Holding Pattern

The next Orbital Operations will arrive on 4 JUNE 2023.

I need to focus on what’s in front of me, and there aren’t currently enough hours in the day, so I’m dropping out of sight and taking some things off my desk for a few weeks, including this newsletter. I have forgotten how to be good at doing all the things, so I’m going to do fewer things until I remember.

After that, normal weekly service should prevail until the end of the year.

What really threw me this week was this: on Sunday last, I woke up with a freakishly blocked ear. Stone deaf in my right ear, and my mild and managed tinnitus was about 10x normal. No balance, vertigo, the whole bit. Careful cleaning did nothing, olive oil did nothing, I got the over-the-counter earwax-cooking stuff and it did nothing. By Friday, the tinnitus was at a brain-splitting 50x, I was effectively as deaf as a post and walking in a straight line was more of a challenge than usual. This is why, late on Friday, I took what is basically a tupperware horse syringe with an orange tip shaped like the head of a 1970s television spaceship, and used it - with a degree of skepticism and fear of cracking something vital in my head, including, you know, my head - to fire a half litre of warm water inside my skull.

Oh my god don’t do that. I mean, do you need to be inside one of those Las Vegas jumping water fountains while it’s also full of crayon shavings, yellowed cobwebs, possible fossils and bits of old bicycle? While it’s inside your own skull? No. Don’t ever do that.

It’s nice to know that even at the end of a long life we can still have firsts. I have not directly irrigated my own brain before. I got my hearing back on the second try, and the tinnitus is now down to 2x normal, which is manageable. Which means, yes, production team, I can now listen to the build on DEPT MIDNIGHT 104.

This is, I am certain, the sort of classy material you subscribed to this letter for. It’s probably just as well I’m taking a couple of weeks off to catch up on other stuff.

Jason Howard told me he’s re-running our old webcomic experiment SCATTERLANDS on his IG account, @jasonhowardart . It was the first thing we did together: we did SCATTERLANDS to have some fun and find out if we could work well as a team. We went on to do three volumes of TREES and the graphic novel CEMETERY BEACH, and we still talk regularly about stuff, so it all worked out fine. Go and look.

Here’s a slightly depressing thought from Jan Chipchase’s newsletter:

Developed as a short essay at this link here.

From the optional.is newsletter:

“Marginal gains.” The tiny tweaks that can add up over time.

Their newsletter goes out once a quarter, and can be checked out at this link here.

From the Daily Heller: Working Through Chronic Pain. Interesting to me, because it’s not a thing we normally talk about. I’ve been working through chronic pain on and off for forty years now. I don’t really remember my last four years of education because I was so loaded up on prescribed painkillers. But when we talk about this we sound like we’re crazy or we’re lying or we’re unemployable or some combination of the above that adds up to “get the hell away from me.”

From Julian Simpson’s newsletter:

Okay. Now that I can stand up without falling down, have to go and wash out the chicken coop, because we have more rescue chickens arriving at the end of the month. Take care of yourself, take care of the people around you, enjoy your month, and I hope to be able to write to you again in a few weeks. Thanks for reading.

W