Pour yourself out of the sea

I feel more than a little equivocal about the fact that after twenty years without regular access to a car, I have found it invaluable to have one on hand since the beginning of this summer, but the fact remains that without it we would not have spent our anniversary afternoon at Castle Island, which we had not visited since 2019. Neither of us had been out to downtown or South Boston since last summer, in the lull of vaccines and careful trains. I was glad to see, as we drove over the Fort Point Channel on the Summer Street Bridge, the tomb of the seagull kings still bobbing in the metallic blue chop. Their descendants had littered the paths of Castle Island and the granite-blocked causeway that curves for two miles around Pleasure Bay with a sometimes weathered dry, sometimes still glistening mosaic of oyster shells, their delicious purses of salt pecked clean. "We believe in you!" we cheered them as they scooped into the water, dropped their catches on the rocks. They hung like carved wood on the wind in front of us while the planes out of Logan tore themselves through it overhead. We stayed until sunset: a kind of cream-blue fanning of cloud over the harbor islands in the east, the skyline charred by the last of autumn in the west. I have felt isolated from my city for a long time. It was good to learn one of its new routes.

( There's cats to guide my soul. )

And because we had a car and this year they were open for takeout and meant it, we ordered and retrieved a catch of sea-dining from our traditional restaurant of Waypoint. Even without the phosphorescent wall of a neon sign that I have coveted for eight years—it looks like a Roman dolphin in plankton-green—it was wonderful. The servers who packed it for us had written a flower-curlicued Happy anniversary! at the top of the bag. The hiramasu crudo was delicate and buttery, not smothered by the heat of the thin rounds of jalapeño or the sweetness of the sesame brittle and the shoyu. The octopus polpetti were savorily dense without heaviness, curled around with tart silver anchovies and thick aioli for dipping. The uni bucatini was as brine-melting, chewy, and sea-smoked as ever, glazed with yolk and studded with the rich orange roe. We had also ordered the seared cod cheeks, but through a slight error in the kitchen received the black pepper spaccatelli with guanciale, which gave us no reason to complain because that's tomorrow's dinner sorted. I wish I had caught the name of the seltzer-spritz mocktail which they kindly let me add to the order, but it contained grapefruit and lavender and none of the Aperol it tasted like. For the half of the party that could drink alcohol, we had procured calvados. We ended up quoting so much of The Blues Brothers (1980) that we hunted it up after dinner on the pseudo-TV and agreed that music in that film works like the magic it is; it was my introduction to almost everyone in it. I don't know when time will stop feeling strange, but this was a good way of marking that it still passes; we still arrive.

Waltzing in like you've cut yourself a key

With apologies if I have accidentally stalked anyone on or adjacent to my friendlist, I am fascinated by how difficult it has just proven to locate a print copy of a small-press queer novel published ten years ago. I discovered Adam/M. A. Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012) through a page of Natalie Marena Nobitz's History's Queer Stories: Retrieving and Navigating Homosexuality in British Fiction about the Second World War (2018); the romantic pairing of a wounded naval officer and a conscientious objector pinged my attention even before I scrolled back and found Nobitz describing the novel as "a modern re-write of Renault's novel that opts for an idealistic ending to signal its liberationist consciousness." I thought to myself that I would totally read a quasi-fix-it of The Charioteer (1953) and decided to see if I could acquire a copy. Not from my local library system. Not from AbeBooks, either. Out of luck with the Book Depository. Amazon seemed to suggest the possibility of used copies if I was willing to deal with their marketplace, but trying to follow the relevant link revealed that they have confused the novel with an entirely different book of the same name. I found a nice interview with the author from 2013 and became depressed that my own copy of Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea (1951) has been in storage for almost that long—also slightly wary that I might have banged into the author on AO3—but the link to the publisher's website was d-e-d dead. If the author has a website of their own where I could drop a line and ask if we could arrange some sort of exchange of goods and services, I couldn't find it. Over at Barnes and Noble, I can with no difficulty at all find a recently released e-book, but I don't like e-books. I don't even like e-books of my own books except that other people buy them. I will read books online and as pdfs if I have no other options, but I do best with print and ink and in the case of this novel I don't see how to get hold of any. I genuinely did not expect it to be this complicated. I would rely on the random luck of used book stores, but I haven't been inside one in almost three years.