Catching up after a big move—and an exciting announcement
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My fam, my goodness it has been so long I have really missed each and every one of you and hope you are all holding on tight and finding your peace and joy wherever you can. I suppose the biggest piece of news to get into right up front is that I now live in beautiful Tucson, Arizona in the sunny Sonoran Desert.
What a however many weeks it has been it has been. Where to even start there was the eternal packing in Boston that involved loading up all of our possessions into a miniature storage unit and then shipping it across the country and also a neglected jar of kimchi in the fridge that had to be disposed of like a dead body in the cover of night. A nostalgia tour of Boston that included a brief stay in a fancy old hotel in Back Bay, several indulgent dinners, a mournful visit to the Copley library, a stroll through town to the North End for one more night of pasta and cannoli, a stop at Cheers where after 11 years I finally got Jamie to go with me, pizza in Coolidge Corner, a visit to Hampton Beach for an emotional goodbye to family. Then a truly Chevy Chase movie-like scheme involving three pets and four humans driving an RV and towing a car for 2700 miles in some of the worst road weather you can imagine including the entire state of Texas being pretty much frozen, and all the while, trying to follow via smartphone a full on war erupting in the background. Then literally riding off into the sunset as we somehow, some way, rolled into Southern Arizona with a car full of dead houseplants and very confused dogs.
But we did make it. Returning to a place where you have a strong connection but have not lived in for many years is a unique experience, particularly in middle age. Your less elastic body has to readjust to higher elevation, lower humidity, more UV rays, new kinds of dust in the air, as you feel your way around a landscape that’s like an unspoken language you’ve allowed to rust. All of that coupled with the exhaustion and disorientation of a big move, the thrill and confusion of having no routines or guardrails, not knowing where in your new surroundings you’re welcome, you’re needed, or you’re maybe not supposed to be.
One interesting phenomenon in that process is this strange feeling of being deeply familiar with a physical place, but realizing that that place is now home to an entirely different community than when you were here last, a community that you are not a part of, at least not yet. As a result, there’s this kind of uncanny feeling of being in a space where you feel like you belong and that you are home, but among people who, as warm and welcoming as Tucsonans are, do not yet feel the same way about you. It takes time to become part of a community, even when coming home.
It’s fitting that the last newsletter was about the mesquite tree and the ecosystems it carries forth out of lifeless dust, grounding countless species atop an enormous root system that reaches down many times deeper than its height above the surface. About a week after we moved into our very old house in the Armory Park neighborhood downtown, our spare toilet started backing up. But it wasn’t backing up with sewage. We called a plumber and when snaking out the pipes he was pulling up plant matter. Tree roots. Another visit from the plumber, more tree roots, tangle after thick tangle coming up from our pipes. A third visit, they flushed it out with water, more roots until it was finally clear.
The plumber explained to me that the house’s pipes are made of clay, and if they haven’t been used in a while, tree root systems will infiltrate them at the bends where the joints meet up. Apparently it is pretty common although I had never heard anyone talk about it before it must be like the HPV of home ownership. So anyway, the weird thing is that the plumber said there were no trees near the location where the pipes were getting overwhelmed with roots. He had no idea where they were coming from. In fact, he said, it could have been a root system from a tree that was here before the house was even built. Who is to say what kind of roots they were without like sending them to the lab at the Jeffersonian Institute I guess, but the predominant genus surrounding the house is the spiny, unkillable prosopis itself—mesquite. It would be fitting if that cornerstone flora of our new surroundings had turned on us upon arrival, a reminder that it was here long before us and will be here long after, and it might just take us back into the soil with it if we’re not careful. But, for now at least, it seems to be allowing us to stay and find out if and where exactly we fit in.
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Cool story about your toilet overflowing bro, but where are all the goods about climate change and white supremacy and capitalism, you might be asking. Where are the all the savage burns? Where are the comic book reviews and youtube screencaps?
Well, it has been a wild 1-2 months, and aside from my actual job, I have had that just-moved de facto part-time job in which you spend evenings and weekends alternating between spending hundreds of dollars at the hardware store and then at Target, and in between those trips you unpack boxes, paint the walls, clean up toilet water, etc. We’ve also been fortunate to have some beautiful guests visiting us from out of town already, which in its own way helped us to get settled in, but has also kept things busy. So you know haven’t had a lot of time for the newsy.
Which brings me to the real news of the day, which I think is both exciting and maybe a bit of a temporary bummer. I’ve decided over the Crisis Palace spring hiatus that I’m actually going to be taking another hiatus for a little while. Maybe it’s more of a sabbatical. The reason this time is that, a little while back I decided that I’m going to pull together the best of the newsletter to date into a book—an ebook and maybe a print book, we’ll have to see if it makes sense. Working title being, Crisis Palace Vol. 1: Climate Change, COVID, and What We Build While the World is on Fire. I don’t know maybe needs a little workshopping. I think the final product will be pretty cool though and I hope at least a handful of people will sit down and spend some time with it when it’s done.
I started organizing the contents a while back and planned to chip away at editing it while continuing the newsletter, but especially with the move, it’s just taking forever and I need to sink some real time into it so it doesn’t come out in like 2050. So that’s what I’ll be doing over the next several weeks.
That’s the news. I know, I will miss you once again. But the newsletter is not going anywhere. I’ve really missed this weekly routine and I plan to report back on all sorts of new connections and conversations and yes even a new set of crises from this dusty desert landscape.
Until then, don’t forget to put on sunscreen and drink plenty of water.
Tate