even pigeons have a patch of iridescent feathers
and sometimes you gotta put a fork in the glue
Even though the people I come from were not built for humidity and we only barely tolerate heat, I love the promise of a sunny day. A childhood’s worth of Seattle drizzle does that to a person. I take solace in the daffodils’ determination to herald the arrival of spring despite profound daily dissonance.
I’m not sure what to make of waking up between 2 and 5 AM to ruminate about how I forgot to incorporate pinky chop/thumb away at the volleyball clinic I ran last week—which is to say, experiencing a pretty routine symptom of looming burnout—while also regularly scribbling “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FASCISM” on a worry list in my journal. There’s something disorienting about sitting on the train, looking around at people bent over their phones and thinking, so this is it? this is the democratic emergency?
Ever since I listened to Ezra Klein’s essay/interview about how the crisis is now, I’ve been noticing these incongruities everywhere. Real events—such as someone who is legally protected from deportation being deported to El Salvador, imprisoned without trial, and presumably tortured—seem abstract. My day-to-day life, by contrast, seems simulated. At a birthday party over the weekend, I played lawn games, and the dirt stained my toes as it always has.
Photo by Ember Phase photography
I think I feel odd because the disaster is happening, but it’s not yet happening to me. It’s tempting to dissociate from that oddness and ignore this momentary bifurcation, but I can think of no better time to be present in a duality rather than pick one side of a dichotomy.
This is the moment to embrace the juxtaposition of urgency with delight. Mundane difficulty and cosmic struggle can co-exist. Let us marvel at little miracles, feel irritated with drivers who think they’ve transcended turn signals, and also bolster our political efficacy. Notice the pearling dew on shaded leaves, wonder why you had to go to the dentist twice when you used to be able to get an exam and a cleaning in just one trip, and remember that we have a chance to change the course of history. At least for now, all of this is true, and it is essential, as I sometimes say to kids when they’re distracted in the huddle, to stay here.
Some tambourine darns with an interior (old t-shirt fabric) patch on a pair of jeans I mended.
It is my great pleasure to announce that I am now a featured-in-the-press darner. The anti-budget personal finance educator and regular Salon contributor Dana Miranda contacted me to be a source for an article about mending clothes, even the cheap stuff, based on something I wrote in a comments section.
As someone who had to have YouTube comments* disabled by a friend (that type of scrolling was not increasing my faith in humanity), I must admit that this experience ever-so-slightly tempered my sense that if the apocalypse isn’t now, the cyber-cesspool certainly is.
I started mending pants with the above-pictured technique because of an incident with some jeans. I had used a miniature loom to darn over a couple of holes near the crotch, and once I emerged from the intricacies of decorating the edges of the darns with a chain stitch (basically crochet but with a sewing needle and thread), and really looked at what I’d done, in context, my heart sank. Because I’d used all six strands of the embroidery floss instead of thinning it out, the resulting mends were strong but thick.
To be clear, I describe myself as “specializing in exuberant mends.” I am a fan of the rainbow crotch approach to fixing pants (see one of mine here). And I do not really believe in starting over while mending, preferring instead to mend the mend, as it were. But even I cannot get behind “inner thigh protrusions” as an aesthetic choice. Dismayed, I showed my roommate. “Yeah,” she said, “you could start a fire in there.”
So, for the first time in a long while, I cut out my prior work, emailed the client to say I’d been “inspired to take the design in a different direction,” and began again.
*My patchwork of YouTube browser extensions also blocks ads, hides shorts and recommendations, and turns off autoplay. These interventions help me reclaim some time and some of my attention, which, as Jenny Odell puts it in How to Do Nothing, “may be the last resource we have left to withdraw.”
a quilt mend of which I am especially proud—parts of the white fabric had ripped and I followed the grid of the original quilting while stitching over the damage.
My favorite writer, Tom Robbins, passed away this year. “Favorite” can mean a lot of things; in this case, I mean “writer whose prose style and philosophizing I admire deeply” as well as “writer to whom I wrote a letter AND HE WROTE ME BACK.” (This is a true story. I framed the letter.)
I first read his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues while I was in Costa Rica during a summer in college. I find that a book imprints more crisply while traveling, perhaps because the senses are already awakened by being somewhere new. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is flawed and will not be to everyone’s taste—there is some racist exoticism / tokenizing of indigenous and Asian people, the plot structure is not exactly traditional, and there is a lot of sex—but I still hope people keep reading it for the musings, for the environmental feminism, for the characters you likely haven’t encountered elsewhere in literature, and for the odes to pleasure and mischief.
My cousin found this apocryphal-seeming account of the lone time Tom Robbins gave a commencement address—if I can’t convince you to pick up one of his books, at least read the speech, where he said, “as for heaven and hell, they are right here on earth and it is up to each of you in which one you choose to reside. To put it simply, heaven is living in your hopes and hell is living in your fears.”
birthday card collage featuring a jury duty summons envelope, a letterpress-printed calendar, bits of Vanity Fair magazine, stickers from friends, old wrapping paper, and dried flowers
The clear pockets holding the flowers in the above collage are actually the windows from business envelopes, a trick I learned from Pinterest (another website improved tremendously by a browser extension that hides ads, in this case uBlock Origin.)
Shade-grown espresso is available at Trader Joe’s (insert cautious exclamation point here). Many coffee plantations have historically used slash-and-burn farming to prepare (deforest) the land for crops, but coffee plants actually grow better beneath the foliage of native trees. Fallen leaves act as mulch, reducing pesticide and fertilizer use. Growing coffee beneath the canopy also preserves bird habitat and improves soil quality. The highest standard for shade-grown coffee is the Smithsonian “Bird Friendly” certification, but coffee that is single-origin or certified by the Rainforest Alliance is also more likely to be shade-grown. As an unregulated phrase, “shade-grown” unfortunately can encompass everything from an established forest with extra coffee plants to a two-crop field where farmers plant rows of a single species of tree to shade the coffee growing on land they razed. That said, from what I can tell after some preliminary internet searches, most of the time a company that calls its coffee “shade-grown” is generally invested in sustainability and the beans are often fair-trade-certified, too.
The cover on my duvet used to come loose until I had the inspired idea to sew two pieces of an old pajama-pants drawstring inside it. Now I can tie down the corners of the comforter and I don’t wake up with one part of my bedding falling obscenely out of the other.
A friend showed me the art of Rachel Perry, a sculptor, collage artist & photographer whose work explores “the persistence of objects in throwaway culture” (according to Wikipedia.) While I’m drawn to many of her pieces, this kaleidoscopic portrait in a pattern she made with fruit stickers is unexpectedly pleasing. Make sure to click the “zoom” button.
I picked up a bag of decorative leather cord from Buy Nothing many months ago for no particular reason… until the strap on a beloved sunhat started to disintegrate. I tied and braided the old strap into a few strands of the new cord. This cycle is how you end up with an enormous craft stash, i.e. hoard, so I don’t recommend procuring materials for projects that haven’t, ahem, materialized. But the delight I derive from that “I have just the thing” feeling is life-giving.
While in Asheville, NC for a few hours on the return trip from Tennessee, I wandered into a gallery where they had a few pieces by Amber Cowan, an artist whom I wrote about briefly in a 2022 edition of Bombazine. Cowan re-casts old cullet glass into sculptures. (She writes: “Nowadays, this material is out of fashion and relegated to the dustbin of American design. I take this material which is abundant on the shelves of thrift stores and flea markets and rejuvenate it into a new second-life.”) Stumbling upon a few of her maximalist confections in real life after years of admiring them online was like going to a concert by a musician whose songs you’ve only listened to by yourself and predominantly with headphones—in the physical presence of the art, I felt genuine awe.
I couldn’t find the cap for the above-pictured glue, and the straight pin I stuck in the hole started to rust from moisture, so I ended up wedging a plastic fork in there instead.
I know I wrote above that we have a chance to change the course of history, and while I meant what I said, I do not wish to imply that this process requires a certain grandeur. If anything, I believe that a plastic-fork-in-the-tacky-glue approach might be the ticket: something unorthodox, using the materials we already have in a new way.
A fork-in-the-glue can be individual:
trying partial veganism
switching from white toilet paper (bleached with dioxins!) to brown toilet paper
supporting libraries: attending events, checking out materials, donating books/funds, signing petitions as needed, filling out “purchase request” forms for books (i.e. request that the library buy books that they don’t have—this is a great way to support authors with smaller platforms and a small counter-action against book banning/challenges)
learning about menstrual extraction (a relatively safe way to perform an early abortion)
wearing your mask more often
using an alternative to GoodReads as part of divesting from the Bezos Empire
giving kids you know tools for building with cardboard
reading about how ICE operates in your community
making sure your travel documents / identification are up-to-date
A fork-in-the-glue can also be communal:
hosting regular craft club
trying something new from this list of ways to work with others
stockpiling Plan B
meeting & greeting your neighbors
sending letters with Vote Forward (or better yet, hosting an event where you and some friends all work on your letters together)
making monthly donations instead of annual ones (even if it’s the same amount of money spread across 12 months, it’s easier for organizations to plan with recurring income)
completing layperson Naloxone (NARCAN) training to learn how to prevent death from opioid overdose
using, contributing to, or helping build the compost/food waste infrastructure in your area
going to school board meetings regardless of whether you have school-age kids
The most compelling and useful information I’ve found for increasing civil participation is a Substack called Chop Wood, Carry Water. I’m not saying this is the only thing or the best one, but if you only click on one link in today’s newsletter, I hope it will be that one. (Even more than I hope you’ll read Tom Robbins!)
Fervently, and in solidarity,
Abby