Something about living

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

― Richard Adams, Watership Down

Something about pain. Something about wanting something so bad you’d play catch with the kind of agony that whites out your vision, the kind of ache that has every atom of you going no, not like this, no more. Trying to stay ahead of it, stay ahead of that instinct to let go, drop down, put away any thought of carrying on. Something about being hunted by the knowledge this ends, this ends with teeth and talon, this ends. No matter how hard you run, at some point, this will be over.

Something about grinning red-toothed at the void and going, “Not the fuck yet.”

I’ve been thinking lately of hunger. I’ve been thinking lately of what it means to be shown a life and its walls, to be given a skin to wear like a wedding ring, to be told this is it, this is as good as it gets, and still want more. How that hunger is what separates the people who make a name for themselves and those who never do. How talent doesn’t count for anything more than a head start. How privilege can get you places but won’t keep you on the path. How in the end it’s that want, that bone-deep need to tell your stories or sing your songs, that gets you where you need to go, no matter how years it takes before that. How you need to lust for the work —not the acclaim necessarily, but the process, the road with all its thorns— more than anything else in your life, how you need to want it so hard everything else falls away.

How it feels almost like flying, like laughing at gravity.

Random recommendations

• I read Alix Harrow’s ladyknight book and all you need to know about that book is that my blurb was, “This book should enshrine Harrow as one of the finest writers of our generation and if it doesn’t, there’s something seriously wrong with the world.”

• I’m violently behind all of my blurbing, but Nat Cassidy’s When The Wolf Comes Home isn’t one you want to miss. As with all of Cassidy’s books, it’s sharply written and gorgeous and tender while also being overwhelmingly brutal. It has a lot to say about trauma and how it not only eats us up but all those around us.

• Hache Pueyo’s But Not Too Old is not a book on enough people’s radars, which annoys me because it’s fucking excellent. A retelling of Bluebeard’s Bride that will delight every monsterfucker in the vicinity. It’s queer and delicious and so short I can’t tell you more without spoiling it.

• Mira Grant’s Overgrowth hurt my heart a little for all varieties of reasons, not least its depiction of how governmental bodies will choose to dehumanize people for all kinds of reasons and how easily they come up with those justifications. I wept over how tenderly it depicts the complications that come of being someone born into a violent situation, how people prescribe all kinds of things to those who never had a say in the matter, how cruel the world can be to someone who is fundamentally different on an atomic level. It’s also a book about vegetal body snatchers and the sci-fi horror is top fucking notch.

• Interior Chinatown on Hulu has my entire heart with its casting, its storyline, its ideas, its very meta narrative. I didn’t know it was adapted from a book but now that I do, I understand why it won a National Book Award. Please go watch it. If I don’t get a season 2, I will fucking riot.

As always, of course: a cat photo: