ALL TAR PULLS

Even though the word makes me feel like a new age freak, I have written before about having a small personal altar, but the previous incarnation used to be a little smattering of objects on my side of the headboard. Now that we have a giant fucking house for 2 people & a dog, I have my own office, which has become my less-little bigger-smattering of objects, full of tiny altars to different things, including this one:

altar? i hardly know'ar!

It looks like I know anything about crystals; I don’t, I mostly just like rocks. I know they have meaning & I’ll sometimes pick up a specific one if I’m looking to stay mindful of that specific thing, but largely to me they are pretty & sparkly & impress upon me that nature is crazy. Actually most of this is nature & how awesome I think it is: turkey feathers & birch shavings & tiny bones & tiny pinecones & butterfly wings. The skull is solid stone, a present from M for some gift-giving opportunity, or just because. I also have a card about Blanca, patron saint of comfy sweaters who personally knitted one of the coziest ones in my closet, & my favorite photo of M & me.

I decided to dive back into a small thing I started doing when I first set this up. I pull a card from three different decks—Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (digital version), a holographic Rider–Waite tarot set + Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change, & Dirt Gems—& usually marvel at the way they seem to coincide with each other.

I spent the week thinking about this spread.

REPETITION IS A FORM OF CHANGE

This one struck me as I pulled it. Oh, I immediately thought, of course it is. Repetition is a path to change. Repetition is a form of change. Change becomes itself through repetition, & through repetition change changes into stasis, & then the cycle starts all over again.

card from Oblique Strategies, drawing mine

Staying the same while everything changes around you is a form of change. We experience time as linear. Not changing is like driving in a straight line & stopping for nothing: you’ll technically be doing the same thing, but the view out the window is sure as shit going to change. So’s the feel of the ride & your suspension & other car words I can’t fake knowing how to use in a sentence (I’m not a car person). I don’t think you can say you stayed the same if everything around you is different——you can’t separate yourself from all that context all around you.

I think I’ve always been afraid of changing [too much/not at all]. I guess it might seem silly to be afraid of both, but that’s me. I look back on past versions of myself like damn, who were they??? How did they get here??? Where did they go??? & yet I look at myself sometimes & think, still the same old me, even after all these years. Earlier Kirins got me to here, I understand they’re all connected, I just feel like I don’t have access to them anymore, like cocoon layers I thought I was shedding for good it turns out are more like onion layers mostly-but not entirely-disconnected. I realize as I write this that, while I think I’ve eaten this thing exactly one (1) time in my whole ass life, I am talking about a Blooming Onion of the self: a thing split open & laid out & fried, but still ultimately stuck together, time continuing to pull it apart. Well, I tried, but it turns out it doesn’t quite work to use Outback Steakhouse as a vessel of poignancy.

THE CHARIOT

my hand holding the chariot

Yoked to the riddle

were the words I finally landed on to synthesize what I’d read about this card, & what it made me think about. This card is also about change, about moving forward, & about wrangling the mysteries of life into something like balance, hence all the dichotomies in the imagery, yin & yang, civilization & nature, sun & stars, control & submission, power & impotence.

Most guides will talk to you about ambition, willpower, & success. Dore has a bit of a reactionary take, but one I appreciate, writing about how Americans can’t conceive of the failure of willpower. What happens when we can’t wrangle the mysteries? What happens if we can’t muscle our way out of this one just by yanking on the reins? What happens when we’re stuck on this ride, like, literally our legs have disappeared and we’re just a torso smushed onto the platform of a weird chariot being drawn by two tittied sphinxes?

Yoked to the riddle would be a good way to articulate how I feel about life. Here I am, yoked to this thing I often find hard to understand. I’m trying my best to keep this bizarre vessel in driving shape, and to enjoy the ride. (Another car metaphor, too. Coincidence? Or just a staggering lack of imagination on my part?)

GINGER

First, the Latin name of ginger, zingiber officinale, is fun & also weird. Zingiber stemming from the old Tamil iñcivēr, which means ginger root. Officinale from the Latin officina, meaning a workshop or manufactory, used to denote plants often used in herbal medicines that would have been sold by an apothecary.

Ginger is an unobstructor, an herb to release blockages. It cleanses & reduces inflammation & improves circulation & combats nausea & pain. Ginger is a chariot of change. A phrase from Dirt Gems re: ginger was fire for the oceany tissues, which I fucking love. Ginger is a controlled burn that is coming for the dams you’ve built within yourself. Let it go. Spice it up. Release what is holding you back. Let your oceany tissues flow.

On a mundane note, we love ginger in this house, we’re ginger stans. Slap some ginger on/in something & it’s guaranteed to taste better. A dish is hard pressed to have too much ginger for us.

beginner’s animation by me

LASTLY, LATELIES

📖 Middlemarch, by George Eliot (a reread for me, still 5⭐️)

📽️ “Hausu” (1977)

🎶 Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

📺 “Detroiters”

🎮 Okami (guys I’m obsessed with this game)

〰️〰️〰️〰️

I actually really enjoyed setting out to write about this over a week. The disparate elements made it easier for my brain to think laterally, and I especially appreciated that the exercise gave me fun ideas for visuals. Was this interesting to you at all? What’s up in your world? Write me back, if you wanna.

💌KM

catchup, ketchup, catsup

hi friends—

BRAIN BYTES:

from these last, long months

nostalgia

i knew i still had my very first gmail account, kirinn@gmail.com, but on some whim i decided to log in recently and comb through it. it mostly consisted of deleting spam and 3,000+ emails that were utterly useless (did i not understand how to delete emails when i was 14-18 years old??? apparently), and it also involved deep-diving into an enormous well of embarrassment and nostalgia, made up primarily of livejournal entries and copied & pasted AIM conversations. in a fit of proactivity (and also probably embarrassment), i deleted and purged my longtime livejournal, but through this email excavation i discovered a remaining, earlier livejournal, and…yeah. be careful wading into the depths of your past. i can’t seem to decide whether it’s helpful or harmful, but i don’t think it’s for a lot of people regardless. me, i will masochistically continue to preserve the remnants of my former selves no matter HOW much of a psychological toll it takes on me to revisit these shadows!!!

on a related note, i really, really, really, really, really, really, really miss AIM. what i wouldn’t give to have it functional and populated again with everyone i know.

camera obscura

m decided to get into film cameras, which means i 1) have been exposed to an extremely concentrated amount of information about them in a very short time and 2) am now co-owner of a lovely and ever-growing collection of them. we’ve been dicking around with point and shoots, and it’s been nice to think about photos, and why we take them, and how to do it. i still remember the time derrick holt complimented me on ig by saying i had a great eye for light. let’s hope i can bring that great eye to the roll of fuji 200 in this nikon lite touch af! results to come, from that and other cameras, in future missives.

*rihanna voice* work work work work work

i quit my old job back in july after procuring a new one. this line of work is still so fucking bizarre to me but i am okay at it and it pays and i never have to leave my house. i harbor no hope for any agency now; i assume the insanity will be the same everywhere, and that i will just keep jumping from sinking ship to sinking ship. but i left the interview with my primary coworker and functional boss hopeful that our values are as aligned as they seem. capitalism is a sticky web that all but the wealthiest of us have to navigate, but if enough people are on the same page, can’t it be mostly bearable? maybe not. worth it to keep experimenting towards that end though.

space & time

my last day at my old job was july 23. my first day at my new job is this tuesday, september 3. i did indeed take almost 6 weeks off, mostly because we knew that kathy was going to die soon and also because i have not had more than 3 consecutive days off without obligations since fall of 2021. the way my mind exhales when i am left to my own devices again. the way i always feel healthiest and happiest when i am (mostly) master of my own schedule. i think that a lot of people struggle to find meaning if they don’t have external validation or accomplishment; as i get older, i’m finding the opposite is true for me: it gets in the way of me enjoying living life. i want more space to tune in to the experience of existing, in this way, in this time, for this window. give me space, give me time, gimme gimme gimme.

death

kathy, my mother-in-law, passed on august 4 after an intensely difficult battle with MS and another undiagnosed neurological disorder or disorders. it felt long, but in reality, it was extremely short: just 7 years took her from fully functional to wheelchair-bound, from a healthy 59 to dead at 66. i’m grateful we got to see her more in these last few years. words cannot really explain how deeply proud i am of m, my love, my best friend, for all the incredible care and advocacy he provided for her to the very end, for the way he walked with his mom through this ending. tough fucking shit, to put it poetically. it was miraculous to witness, and humbling to participate in. kathy deserved better than she got in this life, and i hope she’s finally found peace. i’m actually going to watch the packers play this year, for you.

kathy’s resting place

toward a more frivolous ending

stationary! i’ve been experimenting the last few years with journals and my journaling routine. i’ve been journaling for 20+ years, and have used everything from drugstore composition notebooks to moleskines to fancy shit. in the last few months and toward the goal of better embracing my mercurial nature, i got into these fancy leather 6-ring binders, and i am appreciating their boundless internal flexibility hidden behind the veneer of coherence and consistency. i’ve also been iterating and iterating on how i journal, and what’s working for me right now is:

• keeping a log on my phone for things that i want to be readily searchable to the exact day

• using a single page in my journal in the mornings to summarize the previous day

• creating a portal to myself (carving out time once a day to listen to music and type away without stopping, thinking, or self-editing—a kind of morning pages, but not always in the morning and not the way julia cameron teaches because i just never jived with the artist’s way)

LATELIES

🎶 grapefruit - maaya sakamoto (1997)

🎮 “just crow things”

📺 “american nightmare” on netflix—this case was not on my radar at the time and bro it was fucking crazy!!!

📽️ “godzilla” (1954)

📚 girl, woman, other by bernardine evaristo (⭐x5)

here’s to enjoying the last dregs of summer. autumn awaits, o my heart.

💌 KM