1: tending to melt or dissolve especially : tending to undergo gradual dissolution and liquefaction by the attraction and absorption of moisture from the air
2: having repeated division into branches
Elms are deliquescent trees.
deliquescence ˌde-li-ˈkwe-sᵊn(t)s noun Recent Examples on the Web
His deliquescent tissue had seeped under the keys, short-circuiting the motherboard. — Julian Lucas, New Yorker, 20 Apr. 2026
Big, bold and playfully grotesque, these recall the deliquescent figure sculptures of Willem de Kooning, with a few more accessories tacked on (balls, birds, various tools). — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 5 Dec. 2023 Etymology
Latin deliquescent-, deliquescens, present participle of deliquescere First Known Use
1771, in the meaning defined at sense 1 ~~
I came across it in this poem recently:
Peonies
by Jim Harrison
The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
Roughly a year ago (actually closer to thirteen months), a chair arrived at the house: an Eames Lounge Chair, that classic piece of midcentury furniture, beloved of tweedy intellectuals and pretentious jazz aficionados everywhere. I had wanted one for years but couldn’t rationalize buying the thing, because they were (and are) stupidly expensive; I could and have furnished two entire rooms with couches and televisions for what this one chair costs. I finally rationalized purchasing one because it was on sale, I had come into some unexpected money, and the world was on fire, so might as well be comfortable amidst the flames. It arrived and has been ensconced in the corner of my office since then. I sit my ass into it on a daily basis when I am home.
Some thoughts on the Eames chair, a year on:
1. I spent extra to have the chair made bespoke, with an oiled santos palisander shell and prone leather in “vine” (aka a deep, slate-y green), but I also have cats who honed in on the chair like the furry clawed missiles they are. So, basically ,from the first day the chair arrived it’s been covered in plush blankets, both the chair and included ottoman. This has not detracted from the comfort of the chair (and indeed may have added to it), but I suppose there is something undignified in having a piece of celebrated modern industrial art draped in a fuzzy Ohio State poly-blend throw, with a “tortilla” blanket of the same material on hand to drape over me when I sit in it. Sorry, Eames chair. You deserve better. But, cats.
2. Because I didn’t regularly sit in the previous chair that was in the spot the Eames chair now occupies, it actually took me a few months to use it on a frequent basis. Which is not to say the Eames did not get use; the aforementioned cats took to it immediately. It was not unusual to have one cat in the Eames and another in the cat tree next to it, and after a couple of hours they’d swap positions. At some point I decided that if I had spent that much damn money on the thing, I was going to use it, so I basically trained myself to get into the chair. After a certain point the training took.
3. One big reason the training took: Oh my God, this thing really is as comfortable as advertised. It is not overly soft, like so many recliners are; you don’t feel like your ass is sinking into marshmallow or anything like that. It’s soft enough, but it’s also supportive. I don’t get an ache in my lower back when I sit in it for extended periods of time. The ottoman is (naturally) the perfect height for your legs when you’re sitting in the chair. It just. Feels. Good.
Is it several thousand dollars worth of feeling good? That’s going to be a judgment call. I suspect there are many less expensive chairs (including some Eames knockoffs, probably) that are as supportive and good feeling. But I don’t have those chairs in my house, I have this one. And this one is pretty great.
4. Here is what I think is the real acid test for me, regarding the comfort of this chair: I fall asleep in it pretty much every day, a nice 15-minute nap or whatever, usually in the mid-to-late afternoon. And you say, big ideal, lots of people fall asleep in chairs, old man. And you’re not wrong, except for this: I don’t fall asleep in any other chairs, in our house or out of it. I’m not a chair sleeper and never have been. Sleeping sitting up is just not a thing I do.
Except in this chair. This chair knocks me right the fuck out. That’s gotta mean something.
5. Now my daily schedule is something like this: Morning and early afternoon, I’m at my desk, using the full-size keyboard and monitor (I have an ergonomic chair there, never you worry). Sometime between 3 and 4, I’ll go that’s enough of that and I’ll get up, walk six feet and plop my ass into the Eames chair. I’ll place a can of soda on the handy window sill, crack open my MacBook Air, fire up a 15-to-20-minute YouTube video, conk out to (usually) someone talking about food or environmental tech, wake up when the video is done and then answer email or fart about on social media or (like right now) write on the blog. I don’t do a lot of long-form writing in the chair because laptops are not ergonomic wonders, especially when, as I so often do, I have a cat colonizing my lower half. But for short stuff it’s fine.
Sometimes I’ll take video calls from my chair since my desktop computer doesn’t have a webcam, but my laptop does. If I’m watching something longer than a YouTube video, I might hook up my AR glasses to my Air and project the thing to a virtual 120-inch screen that goes wherever my head goes, thus avoiding the dreaded laptop neck crick. Yes, I look like a dork. But no one else is usually in my office for this indignity, and anyway, I’m comfortable. All told, my Eames chair time is pretty good.
6. Do I have complaints about the Eames chair? A couple. Like a sports car, it’s a little low, so there’s a some maneuvering to get in and out of it, including negotiating the ottoman. If you want to have your Eames chair have a different angle of recline, you’re out of luck (although I know at least one knock-off version offers that). And in my case, I have to constantly reposition the blankets as they tend to bunch up when I’m sitting in the chair.
Also, shit, it’s a lot of money for a damn chair. One of the nice things about these chairs is that they retain their value extremely well; it’s entirely possible one day I (or more likely Athena) can sell the chair for more than what I paid for it. eBay currently has vintage Eames chairs going for ten to fifteen thousand dollars, which is an argument for me keeping the blankets on this thing. Design Within Reach, the store I bought this chair from, keeps sending me emails with other really expensive furniture on offer, on the idea that if I bought one ridiculously expensive piece of furniture, I might buy others, too. Sorry, guys. One’s enough. Our other furniture isn’t cheap. But it’s not this expensive.
7. The Eames chair is expensive as hell, but a year in I think I’ve been getting value out of it, and am likely to continue to get value out of it for a good long time. On balance it’s been worth the initial sticker shock, and will become even more so as we go along. I don’t think a chair like this is necessary, or even advisable, for most folks. You can buy a lot of other really excellent chairs for a hell of a lot cheaper than this, and probably should.
But you know what? If you can splurge, there are a bunch of worse things you could blow this sort of money on. If you take care of this chair, it is likely to outlive you, and while you live, you will be extremely comfortable in it. I’m glad I bought one. I’m not going to get two.
I just got an email from Clover: they’re closing their doors after this Thursday, after 17 years in business, and it has me very sad (it’s the current economy, unsurprisingly). They’ve been a wonderful local business, with a focus on locally-sourced vegetarian food (working directly with farmers to use seasonal produce), in addition to hosting CSA pickups for a number of farms. They have Lighthouse Kosher certification (which not everyone accepts), which has made it extra convenient for me, having multiple locations on my side of the river, including one right by work. (Read: if I don’t manage to bring lunch with me, it’s going to be either supermarket food from the place that’s even more expensive than Whole Wallet, or hopping on the T plus a half mile walk to get food from Milk St, or an even longer trip to get food from somewhere in Brookline.)
I’m going to miss the breakfast popover sandwiches (I could eat these every day), sandwiches with mushroom poppers in them, the zucchini sandwich (a fried slab of tofu with slices of zucchini and fresh-off-the-cob corn, plus whatever dressing with shiso), the corn chowder (they make all their soups from scratch, and don’t have any freezers, so I know it’s always fresh), the black lentil salad with hazelnuts and dried cherries, the egg-and-eggplant sandwich (aka sabich), and so many others.
It was a holiday weekend and when I wasn’t de-skunkifying a dog, I had some free time, so I went ahead and did another cover song, this one from Alisa Xayalith, who is probably best known as the lead singer of The Naked and Famous, but who has put out a solo album while that band as been on a break. This song was one she put out in the run-up to that album. It’s simple but lovely.
My version probably isn’t quite as lovely as hers (she has a rather better voice, for one thing), but it was fun to do and my falsetto got a bit of a workout, so there is that. Enjoy.
Origin: 1475–85; < Late Latin comēstibilis, equivalent to Latin comēst ( us ), past participle of comedere to eat up ( see comedo; -ēstus for -ēs ( s ) us by analogy with gestus, ūstus, etc.; see combust) + -ibilis -ible; see eat
Example Sentences William called it the “Circuitous Cryptanalytic Comestible Contest,” and it took place all over town. From "The Woman All Spies Fear" by Amy Butler Greenfield
Stakes at chess must not be confounded with the favourite "Comestible." From Chess History and Reminiscences by Bird, H. E. (Henry Edward)
Review copy provided by the author, who is a close friend of decades standing.
This is the first book in a sweeping space opera series (Vega Victrix), but many readers will be relieved (may even throw parades or dance in the streets) to discover that this volume has an ending rather than merely stopping for a minute until the next one. Also, the second one will be out at the same time! More on that in a few days.
Corin Oshima is afraid of her past catching up with her--literally. After her horrible mission on Rossem, she traveled away at more than the speed of light. So when Rossem's history was altered, so was Corin's, and it's only a matter of time (again, literally) until the information wave traveling at the speed of light reaches her and obliterates her past, providing her with a new one--or, if she is too untethered to the current world, taking her out with it.
But she's not just sitting around waiting for time to make fools of us all. As all of us conscientious souls know, there's always work to do--and unfortunately there are always exploiters trying to spend their time treating people and lands as profit sources instead. Further complicating Corin's life are aliens who are rational but very much not human in their priorities, political complications among the human "Houses"...and the person she least wants to see in the universe right now. Even a well-educated and interestingly modified future human like Corin has her hands full!
I have read this entire series to date in draft and am thrilled to see that it's going to be available to the rest of the world so you all can talk to me about it. Highly recommended.
In science fiction, everything can be rethought — including one of the most foundational aspects of human civilization, agriculture. T.K. Rex gives it a go in The Wildcraft Drones, with an exciting take on the future of food production… and how we all might live because of it.
T.K. REX:
The world of The Wildcraft Drones began on a train. I’d just finished my first ecology class, I was watching endless farms go by, and it was 2015, so drones were new and mostly in the news as war machines. I knew that industrial agriculture caused major problems for watersheds and biodiversity, and I knew that forests were being planted for carbon sequestration. All these ingredients simmered on that quiet, two-day ride, and over Amtrak coffee and hot dogs, I came up with an idea.
What if forests could replace farms?
Lots of trees make food. But I wasn’t thinking about orchards. I was thinking about biodiverse, multi-story forests where herbs grew in the underbrush and birds nested in ancient oaks. The kind of forests I grew up in, back in Northern California, but carefully managed with food plants, so they could be as bountiful as a field of corn, but also sequester carbon and restore wildlife populations. Was it possible?
Not with tractors, I realized. Industrial agriculture relies on big machines with big wheels, so every farm is half road. Even human harvesters need ground between rows. The harvesting itself requires wasted soil. What if we could harvest from the air? What if a forest was actually a better use of the same space, once drone technology became advanced enough to harvest hundreds of different species?
The ideas rapidly built on each other. The drones could have little lasers to zap pests — no chemicals needed. Encouraging biodiversity would generate natural fertilizer.
Humans would have to be kept out, of course. In this future, we would all live in walled cities, probably, while the drones managed the forest to supply us with food.
I wrote a vignette, and sent it to the only science fiction writer I knew back then: my mom, who had a couple stories published and edited an academic journal. She said something along the lines of, “I love the idea of forests replacing farms, but forcing people out breaks my heart. We loved living in the redwoods. And What about the Native people?”
This is why I love her so much.
Her words hit me hard — we both grew up next to reservations — but I couldn’t let the concept go. Industrial agriculture had to change if we were going to address the climate crisis, and the only tool I had to do anything bigger than recycling, I thought, was the craft of storytelling. So I made a point of learning everything I could about food forests, and how rewilding our farms might work in Northern California. If I was going to write a book, I’d have to get specific, so I researched native edible plants that were already adapted to the climate here, and that led me to one of the most profound mind-shifts of my life.
I was a huge technology enthusiast in my twenties, and I’d imagined this futuristic techno-super-forest would be better, somehow, than what nature could do. That changed when I read about the actual history of Northern California’s native edible plants.
The historical accounts from Spanish colonizers describe hillsides so dense with flowers (all, in fact, native food plants) they were like a sea of color, and flocks of tule geese that darkened the skies. The intricacy of indigenous ecosystem management is well documented by both anthropologists and Native people themselves, and I found details of precisely how they managed thousands of species, not just for food but for all of the materials that made their homes, tools, clothes, and devices used for trapping, childcare, strategic fire, textiles, and everything else they needed. Every inch of the forests I grew up in had been tended meticulously for fourteen thousand years, up until the century before I was born. “Hunter-gatherer” was a bullshit term, and the distinctions between nature, humanity and technology were specious.
(If you care to research indigenous land management in California yourself, I have to include a trigger warning: it wasn’t just the Spanish, it was the Spanish Inquisition. However bad you think colonialism might have been here, slather that with a nauseating amount of nightmare fuel. The tortures were so horrific even other Spanish missionaries were upset by it. I have to take a deep breath here before going back to my story.)
*deep breath*
Okay. So yeah. Researching this book taught me that pre-colonial California was actually already a highly-advanced, hyper-productive food forest, way beyond what I had imagined for my silly futuristic utopia. The scale of what racism, colonialism and greed have cost us is incalculable.
And that sparked the soul of this book. It became not so much a utopia, but a conversation. There will be technology and displacement in the climate crisis — there already is. But how can we be human about it? How can we move forward knowing just how bad it’s going to get, without throwing the most vulnerable under the bus? And if we do rewild everything outside the cities, there will be people who refuse to leave. Should anyone be forced to move? What about children who would grow up without roads, schools and hospitals? And what if there was an entity with no stake in human politics or property values, whose only allegiance was the health of the ecosystem? Would it truly want humans out, given the many-thousand-year history of humans who already did that work? Might it understand our potential better than governments and corporations do? Might it see how much we love the work, when we’re given the chance to do it ourselves?
Eleven years after that train ride, the popular perception of intelligent machines has changed so much more than I could possibly have imagined — they will likely be just as destructive in the hands of capitalists as in the hands of militaries. In The Wildcraft Drones, they answer to neither.
If there’s another way for them, maybe there’s another way for us.
After 40 years together, Don and Rodney face the end of the world from a black hole that will swallow the Earth in exactly one month. So they embark on a road trip to keep a promise they made to their son.
Klune sells very well at my shop. He is good at doing what he does, and what he does is gay, twee, and glurgy. I did not enjoy The House on the Cerulean Sea and I did not enjoy this either. Both of them made my eyes glaze over. I started both of them, disliked them both, started skimming, still was bored and irritated, then skipped to the end to see how it all came out. Then I learned some information that made me revise my opinion of the book even lower. In the case of The House in the Cerulean Sea, it was an interview where he mentioned that his sappy, trivializing book was inspired by the Sixties Scoop. In the case of We Burned So Bright, it was his afterword.
Small accomplishment this week: Mom's cat Gally has problems walking, and she's been quietly freaking out about the life of a cat she loves vs. her very small amount of discretionary income. So this week I got her talked around so she let me launch a crowdfunding campaign to take him to the vet.
If anyone can pitch in or signalboost it would be much appreciated 💕
When I revived this blog it was with the idea that I’d regularly make themed posts for different days of the week on things that I’m interested in or curious about. This is less because I think anyone’s waiting breathlessly for whatever I have to say, and more to instill in myself a sense of discipline. Especially as I start to pick up more freelance work, having a regular practice actually helps with scheduling.
Anyway, Mondays are mostly about whatever’s on my mind, and as I looked forward to this week I thought that might be about Memorial Day—which is, after all, today.
Mostly, though, I’m thinking about yet another rural rite of passage we experienced recently. (Not that this only happens in rural areas, but how it’s playing out is harder to imagine in a city—though not impossible.) We don’t live in the countryside yet, but we will soon, and we’re at our new place frequently working on construction and getting things set up.
Not long ago, my husband went down to get some carpentry done and found that our shop had been broken into and some things stolen.
So, we did the usual things: filed a police report (someone came out to take it in person, which…doesn’t always happen in the city I live in), documented everything we could, checked cameras and shared images with law enforcement, posted on social media. The latter led to a few leads, which kind of stands to reason in a sparsely populated area. If someone’s local, someone will know them.
We weren’t expecting to get our stuff back, but figured at the very least people who lived nearby, who we hadn’t really met yet, would want to know that there were burglars around. I made contact with another person who’d had stuff go missing and we exchanged notes, but that was about it until yesterday.
We’d been working on the new house’s interior and I’d taken a break after a dump run to chat with my brother on the phone. We were just wrapping up when my husband came in with that look people get when they really need to tell you something but don’t want to interrupt you.
“There’s a bunch of guys outside saying something about a theft. I thought you’d better talk to them since you’ve been talking with people on social media and all.”
Outside I found the owner of another place along the same roadway that had also been burgled, along with about half a dozen of his family and friends. They were going down every road and open driveway in the area to see if they could spot a veritable haul of stuff that had been stolen from this guy’s cabin. Our gate was open so they drove up until they came to the house and encountered my husband.
What I learned from them was that we’d gotten off easy, with only a few things missing. The list of things stolen from two other houses along the same road included things like ATVs, drum sets, a lawnmower, and a goddamn dump truck. It’s possible that we scared off thieves who were intending to come back later.
I’ve never seen a posse before, but it was kind of what I’d imagine one would be like. Minus obvious guns. (Non-obvious guns are very much a thing in my state.)
Anyway, we gave them leave to have a look on the more remote parts of our acreage, since we hadn’t gone looking back there yet, there were more of them, and they were younger and with more endurance. They’ll let us know what they find.
This isn’t exactly how I thought we’d meet our neighbors in the area, but maybe they’ll come to our next BBQ.
When you pick up an old children's book because it says it's about a tiny glass mermaid coming to life, you probably don't expect most of the story to involve the main character going to another world where she has to face an evil pirate witch who wants to nonconsensually adopt her. Admittedly this all happens while they're lugging around the now full-sized mermaid so she can be the best friend of the other world's sole mermaid, but if they miss the deadline she'll turn back to glass, while the witch pirate throws spells at them, but... Did I mention that all of this takes place inside a Christmas tree?
This is a pretty fun book but like many older children's books, recounting the plot is like describing a half-remembered dream.
The case of the 500-mile email: "We can't send [e-]mail more than 500 miles." I was reminded yesterday that this exists and am the happier for it.
Two Slice: "A font that's only 2px tall, and somewhat readable!" 'Somewhat' is doing a decent amount of work there; I suspect enough letters are distinctive that your brain can fill in the missing ones from context. Still, impressive.
Clues By Sam, a daily logic puzzle. Starts easy on Monday, gets gradually harder over the course of the week. Been doing these for awhile now. It's nice to start my morning with a tiny dopamine jolt.
Some of the best recipe ideas just involve smashing two desserts into one. I mean, what if a fruit pie was actually a cupcake? Or a croissant turned into bread? We’ve dubbed these ideas “mashup recipes,” and they’re some of the most fun to make (and eat!). From doughnut-like cakes to pie-inspired bars, these unique desserts are the best of both worlds.
I've written two stories about Sweeting, a decommissioner of deities working for the Ministry of Divinities in an authoritarian country that refers to itself as the Polity. The first was The Inconvenient God, a novelette, in which Sweeting had to decommission a god of truancy and slacking off who was causing embarrassment for a prestigious university. The job didn't go as planned. The second was Lagoonfire, a novella, in which it seemed initially like one of the retired gods whom Sweeting first decommissioned might somehow be causing problems for a resort development. Looking into the case revealed all kinds of unexpected things, including things about Sweeting's own past that she would have liked to keep securely buried.
Lagoonfire came out in 2021. In the intervening five years I've been writing a novel that follows directly on the events of Lagoonfire, and recently I finished it. In the meantime my publisher, a micropress, closed up shop, but the woman behind it kindly agreed to read the novel anyway, and even more kindly agreed to publish it! Hurray! So at sometime in the nearish future, maybe-probably within this year or early next year, we will be able to share A Flash of Scarlet with you.
Even though it's a sequel, I've written it so that you can read it without having read Lagoonfire (and Lagoonfire and The Inconvenient God are completely independent of each other). As with the earlier two stories, this one is about how the past will never, ever, stay past. It WILL come forward again. This one features incipient divinities, spirits, and ghosts, and, unfortunately for Sweeting, more dealings with Civil Order, the Polity's feared police force. But (to her own surprise) she's not without friends and resources, both divine and earthly.
1. a European plant, Isatis tinctoria, of the mustard family, formerly cultivated for a blue dye extracted from its leaves.
2. the dye extracted from this plant.
examples 1. The jeans are made from flax and woad planted on unused ground along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. From "British Textile Biennial 2021: Events begin across East Lancashire," BBC, Oct. 1, 2021"
2. "I don't believe the indigo from the Indias is extracted from woad." Indigo by Natasha Boyd
origin before 1000; Middle English wode, Old English wād (cognate with German Waid); akin to French guède, Medieval Latin waizda < Germanic
My sister spent ninety minutes on the phone with me, helping me rewrite the pollinator garden plan for the THIRD TIME, and she is truly the best and what the fuck is wrong with the Parks Department? Not everyone has a sister who is a literal professional expert on pollinator garden design!!!
celli helped with an Excel thing last week and my friend C. loaned me a cart so I could lug the giant bag of garden dirt up to the community garden, and I am so lucky in my friends.
I wrote the Tatler Fairyland story in slow agonizing 100-words chunks and I hate it, the voice isn't quite right, but it is 1600 words long and I do think the premise is fundamentally sound. I'm going to sleep on it and do a last read-through in the morning before I send it to crit group, at the literal last possible second. (How the fuck do I turn this deadline-driven writing practice into something that can produce a novel, I ask. How.)
Once I send the story to crit group, I will reward myself with ice cream and a meeting with someone from the group building a pollinator garden nearby and then I will send the pollinator garden plan off and call it done for now.
One of my favorite skirts has been mended and it was not even that hard. It's not a perfect fix but it is better than it was! I need to sit down and catalog my sewing stash so I know what mending I have and then I can prioritize. I impulse-bought a couple of patterns from Tammy Handmade and that also needs to be done. The makerspace will be great during the summer: air-conditioning!
This is the weirdest spring ever — a forty-degree (F) swing overnight? Impossible to deal with.
Ted White's daughter Kit has notified his friends that he died today from multiple medical issues at the age of 88. It's been some months since I last spoke to him at the Tuesday Zoom meetings I drop in on a few times a year. He really didn't look good, but he seemed more or less his normal self with lots of opinions about the world. I had several opportunities to talk to him via Zoom over the last two years and saw him at the Las Vegas Corflu in 2024. But it is still a shock and I'm very sorry we'll never have another chat about music or fandom again.
He was a good friend to me over many years. I told him more than once how important my three month stay with him in 1983 was. I went to a party at his house after the Baltimore Worldcon and had so much fun I simply didn't go home. He invited me to rent his Green Room (it was painted a very bright green indeed) and get a job in Falls Church (I was a temp worker so that was doable) so we could keep talking about fandom and music. And we did, often with Dan and Lynn Steffan who lived next door. I was in fannish heaven and I know he enjoyed having me there, he always liked to have people around for late night smoke sessions, a favorite jazz record on the turntable, a drink in hand and fan history to impart to a fanzine newbie.
He was generous, kind, funny, and also cranky, held grudges, and was in a constant low key competition with Terry Carr which dated back to the 50s at least. He was an accomplished author, editor, musician and music critic, well known worldwide. He was quite a character.
Man, that was a fun time. I loved having Ted as a fancestor. It's awful thinking that he's gone. But he contributed a lot to his communities while he was here and that's a great legacy.
My Extremely Square ass is writing a scene where a character does LSD, and they (AMAB NB) hallucinate seeing and fusing with a female version of themself- for the rest of the trip, their proprioception/body map is altered so that they feel as though they have a more "female" body shape (eg, breasts, wider hips).
My question is in the title- is fucking with the body's proprioception/body map/sense of touch in this way something LSD can do? Also, the contents of the trip are kind of plot-relevant, so if LSD can't actually do this, are there any hallucinogens that can (and that people take recreationally/Actually Enjoy Tripping On)?
My friend Shelley Combs died, suddenly, a week ago. I found out about it the other day when her ex-husband posted about it on Facebook, and it was fair to say I was shocked. She and I had messaged each other just a few days before her passing, to catch up and talk about our kids and just have very mundane friend talk. I didn’t know it would be the last time I would ever talk to her, but then, we so rarely do know when will ever be the last time. What strikes me most about it now was the very ordinariness of it. Just two friends, chatting. And then that was all.
I met Shelley back in the day, when I had just started writing the Whatever, and she and I were part of that first wave of “online journals,” the name we had for blogs before we had the word “blog.” This what I had to say about her and her site, Shelleyness, most of thirty years ago now:
Shelley is that whip-smart girl in your homeroom class who everyone was a little scared of, not because she could beat you up (though don’t tempt her, pal), but because if she ever trained her formidable verbal skills on you, your sad little head would explode as you tried to wriggle away from the beat-down. Now she’s all grown up and focusing her attention on the world today, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read. Note, however, that there’s more to Shelley than attitude — far more. She’s funny, intelligent, observant, and she’s real. She writes without artifice and she says what she thinks, and she says it with style. You may come for the heat of her wit, but you’ll stay of the depth of her mind.
We got along like a house on fire way back when, because we had snark in common, as well as a birthday – she and I were born on the same day in 1969. There was a kinship, and it was a thrill to read what she had to say about her life, her universe, and everything, and to be part of that world. We become close enough that I attended her wedding, along with Krissy and a then very young Athena. It was a time of feeling very much like everything was on the verge of happening.
And of course things did happen — life happened. Shelley stopped writing her online journal and started doing other things, I started writing novels, she had a kid and we fell mostly out of each others’ orbits. Not from a lack of affection, I think, but mostly just because you focus on what’s in front of you, and also, the context in which we existed — the online journal scene — just stopped being a thing. I went back through the old version of my site in the Internet Archive and come across a collection of links for those early online journals. Nearly all those sites are gone now, a moment of time moved into memory. I do still see some of those folks online, on Facebook or Bluesky, and it’s still great to see them. It’s also different.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Shelley’s intent to give me a gift by reaching out to me a couple of weeks ago — she just wanted to wish me a belated happy mutual birthday, and to talk about nothing in particular. But I see it now as a gift, rare and true, a reconnection that brought us up to date, for what turned out to be a final time. A reminder that we were still, after all this time, in each others’ thoughts. It was a small thing, but small things can be good, and valuable.
And now, let me hand the small valuable gift to you: If you’re reading this, take a moment to reach out to a friend you haven’t caught up with in a while. Just a text or call or email or online message to let them know you’re thinking about them. You don’t have to talk about anything important — Shelley and I didn’t — but the act of reaching out is important in itself. People like knowing they’re being thought of, and fondly.
As for my friend Shelley, well. I will miss her. And I will continue to think of her on our mutual birthday. My life was better for having known her.
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