Burn it All
Hopes for Sagittarius Season
Dear Friends,
I dunno about you, but this past month has felt like a slow punch in the face to me personally, which is not to say that it’s been so different, after all, from many of the other months this year (only that I expected better out of November). Usually, when December creeps onto my calendar, I bemoan the loss of my favorite season, though very cold is still more welcome in our family than very hot. Usually, the change in seasons requires what feels like an unnatural shift in gears, Scorpio being so very very different from Sagittarius—at least on paper.
This year, instead, I’m leaning hard into the medicine of a new season, relishing in what these ostensibly opposed signs have to say to each other, how they overlap (e.g. goofiness, sweetness) and compensate for what the other lacks. Frankly, while I’m all burned out on adventure, I could use some fun and mischief.
I remember an old fable my parents read to me at the kitchen table about a kid who found a magic object that would let them skip forward in time, past all the unpleasant things and onto whatever they were anticipating with particular zeal. Accidentally passing over the majority of their entire life—and discovering it to be just as finite as anyone’s—the lesson here is that wishing hard for the future blinds you to the joys of living in the present, causing your experience of living to vanish underfoot. That being said, 2025 has been a hell of a year, and I welcome December with open arms. Light it up.
Gratitude and Attention
To my small but enormous, distinct but unified communities, in other words, the people who came out to hear me talk about my book this fall, on a little tour that could. All my interlocutors (Robin! Elliott! Paula! Raechel! Barry!) treated me and my book with such care as I can’t explain, and made the at times stressful work of appearing in public infinitely easeful. All my friends made time to come see me. My publisher came to the big conference ready to help me celebrate. It’s been a blessing.
To pleasure reading, which has been hard for me to do outside of work until just recently, so I suppose I’m grateful for having found a way back in. For me, that was helped along by the release of The Rose Field, which I’d like to write more about later.
The farmers’ markets in Boston, some of which go straight through the winter, bundled in parking lots where the brightest greens and oranges twinkle under muted skies. The attitude here feels like, what, you’re not gonna eat because it’s cold?
To those brilliant and kind folks who have agreed to do my podcast, and to those brilliant and kind folks who have listened. I’m not sure how it’s going, really, but I do know that I love doing it. I’m not gonna stop until it feels like we’ve built something.
To Hannah, who somehow makes me feel like I can do anything I want to, even from a thousand miles away (literally).1
Recs
I can’t remember when I first heard Private Reasons, but ever since then, it has kept popping up in my mind with great regularity, reminding me of its existence every couple of months and causing me to think (or yell) OH YEAH WHAT A FUCKING WEIRD RECORD (by which I mean I love it). Lush string arrangements, absolutely goofy vocoder sounds, and love songs with a vintage tinge populate this long and odd masterpiece. Give it a try.
The Snocaps record is, I do not regret to inform you, as good as you dared not hope it might be, coming out of nowhere, to the surprise of absolutely everyone. It’s an indie rock miracle, a big feelings lodestar, and exactly what you should listen to today. Where p.s. eliot captured the bedroom/indie pop version of the Crutchfields’ magic before Waxahatchee went more country, Snocaps explodes softly (yet squarely) in the big feelings universe, all the ambivalence and melancholic, hard-won joy your little heart can handle. When it dropped I thought of Raechel first, all the more so because we had just talked about Waxahatchee at Mac’s, and isn’t it nice to hear music that reminds you of friends, even when it’s new?
Cry hard.
!!
<3
wtf