Welcome to the Coffee Corner! :: I'll have a small drip, dark roast, no room

The Hermit card, fox love, and next right things

2023 has been an outwardly quiet year for me. I published only one piece of new work, wrote only two book reviews, interviewed only a handful of authors. I gave no readings and attended no conferences. Given the pace of some of my previous years, I've been a downright tortoise, that totem hermit. (How many times did The Hermit show up in my daily tarot card pull? More than… five? Ten? A lot. The only cards that showed up more often were the Six of Cups, Wheel of Fortune, and The Tower. If you know your tarot, you know what I’ve been up against.)

Inwardly, away from the public's eye, 2023 has been a year of massive change. My middle cat died. I’ve paused editing; I’ve scaled back on teaching. Both of my kids are in public school full-time. I moved my desk out of the basement. I cut my hair. The person I was on January 1, 2023 is waving to me across a chasm. And here I am on the other side, dusting my hands on my pants, thinking, Holy shit, what a leap.

All that said, it’s been an unexpected pleasure to take such an unexpected break: removing myself from the online world has meant giving myself the time to finally finish a draft of the “novel” I've been working on since mid-2021. I put together a flash/prose chapbook to start sending out. I discovered the germ of a new novel thanks to a visit from a young fox, and I made a (triumphant?) return to the project I set aside to write XO.

About mid-year, I started to think about what it might look like to come back, somewhat, to a public-facing space. I knew social media was out of my life for good, even the newer models like Mastodon and BlueSky and whatever else the kids are doing these days. I keep an active newsletter for publication announcements but that wasn't quite the energy I sought either.

I wanted something fun. Something between early blogging and early Twitter. The obvious solution here was Substack, though I had (have?) my reservations. Eventually, though, as is apparent enough given what you’re reading, I decided to just do it.

So what’s going to happen here? To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure. This year, I rediscovered that my Mercury (as well as my Sun, Neptune, and Imum Coeli, for crying out loud) is in Sagittarius and this makes me prone to “exploring and never needing to land at the answer.”¹ I’ve known for most of my life that the minute something feels like a stricture or a requirement or a demand, I’m going to get the hell out of there, because I’ll do any number of stupid, inessential, mundane, or otherwise activities, but only if I can have fun in some way or can learn something, only if there’s a sense of possibility or freedom inherent in the doing (from my first-ever astrological chart reading, way back in 2002, and I quote, “You are rooted in freedom”²—welcome to the contradiction I’ve been living my whole life). If this sounds like “cuckoo bananas,”³ so be it.

All of which is to say, I’m not making any promises about this venture. I’ve got goals and intentions though! And here are two: “A Year with Some Classics” and “What is Art? What is Lettuce?” These are the two features I’ll be featuring regularly. They may or may not be self-explanatory but I don’t want to define them too much yet, because—well, you know!

Everything else? We’ll see how it goes…

---

---

Oskar June Rauch, April 12, 2004 - March 17, 2023 🖤

1. CHANI podcast, week of November 6, 2023

2. My then roommate, Angela.

3. A favorite phrase borrowed from my son Christopher and his preschool bestie Johnniel.