. I am absorbing as much sunlight as I sleeplessly can. Yesterday kicked off with a doctor's appointment that was too early in the morning to be as unhelpful as it was and only dropped the bar from there, so this afternoon I made sure to secure a half-dozen donuts from the reliable Lyndell's and eat a jam-filled one as soon as I had finished walking home. The neighborhood smelled like alternating drifts of lilac and mulch. I have had the same headache since the weekend and am hoping it is related to the sexing of the trees. The nine o'clock advent of leafblowers to our block was inhumane.