life is strange
diary :: 2026
“Life is strange” is probably my most repeated statement of the year. I always say kind of solemnly, and no one ever knows quite how to respond, other than to mildly agree and say something like, “yeah.” Conversationally, it’s a nonstarter. It’s true though.
I wish I was eating a slice of cake, but instead I’m thinking about The One Thing and The 12 Week Year and if I should get a massive wall calendar so that I don’t let the new year slip away. I’m really good at going with the flow and “living intuitively.” I like to think that I’m relatively balanced in my daily habits, but even so, a lot of this year consisted of going down rabbit holes, and generally wandering around. In the years prior, I had lost my sense of self (inarguably the most embarrassing thing to lose), and somehow through all of the wandering around, my body, mind, and spirit all realigned. I feel more true, more alive, more myself than I have in many years. I wear a tube top showing my belly button. I drink a beer in the middle of the day. Being a bleeding heart looks stupid from the outside, but the alternative (carelessness, numbness) is worse. Real ones know. For all the navel gazing and self-indulgence I occasionally indulge in here, knowing that I get to be a fully actualized contemporary woman (a woman with a Substack and a caffeine addiction) and that I get to write it as I see it, because I wanted you to see it my way… It’s emboldened me and also, fuck it, makes me feel like I’m really on the journey, because of course, being witnessed is part of that too.
In Mexico, over Christmas, we saw an angel mariposa, a gigantic white butterfly the size of my palm. It looked like something out of a fantasy novel, a movie, artificial intelligence. But it was real: gigantic and innocuous and peaceful. I could have cried. “Life is strange,” but also ordered, following impermeable logic that’s inaccessible to my human mind. In the podcast I listened to today, the host said, “Life happens at the level of events.” I’d never thought of it that way.
As soon as I got back to Austin, right off the plane, I went to Sam’s Town Point, because Monique and Hayden invited me, and danced for a few hours. Two-stepping is soothing because you don’t have to think too hard while you do it. I like that bar as much as everyone else does. Dancing is so intimate, you get a glimpse of how people be, a window into how they are emotionally or even sexually. I like it when people are really formal on the dance floor, holding the box or frame or whatever. I follow pretty easily, except for one move called “the hair comb,” which I dislike and always forget about. I drank a Coors Light. Leaving, as I walked through the parking lot, the Texas sky was big and cold, and the street was empty.
I got a library card today, and the library was hushed. The librarian seemed thrilled and surprised that I wanted a library card. I forget that things like this exist sometimes. I looked at books I’d never heard of, and thought about how much of the information I collected as a teenager came to me in a completely non-linear way (the opposite of The Scroll.) I loved things because I found them, or they found me. The Dewey Decimal System was such a huge idea as a kid. The idea that all the strangeness of Earth could be broken down and categorized was unfathomable to me. Today, I couldn’t remember what each hundred stood for (I used to know), which kind of book went where. I wandered.
The year closes. Over Christmas, I read Cookie Mueller’s book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. A star in many of John Waters movies, as well as a writer, gogo dancer, artist, and underground socialite. I loved the book, mostly because Mueller possessed, not grit even, but this kind of resolute toughness that feels like a relic of another era. In the book, she chronicles fucking Jimi Hendrix, meeting the Manson family, doing a staggering quantity of hard drugs, becoming a mother, falling in and out of love, rape, abuse, AIDS, underground stardom, and a career in showbiz. She was the raconteur of her life, seemingly drawing strength not from what she did, but from what she capably endured:
Many years and brain cells ago, I had this belief that everyone would be happy someday. I have since found that this isn’t necessarily so.
Happiness is a fictitious feeling. It was created by imaginative storytellers for the purpose of plot building or story resolution. Fortunately most people don’t know this. They think the lives they are living are actual screenplays or theater pieces. In earlier times people were convinced their lives were fantastic tales told at the fireside. Because of this, I have seen people stop in their tracks for a moment and wonder where the plot is, but mostly they just forge on blindly. Believing life will someday be wonderful isn’t a bad thing, in fact it is absolutely necessary. To know the truth— life is hard, and then you die—isn’t a very comfortable thing to live with.
Anyways. You understand.
Endurance & the ability to have fun while you do, regardless of the circumstances… I’m convinced that this is the real sauce… In the words of Cookie Mueller, wishing you courage, bread and roses in 2026. Let’s really give em hell :)