On Moving Books, Missing Out, Prosody, Observing Nature, and Lollies
The fifth edition of my Substack missives.
Should I start writing an intro and outro on these posts? Editions? Missives? Are they too abrupt, too jarring, too much? I am still working out what this is and where I exist within it. How frequently does anyone want to hear from me anyways? That’s what I like about Substack I guess, the emails feel immediate but the website feels archival. I needed a place to talk about what is going on now–but also what has already happened, what will come to be, and what will never occur. Plus, I had to stop having all of these one-sided conversations with my dog, and thus these impetuous editions occurred. Plus Plus, I found out that my #1 Favourite Author George Saunders has one called Story Club, so exciting I even paid for it.
On Moving Books
I've moved four times in the last four and a half years, once internationally, and the overwhelming feeling I got out of that repetitive process is this: I have a lot of stuff, mostly books. Now this is in no way a bad thing, I am extremely proud of my book collection and I have been keeping tomes since I was a wee child. These books have already been on many moves through my life alongside me. But this last move has led to my collection becoming very disorganised, I had professional unpackers help me put them away across two rooms in our house, and they put them wherever there was space.
I have thousands and thousands of books. It's a flex. I love them en masse and as individuals, many of them dog-eared and covered in Post-It's pointing out my favourite parts. I've always revered books but been hard on them, I'm not afraid to write in them and I love finding the writing of others in second-hand books. They are precious to me but I also leave them in straining stacks and errant piles. They are lived in books, and to me, they are alive.
I've collected them from trash cans and free piles, thrift stores and bins, and inadvertently stolen them from friends. I've spent hours searching the spines in bookstores and op shops, head tilted on a hinge to reorient towards the titles.
My books are currently in a state of disarray, but the mental library I tend to remembers each title. So when the need arises for a particular book, I have to hunt for it like a detective, trying to recall the colour of the cover, the typeface on the spine. It's not that different from browsing in a thrift store, noggin askew, hands eager to find my prize.
Before making the move from rural Oregon to Melbourne, Australia, I took photographs of all of my books on their shelves so that I could begin a database of all of my books, in an attempt to keep myself from accidentally buying something I already have. But I've been struggling the past few weeks with ChatGPT trying to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to turn these images into text I can actually work with.
ChatGPT is able to pull some of the titles and authors from the spines, but then it gets confused and goes on to hallucinate titles and authors that I do not have. So if you know a better way to do OCR on a batch of 110 photos of books, please let me know. I am aiming for a spreadsheet that will allow me to work with the data.
On Missing Out
Rachel sent me this great essay by Jessica Slice called, "I can't go everywhere my daughter goes - and it's heartbreaking." It hits home.
"Personally, I am always wrestling with safety. I live in a body that is proof that bodies are fragile. For disabled parents in wheelchairs or on crutches, leaving the house brings risk. We cannot, despite our deepest desires, run after our kids. We cannot lift a car in a feat of superhuman strength. We cannot dive into the ocean to snatch our grade-schooler from a riptide. But we want to have big lives."
I struggle with this in the same way that Jessica does, and it has taken me a year to even admit that I am disabled, and four and a half years of dealing with constant pain wasn't even enough to bring me there. I had to have the affronting experience of being handed a mobility aid to get things to really sink in. Though I do think that if it came to it I could lift a car with superhuman strength if my children were involved.
I've been left out of countless things since contracting this invisible neurological disease that has completely upended my entire life. Five years ago, my ex-husband and I were running a 70-acre farm in the middle of nowhere together with over 100 animals and two children under 2 years old. I didn't exercise because I worked, and the work was hard and intense. It was the most satisfying time in my life.
I felt, for the first time maybe in my life, fully in my body. I was growing my own food, including slaughter of our own lambs and cattle and vegetables grown from tiny seeds, and I had just done a miracle twice with my own body, creating two perfect little people who needed me. I was strong; I hiked miles each day just operating the farm, I mowed for hours on my tractor, I fed another human from my breast. And then suddenly, while in hotel quarantine in Sydney entering the country to live here, a horrible pain arose in my foot, so severe that I could not put my foot in the running water of the shower. And then it never went away, and my life changed entirely.
I was struck by the conclusion of Jessica's essay especially.
"What makes this manic rejection of our mortality even more fraught is that, once we become parents, we must also find a way to delude ourselves that our kids are indestructible. It is intolerable to think about the reality that our kids will be hurt, physically and emotionally. We buy into the myth of safety, as we attempt to create a force field of invincibility around our family so that we can stay safe and happy forever.
Instead of worrying about safety when we see a baby riding on their parent’s wheelchair, we should consider how we can create more spaces where wheelchair users are welcome. The picture disabled parents paint while in public with our kids is beautiful and offers permission. We are showing that there are countless ways to have bodies and minds and that it’s OK to cross the border of what’s expected. We are not reminders of death – we are reminders of how full life can be."
I do not particularly care about the state of my own body, the pain is horrible but the true cost of my disability is what I am missing out on, the parks I cannot visit, the zoo I cannot walk through, the aquarium full of stairs. The moments with my children where I can be there for them, not just as a mom who wants to enjoy their fun, but as their protector. I'm already a paranoid helicopter mom, but my disability amplifies this exponentially. What-if's fill up my mind every moment I am away from them.
It's no longer FOMO, the fear is real and I am simply Missing Out. I'm already forced to share my time with the children 50%, so I have half as much life with them as what I would like, and then on top of that there are all the constraints that my disability enforces–time to rest, pain medications, waiting for the meds to kick in, waiting for them to wear off, not being able to drive my car anymore, etc.
Slice's excerpt here is from a larger book that I look forward to reading. I don't expect this missing out to go away anytime soon, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if it continued to get worse over time. But it helps to realise that I am not the only one going through this awful experience of being alienated by their own body. It helps to know that my children are so incredibly thoughtful and compassionate by nature, and have now lived experience of a disability that will be with them through their entire lives. If nothing else, together we are learning how to live in the world and with each other, and asking my body to come along as it can.
On Prosody
Prosody is defined as "1. the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry. 2. the patterns of stress and intonation in a language." It's a lovely word that I've only just learned somehow from my therapist, who is possibly a saint. More on that another time.
It came up in my autism diagnosis process as something that I potentially lack, we were completing the first section of the DSM autism qualifications and talking about tone of voice and expressed emotion. I've been told my whole life in different contexts that I am "TOO EMOTIONAL," for whom, I am not really sure. In response to this, I have developed a flat affect that reads to some who do not know me as angry, which is hilarious to me personally because I am not a very angry person. That's just my face, guys!
I am fascinated by voices. My good friend Britt has the best male voice on the planet, in my opinion, followed closely by my hero Sir David Attenborough. I can recognise a voice quite quickly, whereas I have face blindness and couldn't pick anyone other than my children out of a lineup. I used to know when my mom was coming to pick me up from daycare by the sound of her keys and her faint hello at the entry.
I can still hear the sounds of my friend Rachael Jensen's voice as she read her poetry aloud in my head. Now there was prosody. She read things with her whole being, and she sang things with her whole heart. Nearly everything she said felt like poetry, and certainly everything she wrote. Her voice will be the one that reads poetry to me in my head, hanging out with the voice in my head for all eternity.
I used ChatGPT to transcribe Rachael’s poetry chapbook, called FREE JUNK, yesterday. I’d like to include one of her shorter poems here. Please contact me if you would like a PDF copy of the book.
Observing Nature
Crouched, I search through my purse in the dirt.
Suddenly, my ground is alive with worms
and I think of my cat resting on my stomach,
how when I writhe beneath his weight he feels me,
his ground, become suddenly unstable. Yet he remains
in rest: dumb, defiant, untroubled. I decide to be like him
right now, and as I am indifferent to worms, I just observe
their bodies writhing with disturbing fluidity, pulling in
and out of the soil like loogies sucked back through lips.
I can’t tell how many there are, or how long their bodies;
perhaps it's just one, freaky worm like a sea snake weaving
through waves. And then an unbidden image—
they're decomposing a body beneath me—and I fall back,
head hitting cement planter, where above, I see an epaulet
of asters crowning the corner, and laying on the sidewalk
my mind feels clean, like a glass of water;
my blood feels warm, like a cat; and my body feels,
not dead.On Lollies
Since moving to Australia, I've not developed any kind of cute accent, like my children are beginning to, but I have picked up a few cute words and phrases that help me fit in a little. The main linguistic shift is from Candy to Lollies. I still slip and call it candy from time to time, but predominantly, we call them Lollies, and it's the #1 request I hear about foodstuffs from my kids. One lolly will get you really far with a six and five year old. Gotta brush out Fern's tangled mess of hair? One lolly. Gotta finish those veggies? A lolly is promised.
As you may know about me, if you know me at all, is that I love candy...sorry....lollies. I have a particular affinity for anything fruity and gummy, or a good old-fashioned lollipop. My hunger for candy has waned some in the last decade but it still pops up on the regular, I have a bit of an oral fixation and briefly revisited my life as a Smoker during the pandemic out of sheer stress which was gross.
We just refilled the lolly cabinet at home yesterday with our weird Aussie candies and I was thinking about all of the candies that I love and miss from America. There's a little family market here that sells me root beer and cream sodas that also carries some American candy and cereals. There's also a great store called USA Foods here that I've been to once that had Bubbie's Pickles! And Stovetop Stuffing! But they are constantly out of stock of things and their website makes this a very frustrating ordering process so I don't frequent it as much as I would like.
Even though I am not much of a chocolate person these are the treats I miss most: a Milky Way and a Butterfinger and a Rolo and honestly, Hershey's Kisses. I never said I was a fancy chocolate person, I'm much more of a garbage choco girl. Thank God we can get Twix here. But the rest of the chocolate universe here is all Cadbury/Lindt which is a little fancy for my taste.
So think of me next time you pick up a guilty pleasure at the gas station, sorry...petrol station, my American friends. I've got my Haribo, I import bulk Pez from Amazon when I can find them, and I've got a monster tin of Chupachups. But I'll be fantasising about brushing Butterfinger detritus off my chest and onto the bed from over here. I’m going to try and dig up a piece of writing I did on Snacks a number of years ago if I can find the edition of YA5 (yet another defunct publication I was proud to be a part of, created by Sam Korman) that contains it.
and On
I’ve written over 5000 words in the past 24 hours, half about the death and my mother and the rest of it here. ChatGPT tells me this is a good average to complete something in just a couple of months. So anyone who knew my mother, I will soon be calling on you to tell me your remembrances while I begin arranging my stories into some semblance of a book. All of the writing that I am doing here is informing the writing that I am attempting in this Novel? Memoir? Thing! about my mom. So thank you for reading and following along, I am deeply humbled to have an audience, small or large.
I would say I'm a 70% garbage choco girl myself. Love you, KSouth.