[housekeeping] Heads-up

I'm going to be dropping my citalopram to my summer dosage a week on Monday, so the 28th of April.

If you spot me going a bit wrong and I don't seem to have noticed, I'd massively appreciate you pointing it out, but t'isn't any of your jobs; and I'll be self-monitoring with PHQ-9 all else aside.

(ps thank you to everyone going "what the fuck" about my GP; I think I'd got into learned-helplessness mode about the entire situation. I have Done Some Preliminary Investigation into potential replacements.)

[poem] w/hole-hearted

for JJ, because how couldn't it be?

It's not the watching
of any one particular sunset
that's the thing:

it's finding time to breathe the steam that rises from your mug
to feel the warm seep into your cupped hands
to scribble in the margins of your day:

if every one's an island, then so what?
an island isn't ever watertight.

we're leaky vessels. so
drink your fill of sunlight--
and then go about your life.

Welcome to Portero

Do you like Night Vale? Do you like inexplicable creepy shit in small-town southern US?

Go read Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves.

Seriously, I cannot understand why the first I heard of this was it rocking up as part of the Humble Ebook Bundle just gone.

It is smalltown Texas. The Mayor is creepy and wrong. There are hidden doors, and keys made out of bone, and a very high body count.

Your protagonist, Hanna, is sixteen. She describes herself as biracial, bicultural, and manic-depressive. She is bilingual in Finnish and English. Her mum's an island girl.

The boy she ends up hanging out with is Latino. He is also bilingual, in Spanish and English.

Together, they fight crime inexplicable creepy shit, and meanwhile the Bechdel test gets passed every few pages.

Meanwhile, it's a book about abuse and parents and families and critique of the medical-industrial complex from the perspective of my personal is political and teenagers negotiating (complicated, not always happy) sex lives and trust and duty and survivors' guilt.

It has content notes for mental illness, self-harm, suicide, public executions, abusive parents, discussion of child sexual abuse, rape and torture (off-screen), involuntary commitment to inpatient psychiatric care (off-screen), and drug use. It's probably also worth flagging up that a slur used for newcomers to the town is "transy": it's short for "transient" (and this is made explicit) but I still flinched at it.

And in spite of all that I read it in one sitting and want more now. I am this close to e-mailing the publisher and suggesting they get Cecil Baldwin to read an audiobook version, because that is the best way I can think of to get it a much wider audience which it deserves.

[poem] The Accompanist

[The Accompanist]

Early nights and early mornings lend themselves to me
with a wry kindness about their eyebrows
tactfully not asking
what it is I'll have to sacrifice
to keep up with the interest.

I spend them
in cellars and in futile arguments
on crises of the flesh and of the faith
(not that either I or they discriminate)--

-- and in exchange, the reasons that I do:
quiet contemplation, data fresh from the machine--
moments spent in sitting with the sunlight and the trains--
and most of all because the child I was, made brave
by learning that the wide wild world had space
even for them (even for them!),
prefers to pay gifts forward than to try to make amends.

The music that we play in company's the richer
for the daring of the sharing of our lives.