Accidental ziggurat for lunch.
Status:
Took a sleeping pill last night because I really didn’t fancy another restless night of stress dreams. (I have a handful left from before I started on melatonin.) It worked, in that I woke up feeling fine for a change, though I was quickly back on edge with a stress headache and needed a lie down in the afternoon. I heard back from Meridian, the therapy centre, and I’m next on the list when a counsellor becomes available, so fingers crossed that’s soon as I feel there’s some psychic bloodletting to be done.
After my nap, and feeling somewhat better, I was out with the rabbits when I remembered I knew how to flatten a warped piece of wood using a router. So I made a very rudimentary sled to do that, and it worked! Very satisfying, and something I can do very slowly a little bit every day without exhausting myself.
So, you know, win some, lose some.
Reading:
- Stay Classy — Andrew O’Hagan collects the receipts from the astonishingly corrupt and entitled lives of Prince Andrew and family. Obsequious servility has a lot to answer for.
- Some writing from my retreat designed to support people like me — “To have long Covid is to be politics embodied, just as my queer HIV+ ancestors were. Harder to stigmatise us “long haulers” for our “life choices’”, but also easier to ignore."
- Reading is magic — Sam Kriss on the psychological implications of our post-literate age. Being able to read changes how you think in some quite radical ways and “the youth” are increasingly unable to read. What can this all mean?
- The artists sick of the pressure to promote on social media — “Seeing creative people chasing the algorithm, craving to go viral, and completely forgetting their purpose: it’s tiresome."
Watching:
- The fabulous engineering and design of duct tape (10:43) — For a while circa 2010 I joked that I was an artist working in the medium of duct tape as I would use it to make my various camera constructions, but this video is the first time I’ve fully understood how it works.
- Noah Kalina (21:23)