Howl.

Evidence of a kill, possibly by an American Kestrel. 

Not from Ginsburg, but from Alexandra Savior, who I've recently discovered in my ever expanding circle of shit that I'm into. I've been listening to a lot of Indie/Folk lady singers belting out their heartbreaks and melancholic misadventures with their wavering throats in tones like pink lemonade to steal a lyric from another of Ms. Savior's jams. Who knows whence came this re-education, but as I was saying to my special lady earlier, I should have known something was in the works as I had been the alone twink 17 year old boy with tears in his eyes who embarrassedly and with much self-consciousness crooned along, badly, word for word, with Sarah McLachlan's "Adia".

See the swag, the drip, the absolute candy paint bling recently copped from Faerie magazine's merch portal. You can find them under the "Witchy" tab on their site which hails to contain "all things witchy!" This also says something about the current rabbit trail from which I send out these inconsistent updates. I remember, it being the apropos time of year upcoming, how much my mother detested the thought of witchcraft and the unbearable stench of anything pagan let alone Satanist. When we were kids we never dressed up for All Hallows, even going so far as to turn off home lights and ignore the knocks of the bravest trick or treaters to haul up onto a darkened trailer porch in rural Mississippi for treats for the fear on my mother's part that even a dalliance, a bit of fun, an opening to evil could lead to a slippery slope of idolatry and sin, the loss of our collective and delicate souls to the foul machinery of the Devil's workshop. That probably says something about me too, but I'm ill-equipped to say what as I'm all I've got to analyze the situation.

A rare internet sighting of a Dighiera in the wild, seen socializing with wise folk.

I turned 40 recently. I certainly wouldn't proselytize the greatness of simply existing in the world for its own sake, by any means, but this past birthday was the easiest one yet. I spent my celebration day alone, twisted, wandering around town, completely adrift, my special lady having abandoned me for her summer hiatus in the lower 48. I ended up at the bar, natch, and can't remember much about the particulars of it - what I ate, drank, heard. It was, as many current days have become, a seemingly endless cinemascope of a man performing bizarre Skinnerian behavioral loops. Hypotheses: Given "a", subject will wake, look at a screen, rise, dress, walk to a cafe, drink coffee, write, walk to a bar, read Virginia Woolf. Given "b", subject will wake, look at a screen, rise, dress, drive to an office, look at a screen, drive home, drink. Put that on repeat and the edges start to blur. It's reasonable to accept that some of the details are lost but that, on balance, I feel the days are "good". Likely, disaster is just around the bend.

There's snow in the Talkeetnas, the Chugach. COVID numbers are through the state's roof but, as the barista implicitly informed me recently, the pandemic was, in fact, over. I agreed. So do the hoi polloi of the cafe, me one of their ilk, sitting around in the public spaces of others, wantonly breathing particulate clouds around us, perforating each other's bubbles. I had a cousin die of the disease recently. She worked in the hospitality industry, restaurants specifically, in the deepest south you can probably go in this country. Thinking about her situation - an intubation, sedation, improving function, being woken up, trying to learn how to eat again, then a rapid decline into eventual death, is all abstract, like some kind of impressionist view of how shitty it is to die choking on your own fluids. Yet here we are, all doing our thing. You can't think about it too much.