someone PLEASE help me grapple with death

my aunt, who has ALS, has opted for VSED (i hadn’t heard the term before — but it’s voluntarily stopping eating and drinking) (which sounds impossible). it’s just beyond my capacity to understand the path from here, alive, enriching our lives to — not here. i mean i do understand it. but not. also i wanted to ask her what she loved, what she regretted, advice she would give all of us, but there never seemed…the moment. not with my mom, either, though for different reasons. also i think why people have mid-life crises — and not the kind where you abandon your family and date a 22-year-old, more like a crisis of faith/understanding, though I guess that could play out in many ways, including via red sports cars and 22-year-olds — is because suddenly death and injury and sadness are all around you, the youthful injustices to your body are catching up with you, your face looks different (in a GOOD way, right), your parents or friends’ parents are dying, you have friends who have died, you have seen sadness, you have seen so much beauty, you see or feel the (not-immediately) looming end and it’s so unknown and overwhelming and like HOLY WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT.

yes

more bow fetishizing

i have no memory of where i found this but check out that beautiful big bow 🤤

but time is a trip actually

i’ve lived a lot and feel good about it (mostly) (or at least feel good about where i’ve landed?) (or rather good, and lucky) but then if i really think about it all, i’m like, oh my GOD, time is fucked up, how can it be 25 years since i lived in san francisco (the first time)? or how can it be FIFTY YEARS since [whatever]? how can i have known all these people — and also lost touch with so many of them? and remembering sometimes when i was brave and sometimes when i wasn’t and when i was cool and when i was not. times infinity. it’s a lot to hold.

unrelated, i saw this little bit about harriet the spy, which was a formative book for me (i once carried a cooler, full of detective tools, around the neighborhood in my quest to be like her). i had forgotten that she ate tomato sandwiches and cake (every day!) — she really was my spirit guide.

gloria steinem was a vegetarian!!!!!

best news of the month (i’m trying to round up all the famous vegetarians to make a case for Vegetarianism for All)

p good poem

another year

birthday came and went, i’m 52 now!!! celebrated by taking the day off, eating pizza and salad, eating cake for breakfast (ordered off goldbelly in a panic but no regrets, would do again), and watching my “canon movie i’ve never seen” — paper moon (v good) and bonus second: the french connection (not my fave? but you could see why it was a big deal). birthday movies thus far:

• paris, texas
• chungking express
• hoosiers
• mad max
• the conversation
• paper moon

i’m v pleased about this list and this tradition and my other unspoken tradition: TAKING THE DAY OFF. watching movies, eating cake, not working — some define this as heaven (me do). anyhow nothing revelatory to report — feel lucky for all that i have, days can still be tough, headaches plague me, but overall it’s all p lucky, both zoomed in and zoomed out. now watching moonstruck — a perfect movie, as i’ve mentioned (besides the 25 seconds of lifetime movie montage where cher is drinking wine in front of a fire) — which made me wonder which oscars moonstruck won (best actress/cher, best supporting actress/olympia dukakis, and best original screenplay/john patrick shanley) (all extremely deserved). led me to watching cher’s oscar speech and she’s awesome and meryl streep is also so awesome.

on the flight to houston

on the flight home

it only has one volume: 11

from the new york times “The Bagpiper’s Endless Quest for a Place to Practice”: