The Bloggess

Next week I’m going to New England to talk about my upcoming new book at a conference just for indie booksellers (yay!) and I was talking to Elizabeth (the lovely person who runs Nowhere Bookshop) about it and she asked “Where in New England, because it’s pretty big?” and I thought she was crazy because isn’t New England a small state? Like, it’s so small I can’t even remember what the capital of New England is and then Victor and Elizabeth just stared at me in horror, because apparently New England isn’t a state at all. I assumed that they were fucking with me but they explained that New England was a whole group of states and asked if I also thought “the midwest” was a state, and I said, “Obviously not, because there is a ‘the’ in the title. That’s how you know it’s a group. ‘The southwest.’ ‘The Atlantic Seaboard.’ Like, if New England isn’t a state then why do we have The New England Patriots? We don’t have “The Mormon Corridor Stallions,” do we? This is too confusing. Petition to rename New England “‘The Upper Righties’.”

And then they looked at me like I was even stupider and I wondered if New England wasn’t even in the upper right of the map. and reminded them that they didn’t teach me Geography in high school because I was too busy taking classes on judging-cotton, cattle insemination, boll-weevil eradication and square dancing. (Thanks, Texas! Super helpful!)

Elizabeth was like, “You never learned the songs about the states?” and then proceeded to send me something called “The Nifty Fifty,” which was decidedly not a bop and didn’t even rhyme. Then she sent me “Wakko’s 50 State Capitols” and I was like, “Ringo Star as a mouse teaching me geography sung to the melody of every square dancing class I ever took was not on my bingo card for today, but I guess here we are.”

So my question to you is, what is something you learned as an adult that made you feel incredibly stupid, because I can’t be alone here.

Also, whoever decided that we should capitalize “Capitol” when it refers to the building but not “capital” when it refers to the capital city that the Capitol is in is on my forever shitlist. Also, spellcheck is telling me “shitlist” isn’t even a word. I fucking give up.

Y’all. This should be a fancy-ass, glossy post where I breezily tell you about something I’m so excited about and I should be wearing a suit while talking to a news anchor as I toss my hair back and laugh confidently while not doing that anxiety-based blinking tic that comes on every fucking time I tell myself to not do that anxiety-based blinking tic.

Instead, I am writing this from under two cats while in my daytime pajamas with two inches of grey roots and blinking hard like a motherfucker. BUT…I’m also really happy because GUESS WHAT? NEW BOOK, Y’ALL:

This book is just as unhinged and baffling as my others, but it’s a little different. Two years ago when Hailey went off to college I fell into a pretty deep depression and felt utterly unmoored. I had a hard time living and writing and just being human, so I started using all of the tools and tricks that I’ve collected in the many decades I’ve lived with depression, anxiety, ADHD, executive dysfunction, squirrel-brain infestation, memory problems, etc to pull myself out. And I realized that all of these tricks that I rely on to save me are actually a pretty amazing toolbox of things that might help others too. This book pools together all of those strange hacks that keep me alive in spite of myself and that keep me creating even when it’s hard. Some are logical. Some are funny. Some are absolutely ridiculous. But together they are a quick-start manual that helped me to stay here, to keep finding joy even when it’s hard, and to stay creative in a world (and brain) that doesn’t always prioritize expression. They may speak a little more to those with my same issues, but I think they can help everyone who deals with fear, memory, focus issues, weariness of the world, doom-scrolling, introversion, artistic block, imposter syndrome, dumpster fires, or who just needs a little voice in their corner offering encouragement and reminding them that it will be okay.

I’ll have so much more to say about this book in the months to come, but for now…want to see the cover?

And you can preorder it today! Click here to preorder and keep that page bookmarked because I’ll be updating it with book tour dates and locations. I haven’t toured in so long that I don’t even know where to go so feel free to leave suggestions in the comments if you have a local place that you love.

I hope that it helps you to read it as much as it helped me to write it.

First off, a giant thank you to everyone who loves us because Nowhere Bookshop was named the Reader’s Choice Best Independent Bookshop in San Antonio in the San Antonio Current. WHOOP.

Secondly, today I wrote about stealing time from death on my substack if you want to read it.

Third, my favorite new releases this month are The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis and Tantrum by Rachel Eve Moulton. I picked The Hounding for the Fantastic Strangelings Bookclub. It’s like if The Crucible and The Virgin Suicides had a baby that was stolen and raised by We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

And I picked Tantrum for the Nightmares From Nowhere Book Club. Interestingly, this book is also an exploration of female rage…but a little bit darker.

READ THEM BOTH IMMEDIATELY.

Fourth, if you need more new releases to fill your month, I highly recommend Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession by Austin Channing Brown and
Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle.

Fifth, Hailey is feeling better and their cranial palsy has recovered enough that they don’t have double-vision until the evening when they get tired. HELL YES FOR BABY STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.

Sixth, I can’t remember the sixth thing.

I have always been lightly obsessed with birds, and it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, which I can only assume is another sign of perimenopause that no one warned me about. (Seriously, a friend of mine told me that some women’s labias can just go missing in menopause. What in the actual fuck??) Sorry. This is supposed to be about birds…not labias. I am out of my ADD meds, as you can probably tell.

Anyway, recently Victor bought me one of those bird buddy feeder cameras and I love it so much, but it has a number of problems, including an AI robot identifier that seems to have never seen birds before:

“No, buddy…pretty sure that’s not a pelican perched on the hummingbird feeder.”

More concerning though was when I would see birds at the feeder but the bird buddy wouldn’t turn on to record them. I told Victor that it was faulty because I’d just stuck my whole head in the feeder and it didn’t turn on or give me a notification that anyone was there, but Victor was like, “That’s because it’s smart enough to weed out anything that isn’t birds” and I was like, “WELL, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS THEN?”

And he just sighed deeply, which I took as an acknowledgement that I was doing trouble-shooting much better than he thought I could. But it still wasn’t working properly so I got an old taxidermied bird from my shelf and waved it in front of the cameras to see how long it would take to set the cameras off and after about 20 minutes my arm was falling off but it finally triggered and Victor texted me a picture and was like, “See, it’s totally working. There’s a bird out there now.”

And then I sort of questioned if he was paying attention at all because how often do you see a raggedy-ass bird carrying a branch and a human hand (not often, hopefully?) and so I brought it back inside and sent this picture from the kitchen:

“I CAUGHT HIM AND HE LIVES WITH US NOW. WELCOME HOME, FLAPPY GILMORE!”

Then Victor did another deep sigh and moved the wifi thingie closer to the bird feeders and that seems to have fixed the problem, although Victor pointed out that the new problem was that I’d been maniacally waving a dead bird around in the backyard for 20 minutes and that I’d probably freaked the fuck out of every bird in our neighborhood, and that’s fair but also I’m pretty sure pelicans are unflappable. (No pun intended.)

And then a few minutes later this series regular landed and it gave me almost the exact same wtf look that Victor gives me and that’s probably pretty fair all things considered.

And I did feel a little bad, but then I saw this:

That is a terrible picture of a hawk standing at my curb and staring at me. Then he saw that I was looking and he refused to make eye contact and was like, “I’m just waiting for my uber, lady” and I’d like to think that me swinging a large dead bird around in my yard for 20 minutes convinced him it was not worth the effort to stalk my little finches and Squirrelly Jackson. I mean, it can’t hurt.

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Wow. That was a crazy one. Sorry. Someone take me to pick up my ADD meds.

This is less of a post and more of a rant that I just need to scream into the void, so feel free to ignore because I don’t think there’s a good solution here and I’m sure I’ll be fine.

So, I’ve been taking brand-name cymbalta for my depression for years and years. It’s not a cure but it helps keep me out of the deeper holes and when I tried switching to the generic (duloxetine) several years ago I fell into a very deep depression and so my dr switched me back to the brand name because although generic versions are very similar, they aren’t exactly the same and some people can have different reactions and it wasn’t worth the risk of seeing if that depression was just something that might have naturally happened with the brand name or if the generic just didn’t work for me. Taking the brand-name cymbalta is a pain-in-the-ass because my insurance makes me go through massive hoops and even when it’s covered I still have to spend thousands of dollars each year out-of-pocket for the non-generic penalties but it’s worth it and I’m lucky that I can afford it, BUT I just heard from my pharmacist who told me that the brand name cymbalta has been discontinued and is no longer available.

BRO, WHAT?

My pharmacist managed to find one bottle in Texas but I’m writing this here in case maybe you are a fancy pharmacist reading this and know of a secret stash of brand-name cymbalta somewhere I could order, or if maybe you’ve had a similar problem and had a good experience with a generic cymbalta that is closer in formulation to the brand name than duloxetine?

(Insert lightly panicked sigh here)

I suspect there is not a good answer for this problem and so I’m going to cross my fingers that the generic works. Giant shout out to everyone else out there forever working on the bullshit that comes with just trying to survive your own damn body. I SEE YOU, FRIEND.

A tiny list of things:

1. Last week my doctor did 25 stomach biopsies on me AND DIDN’T FIND ANY ADDITIONAL CANCER. CAN I GET A “HELL YEAH”?
2. Hailey is feeling a little better each day and is rocking the eyepatch.
3. I think this cookie called me crazy.

4. I can’t remember what 4 was supposed to be.