🧵 Surefire ploy for cultivating joy during a zombie apocalypse or tax season

Plus a 🔥 book group + exciting writer news

My kids, mom, and I are visiting my sister, her hubs, and their aging Havanese dog in Bellingham. We’ve been experimenting with odd meals like Cheese-Its Chicken.

Whilst our trip to visit family in Alabama was full of “Fuck your feelings: Trump 2024” flags, Bellingham features signs that read DIVERSITY and cars painted with the words “‘I can’t breathe,’ Black lives matter.” Here, it’s easy to be our woke, bougie selves; to let tall Bellingham bros open grocery store doors for me while complimenting me on my flat of raspberries. How quaint.

Bellingham is seriously so quaint and bougie. How can this writer geek not feel at home with bookstores like Village Books, where I discovered my friend Jessica Johnson’s memoir Mettlework on the display right as I walked in?

Or amidst sculptures like this:

Mark Twain and my kid taking a break from scootering to read some new books

And real-life dollhouses like this:

They even have a train here! Being in Bellingham makes me consider quitting my feral Alaskan life and polar-plunging head-on into civil society.

I’m tired of being sad. I want to feel joy. Joy is subversive. Joy is political. Check out this quaintness.

The pandemic was a doozy. A bonafide sep-fecta (I made that up) of catastrophe that gifted me PTSD, cataracts, and thousands of dollars in out-of-network therapy bills. Gratefully, my parents helped buy me new bionic eyes that glow like Sigourney Weaver’s in Ghostbusters when she becomes a demon dog.

Coming out of the pandemic hasn’t been all roses either, at least for anyone who reads the news. During these times, we must choose joy—or, as

Hudson E Baldwin lll

says, we gotta be fiercely fun.