What do they say about imitation and flattery? The best tip you’ll receive today is to follow Anne’s Ishii’s substack. The best emails I have received each day this past month were her daily love letters. It has allowed me to reflect on my own writing practice, how often I post, and what prevents me from saying more to you. I have always also thought of my writing as being in conversation with you, but also with the work I am reading, the writers I love1. I wouldn’t mind it if you were also in conversation with me.
To learn more about all of this, I have decided to also do a daily writing practice for 1 month, starting today. Well I had it all calendared to begin yesterday, but after a successful, bath, dinner, and game of Spit, I just layed down on the bed, and didn’t really get back up to write to you. Once I lay down, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next. I always plan to rest for 20 minutes or so, but last night nothing could get me up. Let’s keep it real, most nights when my kids are with me I lay down with them, and next thing you know I wake up between 4 and 6 AM in my outfit from the day before, dry mouth, feeling like I’ve failed adulthood by virtue of failing my nighttime headcare routine (which includes the teeth and face). Sometimes I use laying down to deal with one of my children’s tantrums, I just wait and let them work it out. Throw the odd chair or slipper around and settle down. They eventually went to bed successfully in their own bed. They had shit to work out, I let them, because interfering in the moment of eruption often doesn’t help. It doesn’t help me either. Some shit is just for them. I have little to do with it.
Maybe that’s how we will always be? Needing space and time to work out the stuff that is just for us?
Anwyay. What will I be doing each day for the next month here? Yes! This is actually a great question. I often find one of the things that prevents me from writing more frequently, is an obsession with the form of this goddamn essay/substack/place you find me. This idea that you have a beginning, middle and an emotional end that binds it all together. So the way my brain works, constantly turning over idea after idea all day long, feels like it needs more time to mull over one concept before it’s ready to show to you. That’s what I’ve typically done. Because I’ve thought that I needed to be more focused for you.
But I think you might be missing out on another thing. The daily antics of my insides. It’s a wild ride in here. But honestly I prefer it to most other things.
Do you ever think about space? There is the design aesthetic version of space. Anne’s last substack introduced me to Kenya Hara and his book: Designing Design, where “he impresses upon the reader the importance of ‘emptiness’ in both the visual and philosophical traditions of Japan and its application to design, made visible by means of numerous examples from his own work.”
I think if you think about design on any level, this concept of space is not new. You see it all the time in Instagram accounts, home decor, and public space design.
I’ve been thinking about the value of space in our intimate spaces, how to cultivate it, what happens when we don’t create enough of it. Why without fail, still my “ideal” LOML2 prototype is one in which I am creatively, sexually, spatially all congealed up with my lover. But also we are allowing each other to live completely separate lives at the same time. Is that even possible? Is it only possible with space built in? A sort of not knowing what that person is even doing? A detaching them from the part of our inner selves that gets mixed up in how I treat myself. A separating of them from the things I have always needed to do for myself. A space that reminds me that we will all die by ourselves in the very end.
Yes! I’m also a death worker, so death will be woven throughout.
Also:
I saw some men foraging in Fort Greene park, for ginkgo, and it took me on a ginkgo path. This image and the below text were found on this Tumblr:
“Old ginkgo tree in 古观音禅寺Gu Guanyin Temple, Zhongnan Mountains, Xi’an. The temple was built in Tang dynasty in 628, with more than 1,400 years history. It’s said this ginkgo tree is planted by Li Shimin, Emperor Taizong himself.”
I found this on the interweb when googling the foraging of ginkgo: “Ginkgo nuts should only be eaten cooked, not raw. Lazy Forager's Tip: Wait until ginkgo fruit has been on the ground for a few months, then harvest the seeds once the stinky flesh has been worn away by wind and time. It's not unusual to find naked seeds in February or March, still on the ground under the trees.”
The golden tree that I love near my house, I just realized is also a ginkgo.
It’s really nice when you finally realize what your home aesthetic is and just lean into it. For me it’s all plants and rugs. Mostly white walls other than books. I like seeing things on the wall, but I also don’t mind the space. Most days I wake up really glad for this view:
I am really enjoying the show Sex Education. Here’s a clip for you I put on Youtube, hopefully it all worked. It’s apparently hard to embed videos on this thing.
But if I’m keeping it 100, sometimes I also find myself writing to humans I intensely disagree with. What is it about those we love and those we low key despise, and the amount of emotional space they take up? We assume it is always completely separated in our hearts, the places these two sets of people take up. But sometimes do those spaces get mixed up? Do I get turned on in the same brain areas by these two completely opposite energies? Do things get mixed up in here? Anyway…
Love of my life