The trouble lies in our mistaking the thing for the person. An exciting or fascinating or otherwise resonant thing we see in someone’s work, their persona, their repertoire. A thing that creates in us a deeply-felt reaction: someone understands! And then we race off towards that person, sometimes (often) expecting them to recognize us and to be that thing for us, continuously.

But a person is not a thing. A person is many things. There’s a human being behind the sounds, the words, the visuals, and we fail to recognize that what delights us  is our own reflection. It’s difficult to see beyond the pure pleasure of thinking we are not alone. We’re alone; but art helps us to be alone together. And that is a thing. And it is beautiful.

Just a brief roundup of things I’m finding interesting right now.

Some Thoughts On Depression. I wish everyone could read this article.

Letter to a Future Republican Strategist Regarding White People. And I wish everyone could read this article, too.

This Downton Abbey-themed poster would look great framed.

A beautiful, edgy teapot with a line from one of my favorite songs of all time on it.  (So very sadly: now unavailable.)

And finally, this thought: The election is over, yes; but for quite a few of us, the avid interest in politics has only just begun.

You lose your way.

You move on because it’s time to move on.

And as your determination loses steam, you drift.

Picking up trails of flotsam, tantalizing by virtue of their other-ness, you sift and arrange and cast lot after lot. And a new direction takes shape.

This is the one.

This is it!

And you wear the new direction proudly, a new coat that bears the cold for you much more effectively and much more beautifully than any coat ever has. Buoyed by this fantastic new technology, you continue. Borne up by a fantastic new outlook, you travel quickly, fiercely, with certainty.

Until once again you are drifting.

You find yourself searching for a new kind of meaning. All at once you find you do not wish to be contained in this space, which not so long ago held answers you’d needed with a narcotic sort of desperation.

You wonder whether anything will seem true again.

You lose your way.

And then you think you recognize something in a trail of flotsam. You think you remember that it was bigger, before.

You confirm: it’s lost much of its mass. Still, it seems complete. Efficient, even.

It’s not at all like a coat. In fact, once you slip it on, it’s nearly invisible.

But it bears the cold for you. And with you.

You know you’ll slip it off again.

But next time it won’t be because you’re lost.

“I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design. If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told. Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. … It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them. There is something beautiful about scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”

— Harry Crews

Cannot get enough of this.

I remember meeting A. for the first time when I was not-quite-three years old. Although he’s my first cousin, he’s only two years younger than my father, which would have made A. twenty-two, then. There was something dangerous and a little sad about him, it seemed to me from hushed conversations I’d overheard. But he wasn’t dangerous himself: He was a sweet boy who’d done dangerous things. (Drugs, and jail time for said drugs, I would later learn.) Blue eyes blazing, he came to visit our aunt’s apartment, wearing a pin-striped suit with a pastel-colored shirt, shiny black Stacy Adams shoes, very short, gold-burnished hair, and sideburns.  He practically crackled, he was so phenomenally exciting.

I have a vague recollection of being introduced to him, of his being sweet to me, of sitting in my aunt’s living room and listening to what, in retrospect, must have been a whole lot of unsolicited advice from people who were only slightly older than he was.

What I recall with utmost clarity is the photograph.

It was time for us to go, and I desperately wanted not to be separated from A. I recall big feelings that protested going home, and the certainty that I had no way to get the feelings out of my chest and into words that would make sense to the grown-ups. And then my mother said she wanted to take a picture of me with A. We stood near the top of the stairway that led to our aunt’s door, and my mother went down onto the patio below. She told me to stand a little closer to A., for which I was glad. He put his hand down, gently, flat onto my head, and I remember feeling like there wasn’t enough room in my body for all the crazy joy that flooded me. And I knew later I’d be able to look at the photo and remember.

(A. remains a badass.)

Don’t forget: you are not immune from groupthink.

Even when (especially when) you’ve succeeded in surrounding yourself with people who get you.

Examine what you’ve assumed to be truth. Measure it against your empirical knowledge.

Never stop thinking.

Estas memórias tienen todo que ver con los cinco sentidos. Por ejemplo, el olor
del verde zacate del potrero. El aire tan limpio, tan fresco, casi dulce. El sabor
del agua, traída desde el poso, casi dulce, como el aire. Recuerdo el sonido de
las lluvias que llegaban rápidamente, y que rápidamente se iban.

Recuerdo al paletero que salía cada tarde, gritando “¿Cuantas paletas?
¿Cuantas, cuantas?” Las campanas del templo que anunciaban la hora. Los
cuetes y las bandas que se anunciaban cada año para las fiestas de Agosto. El
sonido metálico de la puerta de la calle en la casa de mis abuelos. Las voces
de los vecinos que entraban, casi siempre sin tocar, diciendo “¡Buenos días!”
o “’Tardes…” y, muy de vez en cuando, “Buenas noches.”

Recuerdo el sonido de la risa de mi Papá Cacho, llena de travesuras y sabiduría.
Y a Doña Chepa, que seguido venía a la casa a cortar guayabas. Y a Don
José Gregorio, que todos los días pasaba, serio y digno, montado en su
burro. “Buenos días, mi’ija,” me decía al pasar, y yo me sentía muy importante.

Recuerdo el sonido de la nica sobre el mosaico del piso. Y la sensación de ese
mismo piso, frío bajo mis pies. Recuerdo las noches que se sentaban a platicar
los adultos en el patio, con tazas de té de naranja. Yo me sentaba con todos. Me
encantaba escucharlos. Cada persona tenía su forma de contar una historia.
Recuerdo los grillos. Los gallos. Las vacas que ordeñábamos. La caña que nos
comíamos. Recuerdo que caminaba por las calles empedradas y cada cuando
alguien me decía, “Tú eres la hija de Ramón, ¿verdad, mi’ija? Te pareces mucho
a tu mami.”

Recuerdo un gran sentido de libertad. Allí podía jugar todo el día sin tener que
reportarme. Podía ir a donde quería, jugar con cualquier chiquilla en cualquier
casa. Me imaginaba yo que era la protagonista de un libro divertido, más o
menos la versión femenina de Tom Sawyer o Huckleberry Finn.

No deseo, con todo esto, romantizar al pueblo de Mezcala. No me interesa pintar
una escena sin defecto. Simplemente, estas son mis memorias favoritas de ese
lugar en esos tiempos. Con cada año que pasa, veo más claramente que mucho
de la mujer que ahora soy, tiene que ver con lo que recuerdo de Mezcala.