Joan Juliet Buck
Fierce winds all night. N rescued the garbage cans from the middle of the street at five am.
I dreamt of a raven as big as a small bear, I dreamt the spindly columns broke off the ivory casing of the Venetian hourglass, I dreamt of a white van full of old-man day-laborers as gruff as my Rhinecliff landlord.
The cranio-sacral practitioner could tell something had happened to my nose. Of course, I said, a lamp fell on it in 2009. A doctor? Oh no, I didn’t go to a doctor, I didn’t want to interrupt the workshop I was in. I didn’t say: A dream workshop with Elizabeth Kemp. Was that the one where I’d walked like a raven?
Outside, the ground was pale grey almost blue mud; single snowflakes floated through the air.
At home, Athena tried to help with paperwork and made long phone calls into the automated maze of Press One options. She’s 23, she’s never known a time when humans regularly answered phones. I wanted to tell her about operators and crossed lines, but post-treatment I needed to nap , and when I woke between the two duvets on the bed, I didn’t know where I was, or if it was day or night.
Did some Qi Gong to the same video to come back; I’d missed the live lesson I wanted.
N cooked the overpriced salmon from Sunflower and we watched the BBC news, where twice in one half hour, the reporting was based on disturbingly intimate raw footage.
A ring of Bulgarian spies in possession of drones and guns had been broken up in Great Yarmouth, and there we were inside body cams as the police or special forces stormed some Great Yarmouth house, there we were in the real-time live-action faces of this and that protesting Bulgarian, one of them in front of a wall of flowered dressing gowns, saying he’d bought something on eBay . The story about the busted spies was like a slapdash scrapbook. Wondered how much of this awkwardness was a deliberate reality show effect.
Next, a story about how the October 7 Israeli festival-goers were protected from PTSD by the MDMA and LSD they’d been high on was illustrated with iPhone videos of the Hamas raid. I couldn’t tell if these were shot by the victims or the aggressors, but those vertical shafts of horror and surprise are already lodged in our brains, as is the devastation of Gaza that followed. The BBC’s visuals too real-time horrific to convey the essence of their news, which my post Cranio-sacral treatment-slow brain understood as : the best way to endure horror is to be really high.
I looked at photos of me and N on a ferryboat last summer and told him how much we’ve aged. Of course we’ve aged, he said, look what we’re living through.
The author and editor Joan Juliet Buck has two Substacks: the unapologetically personal Every Day Until I Die, which extends her compelling online pandemic diary into the screaming panic of today, and Joan of Art, culture pages for movie and television reviews. Joan of Art is also a Radio Free Rhinecliff show, on all podcast platforms. Her quarterly column in Grazia USA is ‘WTF with Joan Juliet Buck’ and her last book was The Price of Illusion.