First, a couple writing updates:
I wrote a short essay about watching Mr. Mom as a Stay-at-Home-Dad for the site I occasionally blog and edit for. See it up now at Meow Meow Pow Pow.
I also have a flash nonfiction piece up at Reservoir Road Literary Review titled Confessions of a Church Janitor Part I. I quite enjoyed writing this though I’m sure my parents will not like it, jk, love you Mom and Dad!
Also, I am now one-third of the way through my new novel! I have most of the characters and set up in place, a general idea of where the story is going, and the plot/thematic elements to deepen. Now all I need is time! What is it about? Well, right now it is a eco/disaster novel about “The Big One” that’s supposed to hit PNW one day and the story of five characters who encounter strange phenomena in the day, day after, and weeks after the quake and subsequent tsunami. I need some recs for good titles…
Now, onto the newsletter
Sometimes, while writing these updates, I think “Now Levi, If you don’t have anything nice or positive to write, don’t write it all.” I mean, who wants to get bummed out by a newsletter? You should be bored by a newsletter not bummed by one. I’m still not even sure if I’ve nailed down a focus for this “newsletter” which is why it is still called Levi’s Lost Thoughts. Should it be more about fatherhood? Faith? Writing? Art? I can’t decide. My two daughters take everything from me right now and what little mental capacity I have to write soon evaporates whenever I try to hone in on the specifics of my novel, essay, or this newsletter.
Still, if I’m being honest, the last few weeks in my life have left me extra exhausted. Don’t worry! Fun jokes below! Covid finally came for the Rogers Family though. We had a pretty good 2.5 year run. From whence covid came we do not know. I do know that we were flying to Michigan with a 1.5 year old who kept eating blueberries off sticky airport floors and wiping her hands all over public toilets and then sticking them in her mouth, soooooooo that’s a decent guess. Yet Evangeline had been sick for nearly a week before our trip and after. She tested positive only one day while the rest of us have only ever tested negative. Emerson and I both have some type of other bad cold virus however, one that has created an ear infection inside the both of us. That means the three of us have been sick for two + weeks now and had to quarantine for a week or so while Evangeline got better. My head feels like it’s full of water that won’t drain. My body feels achy and fatigued. Yesterday I caught myself eying the bleach container in the bathroom and thinking, it would make sense that if you drank bleach, it would kill all the viruses in your body? Right? No Levi! Bad Levi!
Yet deep down I am screaming and crying “Why me?!” I really am a very selfish (and vain) person and often can’t think of anyone else but me and what I’m going through. I realize that lots of other people have also been sick and in quarantine and have lost jobs and been relegated to caretakers and childcarers for more amount of time than they would like (just like me) but my situation seems even more unfair, because it’s like, happening to me you know? ME. The nerve!
Yet as I read in War and Peace the other day (it’s a year-long read I’m participating in with another Substack group) a certain sentence stuck out. The character Natasha has just called off her marriage to Prince Andrey because some other womanizing figure came in and swept her off her feet with no intention of setting down with her (he was already married!) thereby ruining her and her family’s reputation, and so Natasha falls into a deep depression (even tries to poison herself) and becomes a ghost of her former self. She no longer wants any part of life. And yet, as Tolstoy writes, one day she realizes, “Still, life goes on.” Yes it does. Life goes on. whether there’s death, sickness, or war. And we have to keep going. It seems absurd but that’s just how the cookie crumbles sometimes.
I’ve quite enjoyed reading War and Peace throughout this year for the way in which it shows you the multiple lives and ups and downs one person can lead throughout one’s life. For instance, Pierre—who at first is somewhat of a buffoon and drunkard and aimless—one year decides to dedicate his life to God and the freemasons (yes, them). He swears off drinking and womanizing and the pleasures of this world and throws himself into service of all mankind. That works for a little bit, and yet in a couple years he’s back to wondering what the point of life is and soon returns to all his vices. Only know he understands that there is only so much one can do in life and, at least at this point in the book, has found a sort of synthesis between a life of pleasure lived for oneself and a life of service to others. And now he is in love with Natasha!
In other news, this week we are embarking on a super-radical, hella-fresh, tubular road trip down through California to stay in Yosemite and then down to Santa Barbara to my cousin’s wedding. Fingers crossed and prayers to the sky I might even get a lottery permit to hike Half Dome which would be so dope. Anyways, looking forward to our big summer trip and ready to get out of this damn house and have some adventures!
I went to see Fleet Foxes and McMenamin’s Edgefield Theater. Cat and I have also found some time to catch up on movies and we watched Everything Everywhere All At Once and wow! that is the wildest movie I have ever seen. If you don’t know anything about it just let me tell you it involves a multi-verse, switching back and forth to different versions of your self, and a fanny pack fight scene. Yet it also has an emotional core that will resonate with everyone and holds the rest of the movie up.