THE FEELING: Halfway Between Toronto and Detroit

Sex and death, mostly

Pals,

Last weekend I visited my dad in my hometown, which included a visit to the local art museum, where I got my dad this t-shirt. (Internet etiquette means I should credit James Kingsley for designing it, but I am also annoyingly compelled to point out that we always said “Halfway between Detroit and Toronto,” growing up, and I wonder if this change in order reflects something about perceived power or excitement… Or maybe something about baseball?) (I’m more of an “Eat ‘em up, Tigers” kind of girl because Toronto sports fans on the whole are just too fucking much.) There’s no way my dad will be familiar (or overfamiliar) with this particular sans-serif statement-shirt style, so it’s a clean win.

The museum is cute. Steve Martin went there once to view the Lawren Harris paintings, which was huge news for us. Strawberry made a butterfly “bug mobile” at the Imagination Station. Like the pretty part of downtown, where it’s located, the museum was nicely cared for and mostly empty.

Anyway. Growing up in London, Ontario — which in addition to being halfway between here and there, was also once the serial-killer capital of the world, and is an important test market for things like laundry detergent and snack food and cell-phone services, and a strange mix of big, old money and no money at all — was ideal, in that it was so boring and safe and fun and shitty and pointless and mine that I was free to spend all of my teen energy getting ready to leave.

It’s emotionally and real-estate-ishly risky to visit your widowed dad (widowered? No…) in a pretty, quiet, grassy, cheap city on a gorgeous spring weekend with your preschooler, where the many fields and parks around the edges of town, where I grew up and where my dad still lives, remain as idyllic and available for daydreaming and projection and Frisbee and fucking around as they ever were. I don’t actually want to move back — fortunately, I know that I’d regret it and can easily short-circuit my own romanticism — but I can see my life unlived, which is in fact the life lived by 90-95% of my high-school graduating class (why not stay where you are, on an almost guaranteed pathway to suburban comfort and familiarity, with real cities two hours away in either direction?) about as clearly as I can see the actual-life-me that left. I mean, I know other kids hated it, too, but still stayed or came back. And I envy the time that my London sister’s kids got and get with my perfect dad. (Strawberry loves London, and cried ((rare!)) when we left. Why are you upset? I asked. “Because I love London!” What do you love about London? I asked. “Grandpaaaaa!”)

It’s just not a real place to live, if you need to be able to walk to an independent bookstore, and see a good, small movie the day it opens, and experience “downtown” most days, and if you want to assume that most people you encounter will agree on some basic principles of mutuality and civilization. So, fine. But the nostalgic work it does on me is total, particularly those fields and parks, many of which I zipped past in my mom’s car last weekend, just like I did in high school.

Back then, I learned and practiced every fantasy I would come to embody and know, and the ones I have yet to, via books and boys and music and talking, before I turned 19. I dreamed them out! And now that I’m so firmly in my adult life, not jaded but… over-experienced, I guess, over-served on life stuff, and so deeply inside of my little routines and habits, I’m just as excited by all that space and what it still offers, the simultaneous stillness and expansiveness. (Strawberry loves not only my dad but the “quiet and trees” of London, she says, and honestly, I’m probably giving her a fundamentally worse childhood, on the dirty and hyperdense streets of the east side of Toronto, right? Yes? No?)

To get to the museum I had to drive through a part of town I never go when I visit, there’s just no reason to, but used to bonk around a lot, very “Fuck School Get Drunk” (which is some graffiti I saw once, at a school). Driving past the street where I hooked up with the most beautiful guy I had ever seen, past the city park where I read Nexus, Sexus and Plexus, past the riverbank where I stayed out until four a.m. for the first time, past the [REDACTED] where [REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED]… It was amusing and sweet, and weirdly/unexpectedly just completely alive to me.

There is probably nothing to do, to solve, with the pain of nostalgia. There is definitely nothing to do with the pain of losing your “super-youth” except live with it, I don’t think, and I’ve been studying the ways that older people move through and process their lives since I was a gummy embryo. (Until I stop feeling young, I’m going to distinguish only between early, explosively new adulthood, and then the long stretch of this, of still feeling energized and part of things and fundamentally interested; I’m hoping the next phase is just, like, a sudden, effortless pop of being into gardening supplies and more advanced meditation and that’s it.) But I do think that these waves of nostalgia and desire are mostly information that should be captured and used. Like: the sunlit acres of grass — surely blanketed with weed killer — mean something to me; reading and lolling, phoneless and plansless, gives me something that nothing else does, so physical space and not just timespace has to be part of my life idea, my plan.

FROM THE MGMT

I spelled “Machiavellian” wrong in the last newsletter. (Me: “I spelled ‘Machiavellian’ wrong?!") I think I did two cs, one l, but I don’t remember and I already fixed it and I don’t want to check. What the shit is this? I have a degree in political science (which was a real choice for someone who, see above, once dropped out of high school to do yoga and be depressed), and had the freak-mode version of Discourses on Livy (with the prominent horse butt) strewn, bent and busted, somewhere in my dorm room and various student housing-y bedrooms all four years. (I also have another degree in American Studies, which doesn’t sound like anything but was politics, history and English, and in practice was mostly about studying the production of “cool” in media and marketing, and about how girls and women created the voice and affect of the internet, so just my kind of thing. Academia is where you get to make it up to whatever degree you can be exactly right.) Anyway SORRY.

STRAWBERRY PATCH

Finally, finally, finally: four years into her life of unimaginable privilege and mini-pancakes, Strawberry has moved out of my room. (“Our” room, I guess, but a presumptuous, limiting, conversational TKO-style “we” or “our” without mention of the other person involved always rusts my tongue, when I say it, and makes an attractive person seem like a huge loser, when they do, but anyway: my room, our room, the master or primary bedroom, the Big Bedroom, is just ours again.)

Babies are supposed to share a room with their parent or parents for like six months to a year, because it decreases the risk of SIDS (and you know me, I did it all: bought the Snoo, had a fan blasting twenty-four-sevs, had the sus Owlet monitoring sock on until she busted out, all of it). I also just liked her in there, and didn’t mind reading with a flashlight under the duvet while she slept. I liked when she woke me (“us”) up in the middle of the night and wanted to come in the bed when she crossed over into the toddler era, and also, it took all this time for me/us to move forty or fifty boxes of books out of what was ostensibly her room, and into a storage unit, and then to have the drywall repaired and the walls painted Benjamin Moore “Bed of Roses” pink (her choice), and then to move in her stuff, and then her crib, and then her.

(Somewhere in there, we moved in an IKEA bed, a desk and a freezer, and used it as Simon’s recovery room after a knee replacement, which led to that room being dedicated to naps and privacy for a long while, an unbelievable luxury in a small house, and surely part of why this all took so long.)

(Just today, I found my lost Mason Pearson brush in the rubble of the micro-move. YES! YES!)

Since this happened, I have wandered the halls, holding one thing and looking for something else, having forgotten where anything goes: a pipe-cleaner necklace; a pair of tiny pants. ADHDers like myself often hyperfocus on one or two areas of their life, because without perfection there is only chaos and brain-ash, and Strawberry’s realm of personal effects has always been one of mine, managed with the stern attention of a governess and the magic fingers of an enchantress with a credit card, while the governess-enchantress’s own clothes, cosmetics, hair stuff, jewelry, half-eaten reappropriated Easter candy and medication is strewn, Discourses of Livy-style, wherethefuckshitever. So her things are very well-kept, ordered, organized, circulated and re-upped, but the act of moving her little life out of my room and into hers has been dizzying and disorienting, like the move down the hall used up all of my oxygen, like she took it with her. (She did.)

It was obviously time, time-beyond-time, for The Kid to have her own space. (“I need some space!” she says to me, regularly, more me than me.) She loves her room and we spend a lot of time on the floor playing cars and store and the usual. It’s just, now her hot, darling, sleeping breaths are breathed alone, somewhere else, away from me and mine, from us.

REC’D

Last week I mentioned Ilia (Ilia, Ilia) which coincided with my friend asking me what my all-time, tip-top recs were, so (and here we also honor the essential spirit of a girl who was raised by magazines and blogs): Weleda Skin Food. Wolford stockings. Crane & Co. stationery. Weleda, Wolford, Crane. Weleda, Wolford, Crane! All-time, can’t-go-wrongers. If you email me yours, particularly in the “delights” zone (beauty, clothes, little treasures) I would be very happy.

ASK’D

I need a Huge T-Shirt that will never get hard. You know how cotton can get hard? I want a soft, soft, soft men’s XXL white t-shirt with no fabricated whispers of poly or whatever to wear with similarly mega shorts and Adidas (unfortunately for titty reasons I must defy Rihanna’s rule of "either a shirt or a bra, not both,” even though this “outfit” is meant for a bouncy bralessness). What has the structure of a t-shirt but will never wrinkle or harden? Silk? Silk… cotton? Cashmere cotton?! This is stupid.

FELT IT

For some reason, a newsletter I wrote about marriage in the pandemic has been riding the top of the “most-read” editions of THE FEELING this whole time. (Why?) On the occasion of that being weird but also the approach of my tenth wedding anniversary: “I am aware that brass can oxidize when subject to the elements (and every marriage is subject to the elements). Like, who knows. The depths of intimacy can force you to the surface to breathe, but right now I get to live on the bottom of the same ocean and fool around on the seabed. That is what I had been looking for this whole time with everyone else.” Aw. I love him so much.

CURRENTLY

• Dying for Sex update: last week, I posted about this solid, sex-forward, funny show, and then I took down the back half of the episodes. “Oh.” There is a distinct and resolute turn towards dying and death that I somehow didn’t expect, or maybe knew must be coming but faked myself out about. It’s a descent into the abyss, for sure: still funny, still some TV-storytelling dork stuff, but heavy and vertiginous and hard to look at straight-on. I finished the season/show one literal minute before I had to become a totally different person in a totally different context, mid-choking-sob, and I’m still processing a week later, which even for a great show about sex and death is remarkable, for someone who consumes a few hundred pieces of content each day, like we all do.

• Makeup Update: I ordered a pencil sharpener from NARS so I could sharpen and use my NARS lip pencil (I have Dolce Vita which I think of as “Zoom Pink” and somewhere, likely in a lost and forgotten clutch, I have the Dragon-Something-Something red one), and an eyeshadow primer from Urban Decay (makeup-heads know all about the Urban Decay eyeshadow primer) so I could use my various creamy shadows, and then I fell backwards forever into pure, white nothingness, so boring and arid was this Sephora order. No sparkling gelées??? No whipped stardust??? No pulverized moss suspended in the slime of decomposing Ginkgo biloba leaves??? No, because I want and need to use what I already have. My current domestic fizz-feeling is all about using my things, fine, but then that little envelope arrives and you shake it out and zero dopamine falls onto the bed and it’s like… okay so????!!!

• Got an advance copy of KC Davis’ new book Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship which is a thrill because her last book How to Keep House While Drowning was really important to me. I will report back, but my first impression is that the title rips. I’ve been writing about self-care since 2012!!! and I still get resistance or just blanked out when I say or write that it starts with interpersonal boundaries, not spa services.

• I’m really feeling both pastel tulle and dank plaid for spring and summer. I’m sure those cunning little Prada rugby shirts from… last winter? have subtly influenced me toward the plaid, as I never found a good dupe and would never pay retail for a Prada shirt. (I’ll buy a real bag or real shoes, and once upon a time, a real dress, but a $935 shirt that you’re supposed to wear in real life, when my real life is defined by melting iced coffees and pockets full of dog treats — omg just had an idea: an “iced coffee” that is simply a block of ice, to slowly reward you over the day… YES! YESSS! — but not a real shirt.) The endurance of my own adolescence’s style has been incredidibly satisfying. (I realized on Plaid Day at my kid’s school, when I referenced “Joey Lawrence plaid” to a Millennial teacher and she responded with something about Nirvana, that I have become so used to pulling back my cultural references from their outer reaches, that I had gone too far in the other direction, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened.)

• An Olde Entertainment that was central to my week was this Chris Fleming bit about luxury movie theaters, which has been around. “I’m from Massachusetts, motherfucker.” (A YouTube comment: “The way 95% of this could just be a Talking Heads song.”) Chris Fleming (and Cole Escola) gliding to the center of things!!! It sends me!!!!

xx

I love you.

Kate

“Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks