One of the immensely valuable things I’ve learned from reading Indigenous writers and history (shout-out to Anita Heiss, Evelyn Araluen, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Terese Marie Mailhot, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Bruce Pascoe, David Treuer, Stephen Graham Jones, N. Scott Momaday and many more) is that looking at the United States and the Commonwealth of Australia and seeing colonial regimes that are fundamentally illegitimate is a real and viable option available to you at any time. Instead of doomscrolling, just think: Turtle Island. My shoulders immediately relax and I can breathe more easily. This land has seen empires rise and fall. This, too, shall pass.

This world is a network, not a hierarchy. You can tell by the immense amount of work and energy that pours into maintaining hierarchies. The empire really really wants to monopolize your attention because the second you notice it’s a party trick, it loses its power. Bullies hate knowing they peaked in high school. Billionaires are shit-scared of death, which is even a little bit poignant. The empire is a house which like all houses is only a temporary shelter against the rain. Water will find its way in.

Two obvious objections present themselves. First, isn’t this nihilism? I think it’s actually a bit closer to existentialism. And I’m not advocating for giving up on life and lying in bed being depressed, because I’ve tried that and it’s boring. Anyway the whole premise of this objection is, if not maintaining the empire then what? Which is more totalizing empire thinking, because it turns out there’s lots of things that are not the empire and a lot of them are really great.

For example: Charlie and I got to visit the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center. It’s amazing, a museum in a circular building that emphasizes the cyclical nature of indigenous time by, among other things, grouping artefacts by meaning and not chronology. This curatorial choice underscores the tenacity and continuity of a culture that succeeded in beating back the Spanish invasion and that endures to this day. Plus they have fry bread tacos in the cafeteria.

If not empire then how about ceremony? The rituals of maintenance, attending to the cycle of the years, tending to the land. Gardening, emptying the dishwasher, going to church. Or how about art? Making things or singing or moving your body around outside the relentless coercion marketplace. Forming relationships with particular wild or domestic animals. Being, just for the pleasure of it.

The second objection is that if you don’t consider imperial law legitimate, the empire’s goons can come and snatch you off the streets or shoot you in the face, which: yes. They do that. (Or the flip side of this argument, which is that as an immensely privileged white lady, I can afford to say that the empire is bullshit. Also true.) But while I was in Albuquerque I finally got around to reading Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Holocaust memoirs by their nature are drenched in survivor guilt, and the glib reading of this is that the good ones died and that a person had to do bad things to live. But Frankl digs deeper. To him even death in the camps could be a victory to the people who held onto their sense of self. When he talked about this sense of self I recognized it in myself as the person who thinks that we as Westerners should honour treaties with indigenous people or shut the fuck up. The person who can immediately disregard any argument that comes from a terf. The person who likes books and horses and Jeremy, and who is me.

A self is an amazing thing to have. A serious thing to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world, and so on. As I get older I spend more and more time enjoying consciousness for its own sake. All the middle aged cliches: learning the names of my backyard birds, closing my eyes the better to hear the music, drawing not to show other people what I’ve drawn but to find out what I am looking at, and whether my hand can cooperate with my eyes. When I was young and skinny it took me a long time to learn to float, but now that I’m old and buoyant I can simply lean back into the water and let the earth hold me in her cupped hands. That’s how it feels to me to have my self.

Trans people have taught me what suffering taught Viktor Frankl: that there’s a whole universe inside me that the empire can’t take away unless I yield it. The things I know to be true about myself: my treasure. My secret heart is both the only thing I have and, in the end, the only thing worth having. Find out what matters to you in this life and marvel at it. The stars over Wilbur Hot Springs, so thick and bright they were like rain. A lush-furred coyote outside Bandelier that turned to look at me with its dark golden eyes. The thirty years I’ve spent in cahoots with Jeremy: our witty and clever large adult children. What are the chances? All of it is astonishing. Worth it, despite despite despite.

to this unforgettable exchange

Just after I got home from Tokyo the seasonal switch got flipped. (Oh, yeah, I had a work trip to Japan. I had a wood-paneled hotel room like a cabin with tiny lounge chairs around a tiny table and a delicious bakery downstairs, and I did my work things and then walked for miles and miles through the city like a character from a William Gibson novel or Hayao Miyazaki film. I was very lonely but it was excellent. Maybe that version of me is real and she is imagining my family and my garden and my menagerie in California. Anyway.) I rode Lenny in the late summer heat wave and stopped at Canyon Market on the way home, after dark. People were buying firewood and persimmons had come into season and there was a chill in the air. Fall.

We moved here in April of 98, an unusually wet spring, and it wasn’t until I drove back from the playa that September, crossing the Bay Bridge at 3am, filthy, exhausted and happy, that I saw the lights of San Francisco and my heart said: “home.” Another year I remember unlocking the door to our house on Alabama Street and feeling the twilight chill and thinking of apple pie. The city is at its most beautiful in October, when the drawn-out summer wrestles with the brilliant dark, and loses.

Election years are especially wrenching in this respect, when the encroaching cold threatens to swallow up all the bitterly-fought-for, hard-won concessions to our collective humanity. It sucks to have to beg for our lives every four years. I have to drag myself out of the doomscroll with an act of will. It helps to think about deep time. Turtle Island, I say to myself, and the bay fills in with prairie that stretches out to the Farallones, where smilodon and direwolves hunt camels and rhinos and woolly mammoths. It also helps to be completely in the moment. I turn on the Merlin app and try to see the cedar waxwings singing in the lillipilli tree. I think about Ed Yong’s powerful xoxo talk, and how he counter-balanced his pandemic grief by paying attention to lazuli buntings and the tide.

It was high tide at Heron’s Head this weekend, the path stretching out into the bay like a road to the land of the dead. I walked along the path furious. Why does it feel like I was put on this earth to love things, only to have them ripped from my hands? Why do I get a ringside seat to the sixth extinction, and why do I have to feel it so deeply? A sardonic voice in my head, maybe my mother’s, said, “Because you’re good at it.” I thought of that edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with the Roman column crumbling to ruins. (1946, oof.) I thought (again) of the lyric from The Mountain Goats song Fresh Tattoo: “all of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” I’m sentient stardust witnessing the heat death of the universe, and I’m grateful, so grateful, for every bit of beauty and grace.

Me, in possession of new riding gloves: We can prance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind, cause your friends don’t prance and if they don’t prance well they’re no friends of mine. It’s safe to prance

Jeremy, very seriously: It is NOT safe to prance. Not without hats!

So. Space settlements. Have we really thought this through?

i lunch with a mover and a shaker

What the industry wants to do is revert to the mean—always.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, A Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Miracle Country

Real Life: A Novel

Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West

The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California

The Shepherd’s Life: A People’s History of the Lake District

Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart: An Adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

As is abundantly clear, I was craving books about Californian and Indigenous history, as well as strong landscape writing. Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams hit both nerves hard. It’s an unjustly neglected masterpiece.

I read more fiction and poetry than this list would suggest, but Brandon Taylor and Chen Chen were the absolute standouts. They’re also both fantastic on Twitter, which probably helps them stick in my mind.

I read 142 books, give or take, which is pretty normal. I might’ve expected more in a quarantine year, but I started a new job and house and garden and got two new horses and it’s a golden age for television, so. 92 books by women, 37 by identifiably queer folk, 5 of whom were trans, 30 by POC. It’s hard to read enough books by trans and POC writers, but I should try harder.

I read two separate books of nonfiction called Horse Crazy, which is probably all anyone needs to know about me.

Took Lenny the mustang to a little horse show.

What a very excellent boy.

Intense gamma fields of 100 roentgen an hour and above—on the threshold for inducing acute radiation syndrome—caused such extensive ionization of the air that it left a distinctive aroma, like that after a lightning storm; if you smell ozone, his colleague said, run.

…if we’re willing, we can pick out any number of statements from any number of books and find them comforting.

The Pacific chuckled softly: it was insane, twinkling away in a violent blue dream.

They played a podcast about a gay clockmaker in the deep South, as depressing as it was fascinating. The moral seemed to be: throw yourself into your work as much as you want, become the very best in the world at what you do, it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, you’ll still die alone.

Erica slumped in the back of Stephanie’s RAV4 and drank in the scenery. It was a cold, bright spring day. Snow lingered in the high Sierras, even as Hope Valley spread out a brilliant blanket of wildflowers. Past Markleeville, the redwoods gave way to the high desert and Bodie, the ghost town, lonely and severe. Then a twist of the highway revealed the pastel pink and blue moonscape of Mono Lake, its tufa towers menacing as alien monoliths.

I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.

The American plantation wasn’t the quaint village community you saw depicted in your history textbook. It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping.

For the wild horse, these ruthless new hunters would be both an ark and an accelerant to their extinction.

Last month marked twenty years since I hooked up with himself and I meant to write about it, but the longer I am with him the harder it gets to write about us. Honestly, it feels like tempting fate; like every smug newspaper columnist and relationship coach in America who gives insufferable lectures on How To Keep The Spark Alive and you loathe them so much you just assume that their significant other is planning to elope with their dance instructor and you hope the two of them will be happy.

This morning, flying home from Seattle and listening to Panic! at the Disco’s “Casual Affair” approximately one billion times while reading a particularly devastating chapter of the epic Steve/Bucky love story, I realized one reason why it feels so risky to write about it: it was staggeringly dumb luck on my part. Obviously I was cute as a button at 25 but I was also, in Grant’s memorable phrase, an emotional basket case. And he was being diplomatic as hell when he said it.

Stupid, infinitely improbable dumb luck. Really. What were the chances that anyone would want to take me on, all of me, me and my intensity and my endless garbage-pile of trauma? What were the chances that a person would not only be able to cope with all of that, would sign up for my total lack of self-knowledge or emotional intelligence, but would be able follow me as I ran, as I zig-zagged across the Anglosphere, as I fucked up and bottomed out and rebuilt everything every few years? Would sit with me in the middle of the giant messes I made and coax me to laugh?

I know everyone thinks their boo is the one in a zillion but I also know, I know in my bones, how broken I was and how hard I made things for myself and everyone around me. And to wake up here in middle age with him, with the universe of shared jokes and shorthand so enormous that it makes Claire furious that she will never learn all the stories, never know all the references, with the still-unbelievable truth that however difficult it has been, however difficult I have been and still am, he still wants me, he still misses me when I’m away… eh. Words fail me. I hope he and his tennis coach will be very happy together.

Opinions are divided over who left the five remaining Laduree macarons in our beautiful little apartment on Rue de Seine. Certain people have held the contentious position that I am principally at fault; I, contrariwise, maintain that the responsibility for commonly held macarons is itself collective, and that everyone ought to have done their part.

However the disaster came about, the fact remains that the macarons were left behind, and the Pole Sud macarons purchased in Lezignan, while undeniably delicious, were considered no substitute for the real thing.

We caught the TGV back to Paris yesterday and there was some talk of ducking out for replacement macarons, until we established that there were Laduree outposts at CDG itself. As we checked in this morning, our gate agent told us there was one such outpost just inside security. Jeremy dashed all our spirits when he reported that Google said it was closed.

Fie upon you, Google! It wasn’t, and almost our last act in Paris was to replace the Earl Grey, menthe, vanille, abricot and yuzu ginger macarons that had been so tragically lost. Since this story has such a happy ending, technically it is now the comedy of the macarons. Goodbye, Paris, we love you and hope to see you again soon.