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Collected enthusiasms, September 2021 – Present
(File under: sci-fi, cereal, seasons)
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Recently, my body has been behaving like, pardon my French, a real rascal.
Since September 2021 I’ve been trudging through a gauntlet of diagnoses, getting scanned, shocked, and stuck with needles, in a variety of beige rooms. At one point I'm convinced I had enough blood drawn to fill a punch bowl. There hasn't been any bad news, but there hasn't been much good news, either—just a lot of chronic pain, sleepless nights, and excuses to use the word phlebotomist.
It's been miserable! And isolating! As if two years and change of miserable isolation wasn't enough already. Undiagnosed chronic pain is a real piece of work—it inserts itself like a dismal prefix before every thought, and refocuses all your energy on late-night catastrophizing. Combine this with living alone in a city you moved to 10 days before the world shut down, a city where you can count the number of people you know on one hand, and you're close to filling up the world's most depressing bingo card.
Unsurprisingly, enthusiasm has been thin on the ground. In this newsletter's abrupt hiatus, I gravitated exclusively toward things that felt familiar or consolatory, and I didn't feel compelled to share them. What was there to be enthusiastic about? But these emails (which began a month into the pandemic!) have always been about coping in some way—with grief, with America, with lockdown— and enthusiasm often came from simply writing, regardless of what I was writing about. So, hello again. Here's a few things that I relied on these past nine months.
From December to January I completely inhaled all four volumes of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, a relentlessly hopeful sci-fi series about small stories in the enormity of space—books so cosy and compulsive that I began turning in earlier for the night just to spend more time with them.
If I found that I couldn't sleep after too much time in zero gravity, I relied heavily on The Empty Bowl, a 'meditative podcast about cereal' where two hosts chat amiably about breakfast cereal over a sound bed of crashing waves. I don't believe I've ever heard the end of an episode, and that's 100% to the show's credit.
Fuubutsushi is a jazz quartet that recorded four seasonal records remotely during the pandemic: Fuubutsushi (autumn), Setsubun (winter), Yamawarau (spring), and Natsukashii (summer). Each is an idyllic, meandering collage of guitar, sax, violin, and percussion, threaded with samples and field recordings. I'd walk around my neighbourhood listening to these records, first wondering if the birdcalls I was hearing were real or recorded, later wondering the same of the music itself—maybe this street just sounds like a clarinet loping after a piano.
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See you next month, bodies be damned. Say hello → hello@jezburrows.com
Chronically,
Jez