Chronicling Joy, One Day at a Time

As always, even when I'm quiet, I hope you are well. Little bit¹ of a life update up here at the top; a few recommendations further down.

¹edited to add: it ended up being more than a little, whoops

We're all doing our best, right? Living as ethically as possible within an unethical system; helping others when we can; being good to the planet and to its non-human denizens. Noticing and holding moments of pleasure and joy.

That's all going to look a little different for every individual—here's what it looks like for me at the moment:

GOODBYE (mostly) SOCIAL MEDIA

I spent the last year or so mostly staying far away from social media—beyond Letterboxd, it's off my phone completely, and I use my laptop to sporadically check in on Bluesky and a few subreddits. I think that I've broken the habit for good? It's a little like when I go for a long time without eating super-chemically candy & then I eat some Hot Tamales or Nerds and they taste weird—now, when I overhear people chatting about whatever video is making the rounds, I feel zero percent FOMO. Maybe even negative FOMO.

Chances that my innate contrariness contributed to making this easier: NOT ZERO. Also a factor: My job requires a huge amount of socialization, so by the time the week is over, I'm almost always looking forward to setting my phone down, closing my laptop, and letting my heart and brain be quiet and calm for a few days.

DAILY SMALL, GOOD THINGS

In re: the title of this issue: I've been making a point, every day, to pay attention to moments of joy, to recognize cool/positive/funny things, to chronicle them in my journal, in our how-was-your-day evening conversations at home, to share them with coworkers and library patrons. Being active about reminding myself on a daily basis that there is a whole lot of good in the world—it's been a big help in keeping my heart and brain from spiraling down into The Abyss.

PHYSICAL MEDIA (including ZINES??)

I still feel the impulse and urge to discuss media in all formats, and to share those moments of pleasure and joy. Like so many others, I've moved back towards physical media—our DVD collection is growing again, mostly via the library booksale and buying used from our local indie—and I've sent out a couple of zines to a few friends.

Making the zines has been labor-intensive but also satisfying, in that it scratches the itch to share about various things I find interesting and ALSO works as a creative outlet. I work on them in fits and starts, when I feel like it—it's challenging for me to work on something without a schedule or a grander plan, but rewarding because that lack of stress and pressure keeps the whole process 100% enjoyable.

FROM A GENERAL BOYCOTT to FULL-BLOWN ANTI-CONSUMERISM

From where I'm sitting, it appears that the only thing that the powerful really, truly care about is amassing more and more wealth. So for the last eighteen-ish months, I've been doing a light boycott of... most non-essential purchases, particularly from large corporations? I stopped shopping at Amazon and Target—my last straw with Amazon was when Bezos ordered the Washington Post to yank the Harris endorsement, I axed Target when they axed their DEI initiatives—which immediately resulted in my impulse purchases basically zeroing out.

Forcing myself to find alternate sources for purchases makes the process less convenient, which in turn makes me reconsider how necessary said purchases are, so I often end up deciding that I can use something I already have, find it used, or do without. It's blossomed into a full-bore anti-consumerism mindset; advertising that equates consumption with happiness, equates dust with shame, promises that a new prescription drug with nine thousand side effects will fix your whole-ass life... it all grosses me out.

It feels like so much of the messaging we receive pushes us to self-soothe via purchasing—unhappy? buy something! having a rough day? buy something! feeling sick? buy something! stressed out? buy something! feeling tired, sick of your job, stub your toe? buy, buy, buy! It feels like we're constantly being pushed to band-aid our problems with retail therapy—which results in this horrible cycle of work-stress-consume-bills-work-stress-consume-bills... leaving no time or energy to contend with the actual source of the pain. All of that leaves me wanting to buy even less stuff, so it's all kind of snowballing, but in a (for me!) positive way.

I knocked our streaming services down to two, borrow books and audiobooks and DVDs from the library, the majority of our food comes from local farm shares and Costco. (No giant corporation is ever going to be perfect, but Costco appears to be better than most, and we are grateful to have one less than an hour away.) We spend our downtime puttering around the house and our yard, reading, watching movies, feeding the birds and squirrels, obsessing about whatever we're currently obsessed with (Josh: prepping for a new season in the garden; Me: trying to work on my geography knowledge, which is embarrassingly weak).

WHAT HAS MADE THIS JOURNEY EASIER

I am married to my best friend, and I feel lucky about that literally every single day. Over the last two plus decades, we have continued to grow and evolve and mature as individuals, and also as a partnership and as a team. People grow at different rates, people grow in different directions, people shift worldviews and interests and moral compasses—we happen to have grown in similar directions and at similar rates. We're each others' loudest cheerleaders and biggest protectors, but we also hold each other accountable and talk things out when we disagree. (Sometimes after a cooling-off period, heh.)

We're both on the anti-consumerism train; we figure that the less we spend, the less we need to make, the more downtime we have. Neither of us have particularly expensive tastes, but more crucially, neither of us is interested in doing things purely to satisfy cultural expectations. (Given that we both have that aforementioned contrary streak, we maybe also find a little bit of satisfaction in being defiant?)

We both figure that as far as we know, we only get one go-round—so why spend it maniacally manicuring our lawn when a) we don't enjoy the process and b) the golf course aesthetic is not for us? Ditto our shift towards tracking the year via shifts in nature—equinoxes and solstices, the goldfinches turning yellow, the phoebes returning in springtime, various vegetables being in season—instead of via holidays that don't mean much to us. These are all personal preferences and choices, but bucking traditional and unspoken cultural rules would be a whole lot harder and lonelier if we weren't on the same page.

Best of all, we talk at length every single day—about nonsense, about serious things, about the world as it is and the world we'd like to see—and even on hard days, there's usually some descent into lunacy where we start laughing and wouldn't be able to stop even if we wanted to. Before you start imagining some soft-focus schmaltzfest, it should be noted that our major source of entertainment—higher up than books, movies, anything else—is endless banter and cheerful squabbling. We both feel that we have most people fooled—we have a rep for being bright and capable, but in our true, unmasked forms, we are complete dorks who break out middle-school insults and dad jokes at every opportunity.

Lemon is almost nineteen years old and much more interested in napping than in doing murders; she continues to be a giant asshole and thus, the best cat.

That was a much longer check-in than I meant to write—if you're still even vaguely skimming, thank you for bearing with me. I think I wanted to give y'all context for where my heart and mind are now; I've mellowed so much since I started writing online all those years ago, but I hopefully haven't lost all of my spikiness.

Moments of joy and a few recommendations

I have a famously¹ short commute—six miles—and I spent half of it smirking this morning because whoever owned the Tesla in front of me had pried the logo badge off the back of the car in an attempt to pretend that they weren't driving a Tesla.

¹famous in my own mind

And I knew more than anyone that she had every right to be angry. I hoped she banked that anger, stoked it carefully, and kept it for life.

—Simone St. James, A Box Full of Darkness

Obviously I know that holding too much anger for too long—not dealing with the source of the anger (if that's possible), not finding ways of releasing or managing it (if there's no practical way of addressing the source)—isn't healthy. But sometimes anger keeps me from bottoming out into despair; sometimes it gives me the energy to keep moving forward; sometimes I double the usual deep-breath cooldown and allow myself to feel the anger with the first breath before I (attempt to) let it drain away with the second. I've reached a point where I am mostly able to direct my anger towards systems and institutions versus individuals, but, hell, nobody's perfect.

Anyway, I loved this bit from A Box Full of Darkness and think of it every time I feed the woodstove¹. On the more general Simone St. James front, I enjoy her books. Every single one I've read has been a solid pageturner; thrillers with paranormal elements, some scares, but totally recommendable to readers who don't generally do horror.

¹On the Life in Maine front: Guys it's April 20th and we had a hard frost last night. There were wild turkeys stomping around our yard this morning who literally had frost on their backs and tails.

Speaking of anger: I know that em-dashes have become an indicator of AI writing. I can promise you that I will never use AI to write; paying for the privilege of letting our creative and intellectual muscles atrophy by subcontracting them out should be the stuff of horror stories, not real life.

TL;DR: They can pry my em-dashes out of my cold, dead hands.

While I'm not on social media much anymore, I do occasionally still find delights there:

I just finished listening to a year of backlogged episodes of The OC, Again, a rewatch podcast hosted by Alex Steed and Niko Stratis. It's not a traditional rewatch podcast, in that they're not interested in covering the show in minute detail—they use it as more of a jumping-off place, an excuse to talk about adolescence and pop culture and the general experience of being a person in the world. It gives an extremely it's the journey not the destination vibe.

They lean into digressions, spend more time chatting about The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and Golden Girl spin-offs than about the titular show, and usually do a 20+ minute chat about life and what-have-you before they even starting thinking about talking about The OC. The hosts are warm, thoughtful, bright, and empathetic, and I find the show both soothing and hilarious. If they decide to end the podcast when they finish the show, more power to them and I wish them both the best—but if they decide to continue on with a different topic, I'll follow them regardless of what it is.

All that talk about how I'm not buying stuff, and then those stinkers at Two Point Studios announce another expansion to Two Point Museum! I already informed my co-worker that I might need the day off:

Actually, now that I think of it, your very job title is classist. Private detective. You’re charging people to solve murders? None of that public-funded regular crap for our murder cases, my good chap. Not to get all political on you, but in my opinion it’s quite simple really: close the banks. Money is a lie. Society should be free education, free healthcare and free bloody murder-solving.

—Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in this Bank is a Thief

Hilariously, the character speaking in the quote above is—wait for it—the bank's security guard.

I've been feeling Golden Age mysteries lately, as well as contemporary mysteries that get all meta about Golden Age and fair play mysteries. So I was delighted to grab this one from the library—the second book in the series is still my favorite because it's set on a train and I'm a sucker for Murder Trains—but this one (and really, the whole series) is a lot of fun.

Relatedly, I'm currently reading Sulari Gentill's Five Found Dead, which is a contemporary murder mystery set on the Orient Express. Only two chapters in, and it's giving me exactly what I want—meta commentary about mysteries, a bunch of characters who slot into classic archetypes, and so my hopes are high that it'll continue to be fun fun fun fun fun.

Even with the occasional frost at night, spring has really sprung: The cowbirds are back. They're our favorite avian dirtbags—like cuckoos, they're brood parasites and lay their eggs in other birds' nests.

Even more ridiculous, they strut around like Mick Jagger; our household mythology is that they wear sunglasses and little leather jackets and run around high-fiving male grey squirrels, who are known for being deadbeat dads.

I accidentally stumbled into a little pocket of ACAB Cinema & then decided to go ALL IN:

• To Live and Die in LA: In which William Petersen plays a Renegade Cop who's so obsessed with avenging his partner's murder by a stunningly beautiful Willem Dafoe that he gives up all pretense of even pretending to think about constitutional rights, let alone public safety. And let's not even talk about how he deals with women. Dean Stockwell and John Turturro also appear; Wang Chung does the soundtrack; there is a car chase here that involves going the wrong way on the LA freeway and it is absolutely bananas. BANANAS. I just read the relevant section on Wikipedia and now it's even MORE bananas.

• Cure: A classic detective-gets-so-obsessed-with-a-case-that-he-loses-himself storyline, in which Koji Yakusho investigates a string of murders in Tokyo that both seem like they can't be related (different, unconnected murderer in each case), but also that they must be related (exactly the same mutilation on each body). Sedate on the surface, incredible tension underneath; grimy-but-weirdly-beautiful locations; absolutely mesmerizing. I loved it so much.

• Maniac Cop: The first of three action/slashers in which an undead cop stalks NYC. There's a gorgeous stunt towards the end of the first one that is so great that when they re-used the footage in the second movie I DIDN'T EVEN MIND. Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Richard Roundtree, Blackie from Twin Peaks, and Sam Raimi appear in this one.

• Maniac Cop 2: This is how I logged it on Letterboxd last night:

in an extremely different movie, clarence williams iii could have used "wanna integrate?" as a very successful pick-up line

and poor susan ivanova having to deal with a time-traveling joe wilkinson after being handcuffed to a car and dragged a gazillion miles down the road, no wonder she went to space

bummer about robert davi's politics

also that burn sequence omg we used to be a country

We're planning on finishing up the trilogy tonight with Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence. CAN'T! WAIT!

I was outside reading in the sun this weekend and a bald eagle flew directly over my head, pursued by a very angry raven. They were low enough that I could see them so clearly and they were already gone by the time I even had the chance to think oh please please neither of you poop on me.

Annnnd that feels like an appropriate place to end for now?

More at some point,
Leila