They found his head in a driver's wheel, but his body it never was found

I miss being able to drink. I don't mean it jokily, because of the pandemic. I mean that it took me years to discover that I did not categorically dislike the taste of alcohol—what it turns out I like are red wines so tannic they could do you like Tollund Man, whiskies that taste like those same peatlands set on fire, and a broad variety of cocktails so long as they aren't sticky, with a particular fondness for rum and absinthe and a particular revulsion for fernet and a semi-aesthetic non-ironic fascination with tiki drinks—and whenever I had to fill out those medical questionnaires that ask about drinks/drugs/cigarettes I truthfully reported "one to two drinks every two to three months" and in November I had the stupidly novelistic experience of being told by a doctor to cut it out completely for the sake of not dying. (I was also told to cut out coffee, which was no loss, and chocolate, which immediately complicated my relationship with the number of desserts I could order in restaurants.) Of course it's all academic at the moment, since I don't care that Massachusetts has its reported COVID-19 deaths down to zero, I don't consider it safe or ethical to walk into a bar like the setup of a joke whose punch lines number in the hundreds of thousands, I don't even know if any of the places I liked to order drinks are going to survive this never inevitable catastrophe of incompetence and cruelty handwaved as cold equations, but it's been more than six months and I don't know if I'll ever have the option again. I like having options. I drank more ceremonially than socially, but a person has anniversaries. My very first job as a professional storyteller, I was paid in whiskey. Being paid in mocktails wouldn't feel quite the same.

I don't want to waste any more spells in anyone but myself

Most of last night's dreams were nightmares, but I think the last one before waking was just a metaphor. In the 1920's of an America where people who own land are bound to it like fisher kings, a young Black woman returns from Europe to claim the estate of her white ancestors whose legitimate line has just petered out—she's the only one left in direct descent now that her own parents are no longer alive, but the bindings of the land were maintained for so long by slaveowners and segregationists and just plain I'm not racist, but's that it keeps refusing her ritual and trying to bond to her distant white cousin, her traveling companion who is undiplomatically but accurately summarized with "He's a fifth-degree cadet branch and he's botched up everything else!" (He doesn't deny it.) I have a vivid memory of her walking the bounds of her land while a light like fireflies flares in her wake and small night creatures gather out of the grasses and the trees and yet she can't feel anything within the boundary as she's supposed to: the earth itself is on her side, the estate is not. I had no doubt she would find a way to claim her inheritance. I just didn't stay in the dream long enough to find out how she did it. This country hasn't answered the question, either.

Equality, do you want it? You're not getting it for Christmas

Despite feeling especially weird and fractured and furious with a country and now it seems a state that would like me to die conveniently off (bureaucracy, finances, doctors, catch-22's), I managed to get out of the house this evening with spatch and a camera.

( You want a personal distance from the colonial crimes that made your comfort and your nourishment possible? )

I am beginning to feel that my life has become a perpetual process of discovering damage I knew I had taken but didn't understand the depth of and I have to say it's a lot more wearying than any process of discovery has a right to be. My brain just stalled out this evening trying to assimilate the idea of people having loyalty to me. That's terrible. I'm not even sure it's Tiny Wittgenstein. It's just stupid.