September 13, 2022: How are you doing my dear,

Fine at some things and fucking up the rest. I went to the grocery store where given the choice between arugula, spinach, and dandelion greens I picked dandelions, which I consider the second most punishing. I stopped working on the project having to do with communicating with my dead great grandpa through his memoir when Russia invaded Ukraine because I started to worry that I should know more about the region's history than I can glean from the record of the unreliable narrator I am related to. So I have Stalingrad and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman to get through (thank you Claudia) and Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge. I know it's not totally cool to portray Eastern Europe as haunted or magical but also I can't help that I happen to be able to teleport myself there through the remembered scents of my dead great grandpa. I have been thinking about his apartment in Chelsea that I never visited because I wasn't alive yet and even if I had been alive I may not have visited. I would like to be of a place even though all of them are fucked. I would like to be better at replying to my emails. If my dead great grandpa sent me an email from the Pripet Marshes in 1900 or from jail in Moscow in 1905 I think he would have said that everyone stank and he was a little bit bored and acting out. I wonder if he ever read anything more interesting than the Torah and, I'm sorry, Pushkin. Do I have to add it to the list don't tell me I don't want to. I wonder if I get my trouble with carrying out a correspondence with the living from him.