y'all don’t let any immediate family die while you have to deal with it because this shit has been almost 2 years and I'm STILL not done dealing with probate and I have no idea what I'm doing at any point in time

11/29/2023

At the End of the Tunnel is More Tunnel: Week 3 of the November Writing Challenge

I was spending Thanksgiving last week with my family, and, for our last meal together, we went out to a Scandinavian restaurant. For immersive ambience, the TVs in the place played footage of trains going through the Icelandic countryside. For a significant portion of the meal the train was making its way through the inside of a mountain, rolling the frightening dark of a tunnel, lit by intermittent overhead track lights. When it finally cleared the tunnel, my mom and sister and I celebrated a return of the sky. Then, my mother gestured with her beer. “Oh look another tunnel.”

That’s what it’s felt like lately. I had a whole other blog post planned, but here we are. I won’t mince words with you all. I'm making an effort here to write with no filter, with no plan beyond a simple topic: Seasonal Affective Disorder is kicking my ass. I shouldn't be surprised, since it's managed to do this every year since I was a child, but here I am. Defenseless. Worse still is that the dark seems to know it. With each passing year the winters feel longer and meaner, their ribbons of ink-black shadows forming into teeth. I'm losing energy as the black bat of Winter bites through my neck and bleeds me out. Poems are coming slower, I'm behind on this putting this blog post up, and all my efforts have the distinct musical quality of mining from a tapped vein. This blog post is a full six days late due to Thanksgiving and travel stress, and the poems are actively clotting.

This is most often where I stumble during a writing challenge like this. It's the home stretch where everything kind of slows down, like I burned too much fuel on liftoff and, without the necessary momentum when I break orbit, I just drift off completely. I can feel myself drifting. But more than that, more than the work, I can feel my body retreating into itself, conserving itself, pulling away from socializing and other activities that restore me.

But we go on, don't we? We weather this for what it is: weather. It comes and bellows and roars and blows like the lowest moment of King Lear. It singes my white head, it drenches my steeples and drowns my cocks and all its germains spill at once. But I have my small shelter. I have my small fool. I have my Tom O' Bedlam. Let me introduce them.

One thing I've been doing with my dwindling energy is reading. When the writing won't come, there is always the looming stack of books I've yet to read. Currently, I'm chipping away at Robert Doran's translation of The Lives of Simeon Stylites a collection of three different accounts of the the early Christian mystic's life and ministry. The man lived most of his life, if the accounts are to be believed, atop a sixty foot tall pillar with no shelter or support. It comforts me the way faith and frenzy twirl around each other like a binary star. With distance they appear to be the same light winking in and out. For someone who loves body horror and the flesh and Christian aesthetics, why I had never thought to look into the saints is a cosmic oversight. It took my girlfriend (who has a fucking tattoo of Simeon) telling me about him for me to chase down the accounts. It's been soothing. Atop his pillar, performing his self-imposed penance for the sin of his existence, Simeon gave counsel, offered sermons, blessed crops and warded off savage animals with the help of his god. As I trudge through this last gasp of my self-imposed writing challenge, I can only hope to capture that same grace.

Too offset this onslaught of occasionally dry religious text, I've got a healthy arsenal of poetry to catch up on, beginning with Sean Patrick Mulroy's fearless collection Hated for the Gods. Equal parts a queer oral history and an intimate crawling tour of intimacy. Mulroy's work is a constant subversion of expectation. In deftly switching from the current to the primordial to more recent history, the book seems to assert that queerness and the rage that ripples off the page like heat waves are eternal. We have always been here. While still figuring out my gender and for my adolescence, I identified as a bisexual man, but quietly. While the mainstream perception of queer media is loud, brazen, and unapologetic, Mulroy's work leaves room for quieter moments and voices too. It's a fascinating book that demonstrates the depth and scope of a topic that a lot of culture tries to reduce to one note.

And, because I simply cannot be stopped, I'm reading Natalie Tatou's new collection S.M.D.H. Tatou writes like the the orderlies are on their way. Every story in the collection scrambles and scrapes together its contraband and crams them onto the page. Incest, violence, sexual taboos, and more all come to abject life in Tatou's writing, their radioactivity tempered by an attentive hunger to be understood. The book howls for connection and understanding, clawing at the my eyes so that I may better see its truths. I'm not very far into the book, weighed as it is against my mystic and Mulroy's poetry, but I can't help but feel grateful that such an electrifying book won't be over too quickly.

I'm still keeping more or less apace with my work, maybe a day or two behind at the time of writing, and I can feel the ugly dark behind me like a narcotic tentacle, but I'll do my best to finish what I've begun.

Until then, I'm reading. Until then, I'm writing. Until then, I am always doing my exhausted and darkening best. I can see the end of the tunnel…I can look forward to seeing the sky, at least until the next one.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B