Posted by aloe today
ok, i'm trying something a little different here. a bit of an experiment. it's about 15:00 on september 26th, 2025. everything in the world is super fucking crazy. i'm sitting under a willow tree which i've never considered before, but which i must have seen a hundred times, on a bench made from a big log with the top and bottom planed off longways.
i'm on a bank of the providence river, close enough to smell the breeze. it's really a lovely little sitting area. i gave my friend a ride across town to therapy, and rather than leave her to fend for herself i thought, well i've been failing to write all day at home, maybe a change of scenery would do me good. so i staked myself out here and see what happens.
there's a politically complex gathering of seagulls, ducks, pigeons and geese on a little outcropping with some leftover pier pillars before me. i got just a glimpse of what might have been a loon, too, slick and shadowy neck unresolving against the glints, disappearing on another long dive, shimmering darkly in uncertain memory. will any of this make it to the letter ? i can't be sure. technically, by the calendar, it belongs in the next one. but rules were made for bending ...
a person comes to drop some bits of food, ministering to a little featherball congregation from a chorus of concrete steps that rise out of the water. earlier, another person was doing the same, thus i think initiating the whole interspecies parliament to begin with. now the second has departed and the birdknot is gradually thinning out again. i'm orbiting the segue to the moonreview proper, i swear. but i'm having too much fun just word-photographing this sunny little day on the river. is this a writing exercise? is this what writers do? i highly recommend it, whatever it is. take an hour, find a spot, and just straight up describe it. bet you didnt expect homework >:)
oh, the long-diver came back ! i got a good look at her head this time but i still can't identify her because i dont know birds like that and theres (mercifully) no wifi out here. some kind of heron or egret ? do they long-dive like that ?
what was i doing? oh yeah, moon in review is the moonly newsletter from me, aloe. i send one out every first-quarter moon. it recounts the previous lunation, from one new moon to the next.
that was a fun little departure for me. i'm back at my house now and i won't tell you what day it is. it makes sense to bust the form a bit at the top of episode four ... a single rule of threes cycle (statement/repetition/punchline) has elapsed and completed, so now there's a form to bust, rules to bend and so forth. on with the show :)
🌑 august 23
a cormorant ! i forgot about cormorants, i bet that's what it was. i don't think loons even come around here. i didn't even look this up, i just remembered a whole kind of bird in a flash reading the intro back. that's so like me..
like, ok, here's another little vignette, from the right period this time. i've been trying to find a place to sing and play drums (and spoiler, later in the moon i wind up moving in to a practice space with some other musicians and making all this irrelevant, but woo! space! new tapes incoming i swear !) and for a while i was considering setting something up in the garage at my house, so i went and got this kit to install a lock on the door. but i've also been embarking on a journey through the noble hobby of locksport lately ... and i couldn't resist trying to pick this new lock open. so i go to start, and it turns out there's this like, clip at the back of the keyway that's just the same shape as all the regular wafers, and this clip is the only thing holding the core in place. so i instantly "pick" this clip open and the whole core starts just sliding out in my hand, and dumps the first couple wafers and one of the springs on the ground.
so i go about piecing together what happened, and how funny this lock is (youtube video incoming?); but now that tiny spring is just gone-gone. so i remember there's this locksmith downtown, and one day i walk down there and try to explain myself, and it goes as well as i ever could have hoped, the owner is helping me out and she goes in back and gets a funny little spring from one of their own repair kits and gives it to me for free. so i just go for it and say you know, ive been getting into this hobby and its really grabbing my interest, you wouldnt have any openings .. and she goes, not right now but send me your resume, and i email it when i get home and she replies that its "on top of the pile."
and it stuck in my head as a little narrative because, isn't it just kind of nice? like, i probably won't wind up working for this locksmith, and i took a hard left on the drum cube, but like. it kept the ball rolling, you know? it's a cute rambling story about putting one foot in front of the other, not knowing how things will end up.
another thing i was doing around this time was working on a block print, actually my first ever, for a forthcoming community tarot deck. i took my strength design from YATD and turned it it into a little linoleum stamp. here's a little preview pic of how it turned out ! this was neat because, making it my first-ever of something kind of became part of what the final piece was "about" — the "strength" to try something new, dive into a new creative process, mess around and get one's hands dirty. i wanted to capture something of the raw energy of a first try, maybe some beginner's luck, if i'm lucky.
and so yeah, that's me, moving materials, nodding to last moon's knight of pentacles, sailing into night with a compass and no map. working on the print (and a nine of wands, too) also dovetailed with just a general longer-term arc i've been engaged in, of figuring out how to spend a lot of time on art and other self-directed work over the course of days, weeks and months. what is even a real, sustainable "hours/day" of super high-level brainheart bodymind stuff ? my mind keeps wandering back to this poll. and like, yeah, it is about 3-5, huh. on a certain level i've known this for quite a while, and even loudly advocated for social structures that accommodate it better. but to really apply it to myself is a whole other question. and i'm starting to see a bit of synergy lately between how i schedule and set expectations for myself, and when i can feel myself feeling motivated and strong, and when the animal needs to wander off for a nap like a large omnivorous predator. i find that the company of felines can be a great reminder of how to do this last part :)
🌕 september 7
also this moon i read theory. no, really ! i mean, just a little, it was just this speech, i encountered it on bluesky and commented a bit and shared it here on the new-ish ringblog section of my site. you can trace through all that if you want the super-context, but i mention it so i can dig a little deeper backward into what made it resonate so hard with me in the first place, and frankly in a bid to sort of level up the vague social-political tone that's been simmering thru these letters, not just leave "everything in the world is super fucking crazy" hanging up there but make an honest attempt to provide some framing that's really useful. it's another new thing i'm trying, courageously,
cause i think that thing, that made me respond like that, was getting a real, credible-feeling reminder of the power that we as just people, workers, makers, lovers.. like already have and are using every day, you know? like i think i'm starting to tap in to the fact that one of the things i feel around me is this underlying dreadful sense that we exist at the whim of the ruling class, like they've deigned to allot us whatever rights we experience because it suits them somehow, because they're able to extract value from us or something, but if that meta changes and they don't need us anymore, they can just kind of snap their fingers and end the charade of civil liberties and pick a date to chuck all the undesirables into the wood chipper. that's how they talk, right? they sure would like us to believe it. but its so wrong ! it's so deeply not the case. everything we have is because of mass movements, and because of everyone fighting for freedom before us, that took it and held it and kept it. rest in power Assata Shakur. and the ruling class is already doing everything in their power to take it away all the time!
and that's not to discount any of the heinous shit they've done recently, or minimize any ground they have taken, but just to put it in a certain context. all of this is real. this, right now, is the state of things. i don't know, maybe i'm saying something obvious ? i feel like im not supposed to use words like this, like i should leave it to smarter, more experienced people. but maybe if someone just ahead of me can speak to me, then i can speak to someone just behind me ... (nire bryce had a thread about this chain-reaction effect, but it seems to have vanished in the mists.)1
and the Camejo speech itself, i highly recommend just reading the whole thing if you're still with me here, but it's so funny in parts. it's such a relief in its tone and the way it knocks the piss out of thought errors that i myself had been making. we're facing a campaign of fear and demoralization. we are facing a coordinated campaign of demoralization and fear. and it's integral to their whole strategy. nothing works without it
🌑 september 21
your present lunation began with the new moon of september 21st, waxes to the full moon of october 6th, and wanes to the new moon of october 21st. monday, september 29, was the first quarter moon of this lunation. (this letter is a couple days late. unbelievable, i know!)
calendar events: just one, a bunch of originals from that community tarot deck i mentioned are gonna be up at fuller's speed shop for a couple weeks starting october 14th. i'll have a strength in there and maybe i'll bring some more prints of it the first weekend or something :)
speaking of tarot cards, shall i pull one ? let's see.
your card is: the 9 of cups. (pull your own cards at aloe.gay/tarot !)
remember what i was saying way back at the start of this about letter number four being kind of a new beginning? tarot cards come in threes pretty often, and right away this feels like we've wrapped on our little pentacles reading and we're starting a new phrase. although, threads run through; like, digging into the whole penultimate/ultimate relationship of the queens and kings last time, a lot of that stuff applies to the nines and tens too.2 the 9's can be taken as the completions of the pip cards in a few different ways: the end of a cycle of 3 groups of 3 cards each, the final single-digit number, by analogy to 9 months of pregnancy. (10s, then, might be something beyond the end — chapter one of the next story, a kind of excess, or a reflection on the journey past.)
i'm actually just noticing something right now from looking at all 8 of these cards together: Pamela Colman Smith's 9's show figures that mostly face the viewer, in front of a form like a wall or a gate or door, like a final barrier to cross over .. and the 10s show figures looking away from us, some (like our cups) back towards their icons. and the nine of cups especially has a kind of portal-guardian vibe, almost seeming to ape the style of some curtain-sitting majors like justice or the high priestess. it's a common enough read of the 9 of wands, the "last hurdle" before some kind of conclusion. but i've heard it less often applied to this suit of water, of feelings and interiority.
so if the 9's are kind of, ultimate but penultimate, the completion but also the last step ... there's something unsettled here, yeah ? if this is looking forward, but the ten is looking back, then where's the thing itself ? where's the actual experiential bliss, not anticipated, not remembered ? the more i think about this it's kind of delicious the way it's obscured between the cards, the way it's made mysterious.
so yeah, maybe, whatever that emotional conclusion is for you, whatever's behind that curtain, maybe i won't speculate about it too directly, in the spirit of that mystery — instead just allowing you to imagine anything you want, anything you need. to find those conclusions that bend, break and challenge the demoralization and fear; the ones we put words to and share, and the secrets in the languages of our hearts alike.
thank you so much for reading my newsletter! we're hosted by comradery, a cooperatively-owned platform for artists and community projects. i put basically all my work online for free! if it means something to you and you want to see it continue, please consider supporting me with a recurring donation as low as $1 a month on comradery, or with a one-time tip on ko-fi. anything helps a lot. my website is aloe.gay, and you can write back to me at aloe (at) aloe (dot) gay. i hope you have a good moon. i'll see you on the next first quarter ~
══╗║ 🌓 ╔═╗
╔═╣║╔═╗╠═╝
╚═╗╚╝═╝╚═╝