The new year is off to a strange start.
I met someone recently who took me by surprise in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever been taken by surprise. He had a presence and a gratitude toward life that radiated outward in a way that I wanted to reach out and grasp. There were moments where, when he spoke, it was like hearing my own subconscious refracted through the prism of another whole, complete, complicated human being. I felt a resonance whose enormity frankly scared the crap out of me. I wondered if we found some of our common traits in the same place: He, too, had experienced grief as a young person. Before we met, he sent me a blog post he’d written. In it, he mentioned a loss that he had experienced as a child. I don’t think he realized that the piece was so oriented around grief until after he sent it, and he apologized, but I was grateful that he shared it. And besides, who among us hasn’t blogged about our grief? When I said as much, he asked me to send him a link from my own blog. I wasn’t quite ready to open that part of myself to a person who was by all accounts still a stranger, but I did stay up late that night, combing through the Wayback Machine and revisiting my old posts which no longer appeared on the website. Years ago, I deleted them in a moment of terror after a coworker told me she’d found my blog and read the whole thing. (Four years on, she is a dear friend and is coming over to my house for dinner tonight. Go figure.) Somehow, I end up doing this trip through the Wayback Machine about once a year, and each time I contemplate reuploading the posts. I haven’t yet mustered up the courage. Reading back through them, I feel a tenderness for this earlier version of myself who is curious, confused, wrestling, searching, unspooling. I don’t mention the grief aspect in a “we are connected because similar bad things happened to us” sort of way. Let me try to explain what I mean: Often, when I explain my loss to others, I do so in a very matter-of-fact way. One that says, “Yes, it happened, but it’s in the past now.” On one level, this is true, but the whole truth is much more complicated. Grief transformed me in ways that I never could have expected. It disoriented me, scared me, it instilled both a loneliness in me and a sense of reverence for everything that is — how easily there could be nothing at all! — and it taught me the practice of non-certainty. Grief was a profound organizing force that arrived in my life at a time when a person is perhaps most susceptible to organizing forces. There is no separating my grief from me. This isn’t to relish it, but just to state a fact: The way it has turned me inside out is inseparable from how I’ve been reconstituted. It’s part of all of me — the good (gratitude that, on occasion, moves me to tears) and the bad (the nagging fear that everyone I love will die suddenly and tragically). It's not often you meet someone else who knows what it is to be remade by grief. Around the time we met, I had been thinking once again a lot about grief and loss. My paternal grandmother, whom I love and with whom I share a complicated relationship, seemed to be on the precipice of hospice care. I had been trying not to think about it too much, partially because I don’t feel quite ready to probe the complexities of that relationship, and partially because I resent how life has a way of inflicting itself on a person — announcing “Ready or not, here I come!” — at a moment when you are not and cannot bring yourself to be ready. My efforts not to think were not successful. For my troubles, I received a full-body eczema outbreak and an insatiable desire to listen to Sylvia by The Antlers on repeat for weeks. (Suddenly, I am a grieving teenager again.) After a few dates, things seemed to cool rapidly. I felt a sinking (sadness) and a rising (anxiety) and fished for the CBD tincture on top of the fridge. On Thursday, I schlepped an IKEA bag full of boxes to one of the three CubeSmarts on Atlantic Avenue. En route, I passed a stranger who was having a flat tire on his SmartCar fixed. We made eye contact and I gave a polite smile. I am pathologically Midwestern in this way, it’s my culture to acknowledge strangers, I cannot change. He asked whether I was an actress and said that I had a beautiful smile. I told him that I was not, but said thank you anyway. When he struck up a conversation, I obliged. Barring any obvious peril, I think it’s good and completely advisable to talk to strangers — historically, this practice has yielded great results. (The best one in San Francisco with a train-hopping anarchist in sooty overalls.) We chat for about thirty minutes, and over the course of the conversation he reveals himself to be an archconservative blogger (is that really all it takes to get a press license plate these days?) with two million readers (he is not enthused when I ask whether some of them are bots) and some extremely abrasive worldviews. I love a spirited debate, so I ask a few questions and it’s enough to unleash a scattershot series of opinions ranging from woke media manipulation, to women with piercings (“facial shrapnel”), to the fake pandemic. At one point, he tells me that while he’s against censorship, he’s also against porn and thinks it should be banned. I tell him that he and Andrea Dworkin share at least one thing in common. I think this joke is very funny, but it falls flat. Eventually, the conversation devolves into him trying to convince me to go on a date — You look very pale, are you iron deficient? (Yes. I take iron supplements.) There’s a steakhouse in Manhattan that serves incredible meats. Monday — I’ll take you there. (No, sorry.) — which is not very interesting or fun. The conversation has run its course. I tell him I need to go. He gives me his phone number and tells me that it has a 12-hour expiration — I must text him by 4:57 tomorrow morning. I think we both know that I will not. I take the elevator to the third floor of the CubeSmart, stash my shit, and race home to see if I can find his blog. Sadly, I’m unsuccessful. But man, turns out anyone can run a blog if they want to. On Friday around noon, I get a text (from the person I am very intrigued by) ending things. He is overwhelmed — feelings about an old relationship are surfacing and they won’t go away. I cry with a facility that is unexpected. It’s the sort of cry that I have found hard to come by in my adult life — one where everything feels close to the surface. It moves through my entire body and out and out and out. After that I sit for a bit and think. I think about what to say. Whether to say anything at all. I respond in a way that I hope is considerate but honest. I tell him that if this is a case of a good connection arriving at a bad time, I would be open to our paths crossing again someday. I wonder whether it’s a stupid thing to admit, but I say it anyway because it’s true. A few hours later, he says he’d also be open to reconnecting down the road after taking some time to look inwards. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Maybe all of this is a total load of bullshit — it's impossible to discern someone's character in the amount of time we've known each other (do we even know each other?), but I think it's a good practice in general to take what other people say at face value rather than engaging in paranoid interpretation. I feel both grateful for this chance encounter and disappointed that it’s gone just as fast as it came. That night, I go for a bike ride around Prospect Park. Three-quarters of the way through, I get tired and give up and walk the rest of the way home. The B41 glides up and down Flatbush, its mechanical and pneumatic sounds puncturing the night air. I love this part of Brooklyn. The first time I came to New York, I wandered around this neighborhood and stumbled into an afternoon that felt warm and slow and serendipitous. So much has changed since I first came to this place, but in certain still and quiet moments, it feels eternal. On the way home, I pass the entrance of my favorite park (condemned to a future as a skate park) and my favorite ice cream spot (closed in December 2023) and I feel a heaviness somewhere between my heart and my stomach. On the corner, there is a new apartment building where a perpetually-closed bodega used to be. The neighborhood is changing a lot lately. I don’t begrudge it — everything changes. But I feel a deep sorrow about the transitoriness of it all. There’s a drawing that hangs on the wall near my bed. It’s a commission — one of my dearest possessions, something I would grab in the event of a fire. It’s buZ blurr’s Colossus of Roads moniker, complete with the caption “PRACTICE NON-CERTAINTY.” BuZ blurr died a little over a week ago. The news took me by surprise and felt a bit surreal, as I’d been thinking a lot about his work lately. Somehow, this convergence felt like it was not coincidental. Like the universe was trying to force some kind of deeper reflection. (A little heavy-handed, no?) “Practice non-certainty” is a phrase that has woven itself into me over the last few years, existing somewhere in the space between instruction, mantra, and paradigm. Crucially, non-certainty is distinct from uncertainty — I think there’s a positive/negative distinction at work here. (“Uncertainty” positing no certainty, committing to a deliberate confusion, “non-certainty” negating the existence of certainty, accepting that the world is transitory and often indeterminate.) Practicing non-certainty is, to borrow a phrase from my mom, accepting that life is “one part effort, one part mystery.” In the days after buZ blurr died, I re-read some of my favorite interviews of his. In one, he talks about his interpretation and practice of autostoricizzazione, or auto-historicizing. (That afternoon, I thought about my own relationship to documentation.) In another, he says: “Ultimately transitory nature cannot be counteracted.” I thought about this phrase as I opened the front door to my building. It is true. It feels a little unfair. I don’t say it in a way that’s meant to be morose, but all of life is a practice in letting go. Everything changes, and all a person can do is learn to float on top of life’s current, to move through its transformations with acceptance and curiosity. As one common buZ blurr caption reads, “SORROW FLOATS.” But sometimes that flavor of existentialism is a little heavy for me and I like to remember that, mercifully, everything else floats, too. This romantic connection was over before it even happened, and yet, I feel changed by it. I feel grateful for the deep strangeness the world has to offer. For its connections, its transformations, for the bizarre and for the wonderful. And I have a hunch that it’s time, after a long dormancy, to revive the blog and do a little autostoricizzazione of my own. Recommended Listening: Sylvia – The Antlers Heart Sutra – Susan Alcorn Strange Encounter – Father John Misty
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