true as far as a lot of stuff

Each month this newsletter sends me a little digest of what has happened in the past month and I delete it. I know this month I didn’t do what I kept wanting to do which is the general theme of the summer and this missive, which is “write newsletter.”

At the start of this month I went up to the Cities in some sort of mood. About a week later, Luke O’Neil shared a cover of “Leave the City” by Sun June, and I’m just mostly still listening to it. There’s a vibe close to the current trend of television shows to find sinister or wistful or sad covers of vaguely known songs, making them, what? I guess subversive. In my head they’re all from WB Shows in the oughts, but this cannot be true, except a girl emo cover of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like” lives rent-free in my head. But I think it is more beautiful, and I should probably look into Sun June.

This song comes in my head, but mostly when I’m not leaving a city. It arrives in the afters, or the befores. Jason Molina’s original has this piano in a barn push and a plaintive trumpet that threads through the whole thing.² I read about the recording of the album in the very sad, very good biography of Molina last year: a gathered together group of musicians who loved him so deeply, doing this in one take, basically, and the perfect haphazard go of it. You can hear it if you listen to the song enough times. Molina kept making music but died of alcoholism. I discovered him when he died and listened to him when I lost my grandmother, then again as a beloved friend dissolved a marriage, so slowly, so tenderly, on the hot concrete of an apartment I lost my mind in, the apartment I got too tired and too sad over watching someone I loved treating me like shit, and then that, this summer, just ran its course in another way, and I keep wondering about myself, either my inability to repair quite right, or the seeming wrongness of my own convictions about the nobility in the calm avoidance of any repair by simply quietly going away.

People we knew as kids in the lives we lived for the lives we wanted, which is all of us broken up everywhere - these people are hard to let go of. Until one day you have had enough.

-

At the beginning of this past month I made my way up North on an overdue pilgrimage to Minneapolis. As my car went past the housing towers in St. Paul on 94, I did not think I would choke up. Not a feeling like relief, when the airplane lands where something, someone, feels like home and you speed up down the gangway, tears and joy already leaping out, nothing like that. Just something that came on out of nowhere in the heat over the Twin Cities, the entire Midwest. As soon as I passed through to Minneapolis, it was gone. It was a hard time that it’d come through.

That same week my book became real and arrived in author copies at my door, this long process I’m sure I made longer. Some people preordered it and it arrived for them and I was touched and they told me about it and a writer I admire and like read it and said nice things on their internet and people were excited for it to arrive and there it was.

I suppose I should have had a better plan but mostly my plan was to get it to print and figure it out. Part of that was to write newsletters and part of it was to get it into bookstores, but as far as I can tell one of the ways bookstores get it is by people buying it. Part of getting people to buy it is to talk about it, or go read it out loud and talk about it at bookstores, but will they do this without you selling a book? It’s hard to say. If you want the update of my marketing plan (read: no marketing plan, nor any prowess to do so), it is that I WILL go put some books on consignment in stores. But if you don’t live in Chicago, I would ask you to get it in YOUR local store. If you want. I hope you do. It’s a slim volume. I promise myself I will write about it more in the effort for people to be interested in it, so feel free to wait on that.

It’s hard for me to throw myself into this because of where the book was, then how it came to be, here, now. A wildly uninteresting part to talk about. I mostly have waved my hands and shrugged when I trying explain it to people caring enough to ask about it. I wrote it first in college, I say. I wrote it again every few years. I think back to the decade of dragging the original notebook and the drafts I marked up from apartment to apartment (see: blurry cell phone photos on Tumblr circa Blue Island and Wood, 2009.) I finished it in San Francisco. The book is shimmering air to leap five years back in time, somehow. Of course the five year demarcation of here we are, now, 2025 pulled some of the memory and the bewilderment of that time to the present’s surface. How could it remain amidst all of this?

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I left Minneapolis in 2020. The book came close to being something that year, too, but didn’t and ultimately that probably worked out for the best (I think Pank is still … doing something?). I can’t tell you if leaving the city worked out for the best.

At the beginning of July when I crossed over the river onto Lake St. and down onto Minnehaha to pick up books³ and considered a case of Grain Belt to bring to my friend, the shimmering air brought back long unemployed days moving around a burnt town, of mutual aid, of the shame I felt each time I left to find a spot in the woods where everyone had been encouraged to distance from each other. My sweet friend lives in another friend’s old apartment and all the spaces seem to shift, rotate. That has a big house, now, a sun porch, two children scattering their treasures all about it I made the journey to witness. I rode my bike down 17th as I’d done a thousand times to Lake Nokomis and tiredly enjoyed time with K, the shallow, warm water, the long dusk. I rode back under all the trees, the wrong way in my brain, past where I used to live and the downhill way there.

It felt like I’d thrown a lifetime into all the ways I learned to live there, the streets and coffee shops and bars and breweries, the ways to get to the warehouse, the attempts to find someone, the lucky finding of friends. It had basically been not even three years, or absolutely nothing, no measure of anything. And yet there, some part of me in tears as I moved through it.

By the end of 2020, I was also mostly in tears. Not really about the decision to leave, more of the inability to stay. Things tensed and frayed. I listened to “Changes” by Antonio Williams ¹ as loud as I could on my hatchback speakers or my headphones, in and out of town, the pluck of it’s guitar and the plaintive explanation of the words. In the same old town, in the same old town. You seemed so sad.

I was sad and it felt like for all the wrong reasons in the year 2020. I was giving up, I was running, my concept of loyalty and what mattered and the splinters of it hurt too much, and so I would cry on the porch after feeding the cats at the house my friend whose heart I feared breaking, who kept breaking some part of my heart, and I would count down the moments until I would leave.

One night leaving from her house I found a woman on Chicago Ave, distressed, looking for help. I asked where she was going and she said she just needed to get to the bus and so I drove her to the Holiday and bought her bottled water and a pack of menthols and when I said I was from Chicago, she said she’d pick Chicago any day over Minneapolis, and how fucked up it was. How hard it was. I drove her to Lake and Hiawatha, turned around past the precinct, and cried. I would pack up my things on the eve of September and in the dark go West. In hindsight I did it selfishly and stupidly, at least the leaving part, driving to Washington. It’s possible I would’ve died or ended up in the Lolo forever.

Thought of all my great reasons for leaving
Now I can't think of any
It's true it was a hard time that I've come through

But of course not. It broke my heart to leave or because I wouldn’t try harder, it wouldn’t be enough, because at that time I believed things like that - that a place would be intrinsic to someone. When I knew it was over every part of leaving imbued itself with future wistfulness, or longing, or the long and beautiful view. I felt the farewell and the intoxication of it deeply, and in hindsight, I realize others did not assess it as I did. Now, when there is the radio static of what I let tatter or fall by the wayside or not try hard enough at, I find the signal of sweet partings in memory: garage beers at a distance in alley twilight, the same friends with cats who became engaged and told me and I cried in happiness, the overgrown garden onto the alley, the long evenings.

I could not fix my heart. Instead I cried driving into the city, and then left quiet and blank, the long way down the river and out onto 61 a night earlier than I’d intended, I guess, and felt tired and like I wish I had more time in the country, I suppose.

I did spend years thinking it would work: that if I kept moving, it would match up, and I’d find it. I think my friend is still hurt I wouldn’t make that city be mine, or that I wouldn’t try harder, or that I refuse to accept her knowledge it should be mine. But no city is mine, or maybe anyone’s. No place, at least that when roaming, will magically fit, the key in the lock. You come from where you come from, that much is true. As though we could have the power and luck to have any meaning from leaving or staying. I put this song on a mixtape for someone who the whole time I knew would leave a city or would always be leaving, and then was surprised when I was sad about it, or would simply think very little about sometimes following or sometimes being followed. That’s, I guess, what the book is also about. But that’s what it’s been about for longer than that.

We are at August and maybe you, too, know this past inevitable strange sad and scarce of summer’s end, and now maybe the fierce fear of scarcity gone exponential in this time, of there are no more summers like there were. That’s probably true. But the Sturgeon Moon remains right there, and nothing is okay, and also still here, fighting for gratitude and the shame of gratitude when it is noticed. Most things are heavy. I don’t need my own forgiveness. I just need to do this anyway, pragmatically. I’m very proud of this book, as I sometimes will be about the fact I still keep doing whatever this is, but that feeling is not the same as the sentiment, and the sentiment is what I can articulate.

I hope you listen to all the songs mentioned here. I hope to leave this city, at least for a moment, soon, and bring my book with me, and maybe find people there to hear about it. I hope maybe you want to, as well, and let me know. I’ll try and come there and if not, tell me you have my book, so I can write you, too.

It's true as far as a lot of stuff
You could have had a little better luck
You just called and just hung it up
Baby both of us have had enough

The original Leave the City. Worth a listen. Sorry I seem to pick this format, which feels like an old version of writing with songs and lyrics, but I can work on being sorry later. Strive to be kind, stay safe, fight for your neighbors. And, well, here’s the book.

1  This video online is one hundred percent worth a watch while listening, new to me.

2  It’s been enough time that towards the end I pick the higher register harmony, and I like it, despite my contralto til I die.

3  You could buy the book from MOON PALACE BOOKS