Author: Azlan

455: “Sometimes You Just Miss” (Ross Gay & Jericho Brown)

                “One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself for how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights.” -Ross Gay, in the preface for The Book of Delights

                “Sometimes you just miss.” -Jericho Brown, in a talk at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, November 13th, 2021

                I meant to write my uproar post this morning, and ended up writing a piece of my PhD dissertation and then lying on the couch instead. By which I mean, would you like to try a practice with me?
                One of the lovely things about a practice (Uproar posts once a week, for instance, or a year of daily essays about something delightful) is that they don’t go how I intended them. Jericho Brown is responding to an audience question, maybe “How do you feel when you’re working on a poem and it just doesn’t work” or something like that. He laughed and asked if the audience member ever played basketball. “Sometimes you just miss.” 
                Ross Gay makes it clear in The Book of Delights that the daily essay thing stopped being “daily” pretty quickly. He missed a day. Then another. My own practices are like that: lots of missing the basket, lots of missing a day or three. And the practice makes it clear that this missing isn’t the horror that all these work-habits tips would have me believe. Missing is lovely. It’s another hour in bed. It’s pages of my PhD dissertation that, no, I’m not going to share here, but I might share sometime, and there they are tumbling. Five years ago when I started riding a kick scooter for my commute, I didn’t think about the days I’d be soaked in downpours, the days the wheels would jitter across icy, the snowy days I would carry the scooter instead of the other way around. All those were missing. And finding. And part of it in a way that grew delight. 
                So I’m not inviting you to try out the practice of writing a short daily essay (unless you want to). I’m not even inviting myself to try that, if “inviting” is somehow code for “setting a goal” which starts feeling like “setting in stone.” I’m saying: what’s a practice you’re growing into, a practice different from what you once thought it might be? How do you walk that practice? What do you find, what do you miss, and where (beyond the finding and the missing) do you end up, soaked through with rain or laughing about basketball?

by Azlan

454: “Listen To Your Body” (Charlesia McKinney)

                “Learn to really listen to your body.” -Charlesia McKinney, “Demystifying the Dissertation: A Critical Conversation with Graduate Students and Advisors,” April 3rd 2024

                I’m traveling now, away from home, but a few nights ago I was lying in bed next to my partner, a cool wind rustling in from the window, our skin warm, a neighbor laughing as they walked outside. And I felt this abiding peace, this lovely overflowing past any question of “enough.”
                In the last months I’ve also felt more unsettled in my career than I have in years. There’re lots of reasons for that—economy stuff, job market stuff, health stuff—but beyond those reasons, I’m thinking about one of the funny ways I’ve been coping. Or pretending to cope. I’ve been watching these really dumb reality competition shows. Running towards elaborate, obvious stories that pretend that meritocracy works in the US, that work hard and control everything and you’ll get ahead is advice that makes sense instead of an attempt to hide (or justify, or protect) prejudiced systems designed to create imbalance. To exploit workers. To concentrate power toward a few. I think those stories are part of a worldview that likes separating the world into winners and losers, and likes explaining why the winners “deserve it.” I think those stories are interwoven with racism, sexism, settler colonialism, ableism, empire. I believe that, and there I am, watching Survivor. Feeling the parts of me that have still internalized that competition is, in the end, the real description of what “we” are, and that competition is also the way out of whatever hurts I don’t want to feel. What a funny thing to believe. But myths are strong like that.
                Lying in bed next to my partner, I felt how I seek shows like Survivor because I learned somewhere that there will never be enough, so you’re supposed to take more. But I don’t think that’s true. When I feel deeply, that’s not what I feel.. And I had a wonderful moment of feeling how I could choose to turn, not toward my worries of doing enough so I can win, but toward the cool air and our skin’s warmth. To our words and our pauses, drifting between us like leaves on a lazy breeze. I could really listen to my body, to our bodies together. And our bodies were saying how wonderful and washed together a moment is.

by Azlan

453: All Ghosts, All Together (Caitlin Doughty)

                Usually when I write I’m scared. Scared of getting enough done, scared of how long it’ll take, scared I’m not good enough or funny enough or fast enough. It’s like that game where kids carry an egg on a spoon and try to walk faster faster but my egg is already smashed. Smeared on my spoon. Clear and yellow pulp crunchy with eggshells. And any moment someone will notice I’ve always already failed.
                I wish when I wrote I was talking to you. I wish we were together at the lake with the first hints of the storm ruffling the surface, and maybe we’ll go in soon, before the rain really hits, but for now you say I keep thinking about the horror of having a body and I say I think about broken bones, the way they twist, the way all bones are broken bones that haven’t broken yet and you say I read this essay from a mortician who’d held a skull that day, a complete skull, cooked clean by the cremation chamber, and she was looking at the skull, holding this which used to hold a person, though now it was covered in ash and scorch marks and she was thinking about how sometime every part of her will be something that somebody else holds, and she’ll come apart, and she realized it’s important to sit sometimes with the fact that none of us are the center of the story, or at least not the center of the story for very long, and while we might be stardust, the iron in us literally made in the furnace of stars, we are also borrowed stardust, we are iron that was earth or roots, that was something else, and will be something else and I say wasn’t that Caitlin Doughty and you say yeah, I think it’s in Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and then you pause and you say the rain’s really starting to come down. And for a little while we’re sitting there, you, me, and Caitlin Doughty, all ghosts, all together, this together we’ve made as the surface ripples a reflection of the clouds and the trees.

by Azlan

452: “Find My Way Back” (Mylo Choy)

                “I slowly found a way to be in the water without drowning — a place in the middle. Even though I couldn’t always stay there, now I knew how to find my way back.” -Mylo Choy, Middle Distance, page 99-100

                There’s this phrase in the USA’s imagination of therapy: “I’m working through some stuff.” Working through. To the other side, I guess. In my own therapy (which was wonderful!), I definitely started wanting to work through and come out to somewhere past my hurts and confusions. And I don’t think it works that way. Choy and I like imaging our deep emotional worlds as water, as ocean. Reading Choy, for me, this kind of healing feels less like a going through and more like a habit of sometimes going into the water. Swimming out, or swept out unexpectedly. Learning that, as this is a place we can go to, this is also a place from which we can learn ways back to the sand when we’re ready to lie on the beach and rest.
                There are so many examples I could take up, but writing is a close one. I’m writing now. And all day, in the back of my head, I’ve been unsure how I would write this post. For a little while before I started I was looking to find a calm place, where the post was all laid out in front of me. Without any emotional waves. And I like feeling calm (it’s lovely), but writing this does have emotional waves. That’s why I want to write it. Sitting down to write about this isn’t a matter of finding some mythic place where there isn’t the water that washes me, carries me, or sometimes feels like it might drown me. It’s about finding ways to be in the water without drowning. To swim down. To feel the current. To know there are ways back—back to the beach, and back to the waves, as I need them. Fear and hopelessness (Mylo Choy reminds me) aren’t pitiless seas where no one could possibly breathe. They’re currents and creatures in the oceans where we swim

by Azlan

451: “As Long As It Helps Us Hope” (Weiwei & Stamboulis)

                “I think that it doesn’t matter whether poetry is good or bad… / …as long as it helps us hope.”
                -Ai Weiwei and Elettra Stamboulis, Zodiac, p. 154

                Sometimes I sit and listen to the resonance between experiences. Between these three, for example: 1) When I taught high school poetry in the twenty-teens, one of my favorite practices to do with a class was “short order poetry. Each student asks another for a poem (“about the first day of school,” “about a cracked windshield”). Then in ten-ish minutes each writer makes a poem to give back to the asker. This practice positions poetry as community, a gift between friends. The time limit can also help me stop worrying about “how good” the poem is and focus on putting lines together. 2) Some years after those classes, a mentor and I started talking about a teaching moment when you let go of worrying “how good” your classes are, recognize students’ work and interest as so much larger than you, and focus on offering what you can and supporting your students’ work how they ask you to. After that moment, paradoxically, our classes felt “better”—but something else had shifted, too. 3) During the worst years of feeling farther and farther away from my writing, writing felt more and more like a place where I had to perform expertise and less and less like the reach toward community that made me want to write. In the middle of those years I started writing flash fiction. Tiny paragraph- or page-long stories that touched one moment of connection, movement, need, loss. Writing those came to feel—well, like walking down to the beach every day to splash my face with the water. Or like letting the ocean wash its face with me.The practice helped me start finding my way back toward what I love in writing.
                When I finished reading Zodiac, I sat for a while, listening to the resonance between Ai Weiwei’s thoughts and so many of my (shared) experiences and relationships. I think the sitting—the quiet—was a way to turn towards and understand how the question “how good is this?” gets planted almost everywhere around me. And recognizing that planting is also a chance to stop planting, to focus instead, perhaps, on the ground the question grows in. The ground of what we’re doing, together. Of how what we’re doing together weaves our lived experience. How that doing makes it easier (or harder) to hope actively, playfully, courageously, communally.

by Azlan

450: “A Place For You” (Jasmine Walls)

                “Or, if you want, there’s always a place for you here with me.”
                -Jasmine Walls, Brooms (p. 230)

                I’ve been thinking lately about how so many of the places where I’m at home and feel connected, feel able to help—so many of those places are actually people.
                I’ve moved a fair amount in the last fifteen years. Massachusetts to California to Andhra Pradesh to a different part of California to Oklahoma to Illinois. And while I’ve largely stayed here since 2019, I’ve also moved six times inside Illinois. That doesn’t count the trips to visit folks elsewhere. If I look at any place, if I look at how I was and who I was in a place, what I find is people. My friend Krishna in Andhra Pradesh, the two of us at a table supposedly playing chess but moving more thoughts and smiles than pieces. The rabbits who nested near my front door my first year in Oklahoma. My friend Fin in Illinois, the two of us lying beneath the trees and talking. And on and on: there are so many friends to remember, so many people making a place for me with them.
                When I started working on this post, I was focused on how people become the “where” of my life. But as I sit with this, revising it—that’s one of the wonders of revising: sitting with words like muddy waters, as the clay settles, as I see another shape in the slow current—I’m also thinking about how wheres grow the communities who become my life. Fin and I became connected while watching the trees together. More than anything else, the rabbits and I shared grass, its a green delight. Krishna and I became friends in the shade that dappled our table. So I’m focused less, now, on how one leads into the other, and more on how they blend together: how here and us can weave together so there’s always a place for me with you. For you with me.

by Azlan

449: “Nuance” (a color gradient puzzle)

“English acquired ‘nuance’ from French, with the meaning ‘a subtle distinction or variation,’”
-from the box for “nuance,” a color gradient puzzle produced by Robert Frederick Ltd

                I don’t usually pay so much attention to color. Sometimes I do: my orange jacket is next to the orange foam roller I use to help relax the muscles of my back, and as I sit here thinking, I’m enjoying the difference in their shade. The way they’re both shadowed by the room’s one light. The way those shadows paint the pale cushion my jacket’s sitting on. But I probably drop my jacket there a lot, and the roam roller’s usually beside that cushion. I’m looking at them now because I’m thinking about this puzzle. 
                A couple years ago my partner and I did the puzzle together. Starting with the edge, like we usually do, and then the corners. I think about that sometimes, because early on I wasn’t at all sure I could do this puzzle. There were no lines to follow. No horizons, no lakeshores. But then doing the puzzle together turned into a playful game of feeling with our eyes: there’s a lot of green here, but what feels really green? Or in all these purple pieces, what feels really purple? And surprisingly often, looking at all these pieces, I had a feeling to follow along to a piece that fit. I think I’m remembering that tonight because I want to spend more time being open to the orangyness of the orange, the shadow of the cushion: the wash of changing color, luxuriant as paint washed along my skin.

by Azlan

448: “It Needed to Read My Reactions” (Martha Wells)

                “It needed to read my reactions to the show to really understand what was happening.” -Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

                The “it” here is a super intelligent AI starship pilot, very much an important character in the series, and the speaker is our main character murderbot — a part organic/part synthetic construct designed as contracted security that’s now playing around with its hard won freewill. Playing means lots of watching tv, it turns out, and the AI pilot wants to watch too — but since its whole experience is being a spaceship and piloting a spaceship through space, it needs murderbot’s reactions to help fill in the meaning and context of the tv shows. It needs to watch together.
                I think I need to watch together. Because my partner and I have been reading Wells’ novellas together, and it’s lovely to sit with how much of what they mean flows from our lying in bed at the end of every day and reading together. Because I’ve gotten more interested in gardening (see all my gardening and compost metaphors in the last months/years), and that has a lot to do with my friend Dusty, who gardens a lot and who I sometimes get to garden with. And what gardening means — my understanding of what we’re doing, what gardening is, and my attempt to be with soil/water/seed/plant — has a lot to do with watching and sharing in Dusty’s reactions. Because my novel manuscript grows from talking with so many friends about how we experience gender, community, fear, magic. Although maybe that adds a layer to “reaction.” I think it’s in our shared sensing, our overlapping experience. That’s where I feel us making a happening out of all this is in front of us. We weave into so many sensings to find our way here.

by Azlan

447: Typos, Hot Dogs, Improv (Shel Silverstein)

“I asked for a hot dog
With everything on it,
And that was my big mistake,
‘Cause it came with a parrot,
A bee in a bonnet,
A wristwatch, a wrench, and a rake.”
                -Shel Silverstein, from “Everything On It”

                The hardest I ever laughed over an uproar post was because of a typo. Or because of a friend. Or both, I suppose? I don’t remember which post it was, but I ended up writing “shifting me weight” and a friend, reading, started laughing and repeating “shifting me weight!” in a funny accent while bouncing side to side. That would’ve been fall 2020. I still think about the way she grinned, the way the line became a bit we went back to.
                Somehow as a kid I picked up (like so many of us pick up, maybe, and for me it wasn’t from my parents) this fear of making a mistake. It’s nice to remember that something as simple as a typo (and simply complex as a friend) brought me all sorts of laughter that my regular careful revisions often don’t. I believe in the serious revisions. I like them. But I’d also like to seriously pursue hilarity and chaos a little more, and I think we can. When I coached improv comedy I watched people throw themselves into stupid chance and ridiculous choice again and again, like kids practicing belly flops, like poets stacking wristwatches and wrenches on a hot dog. And it worked. The improv came alive. And then we were laughing about barrels of basalt and no one really knew why, or how we got there, but it didn’t matter because here we are.

by Azlan

446: “Crunchings and Munchings” (Lloyd Alexander)

“Oh joyous crunchings and munchings!”
                -Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three

                The last three nights, after crawling in bed, my partner and I have been reading a novella out loud with each other. Well, we finished the novella, actually, and tonight we’re starting the sequel, and it’s so lovely to fall into story together. To feel the rise and fall of different voices. To get drowsy (and awake! We stayed up too late last night, but there were only 60 pages left) in these shared places.
                Growing up my parents read to us. My siblings and I all still read to each other sometimes. As an English teacher my students and I would read in class, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes excitedly (though I always have a rule: you don’t need to read aloud if you don’t want to), and so many of my lovely friends are the kind who every now and then share a page aloud from the book in their hands. Or read a play, divvying up the parts. Or speak a whole book of poetry while sitting at an empty bus stop even though the bus isn’t running today. These moments live through me in a way I can’t really explain. Four years ago, for instance, I might’ve said I barely remembered Alexander’s The Book of Three. Then I heard my brother reading it to his kids. And I was a kid. And I read a chapter aloud, hearing others’ voices in my voice. And I remember all those rhythms. Those places. These people. These crunchings and munchings are treats I eat and eat again, months later, years later, circling back, remembering, circling forward and becoming. And how delicious they are.

by Azlan