Sold the Prius to a friend and got an all-electric car, which I may be enjoying a little too much. I have already driven it to Los Angeles and Portland, and am heading up to Seattle next week. In between there was a quick trip to Detroit and Toronto. Charlie and I spent a good part of the summer following American rock band My Chemical Romance around for a while, just to see what they would do. Interesting things, it turned out, at least to me and Charlie and a few hundred thousand like-minded souls.

My dear friend Yarnivore asked me to tell her a little bit about My Chem and why it matters to me, which prompted a lengthy monologue, and I’ve been fretting ever since that I failed by saying both too much and not enough. For example, I forgot to say that you can get a fair sense of what the band is like by watching six of their music videos. There’s the one that’s like all of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore condensed into three shouty minutes that end with a kiss; the one where they bury their beloved grandmother, who raised them to be artists; the one where the bassist is killed on the beach during the invasion of Normandy; the one where the band itself is become death, destroyer of worlds (of all their songs, this is the one you probably already know); the one where they burn it all down; and a personal favorite, the post-apocalyptic one shot in the desert, drenched in color like a Saturday morning cartoon, with a cameo from my beloved comic book writer Grant Morrison.

Each video is a perfect little jewel of a story about beauty and love and fear and grief and hope, not necessarily in that order. They riff on gender and queerness and mental illness and loss and guilt and complicity and rayguns, all things that I spend a lot of time thinking about, you may not be surprised to hear. These narratives are embedded in the larger narratives of three truly excellent albums, themselves embedded in the fucked-up and transcendent narrative of the band itself, or at least what we know of it, which is a great deal and also almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. My Chem is the kind of phenomenon Anne Helen Petersen calls a rich text. Pull on any thread and you’ll find yourself talking about socioeconomic class or ghosts or Joan of Arc. There’s so much to say about it that Charlie and I have listened to fourteen hours of an excellent podcast exploring the discography through a critical theory lens, and we’re only sorry it isn’t longer.

I’ve talked before about My Chem as a map out of hell, but that’s only half of it. I’m drawn to the band when I’m in terrible pain, suffering loss or rejection or the banal horror of another fascist presidency, but their music also spurs me into trying to make sense of things, trying to make stuff of my own, silly little stories about love and grief and rayguns. I’m an agoraphobic misanthrope but this band can get me out on the road and onto a dancefloor. Thanks to them I’ve seen the Getty Villa and the Detroit Industry Murals and been reminded that art matters to me so, so much.

On this current tour My Chem are wrapping their existing narratives into another grand and mysterious and operatic story that is being revealed a little at a time, in teasing and affectionate interactions with an audience they trust to figure things out. What a gift to see them live at all (this band broke up, not very amicably, in 2013, and it turns out has only reformed because the rhythm guitarist had a particularly vivid dream). What a gift to be in this relationship with them and the other fans. What a gift to be weird and queer and arty and to hear the voices of the dead as they travel through time. It’s not just a map out of hell. It’s a reason to live.

…all was well. Well enough. The world still ached with beauty. The birds kept chirping, leaves clattered in a breeze, the late-afternoon sunlight, thick and pale, slanted in from the south.

…she was struck by how private American forces of mercy were straining to offset America’s public agents of cruelty.

Looking at the bright light on the horizon, your first thought was: well, that’s it then. Nuclear war. Sydney’s gone.

…the ‘ancestors’ and the ‘communities’ we believe we have shucked off (where I come from, at least) are still present. They haunt us, not least because they make it possible for us to be alive.

British colonisation was the beginning of the end for natural Australia.

The plunders and even the occupation of earth by the Europeans violated the land. Bennelong hoped they could be taught that fact. It might have been one of the reasons he stayed so long in Sydney Cove, and risked his soul.

The enduring lesson of the Rum Rebellion was the power of the big men of New South Wales.

Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being

This was Katherine May’s pandemic book, a book haunted by lockdowns and mass death. Needing to feel grounded, May dug into the earth beneath her feet. Not in an ickily sentimental way – she makes it clear that Whitstable’s stone circle is modern, and that the sacred spaces of Dungeness are its WW2-era sound mirrors and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. She admits that her garden is a mass of weeds and that staying up late to watch meteor showers is tiring and chilly.

May’s pragmatism makes awe accessible. She learns the names of wildflowers (viper’s bugloss! Known to Australians as Salvation Jane or Paterson’s curse) and attends a class on bees. I listened to this book between drives to Rancho Viejo and bike rides to Heron’s Head, my own sacred landscapes. Big storms are coming. There’s no way out but through, and enchantment is one of the ways through.

Few and far between are the writers that can kick off an authentic hyperfixation, alas, but Adam Higginbotham has done it to me twice now. His Midnight in Chernobyl is up there with Svetlana Alexeivich in the definitive bibliography of that clusterfuck. Now he takes on the other great engineering catastrophe of the first half of 1986. His is an oddly specific niche.

I am so profoundly torn about the shuttle program. It represented the democratization of space. Its astronaut class, the thirty-five new guys, was the first to include women and people of color. Dad and my brothers and I got up before dawn to watch Columbia’s first launch. When I took the kids to see Endeavour in Los Angeles, I cried. This awkward camel of a spacecraft made the universe bigger: no shuttle, no Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’m such a fucking fangirl, I have NASA plates on my car.

But NASA straight up murdered the Challenger 7. The agency’s budget peaked during the Apollo program, and the diversity of astronaut class eight was an attempt to build public support for space exploration. It kind of worked! Everybody loved Sally Ride, the hot bi butch with the name right out of Mustang Sally! That line of reasoning led to putting a social studies teacher on top of a missile and, in the presence of her parents who were on camera as these events took place, blowing her up.

NASA’s position was: look at all we can do, with how little money! Everyone can play, even the girls and the brown people! Just keep letting us fly rockets. Politicians were all, I wish to associate myself with these impressive feats! But no, you can’t have any more money. Meanwhile engineers at Morton-Thiokol knew the O-rings would fail at low temperatures. There was an impassioned conference call about it the night before the launch. NASA had so many chances not to kill these seven incredible and accomplished people, and it missed them all.

And then seventeen years later, it did it again.

I think this particular book hit so hard in this election year because we are all of us helpless passengers on a spaceship out of control. Anyway, my hyperfixation – after this book I borrowed everything the SFPL had on the space programs. My standouts: Michael Collins is the best writer of the Apollo astronauts – as somebody somewhere said, his Carrying the Fire reads like EB White got a trip to the moon. First Man is an extraordinary, very literary biography of Armstrong, adapted into maybe my favorite space movie since The Martian. (Armstrong was a near-contemporary of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose An Angel at my Table made a striking compare-and-contrast to First Man. Tl; dr much better to be a weird clever man in the 20th century than a weird clever woman.)

Bringing Columbia Home is the kind of awkwardly written but almost unbearably moving account of the recovery of those astronauts. Leaving Orbit, about the last flights of the shuttle, has a similarly elegiac mood. Finally, the podcast The Space Above Us, which deals with crewed space missions one at a time, kept me and Jeremy enthralled on an entire 12-hour road trip home from Portland. A gem of the genre.

(I usually end up short-changing good books toward the end of my list so this year I’m going to split things up into separate reviews instead.) Ed Yong’s An Immense World turned up on everyone’s lists of favorites the year it came out, and deservedly so. Late to the party, I listened to the audiobook which Ed Yong himself read brilliantly. Not to be a shallow bitch but the narrator of an audiobook makes a huge difference. A bad narrator leaves you struggling to parse whatever sense the author was trying to make, whereas the author reading his own work competently draws you by gentle degrees all the way into his own sphere of perception.

Check out that segue! Because this book is about animals’ spheres of perception – their umwelt – and how their various sensory capabilities, so different from ours, mean that they live in overlapping but fundamentally nonidentical universes from us and from one another. This is, in fact, a book about empathy. However well the narrator reads, we can’t experience life from the point of view of another being, but in spite of the impossibility of doing so, it’s incredibly important to try.

I did think about my political opponents, listening to this book before the election. I tried to imagine the world from their point of view, and how their choices – ruinous from where I’m standing – might make sense to them. It was hard and probably futile but it was one small thing that helped me to clamber out of the impact crater in the awful days immediately after.

In January 2014, the four of us were flying home from a Christmas trip to Australia. We transited in Auckland and I called my mother, who had seen her oncologist while we were in the air. “He said that it is in my stomach, in a knot. He said that this is the end.” Whenever I fly through Auckland now I can feel it, my knees buckling, my 8yo and 11yo trying to hold me up. We flew on to San Francisco where I held my beloved and very elderly cat Bebe while I booked my own flight back to Australia. I left Jeremy to take care of those scared little kids, and I never saw Bebe again.

When I got to Barraba Mum had been set up in the palliative care room at the local hospital, which had its own lounge with foldout sofas. My brothers and her friends would come and go. We played mah jongg for hours. I curled up with Mum on the sofa and we watched the Last of the Summer Wine on my laptop. Her friends had made her a beautiful patchwork quilt and we wrapped ourselves in it. There was so much joy. The nurses said it sounded like we were having a family holiday, and we were. We told a lot of jokes. One morning I asked her what she wanted for breakfast: “Gin and tonic.” “Coming right up!”

I sometimes say that Mum went nova. In four weeks she poured out twenty years of unconditional love. When Bebe died, Mum held me and said, “It’s okay to cry.” I said “Mum, if I start crying, I’ll never stop.” She said, “Yes you will.” I think about that all the time.

When she died, the nurses let me help wash her body, and I cried, and I kissed her cooling flesh. It was the honor of my life to attend at my mother’s death. I think of the radiance of her love, and I think of my clarity in the moment. Let me carry that grace in my heart and hands all the days of my life.

I tested positive for Covid on Sunday, my first time. The last of my family to get it, nearly five years into this global panny-D in which we find ourselves, I thought I was doing the tests wrong.

I’d been run-down since Thursday. Cortland Street was closed to traffic for the first time but I missed Halloween. On Saturday afternoon I could only ride my bike as far as Potrero del Sol, to look at the Day of the Dead altars and the squares of the AIDS quilt in the crisp autumn sun. Marigolds and grief. I cried for the lost boys who should have been my queer elders.

By Saturday night my temperature was 100.6 and it took some effort to breathe. When I finally called my doctors on Sunday, wheezing, they sent me to the emergency room. In the friendly robot taxi I wept for the people who went to the ER with Covid in 2020, and who said goodbye to their families through iPads, and who died. Me, I had x-rays which ruled out pneumonia, was given paxlovid and all the steroids and came home to quarantine in the attic.

Election day is a more reliable trauma trigger even than the week in which both my parents died. I spent the morning text banking in Michigan, then I howled all through therapy, deep, racking sobs for all that we have lost. Afterwards the cats insisted on taking me out into the garden, where the linnets and phoebes and hummingbirds and crows had various constructive things to say.

I took portraits of the sticky monkeyflower and hummingbird sage and Douglas iris. I chatted to my sister in outback NSW. I scrubbed out the bird-feeder with hot water and soap. That’s about all I had in me, and now I’m back in my college kid’s bed, looking over Excelsior and San Bruno Mountain as the sun sets into the Pacific. May all beings know peace.

“The problem with Challenger wasn’t the machine. The machine was trying to talk to us, but we didn’t listen.”

I know what it feels like to fear that there might not be many meaningful strategies left.

Everything you hold onto too tightly will die in your hands.

…nothing humans do is real, and the trees don’t care, and we are all here together in dirt. This feels to me somehow like the opposite of despair.

The horror is so persistent, it’s almost banal.

My auntie Barb has died. My Dad’s older sister. Sharp as a needle, funny and profoundly kind. Maybe my first role model and a person who saw me and loved me as I am from when I was a chaotic disaster youth all the way to middle age. She made 93. A life well lived. I will miss her always.