Vajra Chandrasekera @vajra@wandering.shop

Old unfinished drafts of stories that I hadn't worked on for a while tend to grow stale in my mind—I always remember them as being far more rough and unpromising than they actually are. But working on them again—almost always—reveals that it is only the memory that is stale. When the dry crust comes off the surface, underneath is sap still as liquid and fresh as the first day. It's just that if you don't go back to it you'll never find out.

The state of the world and the lubricated ease of social media together conspire to turn us all into (if not journalists per se) opinion columnists and unpaid political analysts, and I'm not sure how useful that even is as a contribution to (which, even?) public sphere, but I do know that living in it too long makes my throat feel dry.

I'm trying to teach myself—again, as one seems to need to do—the joy of the written word, the sentence, the paragraph; to remind myself why I am a writer, and specifically a writer of fiction, and poetry.

I love Mandela Effects (basically weird mass false memories) and discovered only today that there is actually minor Mandela Effect about where Sri Lanka is—a surprising number of people seem to remember it being directly south of India, rather than off-center to the southeast https://mandelaeffect.com/sri-lanka-location/

I really like the option of a single-column interface in the newest masto version. Always had trouble navigating the multi-column interface—this is much simpler.

Blindspotting is such a good film.

aaah it's freezing (by which I mean it's twenty-seven degrees celsius)

I did an interview http://www.bigecho.org/vajra-chandrasekera-interview It's been a while and I always forget that I actually like doing interview-type stuff. Though also I worry that I talk too much in them. Always with the having too many things to say.

Really glad that Krish Raghav's music newsletter is back.
https://tinyletter.com/krishraghav

Ȟe is a mountain as hé is a horn that comes from a shift in the river, throat to mouth. Followed by sápa, a kind of black sleek in the rise of both.
— from “Ȟe Sápa, One” by Layli Long Soldier
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/he-sapa-one

If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee,
battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom
of the cage I bury it, like God tromping the sky
in his undershirt carrying his brass spittoon
— from “Song in My Heart” by Dianne Seuss
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53141/song-in-my-heart#poem

That the moon causes tides
seems too witchy to be science.
The sea purging sheet iron,
jeans, a jewel-eyed
alabaster goat.
— from Kaveh Akbar’s “Exciting the Canvas”
https://aprweb.org/poems/exciting-the-canvas