The Newsletter Thingy
The Sybarite Newsletter: Back from the Dead
Reporting to you with puffy eyes and smoke-filled lungs.
Greetings from the primordial slime of grief and confusion. Dad died on July 31 and the funeral was on August 13. Between those two dates, I spent all my time planning the funeral and doing other stupid shit. I was definitely not writing or editing or publishing. After the funeral I went back to work. Now I spend all my free time drinking and smoking in my backyard.
I don’t want to be a smoker. I blame Camaro Man for getting me back into it, because when we hung out he would always bring a pack of cigarettes. He’s in the fitness industry, and his smoking was one of his dirty little secrets. He loved the privacy of my teeny tiny backyard, overrun by a ceiling of bougainvillea where he could smoke without being seen.
We hung out there for hours, drinking, smoking, flirting, before falling into bed. Sometimes I would make him dinner, sometimes (okay, once) we walked to a nearby restaurant. Later, when we were having one of those “I-need-you-to-at-least-do-the-bare-minimum” talks, he said something about how we had been “dating” for five months. I laughed in his face. “This,” I said waving my arm across a sea of cigarette butts and a half-empty booze bottle, “is not dating.”
“What?” he asked, suddenly sounding like a character out of the Sopranos. “You want to be wined and dined or something?”
“No,” I answered, blowing smoke in the air, “but it would be nice to, like, go on a hike? Drive up the coast and get a beer and crabs legs at Neptune’s Net.”
“I hate hiking,” he smiled, while he pulled me closer to him.
This was just before he started ghosting me in slo-mo. After my dad got very sick, other men showed up at my doorstep with nice bottles of whiskey and sat in my backyard with me while I cried and retold the story over and over of taking my dad off a ventilator, like a shock victim. While I was sure of the decision when I did it, I was suddenly not sure about it after he died. I don’t think anyone talks about this.
It felt really stupid to be thinking about Camaro Man during this period, but during my grief and confusion while in a haze of smoke and sleeping pills, it occured to me that slithering through my grief about my father was also a little snake of sadness that I was being ghosted for the 139394940239495 time in my life. I couldn’t believe I was even paying attention to this little snake. Who cares about stupid men when your dad just died? But the snake was there, swimming through the dark muck of grief, and I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t.
Around the same time, my friend Harris Sockel was going through something similar. We wondered aloud: how do you get out of the endless loop of wishing someone would text? Where is the off-ramp from an endless loop of desire that goes on for infinity?
Well, good news. We started to discuss various ways to save ourselves from the loop, and came up with tips to get you to that elusive off-ramp, which you can read here. It’s a self-help guide from people who have actually saved themselves, or at least tried very hard.
Do I think it’s weird that I wrote about boys before I wrote about the trauma of telling the doctors to stop treating my dad? Yes, very fucking weird. Am I happy that I spend my days calling my friends so I can talk to someone while I smoke? Nope. Not happy.
But I’m trying to be gentle with myself, because I’m grieving and because it turns out that being a health proxy for someone who you decide should die, is traumatic as fuck, and again, it doesn’t seem like anyone talks about this? So I’ve decided to simply slowly chip away at tiny goals: do not buy another pack of cigarettes. Walk Fish. Make a pot of spaghetti. Take a nap.
There are also things I’m going to continue to let go of during this crawling-out-of-the-ooze stage. This includes editing or publishing, and I probably won’t write that much. If you do want to send something to Sybarite for publication, you are welcome to (obviously) but know that it will likely languish for awhile.
That said, if you want to cut down on the languish time, consider developing a split personality and becoming your own editor. Brutally edit your piece with the writing principles found here. Then do it again and again and again. Be mean to yourself. If you send something like that in, it might be publishable right away.
Finally, I’ll sign off with an important fashion tip: the pocket leggings at L.L.Bean are incredible, and the ones at Athleta suck.
I found this out the hard way: I needed leggings that could hold my phone, keys, poop bags and treats when walking Fish. He is now 50 lbs of pure muscle and more confident than a middle-aged divorced man on a dating app, which means he lunges at everything. I get a nice little ab workout each time I brace myself and scream STOP IT. Because our walks are just a constant struggle session, I need my hands to be free.
I bought the Athleta leggings first. They were all over my Instagram feed, and the Athleta brand seemed to be the gold standard, although I have no idea why I thought that; probably something to do with the insidious branding/advertising/subliminal messaging world we we live in.
Sadly, they are the worst. So bad. The waistband rolls down, over and over and not matter how much you pull it up. Later, read the reviews and I felt validated: according to other reviewers, the waistband was good at one time, and then suddenly it wasn’t. Athleta once made a good product, hooked everyone, then reissued it more cheaply made. The reviewers all felt duped. (Cue the person in the comments who is going to tell me to read the reviews before buying something).
So I went back to the company that gives me the cozy feeling: L.L. Bean. And because they are reliable, solid, and have earned their reputation for always giving the cozy feeling, of course their leggings were perfection. They fit. They cost less than Athleta’s. The pockets are great. I wish I could wear them to work. I don’t think about them when I wear them. Run, don’t walk, because it seems that they are running out of the sale colors.
When I first created Sybarite, this was the type of advice I hoped we could all share. The best towels. The best hotel in Boston. Even the best airlines, if there is such a thing in the dark days of air travel?
Start thinking about those things, and when Sybarite (aka Me) is up and running again, let’s break the Internet with information like this.
Going back to bed,
Sybarite-in-Chief, AD
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