i moved to vermont. wish i could climb into the clouds and dig a hole open to sit in the sun.

list of events happening around birmingham that i’m missing bc we moved:

  • 3RA1N1AC
  • neil young and crazy horse
  • seeing haylen play bass in hotline tnt, we started our first band together in like 6th grade
  • eating at rougaroux and saw’s bbq and the taco truck by the gas station and red pearl and any restaurant owned by frank stitt and hot n hot and the thai place that burned down and the meat & 3 that closed and the essential and zaza and slice pizza and el barrio and bamboo on second and shu shop even though the owner was rude when hal was barefoot and put on his slippers and they refused to serve us
  • daffodils blooming by february
  • seeing the redeye bass swimming along the shoals in the little cahaba and not being able to catch one, so i go look at all of the rare plants around in the glades
  • i regret never seeing joe minter’s “african village in america”
  • seeing our missing cat big daddy
  • our old landlord is selling the house despite us asking to buy it and them stringing us along like they might sell it to us, for the 5 years we lived there. according to zillow, the amount of money we paid in rent is 3/4 the cost they paid to buy the house.

i’m having some weird mental stuff. among various problems, i don’t have any friends close by. (i moved to vermont because zoe got a job here. i love zoe.) i didn’t have any friends left in birmingham so it’s not a huge change. but i’m desperately missing friends nearby now. i want to start a group message with my friends scattered everywhere called:

PLEASE HELP FIX MY FRIEND ALONE

and we will conquer the world. maybe we can get up to something else too, i don’t know, i just need to be with the dear friends that i love and love me despite my flaws. if you would like to be my friend, you can email me at smcalilly@gmail.com. i need in-person friends but i will welcome internet friends, too. though heads up i have flaws.

have this urge to run into a church and surrender my body on the sanctuary floor as a sinner who needs to be punished. ask the acolyte to light me on fire. there is a void in my spirit, that’s for sure. 100% failed on the first day of lent.

vermont local food. that helps. creamline milk, my god, have you had that? divine. we found a delicious cream cheese that doesn’t have a label. there’s a blue cheese from a nearby dairy farm and you can see the cheese mold inside the cheese holes, it’s electric on my tongue biting down on the crunchy mold bits. i will enjoy the summer here. if we become friends then you should visit and come hike or fish or just hang out in the mountains. i’m gonna have a 750 sqft vegetable garden.

we attempted to make shrimp étouffée for valentines day and i messed up the roux. twice. i was having a bad day and this was one of those things that add to the bad day. zoe saved us. roux is supposed to be 1:1 but the recipe had the wrong proportions (which is weird because it’s a trusted recipe). i felt like a failure moving to new england and can’t even make the food from back home. me and zoe have different ideas about what an étouffée is, we need to talk to some elders. btw grits are hard to find here. we ordered a lot online. we also can’t find crystal hot sauce. no buttermilk biscuits anywhere. also, i told somebody i moved from alabama and they thought it was out west. i didn’t know vermont was considered new england but at least i could point to it on a map. btw, i can’t believe people lived here before electricity.

one thing going well: i did a writing workshop led by bud smith and jimmy cajoleas and made some friends and got some encouraging and helpful feedback on my novella manuscript. i could’ve sworn the writing was done for this story but it’s not, i had moved on from this but now it’s back. i’ve been using that energy to try a daily writing habit where i’ve been editing and rewriting parts of the manuscript, and i actually think i like it more than the last draft, cutting a lot of boring and awkward things, making it flow better (but sometimes feel like i’m making it worse), making the plot pull the reader more effectively, trying to be more deliberate about what i’m writing (an invented theology) since i’m unfortunately dealing with hard topics and i’ve never written a book before this one. i might as well try to do the best i can. i tried to write this book about a funeral based on something that happened to my family and attempted to use good sentences to get a reader through a terrible tragedy. because otherwise how could you read that? there’s no plot in this: an awful thing happened and then our family suffered together during this horrendous public funeral, it was the most surreal and absurd thing to experience, and we continue to heal a decade later. and i realized while writing it that i need to use some traditional plot tricks to get a reader through, tension and stuff. plot was like an afterthought, i started to add this prose poetry charater thing who ended up being half of the book and was like wait a second, he needs a reason to be here so i just stumbled into a plot and it slowly revealed itself as what the story needed. and now thanks to the workshop, everybody helped me realize that i need to lean more into plot elements (among other helpful criticism i received).

i got a package sent to our old house and we have no friends there to pick it up, will somebody please forward it to me? our old landlord is not being helpful and our nice neighbors moved to portugal.