Writing a Substack can’t hurt you, but it can hurt me. That’s my excuse for not writing on here lately. It injures me. Physically! My spine curves and my hands lock up. I become less human, and more mound. I picture myself as that one guy from Hellraiser when I’m writing on my laptop. Not the main hot one, but the gurgling one with sunglasses and razor wire on his face, who looks like he’s titled his head so far into his chest that his chin and clavicle have fused. That’s why I’ve been keeping my distance for the last three weeks. It’s not you, it’s me etc. It’s me building mystique. My brand is enigma. I can’t make myself too available.
I am managing. What I’m managing, I’m not exactly sure. But I am managing. I think we’re all managing. I wouldn’t say anyone can do anything other than manage right now. Everyone is yelling at once and not saying anything. Just reposting. We are a nation of reposters. If you repost something and no one sees it, did you actually repost it? You should probably take down what you reposted and repost something else. State your opinion as a non-opinion. It is your only chance of getting your point across, which is actually someone else’s point. If you can do all this, you can absolve yourself. You can purify. If you missed your chance to repost, don’t worry, there will some other horror soon.
I saw a solar eclipse in the last week; I was on top of a bluff with my husband and our dog, who I carried up in a papoose and cradled in my bosom. We were in Utah with my husband’s twin and our friends. We woke up and early and drove to the border of Arizona and parked the car off the highway with my brother-in-law and our friends. We climbed over a chain connecting two barbed wire fences and headed into the desert. We saw the half-rotten hide of a bobcat laying onto the dry wash off the highway.
There were less flies circling it than I thought there would be. I was grateful for that. The flies in Utah are bigger than normal. They are not right. They are abominations. They swarmed the window screens of the AirBnB we stayed at and were slower than normal and barely flew. They were bovine and grazing. It made them easy to kill and it made me feel guilty. They seemed confused. The house itself was confusing. Large and clean, but located on a Mormon campground and filled with bedroom after bedroom, including a big room on the third floor with six bunk beds. We assumed it was built for polygamist families who were seeking a remote area to live out loud under one roof. We all accepted this narrative as fact, just like the mutant flies.
But for whatever reason, the flies stayed away from the bobcat carcass. Maybe it was the eclipse. I knew coyotes had gotten to it, but maybe a wolf the size of a car, or something worse. Something strange. A vast, writhing fleshly mouth. I pictured the meat of the bobcat being sucked out in one breath, and its skin tossed back like a plastic wrapper.
We arrived at a clearing near the base of the rock, where we looked for a high but safe area to climb up on and stand. Our one friend would remain on the ground to photograph us; he’d been planning this shot for months. The sun was already disappearing. A solar eclipse is like a gorgeous tantrum. The moon blocks out the light slowly; the process is meticulous. The moon becomes a precocious child who’s only recently learned how to punish an adult. The temperature drops but it isn’t cold. Warmth is vacuumed out of the air. Non-warmth. There is cold and there is non-warmth. Cold makes you shiver. Non-warmth breaks your brain. It is unease. It is doubt. Nothing makes sense during an eclipse, and it doesn’t need to. It is too beautiful for that.
Your shadow turns fuzzy and there is no sound. You don’t watch an eclipse. You bear witness to it. You behold it. You submit. You marvel and you fear it. I wondered if the coyotes who killed that bobcat were nearby. I imagined them panting in a dark, hot den and whimpering at the lightless sun. I hated them and hoped they were scared.
Happy to read this. Been missing your posts. Be well.
Love this 🤍