August, Returns, Us

and what is there to save?

Author

carmen alicia
August 31, 2024

Two newsletters in a week, sort of, hot damn. It’s Labor Day weekend, what are you doing here? I’m very tired.

Where July may have been approximately seventy months long, August was about five days plus a Stargate portal (I think that’s just called a Stargate, but not my fandom) buried in a smelting facility. AKA it was hot as shit here the past week, which, why did the DNC get the good weather? I don’t know. Speaking of the DNC, I wrote a thing for Luke O’Neil’s "Welcome to Hell World” and I feel pretty good about it. Well, not “good”, but very fortunate and lucky he took me up on this. I think I mentioned his book “A Creature Wanting Form” in a year-end wrap up, and anyway. It’s a paid subscription, so if you’d like to read it, let me know.

Another excerpt:

Men in cargo shorts. Old white women in sandals. Elder Palestinian women shaking with the dance drum beat. A small child running between legs handing out water bottles, mom behind him. A new friend. Giant paper mache hands. Journos weaving with boom mics and DSLRs leaning on fences or perched on train trellises or attempting to haul their picnic wagons full of gear past cops who will not let them through. Babies wrapped to chests or in strollers. Small children eating yogurt.  A teenager in an SDS shirt handing out granola bars. Old men in yellow vests signaling to other marshals. Intrepid lawyer witnesses in bright green caps hustling up and down. Kids on guitars. A man in a UW-Madison shirt with Bucky Badger flipping the bird. People on bikes. People behind cameras and cameras and cameras, phones and phones and phones. The blue red strobe lighting of an endless line of CPD bike cops, running next to their bikes down the line. Press under BMX bike helmets printed haphazardly with PRESS. Cops in blue riot gear helmets. Chicanos for Palestine. Grandmas for Ceasefire. Veterans for peace. Anyone you could imagine. Anyone you could think. Like you could remember we are not doomed to aid, abet, dumbly watch horrors. Like in the raw of your throat and your rhythmic fist and the eyes you meet behind your mask you could remember you are not the crazy one.

Kind of wild how fast shit moves on - everyone came back to work, filled up the trains, remain unhoused, although I certainly do worry about what still feels like an absence. In any case, like most drugs you can take as a rich person, it’s over pretty fast, and that seems to be what was going on in the United Center all week. At least my nervous system has rerouted back to existential dread.

Speaking of existential dread, I bought Pulp tickets on a lark because I love them and I’ll never see Oasis (the joke is NONE of us will, they’ll concuss each other before the tour begins), but I’m pretty excited about it. Jarvis Cocker on the “Classy” podcast really made me love him even more. I also read “Blackouts” by Justin Torres (the reading train stalled, alas) this month and it was really, really, really good.

Mostly just here to tell you about my work in someone else’s newsletter! I’m really glad it happened, so please let me know if you’d like to read it and I’ll make sure you can read it. Leaving you with someone else’s poem, a good one, because these past weeks have been exhausting.

August
Alex Dimitrov

So this is love. When it slows
the rain touches everyone on their way home.
Whatever was promised of pleasure
costs the body more than it has.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books…
to look at the sky without asking a question,
to look at the sea and know you won’t drown today.
Despite all our work, even the worst of life
has a place in memory. And the fixed hours
between two and five before evening
are the aimless future with someone
who cannot stay new. August returns us
to a gap in history where our errors
find the invention of a kinder regret.
Almost possible: to believe these days
will change more than us but the past too.
Which is blue and without end.
A long drive toward a remembered place.
A secret left on a beach. Underwater
where the voices of summer are tones of speech,
requiring less of the mind. The familiar creaks
in the old floorboards. Glasses left out in the storm.
Our handwritten lists with every illegible worry
and more. The person you think of
despite their cruelty. The sun and its cruelty.
How it’s kept its distance and kept us alive.
Not needing to know anything about what we do
with the rest of desire.