brassica

Cymru the Christmas Caterpillar has died. Weeks ago! He emerged Christmas Eve Eve and I got him some broccoli rabe to snack on. I found his cousin hanging around the houseplants a few days later, and he also spent his brief life in a cage. All for my own meddling. I wrote them and Jeffrey a letter about the woes of occupying space and prayed to Golgi to wrap it in love.

I went back to New York for Christmas itself and received a little family history as a gift. That I've managed to miss the impact of my Irish heritage on my life seemed like a personal fault at first, then I discovered Plastic Paddy. I rejected my connection to New York having not been raised there then tapped into it watching North by Northwest. Five or six generations and a few thousand miles removed from Ireland, I thought "struggled through some of Ulysses" was as Irish as I was and couldn't accept the identity. Or maybe I could but didn't because it would mean having to do the work of exploring what that meant beyond "the culture around me seems inexplicably familiar". And if I did that for New York and Ireland then I'd have to do it for Japan and Wales, back through the indigenous cultures there and through to Africa and the depths of the Pacific, when part of me would really like to exist with some degree of naivete of the patterns around me.

It rained and snowed last month. I saw a reel that told me to ask ChatGPT to enumerate a table of people's frustrations, desires, and fears as a marketing shortcut, then another that explained the same process using the same language. My frustration is when it snows a little more after I've already shoveled, my desire is for narrower roads shaped by the marks left in the snow, and my fear is that winter will never end. My disappointment is that we've changed the climate to power intelligent machines to paint pictures of weird hands while pre-destination and luck continue to justify suffering.

I spent most of January eating. I cooked and baked and adapted heritage recipes. I thought about legacy and the planner and how robotic and inhuman it's felt to desire to encode myself in one declarative expression. But that can't be much different than a painter's craving for a self portrait or the aims of all the great grandmas aching to record recipes, testimonies, and family stories. So in the kitchen emerged four characters. The tall red headed woman is the Tree Witch, god of identity, particular about the precision of the recipe. Beside her is the Cousin of Chaos, who's never owned a measuring cup and instead samples and judges along the way insisting that the meal is what it is in whatever fluid shape it exists. Between them is the moderating Force of Ancestry, affirming their duality. And then there is The Human, shortest of them all, the writer in the room who'd like to believe that the thermometer doesn't alter the temperature of the body.

I saw Poor Things a couple weeks ago and spent time with the dead and with the young. Greek Man speaks in mythology, and the feral, queer, and closeted hear familiar sounds from a safe distance. If Bella is at home in the lab then I'm at home in the kitchen, the garden, Emacs. I stopped by Keystone on their last day in Montgomeryville on the way home from a memorial service and grabbed a porter kit that I brewed in anticipation of the spring. The Farmers Market left the Madison lot, which used to be a mill and is now apartments. The market manager has passed and the market moves on. You claimed they're both right, I said, but that doesn't make sense. I know, she said, we're in conflict.

January 2024 became the first month without publishing since this experiment began. I wrote when I could but I felt a depression pressing down on me. Everything was gray and heavy. All I could do was eat and sleep until I couldn't anymore. The doctor said I was dehydrated then he said I was eating for two billion. Now I'm back down to two hundred or so and energized again. One of the storms loosened a fence panel so I went out for repairs. Somebody once said the posts were fine so the rails and pickets have become a patchwork. Winter is dark but I feel light halfway between the solstice and equinox, strengthened by the sisters.