The forest for the trees

Acacia in Flower (or, Blossoming Acacia Branches)
Vincent van Gogh
1890

Lately I have struggled to see the forest for the trees, and for a gloominess of my own creation blanketing the light. I am working to re-discover what a pleasure it is to wake up at dawn, to move my body and tend to my home. When I bother to take a moment, stop and reconnect with what actually makes me happy instead of burying my mind in media and ugly habits, confusion turns to clarity and I feel like I can actually breathe.

Meditation and yoga is helping, and so is reworking my diet, writing and reading more books – but climbing out of my own ass has truly been the most effective thing.

 

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Tuesdays with Geordi: The Naked Now

Making my way through the complete series of Star Trek: The Next Generation, one Tuesday at a time. This week covers Season 1, Episode 2: The Naked Now

Single Sentence Synopsis: Fuck Wesley.

Recap: The Federation Fam are planning to rendezvous with a scientific research vessel – a sexy scientific research vessel, not a boring one like those other research vessels – that has been sending workplace-inappropriate voicemails for quite some time. Putting it mildly, “indications of what humans would call a wild party” are discovered, and after that things get a little horny. 

The good? Data and Yar totally bang. The bad? Wesley. I fucking hate Wesley. This entire episode exists to set up Wesley as a character of any value. It is a lie – Wesley is useless. Verdict: 3/10. 

 

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Tuesdays with Geordi: First Contact

Making my way through the complete series of Star Trek: The Next Generation, one Tuesday at a time. This week covers Season 4, Episode 15 – First Contact

Single Sentence Synopsis: It is better to ask permission than to beg forgiveness.

Recap: Dr. Lilith Sternin (formerly Dr. Lilith Sternin-Crane) and Malcor III’s most curmudgeonly government official, an unsettling mashup of Henry Bemis and Trent Lott, fuck up everything and almost get Riker killed. Picard’s best efforts and long, meaningful looks aren’t enough to save the day, unfortunately; Federation/Malcor relations will be verboten for generations, until old prejudices die and a new generation is ready for significant change (boy, that doesn’t sound at all familiar.). Upside? Riker gets laid. Downside? We don’t see it. Verdict? 7/10.

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The Keyrock Kollection – Volume 2

Saved quotes from my 2013 black Kindle named Keyrock, Part 2 – read Part 1 here.

1/4/18 – The Storied Life of A.J. Fikroy by Gabrielle Zevin

People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

2/9/18 – The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman

The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this: life is not fair. Forget all the garbage your parents put out.

&

He didn’t really blame them; he looked like the kind of person you did that to, mocked. His clothes were torn and his throat was gone and his eyes were wild and he probably would have yelled too if he’d been their age.

12/6/18 – The Good Widow by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke

It was one of my biggest fears… that instead of just being a widow the rest of my life, I’d be a victim. People say that’s a choice, and they’re right. But the thing is, when it’s your shit hitting the fan, it’s ridiculously easy to lean into the sadness.

Keyrock is dead; long live Keyrock. On January 19, 2020, after almost seven (7!!) years of near-daily use, Keyrock (second of His Name) went into sleep mode for the very last time. Future Keyrock Kollections will be coming at you from Keyrock III, my 2020 graphite Kindle Oasis. 

PourOneOut

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Pure human fuckery

Struggling to make sense of the world today, I decided to indulge in a bit of light escapism by finally picking up my old copy of The Stand by Stephen King. Nothing like 1,137 pages of 7 point font detailing the horrors of a highly contagious flu to help relax before bed. Not so much, right? But at the risk of sounding dramatic, at this point in time it feels faintly inappropriate to be reading anything else. So, overall this read is going about as well as when I cracked open The Handmaid’s Tale a year and a half after Trump got elected.

The Stand was originally written in 1978; the complete & uncut version hit in 1989. My copy is from 1991. We exist today in 2020. Six pages in I have already spotted one of (what is sure to be) many, many examples of how some things never change:

‘That ain’t necessarily how it would be,’ Hap said weightily, from the depths of his ninth grade education. He went on to explain why.

Altogether it has been deeply jarring but cathartic in a weirdly emotional way, hitting some dark space inside me and giving me back some sense of peace. It works – better than obsessively reading news articles and watching my fellow citizens demean themselves on Facebook, at least. In These Troubled Times, I will take it.

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