Whoa! Hey! Did you notice…it’s Thursday?

I missed Sunday. As the pattern emerges more clearly, Sunday is a day that I now mostly reserve for rest. Because Saturdays, every Saturday for the last ten or so, we’ve visited my mother in the residential board and care that she’s becoming more accepting and accustomed to, and we’ve been at my mother’s house, the one I grew up in, filling up bags, filling up a trashcan of bags, and setting items out for large-item pick-up. I think we’re halfway done until we hire someone to take out the biggest furniture. My partner has done most of the heavy lifting in all the ways, and I’m extremely lucky and know this every day of my life.

The pattern that emerges (because it keeps becoming something, then changing into something else, so I don’t want to use the past tense) is that the pain I’m feeling is changing my whole life, in that I need to reserve energy in new ways, like taking a recovery day if I can between large physical and emotional events.

I tell you this because it’s something I sometimes think about all day long, but also because it means the Sunday newsletter might become a Thursday newsletter. Or even a Wednesday. Feel free to unsubscribe at any time! You know I don’t check these things, and only happened to check in once recently (re: taxes) and realized a paid subscriber had been charged twice! Glad I caught it, but more to the point, I only vaguely know who subscribes, I don’t keep tabs, and I thank you for your attention. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you for your faith. If you are not a subscriber, but happened upon here:

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As Mommy’s El Camino nears its 3rd birthday, I’ve decided to change up a little something. I typically only write the list of books I’ve read throughout the year twice, the first half in June and the whole year’s list in December. This year, my reading has slowed way down. And I’m changing some of my own personal parameters about what I want to give my attention to, so my to-be-read stack just seems like it will…not move as swiftly as it used to.

PART I

I took all of January and halfway into February rereading Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko. I think I last read it when I lived in Olympia, so sometime between 1993-2001. I remember finishing it and feeling like I’d been hollowed out, but in a good way. And feeling like I needed to personally explore just how far I was willing to go in my political activism. I’m in the middle of transcribing my journals from when I lived in Olympia and I’m right at the point, in 1996, when I was starting to volunteer for the local independent progressive/radical paper, attending meetings of various social justice groups, actions, protests, etc. So when I read Almanac of the Dead the first time, I remember feeling amped. Like it was presaging something that I might loosely be a part of and not even know it.

Rereading it now there is no way to turn off the spigot of how much the story and its myriad characters foretold what’s happening today. I started gathering evidence from the text that is reminiscent of much of what we see in the awful news every hour of every day. Interviews with Silko often include the interlocutor mentioning how prophetic Almanac of the Dead feels. Articles online by writers and readers reading it now, or re-reading it as I did, say the same.

I just checked and my document (compiled of highlights from the electronic text) is ten pages long.

In an ideal world, I will write an essay about my first reading (if I can find it in my old journals—where I have the terribly bizarre habit of describing books I read and movies I saw WITHOUT NAMING THEM!!) and my second reading and I will use this document of highlights from the text. Or I might insert fiction in there. Not sure. But I have the ten page document of highlights, and maybe it will be something that finds its way into my book project.

PART II

A week ago today, my family went to see Lady Gaga. Our family/friend bought us all tickets. It was a school night, and I prepared by resting all day, because that’s how I’m living these days. He got us amazing seats. This concert was a gift in so many ways, least of which is that I would not have bought tickets myself. So we went, and I had expectations of a good show because it’s Lady Gaga, but you know what? I did not KNOW Lady Gaga. And I still don’t. But I want to know. Because that concert was phenomenal. I thought, Oh my god, I want to write about this for Sunday’s newsletter! But I didn’t, because of pain and having too much physical and psychic and emotional work in the days after the concert. And as of today, I mostly lost my train of thought as to what exactly I wanted to write beyond how much I felt the connection Lady Gaga has cultivated with her audience, how the love feels like it goes back and forth. I fucking cried, okay? It was intense, and beautiful, and goth, and sexy, and loud, and fierce. I think Lady Gaga cried, too. I left there seriously asking myself Who IS Lady Gaga? and I’ll probably read a book this year about her.

PART III

The second book I’ve read this year, right after Almanac of the Dead, was Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes. I can’t excavate where I came across the title—it was a list online somewhere. Probably a big list? It was immediately available on Libby so I started reading it. What I remember is that I was initially taken in by the luxurious way interiors were being described. Then I was reading about the inhabitants of the room who are millennials. By the end, I was surprised I’d finished reading it. It was read mostly in bed before I slept, sometimes while I was in pain, making it become a strange, episodic movie that repeated itself and was kind of interesting to look at but ultimately would become somewhat forgettable to me. The book effectively evoked a banal, vanilla ennui, that much I will remember. (It was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, that’s where I saw it.)

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Hope to land in your inbox again on Sunday.

Buy Excavation, Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja from Bookshop.org for a discount, plus support your local independent bookstore at the same time.