Your friends may say that I'm a stranger

I spent the majority of my afternoon on the phone with doctors and unemployment and I have just discovered that I will have to spend the majority of tomorrow's afternoon on the phone with health insurance. It's almost like normality, except for all the ways it's not. With the equinox upon us and the sky the crisp dry blue of the season, I have been feeling a sharp and useless pain for all the things I like to do in autumn, almost none of which can happen this year. I did get to see gaudior and Fox yesterday for the handoff of a honeycake at the small park down the street and later joined them and rushthatspeaks for family dinner Zoom. I managed to watch a couple of movies for the first time in weeks. I am cherishing the possible delusion that as the weather cools fewer people will want to spend much time outside and I will feel safer roving out with camera in hand, which had started to feel almost impossible by the end of the summer with all the heat-crowded streets. I seem to be sleeping better in the cold, although I have nightmares of houses decaying, of moving into apartments already falling apart: none of my dreams are subtle anymore. I feel like a very poor zamler, writing these shallow fragments across gaps of days. I really wish I had made that golem of Louis D. Brandeis when I thought of it in 2018.

It gets so cold after midnight

I did spend the majority of this afternoon on the phone with health insurance. So did spatch. It went poorly. We cooked a steak in self-defense. Have some links.

1. An excellent interview with Judith Butler, all the more so because the interviewer keeps pushing her for cheap answers on trans rights and feminism and cancel culture and Butler keeps pushing back: "Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not." The entire thing is quotable.

2. "For 18 months, at precisely 7am every day, the broadband signal in the tiny Welsh village of Aberhosan simply vanished." Sapphire and Steel have been assigned . . .

3. I like this information about the speed of chocolate.