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[pithmemos]

a form

A murky cloud, blurry but there--actually there--appears in front of me. An idea of the future. Without concrete lines and I can't work out the logistics in my immediate context, but I can see it all the same, and I know it's real.

[pithmemos]

in the mail

Colorama prints and zines

Biches & bûches le gros lambswool in medium violet, for a Brut sweater, and sock yarn but maybe not for socks

Lolo tee

Melek Zertal prints and spoons

Common Threads publications -- to the store, but still for me

for pickup to not forget: blouses and a black t-shirt

[pithmemos]

[pithmemos]

of outside

It's not quite that I no longer think about dying so frequently. Maybe that the sharpest fear is gone -- that death in nature would seem less permanent, not as harsh. A body in a natural state, seen or not seen, left to cycles outside of a constructed environment. A body that has been interrupted in its life but not disrupted. Of water, mold, other life. And a weight lifts and I can feel the sun on my neck and a spider circling my wrist and I know warmth, can feel hope.

[pithmemos]

[pithmemos]

sound is ruining my life

Not to be dramatic. I stand in line to get popcorn at the lightbox this afternoon--didn't realize the Inside Out festival is happening, and it was incredibly busy--and I want to cry trying to answer a simple question from the employee behind the cash. How can I be heard if I can't value my own volume level > I think I'm constantly tapering off because I fear I'm shouting. I don't understand the maskless on many levels but I need to read lips. What are the ethics of putting in ear plugs near permanently and then pretending they're not there? I've said it before and I'll say it again: I wish my hearing was gone completely. I think this and then realize how crucially sound is my entire life, but at least then I would be inspired to more urgent action.

[pithmemos]

a list of open tabs

need to close so my laptop can run photoshop:

zauberball (and the potential for a coraline, straight jumper)

artist duos writing to each other through riso-printed correspondence, which you (you!) can subscribe to and receive

Art for Radical Ecologies (manifesto)

Studio Visits by Chih-Tung Lin (ordered via Instagram dms, for me in Canada)

an interview with Patricia Rozema and Saffron Maeve, on I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, seen months ago at the lightbox

Anne Carson's Totality: The Color of Eclipse

Kaia Gerber's backlog of book club picks (just curious)

A page about em dashes I don't remember opening

Googled lyrics for Imogen Heap's The Moment I Said It

Biches & Buches le sock yarn, mentioned previously in this diary

Several product pages on 100 percent silk shop, regrettably but necessarily closed

Danielle Dutton's Not Writing

a googled murdering of his quote "your worst sin is that you have destroyed yourself for nothing"

Lucy Clout's archived editions of the Good Sleep Ring, in silver, via tenderbooks, via the internet archive

The Serene Steamroller

Shane Waltener's Instagram profile + Walton Flax Exchange

National Knitting Eve

The Persephone Post

The Dry Garden via publicknowledgebooks

The Nose's past book club events

[pithmemos]

[pithmemos]

reading

Sillily happy with this project's half-existence: it cannot be left temporarily or permanently as my notebooks are, in my apartment and in my bags, so it must be updated and thought of--but, crucially, with myself as the only reader. Myself in the future as the only reader: me a minute from now, reading this back immediately after posting, me next week after I write the next entry, me maybe in the months ahead. I used to read back old entries I kept on a different blog, but it was traumatizing and horrible to think about myself at 16, again, so clearly, living with terror perpetually. Occasionally I wish the sites I kept even more writing on--fictional, or life updates sometimes, often fictional as well--weren't wiped and lost forever. I used to literally(!) write chapters in the captions of Youtube videos. Used to post one shots based on randomly selected songs onto fanfiction sites whose focus I didn't care about. A grace, probably, that I can't access them again. There's always the option, here, if I really wanted, of returning to notebooks for something that shouldn't be shared--we haven't reached it yet but it is a kind of test for myself.

[pithmemos]

3:04 am saturday may 11th

Tried to describe this state of exhaustion once to Rachelle, in a different time: my eyelids feeling like sandpaper, my lungs heavy, my soul receding back against the furthest wall of my skull. My hands are so far away from where I really am. Earlier tonight my (noise sensitivity? Tinnitus? If I'm alone in a room I can't tell if I'm overblowing a noise that is there, or if my brain is making up a sound that doesn't exist.) problematic relationship to sound was so terrible I started playing on loop an evil little mantra wishing harm against my eardrums. If I keep talking about my symptoms will it give them meaning

[pithmemos]

may, again

It's May, again, and soon it will be August, and I wonder if I should make it all the way there, a repeat of two summers ago. My first summer working at the bookstore, a different place than where I am now, where I work on the floor but around different books, where I work at a back office desk surrounded by notes left by other people, where I work on Tuesdays at a basement desk that holds none of my belongings. I don't leave my favourite pens on the Tuesday desk--I didn't have any desk at the bookstore two summers ago.

I don't have to ask to know that it's different this year--I'm not sure, but at least I suspect. Two summers ago I lived in a different part of the city, above shops I couldn't afford to browse in, businesses that sometimes had packages delivered to our stoop instead that I considered stealing but never did. I brought you six boxes--would you please give me a steep discount on the cashmere scarf in your window I look at every year? No one ever buys it. It goes on sale and off again, pretending it doesn't exist on an unseen basement desk in the warm months. I had no AC, I had no working stove, I had mold across my bathroom walls, I had gas leaking out of my kitchen, I thought I was nauseous because of the weird odour as I brushed my teeth, getting too close to the sink drain. I was hot in my apartment--my fan is pointed at my rabbits, under the bed, on the hardwood floors, there are frozen waterbottles in their corners, not mine--and then I was hot on the walk to work, in streetcars, striding up hills in small heeled shoes, long sleeves to hide tattoos like I am sixteen and applying for a grocery store job again, hot on the walk home after working on my feet eight hours, lapping circles and straightening cards, hot walking through the ravine with a scoop of kawartha dairy.

I know it's different, now, to suspect and to wade through the summer all the same. Maybe I should pretend to consider, though? Pretend to be considerate? It's not knowing, not really. I think about a memory from when I was eleven, but I won't share it with you. I think about collapsing on my bed two summers ago at seven pm, book open and eaten beside me, waking up at eleven at night to cicadas through my open window, no reprieve, sweat around my ears and the feeling of having no blood in my body, heavy limbs moving to the fridge and finding only lemon-lime gatorade inside.

[pithmemos]

levelling

Getting quite stuck on work at a micro-level: word choices, structuring in a sentence, am I remembering this exact detail in a memory no one else can recall correctly. I finish pairs of socks up to the toe--string them off to be measured against their recipients--and then never return to them. Red yarn loops through almost all of my projects. I have a dream, my little sister is in it, and we create small, strange felted creatures in a landscape she creates and orders. I become obsessed with all the tools and materials I need, the design of would-be entities, instead of starting and altering.

Had a conversation with Justin on Friday about many things but specifically on his adjusted metaphor of the ship, its rudder, its sails (your sails), you looking through the glass, the waves, and you, on the island, waiting. I recount a lyric to him of being the forest and the fire and the person watching it. I see the end, I see where I am, I am in it, and most of all, I am spectating it, and overlaying past moments of the forest on top of the current one so it's not at all clear as to where in time I am.

[pithmemos]

[pithmemos]

cross-referencing

During a q&a with the editor following Duras' La navire Night, someone notes the disorienting of her other films, of the disembodied voices over contextual images, of images of France shown while a voice discusses Athens. Following Baxter, Vera Baxter, another audience member brings up visual displacement. I listen to the new Between the Covers podcast episode focusing on Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other this same day walking to lunch and on the subway, and Danielle Dutton speaks on writing where one action is happening and then a previous memory or dream is explained--so at once you witness the current moment and still experience a prior one.

In this same podcast episode the host asks Dutton on her referencing system, of writing about and in dialogue with previous reads, reads from childhood. I read and despise Ashley Poston's forthcoming A Novel Love Story, where the protagonist lands in the town of her favourite book series, and think of Wisteria and Elizabeth Chandler, and a town full of ghosts and lakes that I have been dreaming of since I was 11. Claire introduces Nathalie Granger, earlier this week, and I text her that night on the lack of knitting (after a promise of knitting) and mention that the clothing tags for boarding school remind me of Thomas A Clark's Personae project: a set of 4 name tapes, not your own, that I first saw on Tenderbooks' online site. (It takes me three hours to track these down again).

I learn the signs for various languages on Saturday morning and discover my classmate also studied Classics as he fingerspells ancient Greek. I imagine going back to school and fingerspelling the grammatical cases, how the cases were classified by different names in Australia. I learn how to sign how useless I am with ancient Greek now, and how to sign that I go see a movie almost every day.

[pithmemos]

[pithmemos]

wednesday-thursday

Oh! Oh! Oh! I forgot to pick up groceries on my walk home and now am eating froot loops for dinner. Oh! Last night I had a conversation with a stranger who told me he knows the pain of losing an impossible love and understands Duras' fear of it--when he first saw Hiroshima My Love, "a million years ago," he hadn't. I worry I haven't. I imagine that I can feel ghosts pass through me.

[pithmemos]

re: on a return

A realization I turn to the Marías' songs in Spanish I can tune out and allow myself not to pay attention to or translate the lyrics -- a tuning out of the dialogue in La Chimera: words are passing but they're not for me.