First Among Seconds

There’s a delicate, industrious ticking at my left-hand side. A tiny golden hand advancing second by second around the upturned face of a watch from 1969. My grandfather’s watch. A watch I didn’t know existed before this month, belonging to a man I’d never met, whose personal effects I just traveled 5300 miles to retrieve after 30 years in storage.

The gold and white dial of a Smiths Astral wristwatch.

I’ve always been a sucker for tiny, functional items; things that carry the evidence of daily activity and the particular devotion of the mundane. A monument may dazzle, but it’s the sealed jar from Pompeii that sticks with me after all these years, its lid lifted to reveal the scooped impression of three fingers in white cream.

How many times have I scooped lotion from a jar? Fidgeted with a ring? Buttoned on a coat?

How could I have known that winding this watch would bring it back to life as if no time at all had passed?

First of the Season

Given that they were the standout delight of 2023, I planted wildflowers again for 2024. The frontrunner is still Nemophila menziesii (Baby Blue Eyes), opening its first flower on March 16th. (Last year’s arrived on March 29th.)

A delicate five-petaled flower with blue edges and a white center.

Most of what reseeded this year was Elegant Clarkia. It is out of control. Every patch that held five plants last spring now holds triple the amount of seedlings. The lupins were much-beloved by gophers, so no more of them for now. I sowed a lot of Purple Vetch (with seeds harvested from El Nido Meadow in 2023). They’re currently putting forth tiny tendrils around the agave bed. The local high school’s native plant sale yielded more Narrowleaf Milkweed for the butterflies, Sticky Monkeyflower for under the oaks, Island Snapdragon for the cursed bed out front that gets too much sun. We were liberal with the California Poppies, with varied success.

There’s so much greenery this year that the seedlings often can’t complete, but they’re made for this land. They’ll keep coming back.

One Quick, One Slow

Two lovely pieces of feedback on the blog in very different mediums recently: a tiny, encouraging email from Rob right after my last entry and the sweetest postcard from Piper that arrived in my PO box sometime in June (but given the way life’s been going I didn’t manage to stop by and discover it until well into July).

Maybe it’s because blogging is often a much quieter affair than posting on social media, but I love these little blips and boops of connection. They hit harder than comments and likes and reblogs. They feel more personal. They remind me to reach out and email people (or write them a card!) when their work strikes a chord.

I had cause to do this recently with Ursula Vernon, whose work I’ve been following since I was in middle school. She’s been sharing some very vulnerable comics about dealing with breast cancer and I thought “My god, if not now, when?” It’s been over TWENTY YEARS and I’ve never taken the time to tell this person how much discovering her website and her comics and her delightfully eccentric illustrations meant to me as a weird tween without a lot of artistic friends. It’s an impossible gift when someone’s been a fixed point in your creative community for that long.

It reminds me that even if social media is crumbling around us, people can endure. The impressions we make on one another outlast the silos and the buyouts and the implosions.

But it’s good to come out and say so every once in a while.

“If you don’t believe in god, say ocean.”

If queerness can be understood as a longing, a technology that allows us to glimpse something new that we sense before we can see it, a dowsing rod, a black light, then water might be the catalyst that dissolves our attachment to whatever is keeping us from it, from ourselves.

It’s very hard not to quote the entirety of this essay by J Wortham, which manages to articulate so many angles of my obsession with getting into bodies of water. I wrote a fair bit about my plunge habit when I first moved, but there were many more beyond what I covered. This week it was the frigid Pacific Ocean under a drizzly Santa Barbara sky, then the broad arroyo of the Ventura River, then Thacher Creek in Horn Canyon.

Thacher Creek rushing past sunlit boulders.

It’s been a winter blessed with unusual—almost unprecedented—amounts of rain.

Part of the reality of searching for queer respites is that they are fleeting, ever-evolving, a question without a resolved answer.

Their writing makes me think of Heraclitus.

"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."

Queer time is a sensate way of life, the kind treasured by people who perhaps understand with crackling urgency how circumstances can change in a moment, and the importance of pleasures that even in small doses can sustain you for weeks, months, years after the moment has passed. 

Both times I’ve been at Wayward (a decidedly queer space) I’ve swum more frequently than any other time in my life, and yes: those pleasures have sustained me for the last three years. The daily naked plunges in the lake woke me up after naps and started me off right on foggy mornings; they soothed and refreshed and coaxed and shocked. They gave me a touchstone of what it felt like to be fully embodied, fully held. Given the self-obliterating caregiving role I find myself in now, I’ve needed it.

This total immersion of my body into water, repeatedly, without fear, allowed for a total surrender of the illusion of separation between self and the natural world, the universe, whatever you want to call it. If you don’t believe in god, say ocean. Diving nude into the ocean in broad daylight, without fear of reproach, opened a portal to a higher consciousness. Ordinary, and then extraordinary. To be near the sea is to be humbled by its magnitude, to watch your priorities be reordered to its scale. What are self-consciousness, fear of the future, existential worries, to the ocean?

The last night we were on the island, after the main cohort of retreat attendees had gone, we hiked through the forest and over the cliff to the sea. After warming up by a bonfire on the beach, there was no more reason to wait. Two of us waded out into the freezing black water, stepping gingerly over beds of oyster shells until it was deep enough to paddle. I was shuddering and staring, willing and wishing, just about ready to turn around and admit defeat when I began to see it: the water beneath me erupting in stars, bioluminescence eddying around my limbs, all of it too beautiful to seem real.

Each time I allow myself to be enveloped, something is remembered for me: a place, a feeling, a fluency. I can’t always name it, but it’s too powerful to deny. It’s almost as if the parts of myself that have gone missing are recollected in water. 

The stars that night were glinting, and the bonfire on the shore waited like a beacon, but the brightest shimmer was running down my forearms, spiraling behind my palms, reminding me of everything I could be.

Hello, hello, hello.

Moananuiākea

Hey! The gorgeous double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa and her sister ship Hikianalia are setting off on another circumnavigation!! LOOK AT THIS VOYAGE MAP!!!

A map showing Hōkūleʻa's voyage itinerary.

I’m heartbroken this year’s trip to Juneau falls a month before the launch date, but also so excited to see these upcoming plans. I hope I can catch the vessels when they’re further down the US coast. (If you’ve never heard of Hōkūleʻa before, it’s worth skimming through her history on the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s website.)

Here are some drawings I did back in 2017 when I got to visit Hawai‘i for the first time and fell in love with the history of wayfinding. (Ask me sometime about why Disney’s Moana is basically a true story.)

Three sketches of Polynesian canoes.

Wonders of the Sea

Back at the start of March I uncovered this cookbook in our overstuffed kitchen shelf. It’s incredibly upsetting, even for something designed in the 60s.

A photo of a hand holding a paperback book titled Madame Prunier's Fish Cook Book. There's sickly yellow background color to the text and a large, unappetizing photograph of a sting ray below it.

NOBODY WANTS THAT ON A BOOK ABOUT FOOD.

But the original text, I should mention, is from 1939. And when I cracked it open I was surprised to find that the illustrations were incredibly cool.

A photograph of a yellowed page from a book featuring delicate black and white illustrations of sea creatures.
A photograph of a yellowed page from a book featuring delicate black and white illustrations of sea creatures.

Look at those lines! So stylized! So energetic! And the compositions!

Turns out the interior artist is one Mathurin Méheut (1882-1958), a French painter I’d never heard of before. When I went searching for more of his work, I found a treasure trove. Méheut had spent two years before WWI working with naturalists at the Roscoff marine biology station—a collaboration that resulted in two enormous volumes of gorgeously-depicted marine life.

And, to my immeasurable delight, both of them are available online via RISD’s library.

Small sea grasses and weeds painted in color on a white background.
A delicate painting of kelp and seagrass rendered in color.
A gorgeously detailed illustration of several tiger sharks on toned paper.
A gorgeously detailed illustration of several cuttlefish on toned paper.
Two watercolor paintings of sting rays in yellow and purple.

I love stumbling on illustrative work like this. It feels so modern! There’s a level of stylization that really reminds me of Jemma Salume’s animal studies.

Three illustrations of an iguana in various poses
Three illustrations of an octopus in various poses
Three illustrations of a great blue heron in various poses

I also can’t help thinking about the work of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the father-son team known for creating the most exquisite glass models in human history. Their success lay in capturing the shapes and colors of marine invertebrates at a time when methods of preservation typically left specimens looking like so much indistinguishable mucus.

This octopus? GLASS.

A detailed model of a small orange octopus crafted from glass

This cactus? ALSO GLASS.

A detailed model of a strawberry hedgehog cactus crafted from glass

Unreal. (And well worth a visit if you ever find yourself near the Harvard Museum of Natural History.)

In the process of writing this post, I learned that Leopold fell in love with marine invertebrates in 1853, when the ship carrying him to America was becalmed for two weeks near the Azores. His wife and his father had just died within a few years of each other. The trip was something of an escape.

I think about him, adrift and grieving in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to do but stand on deck in the night and pay attention.

Hopeful, we look out over the darkness of the sea, which is as smooth as a mirror; there emerges all around in various places a flashlike bundle of light beams, as if it is surrounded by thousands of sparks, that form true bundles of fire and of other bright lighting spots, and the seemingly mirrored stars.

Little wonders all around.

Zip Books

Stumbled onto this page on my local library system’s website while looking for a way to request a graphic memoir about care homes and learned about something magical: ZIP BOOKS.

It does my heart good when I yell about library stuff on Twitter and lots of people share the tweet. The Internet being hot for libraries gives me faith in society. Although it’s also rough that the library’s website is so labyrinthine that I had to stumble onto this program by accident. I wish every library had a website as functional and fancy as a startup meditation app.

(I really liked The Library Book by Susan Orlean.)

Haven’t been blogging because my brain is really excited about thinking in images right now and also I can’t seem to muster the follow-through, so this is one of those “done is better than perfect” posts.

Two EXTREMELY Different Phone Lines

Since launching The Right Number in 2020, I’ve become more and more aware of the ways people are using phone lines in creative projects. There’s services like Dialup, where you can connect to strangers for live conversation, and SARK’s Inspiration Line (a formative one for me), but there are two new ones that I caught this week and needed to put next to each other:

A photo of a hand holding a slip of paper torn from a sign with many such slips on the bottom. It's blurry in the background, but says There are things missing in us all. This isn't one of ’em, but maybe it has the shape of ’em. Call 503-928-7008.

My friend Anis, who happens to be the current Poet Laureate of Oregon, is running a phone line this month where you can dial every day to hear a different poet read you one of their poems. It’s lovely.

For poetry: 503-928-7008

A black and white image of a hand making the "call me" sign with pinkie and thumb extended, beside a mouth with its tongue out. The text above reads bureau of telephone fornication

My friend Shing, who happens to be A MENACE (and brilliant creator of the absurd), just launched an existential horror phone sex hotline. You will definitely not be speaking to any live humans if you call, but you will probably shudder and then laugh and then shudder again. Make sure you Press 8 for aftercare!

For horrible bureaucratic phone sex: 760-993-5828