Abraxa loves them both, wishes them only good. They’ll leave me, she tells herself, and then the thought rearranges itself like a warm wax lamp: they’ll let me go.

I was convinced that I’d never have any friends, so I had this idea of being one to myself. I could be honest and loyal and supportive. I could listen to myself and make myself laugh.

Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories.

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.

I have neglected my algebra and watercolors and learned that I don’t like beans. Jeremy came off his bike on Inauguration Day and exploded his ACL, so it’ll be August before we go riding again. But my new foundation of tragic hope has proved surprisingly durable. I found a gay church and a gay gym because it turned out what I really need at the end of the world is strength and (gay) Jesus.

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.

We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise.

I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.

We have the contractors back in to rip out the Mamie Eisenhower pink bathroom (I know, what barbarians, but it was leaking) and replace it with Fireclay tile and a shower under the skylight. Opening the walls revealed, as expected, eldritch horrors, most notably that the upper staircase was supported by an angled 2×6 resting on its narrowest edge.

I’m no expert but that ain’t right. While the house undergoes what’s essentially a heart transplant, the main level is a carnival maze of plastic walls with zippered doors. We’re still working from home, camping in the kitchen, on the deck and in the garden.

Luckily it’s spring and the garden is a little ridiculous, unphotographable. The box elders and grapevine are back with a vengeance, velvet green leaves casting dappled shade. The sticky monkey flower, purple and hummingbird sages are in full bloom and the meadow is a riot of poppy, tidy tips, Chinese houses, flax, globe gilia, bird’s eye gilia, the last of the five spot and baby blue eyes, Douglas iris and mountain garland. Fluffy black bees as big as your thumb buzz from poppy to poppy with panniers full of emergency-orange pollen. It’s gaudy, excessive.

Because we’re further up the hill than the Mission, closer to the edge of the fog-tide, it’s often windy back here, and I’m aware of the atmosphere as a restless, oceanic thing, always in motion. The bathroom will be tiled in celadon and silver-blue, with a terracotta sink. Earth, meadow and air. Opening the walls of my own heart reveals, as expected, eldritch horrors, but what a privilege it is to rebuild this lovely old home, make it sound and safe for the next fifty years.

…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.

Cynicism and nihilism will make you dry up, like soil compacted by neglect and abuse. But soil holds the memory of life, and with some water and a garden fork, you might be able to bring it back. It helps to remember that you’re not alone. Look around. Is it really true that everyone sees time as money?

Theirs was a world of fear and chaos, with tiny islands of goodness and hope.

We knew coming in here that the tall green stand of top-heavy, shallow-rooted blackwood acacia trees would have to come down, and that we would be lucky if they didn’t come down on the house. We lost them to this winter’s unending chain of atmospheric rivers. Even expected, their loss is incalculable. They were invasive, but the hummingbirds and woodpeckers and grey squirrels loved them, and so did I.

Without their shade and shelter, my little garden feels much more exposed. The patterns of daily sunlight have changed and the fog wind whips across the deck. I got two lovely Japanese maples from Flowercraft and put one on the deck and one in the shady alley above the stairs. I worried for the one in the shade, but the deck tree blew over half a dozen times and is dry and shocky. I have put it with its friend in what is now the maple courtyard, the shaded tree still green and thriving.

After considering buckeye – toxic to cats – and bay laurel – a carrier of sudden oak death – I noticed a tree at the barn, on the bank of the creek, with maple leaves and a weeping habit. Box elder. Paul at Bay Natives had two of them in fifteen gallon pots, over six feet tall. He’s had them for years and was delighted they finally found a home. They barely fit in the Prius, which is still full of their leaves. Aisea planted them yesterday and this morning I drank my bowl of latte in their dappled shade. No single thing abides, but all things flow.

In that brief moment before the clouds shielded the sun again, I felt what it was like to be held. I was standing in the earth’s enormous hand.

Whoever saved the seed loved us before they knew us. And some of them loved us as their world was ending. Our gardens archive that love.

I’m more interested in solidarity, even if I don’t quite yet know myself what I mean by it, just the feeling I get from it—the startling, quenching relief of it; the force of its surprise, like being loved.

…life in a city near the sea or near the mountains where the sun shines for an average of half the day. My house would have a living room, big kitchen, bathroom and one bedroom for each of the family, and my work would be so engrossing that while I did it I would neither notice nor care if I was happy or sad.

When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child—a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all.

The truth, according to Finisia, was simple: our purpose on earth is to tend and keep the garden of God’s original planting.