Lately, I’ve had a line from the Rilo Kiley song “It Just Is” running through my mind: “This loss isn’t good enough for sorrow or inspiration.” It’s not a perfect analog, since I am experiencing quite a bit of sorrow at present and also the song is about the suicide of a famous musician, and not the loss of a beloved cat. But there’s something about the description of a loss not being good for anything that really sticks with me. Grief can feel like such a useless emotion. What’s gone is gone, and there’s nothing you can do about it. All I want is for this one thing not to be true, but there’s no nuance to it. There’s no undoing it. He was there, and now he’s not, and there’s no bringing him back. It just is.

I’ve been having what I think of as grief storms, which feel like a weather system that passes through. The weather system comes on and I feel this inarticulate rage and grief and sorrow that this has happened, and then the system passes and that intensity of emotion isn’t accessible to me any more than you can feel rain when it isn’t there.

This was on my mind a bit more at the end of December, because the year was ending, and that was the year I lost him, but it’s also the last year I had him. This new year is the first year I won’t have him, and that knowledge is its own form of grief. I will keep on having experiences and living my life and he won’t be here for it.

Not everything that happened last year was bad! But having the thing most precious in my heart slowly ripped away over the course of months does not make me overly fond of 2023. He had a hard end to his life, which does not seem fair, in that apart from his rampant food theft he was a blameless and flawless individual. I find myself struggling with this notion that I don’t want to feel like this anymore, because it’s a pretty miserable way to feel, but also if I stop feeling like this, it’s a sign that his loss is a little more distant.

I don’t want to tempt fate by saying something like, at least 2024 has to be better, because you never do know what shit garbage life has in store for you (I hope someone turns this line into some sort of inspirational slide to post on Instagram). But I guess the upside is that I don’t have to go through the specific horrors of 2023 again.

A sly boy, and a good memory

Here’s this newsletter’s nice memory of the good cat. Oskar used to sleep in the bed with me sometimes, and he was very assertive about where he got to sleep. I’d wake up pressed against a wall because he was stretched out across the entire queen-sized bed, diagonally. But he also liked to sleep under the blankets when he got cold. The thing is, he couldn’t get under there on his own—I had to lift the blanket up for him. Sometimes this meant he’d poke at the blanket and I’d hold it up for him, and then he’d really consider whether he wanted to go under there, so I’d be sitting there, letting cold air in and not sleeping, and then he’d change his mind. But sometimes I would wake up and he would already be under there, which means he trained me to move the blanket for him without waking up. And I have a distinct memory of waking up in the darkness and being slightly confused to discover that he had fully burrowed into my arms under the covers so that I was embracing him as he purred away. Was there a cuddlier boy on this earth?? I do not think so!!!

What I read in print

In 2023 I read 125 books, which is the most I’ve ever read, or at least since I started keeping track in 2019. But considering that I read what was at the time a “normal” amount for me in 2019 and it was 35 books, I think it’s safe to say that I have not previously read that many in one year. The pandemic really rewired my brain, and then I was, shall we say, somewhat distraught for a lot of last year. I added all the books I liked best to my Bookshop shelf if you want some ideas, but also I wanted to say thank you to everyone who shared book recs with me over the course of the year. I really needed a fresh supply of books to keep me going, and so many people kindly came through.

What I’m reading online

There have been a few pieces lately about the ways our internet experience is changing, and a lot of them have been about how much worse it’s getting, but this piece suggests something much more sinister: millennials are simply aging out of the fun internet. Gen Z is still having a grand old time with memes and whatnot, they just do them on apps and in formats that millennials don’t like (it’s video. why is everything videos now. the only acceptable videos are redubbed GI Joe PSAs that someone shows you in a dorm room).

As a one-time theater kid and occasional culture critic, this piece about what it means that we’re losing all of our theater critics really stuck with me. Everyone rags on critics, but I’ll always love really insightful, thoughtful criticism.

There’s a movie out now about the Von Erich wrestling family, but if you want to know more about them, this Texas Monthly article is a good place to start.

I’m not sure if I’ll end up seeing the new adaptation of The Color Purple, but I liked this piece about the movie’s treatment of the novel’s queer love story, and how it measures up to the Spielberg movie. Really interesting to see how Hollywood’s treatment of queer love stories has and hasn’t changed.

The haters have made fun of me for wearing socks to bed on cold winter nights, but science says I’m right and it helps you sleep better. I’m going to wear even more socks now!! I don’t know how, I’ll figure that out later.

A weird thing that happened recently

The other day I went out for a constitutional and I watched a man open a large bag of Doritos and then drop handfuls of them into the well-tended shrubbery in front of a local church as he walked by. What a tragic waste of Doritos. I went by again the next day and they were gone already. Did the church clean them up, or did Cambridge’s rat population get in there in a hurry?

OK, that’s all we’ve got this week. Hope you all are staying warm and listening to adequate quantities of Rilo Kiley to manage your emotions.