I. Pre-
New York City is surging. 10,000 cases in a single day. Yesterday almost 12. Everyone I know has recently tested positive or knows many that have. Grateful to report a negative household, and bracing to spend much of the next few weeks inside.
II. Postponed
Again, there’s been a line of event cancellations—many posts postponing.
The last few days have me back at that initial initial wave (and to the third installment of this newsletter), reminding me that time has always been elastic—a rubber band of non-linear, topsy-turvy, upside-down we sometimes pretend is otherwise. Again, an undefined horizon that has always been temperamental and that our queer, sick, and otherwise divergent bodies have not stopped feeling.
Parties, whose posters frequently include an inexact end time of “until,” are in a different kind of holding pattern—until the New Year? How new will the year be when these gatherings return?
Of course, postponing is both what got us here and what we should have done sooner: global, capitalist imperialism postponing anything close to an equitable strategy for vaccines, for testing, or for workers got us here. And not postponing more at so many points during the pandemic has drawn this out. We’ve tried to steamroll normalcy over and over despite signs of the virus’s continued presence and then are Pikachu-meme *shocked* when things play out when they do.
Despite—and because—of these returning frustrations and fears, let us turn to love. (bell would want us to!) Postpone is from the Latin: to place after—an origin I can’t help but read as containing tenderness. I like to imagine these postponings as, perhaps, acts of love.
See this recent post by Ted Kerr:
How can we foreground the care in our cancellations, in our quarantines, in our waiting for testing lines? What can we find—to borrow from the title of Jjjjjerome Ellis’s recent bell-ringing project—in the clearing?
I felt similarly this time last year, where I wrote:
Like so much of our current/forever time scramble, I’m trying to find the ways our many re-arrangements result in more care, and normalize it in new ways. What moments of postponement are actually moments of needed pause? What space is made? Indeed, the space of no-work, no-production, no-motion can be the most lucid. What postponements are refusal of capitalist demands and pacing? There are enough real urgencies for us to fall into the trappings of constructed ones.
I hope each of you have the care you need.
III. (Re)Post
Avery continues fundraising, lately with this gorgeous postcard project on @besoft.raw. Two postcards are posted every Monday and are only available though that Sunday for a donation to their fundraising.
Untitled Queen always shows what being a community member actually looks like with her new directory of Queer Creatives, which you can join here.
If we’re going full March 2020 again, make sure to check in on your immunocompromised friends, your friends in nightlife, your friends whose work or housing may make this time especially difficult. Redistribute resources (time, information, money) as you can.
Let me know if you need anything.
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