Month: November 2025

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13 Steps Lead Down

I realized, with the slow, dull awareness that such things come to me, that I have a particular type of sense memories that only occur with stairwells — and, specifically, walking down stairwells. I couldn’t tell you why this is, what there is about the feeling of walking down a set of stairs that locks everything about the experience away in my memory when everything else from that time period becomes faded and filled with holes; I couldn’t even tell you why it’s walking down the stairs as opposed to up that seems to be the key, but it is; perhaps walking up, I find myself too aware of other things and walking down I’m concentrating on less? Who can tell how the brain works.

And yet, I can tell you exactly how it feels to walk down the backstairs into the shared basement of my first apartment in the US; how thin and claustrophobic the stairwell was, how rotted the wooden stairs were to look at, yet how solid and sturdy they felt by comparison. I can tell you how oddly comfortable the experience was, even though it meant walking past multiple other apartments’ back doors on the way down — we lived on the top floor of the building — each one potentially about to open at any minute without warning. I could talk about the shift in light of the stairwell as I reached the parts of the building blocked from natural light by everything else all around.

Or I could share the feeling of walking down the stairwell in my high school, and how nervous I was when I first started attending the school at the top of the stairs, my teenage vertigo warning me to stay away from the railing in case I somehow fell over. Each step at first being nervous about how steep they felt, hating the enormous windows the stairwell opened out onto. (I had similar nerves walking the stairwell down from the top floor in art school, years later; there was something about the design of the central stairwell in the school that felt as if all it would take would be one trip and I’d somehow cartwheel over the railing and collapse to the floor three stories down, broken bones and blood. Schools and stairwells, apparently not a good combination for me.)

Or the stairs in the house I grew up in. Or the stairs in the hotel in Paris when I was 21 on a magical weekend trip that was tragic and heartbreaking as you can only feel when you’re 21. Or the stairs in my first house in Portland, or the stairs, or the stairs, or the stairs.

It’s nice, given how unreliable the rest of my memory is, to have something so clear in there for multiple markers and areas of my life. I’ll never understand why it’s walking down stairs, but I’ll always be grateful that they’re there.

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Secret Secret Origins

I remembered, the other day, about getting an unexpected letter from America when I was in my early 20s — 20, maybe, or perhaps 21? — and how it felt at once entirely surreal and unexpected and perfectly in tune with everything else that was happening in my life at the time.

I was finishing up my second year at art school, which had been frustrating but good for me in any number of ways I wouldn’t realize until years later; I’d become more self-sufficient after living on my own in the middle of nowhere for six months or so, and I’d started to find out who I was in terms of being a social animal as well, which is a thrilling moment for anyone of that age. Certain benchmarks were still months and years away from happening, but I finished up the year feeling like a very different person than I was when I’d started, and that was an exciting realization to have. The world felt filled with possibility.

In the midst of all of this, I’d been writing to my favorite comics of the era, because that’s what was done back in those pre-internet times. To my amazement, some of those letters had been printed and people had written to me in return, which was even more amazing. (My full address was published with each letter, because I didn’t know enough to ask them not to include it.) It felt like a connection to a world and an industry than I’d loved for years by that point, and one that had previously seemed to be separated by a magical veil that only allowed me to receive information. Now, somehow, I was sending and receiving. Again, everything felt newly possible.

One day, in the last few weeks of the school year, I got an oversized envelope that had DC Comics branding. I opened it to get a note explaining, basically, hey we saw the letters you wrote to some of those comics and we thought you might like this comic, too, give it a try and if you do like it, spread the word to your friends. There was also a black and white photocopy of an upcoming issue of Xombi, one of Milestone Media’s comics of the time.

To their credit, I did like it: it was weird and lyrical and read like the spiritual successor to Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol of a handful of years earlier, but drawn by an outsider artist who was mad at the page. I started buying it, and would have spread the words had I any friends who’d be into that kind of thing. (I didn’t.)

What stuck with me more than the comic itself, though, was the idea of someone who published the comic seeing something I’d written and thinking I was worth the photocopying and postage to get this preview. I felt accidentally, undeservedly important and entirely humbled and terrified by the concept. But it fit with the everything is possible somehow feeling of the year I’d just had, and the blurring of lines between me as an audience and a participant in whatever I was reading. The boundaries became that little bit fuzzier.

Looking back, I wonder if I’d have ended up where I am now professionally (or even personally) without that letter signalling that someone, somewhere, had been paying attention and some domino in the back of my head falling over at the thought of, if it happened once, why couldn’t it happen again…?

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Float Like A Big One, Sting Like a Miniature

I’ve talked before about how utterly arbitrary my annual playlists are — it’s music that I’ve discovered this year and become obsessed with for some period of time, except when it’s music that I’ve known for awhile and become obsessed with all over again, except with it’s neither of those things and just something that I wanted to add to the playlist — and, with this latest batch of 50 songs (another arbitrary thing! Why do I share the lists here in batches of 50? I have no idea; I did it once and it stuck), I broke another of my self-imposed rules for reasons that basically boil down to remembering that it doesn’t have to be that dish: namely, I added a second song by the same artist to the same list. In my defense, “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” by Raye is a great song, and I apologize for nothing.

Anyway, here’s the latest update from my 2025 playlist. (The playlist itself is here, and the previous three installments of the list on this site are here, here, and here.) May you find something new on here that you love, too.

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It Makes Me Feel So

It’s taken me a few weeks — in my defense, I’ve had both the death of a pet and being consistently overwhelmed by work, to the point where it felt as if I was only able to stay at my desk for roughly 90% of the time I was awake for days on end — but I am finally at that point of the year when I’ve remembered that fall and winter are my favorite times of the year. I’m hedging my bets by naming two seasons, but what I really mean is, the stretch between October and December.

What underscored the realization for me was walking home from the movie theater the other night. It’s a point now where it’s dark pretty much from 4pm onwards, making the night feel at once omnipresent and endless, and also oddly magical and unknowable. That felt especially true that night, which was one of those weird Portland nights that are both warmer than you’d expect and oddly misty, so that everything feels hazy and somehow welcoming as you wander past everyone going about their business.

It was late enough that people were flocking to the many bars I walked past (and I could hear the various types of music flooding out from the doors as they opened when I walked past: shitty techno, muddy guitars and twang, echoing jazz-pop), but also early enough that I was walking past families and couples as they left all the various restaurants after their meals, huddling together and laughing, talking, conspiratorially. Maybe it was the darkness or the supposed-cold-of-it-all but it all felt like end-of-the-year behavior, as opposed to people walking through the streets in summer where they take up more space and interact with everything around them more. This time of year is for people to hunker down and lean in, appearing and disappearing from the fog and suddenly illuminated by passing cars as they walk before vanishing.

All of this was soundtracked by the crunching of leaves underfoot, and surrounded by the orange glow of living rooms in houses as I walked past. I was reminded of how much I love to walk around neighborhoods during the holidays and see the colors of Christmas Lights everywhere. How the lives of everyone in those houses feels like it bleeds outside during this time of year, and what should be this dark, lonely, cold thing becomes so much warmer than it should.

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The Mornings After

It’s not just the night itself, when we had to decide to put Piggles to sleep. That was hard enough, even thought we knew it was both the kindest option considering the circumstance and what felt like the inevitability of it all. She was, after all, 18 years old — officially very old for a cat — and we’d been noticing that she’d been breathing heavier in recent weeks, but not to the point where it felt like it was a pressing issue until it so very, very much was.

(We’d made the decision and felt the paralyzing mix of regret and grief and sadness and uncertainty over have we done the right thing, is this the right thing to do? and then, soon after, were told that she couldn’t even be brought out of the oxygen tent to be intubated easily; knowing that felt like a strangely horrifying gift: if she was suddenly having such trouble breathing, we were definitely being kinder, saying goodbye that night.)

Nonetheless, we’d been — or I’d been, at least, all I can say for certain — unrealistically optimistic that she had longer left, that she was breathing heavier because of the weather or maybe it was arthritis because she was so old or any number of things that would allow us to pretend that, sure, she wasn’t a spring chicken anymore but she still had a lot of time left with us. She was Piggles, after all; she was, until the end, this tiny little cat with an oversized presence who was at once affectionate and demanding and ever-present. Life without her seemed unthinkable.

And that’s what I mean, when I say it’s not just the night of saying goodbye to her, and hoping that somehow she could tell through our head-scratches and cuddles that we loved her so fucking much. It’s been the afterwards of it all: her not being there when I expect her to be, the absence of her on the couch, or yelling at me when I’m in the kitchen, or running towards me when I get up in the morning because she wants to say hello and get breakfast. (Feeding her was the first thing I did when I got up every day, and the last thing I did before bed each night.) It’s her not being around when she was always around.

Even now, it feels like she’s around. Just not in all the ways I wish she was.

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The Problems With A Schedule

November is the start of the year breaking down, in the best ways possible. Sure, there are drawbacks to this time of year — think about how cold it is at all times seemingly, how sluggish it can feel to get up when everything is so dark first thing in the morning, or that nagging feeling in the back of your head that there’s only so much time left before the holidays and/or the end of the year and you’ve got shit you need to do — but at its best, November is when things start to slip and fall apart and the structure of the year begins to unravel just enough to let us breathe a little easier.

Occasionally, I admit, I get exhausted by the fact everything just keeps going: the work week is what it is, and then the weekend happens and that’s just enough time to catch up on everything and prepare for… the work week again. More than once, I’ve told people on Sunday night that I’m lowkey mad that I’ve finally got my head straight after the last week only to have to face up to doing it all over again the very next day; there’s a Sisyphian feel to the whole thing for 10 months out of the year… and then November arrives.

Part of it is because the holidays are around the corner, and that means that we get some time off for Thanksgiving here in the US, and then the Christmas and New Year breaks (or, if you’re me, one long extended break between the two) come along and it’s a glorious chance to step off the roundabout for a period. It’s a chance to decompress a little before the whole thing starts again in the New Year.

For the past couple years, however, I’ve had an additional boost to the system collapsing just a little bit: I’ve been so bad at taking PTO at work that, somewhere around the middle of October, someone has to take me to one side and politely remind me that I need to take a lot of time off in the next two months or else I’ll lose the hours I’ve accrued… and so, this year like last year, I get two solid months of three-day-weekends at the shortest. It feels decadent and indulgent and something I feel no small amount of guilt over, but I can’t deny that it also helps me relax and feel human in a way that I truly appreciate.

Sure, I could always use my PTO during the rest of the year so that I don’t feel so stressed and oppressed in the first place, but if I did that, I wouldn’t have any ability to take so much time off as the year ends and everything gently, wonderfully, unravels and gets slower and easier.

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The Movies of October 2025

Here’s to watching movies on planes, which is where no less than five of my October watches come from — and Sorry, Baby, at least, was the kind of thing that makes me thrilled to have been trapped in a flying metal tube, given that I wouldn’t have likely watched it for any other reason but I utterly loved it. Elsewhere, let’s enjoy the abandonment of the traditional horror focus for the month and the return of two camp favorites to finish October off: Phantom of the Paradise and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sometimes, you can’t beat the classics.