Whoops! I started a newsletter post eight million years ago and then lost it in the pile of cloud-based services THE MAN forces me to use and that refuse to talk to each other like the spoiled internet roommates they are. Have I talked to you guys about how much I love Zapier, by the way? In one of my many nervous-breakdown escape career fantasies I land a job at Zapier. I fly to Paris and get front row seats at all the fashion shows until the people at the shows figure out what Zapier is and that I do not belong there. Zapier is a company that you can pay to make your dumb internet services talk to each other and work together. It’s like Ifttt. Oh, you don’t know ifttt? Come, sit with me, child *gestures to a bench overlooking a river of flowing ones and zeroes. It sucks that the internet has been siloed off into great swaths of corporate greed pits, because IFTTT and Zapier are just taking advantage of that monetization but it feels less evil because and more subversive. It’s weird that “solving a problem” is subversive now, but here we are. Zapier makes it so that I can create a graphic for a new treks and the city episode, save it to a folder on dropbox, and then it automatically gets uploaded to a spot on my server where it also automatically gets posted to instagram with the text skyler has written to accompany the new episode. All I have to do is make a file and save it, which is something I remember to do nearly 34 percent of the time it needs to happen (That’s why sometimes the same posts go up). Ifttt is similar but it works with more of your smart home stuff so I think you can make it that someone sends you an email and a lightbulb goes on or something. It makes me feel like an internet Inspector Gadget, making little Rube Goldberg machines to spice up my mundane tasks.
On that note, an update to this newsletter is that you can now read all the back issues and the new ones on wordpress as well as here. It’s one step closer to you actually getting these in your email inbox. WordPress will hopefully provide a more pleasant newsletter reading and browsing experience than the patreon app where you’ll be able to read a bunch in a row without clicking a category or whatever the app makes you do. Use your same login details and let me know if there are massive bugs which I cannot wait to address.
The following is the post I began writing the day of the final episode:
Would it be possible to just have one feeling at a time, please? Is there any way to limit the amount of emotions a person can experience at one time? Maybe a nice blend of two or three as opposed to *checks notes infinity??? I’m trying to literally just drive to a coffee shop.* It might help if I wasn’t listening to political podcasts while trying to get my nail polish to dry for the 10th time in one week (it is a personal failure if I cannot get nail polish to dry on my fingers and is an indicator of my essential nature). I’m so sensitive to everything at the moment and every interaction with every stranger is making me want to cry and hug them and also hide forever. It might sound like I have taken some off-brand psilocybin, but I attribute my condition to two things:
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Today is the last episode of Resident Alien.
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I have been undergoing EMDR and everyone who has ever done this told me to expect some emotional side effects.
There would be no point in listing the things I am thinking or feeling about the end of Resident Alien. Imagine how you might feel if you were me. I feel that way. The answer is yes. I can’t tell how much the very intense trauma therapy is affecting me. I assume not at all, but that is based on my deeply held belief that nothing will ever fix my inherently fucked up nature (nail polish), a belief that has ironically been revealed to me through said therapy!
A friend of mine who is an AA person has shared some real bangers throughout the years. See “God’s will is just reality. It’s what happens.” Also “The other night I just went to bed, and fell asleep. Like a person.” which made it into the background dialogue of the AA scene in episode 8! I saw her at a meeting the other day and she used the phrase “raw-dogging reality” to describe being sober. There is no better way to describe the feeling of meeting life on life’s terms as a sober person with an email address in 2025. Every waking moment is an absolute firehose of unmitigated consciousness and frankly? No thank you. Alcohol is like a switchboard for reality where you don’t get to decide what gets turned off, but it’s better than nothing.
It’s not the fact that you get to experience the good with the bad that makes being sober worthwhile. Reality is a crapshoot, and I don’t care for the chaos of “being present” especially amidst the stupidest rise of fascism the world has ever seen. The thing that makes sobriety good is that you get to show up for other people. I look forward to being the first call when one of my friends goes through a break up. I want to be there to help people get through hard things. And when I get drunk that just goes away completely. The option to be a useful member of society is removed, and I don’t think that happens to people who don’t have alcoholism. Garret is somehow able to be a good partner and friend while enjoying the occasional martini. Weird flex but ok.
Well, this wasn’t supposed to become a meditation on alcoholism, but I needed to let you all know that while I’m not ok, I’m ok. I have a million plans, and I know those plans will get ruined, which is also ok because the plans are probably flawed in some way that I cannot see. God is reality, I am going to raw dog it, and my nails will be imperfect and melty and so will my face and eventually my entire body, lol! I will have feelings about it! I will share them with you! It will be hard but we will be there for all of it.
*I’m not driving now I am typing, but I was thinking this while driving.
