perseids (Patreon)

goodness, what a couple days.
so after my last post a few of the darling folks on our discord server advised me that perhaps i might want to allow myself to take a break here and there when i need it. i hemmed and hawed a bit at first but after talking to cass i decided, yeah, that's probably healthy.
so yesterday was a premediated break.
instead of writing, we ended up cleaning and shredding documents in our basement for 8 hours straight again.

for those who missed the context-- i took over my father's house, which has been sitting empty for 15 years. but it was left as-is all that time, so there's a lot to clean up, including a lot of confidential work documents in just columns and columns of boxes in the basement.
we'll definitely talk about that work another time,
but for today, the thing that we pulled up from those old boxes was
a series of letters sent from my mother to my father before i was born

my parents are divorced. frankly, i can't remember them ever so much as hugging, let alone expressing any kind of affection for each other. so these letters have been odd fragments of a time where they actually liked each other, which is both bizarre and refreshing to see.
frankly, there's a lot to unpack there that i haven't quite gotten to yet...

...but one of the things that stuck out to me was, in one of those letters, she mentions that despite the wildfire smoke, she was going to go see the meteor shower on august 12th when it was supposed to peak.

that was about... 33? years ago. my mother would have been about the age i am now. i happened to discover that letter on august 11th. the meteor shower in question is referring to the Perseids, which happen every year, and generally peaking around the same time
because time is a closed circle.

so what can we do on a fine august 12th, but drive out to the mountains and see some meteors for ourselves?

for the record, it is insane to me that such a cool astronomical event, which is apparently so reliable as to peak on the same day 30+ years later, is not just a holiday. we should totally fix that.
august needs something anyway.

so we had a mountain trip and saw a few meteors, and talked about a lot of things like the intrinsic value of consciousness and what we're all doing with our lives in this fucked up system of the world right now
and frankly there's a lot more to say about that too but we can only fit so much in a single post

anyway, it was an incredible time. we got back and i got back to writing.
only 1.2k words today but i feel way better about them than the past couple sesh's.
i'm throwing out a lot of what i wrote in the past couple days for a second draft already. basically i had two separate things that felt half-baked and realized that combining them was a whole biscuit.
so shoutout to one (1) break day, i feel super motivated, i'm gonna finish the biscuit when i'm not on the verge of sleepiness, but by golly we've got a lot to chew on

oh, hey, did you know about the constellation the perseids are named after?
you know, perseus?
i feel like that name has relevance lately or something.

cass: i fucking told her so