I will be speaking on February 28th and 29th, 2024, in Bloomington, Indiana at the Black Metal is for Everyone Symposium.
The tabletop roleplaying game I helped design, Penumbra City, is back from the printers and will go out pre-orderers soon. Get a copy from the publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.
Ten years ago, my great aunt, Sister Dominic, sat in her chair in her room in the hospice ward of the convent. She was watching Mass on TV. It hadn’t even occurred to me that someone would televise Mass. But there she was, too infirm to attend in person, so she watched Mass from her chair while I waited awkwardly, patiently, to talk to her.
It’s been almost ten years now since she passed away. I still talk to her sometimes. If she says anything back to me, it’s in ways too subtle for me to understand.
I didn’t know if she would know who I was. “Louie’s son” was about all I hoped for in terms of recognition. Senility comes quick with age in my family. I don’t expect to have too much in the way of memory or cognition in my eighties.
Sister D lived in a convent in Iowa, more than a thousand miles away from the rest of us, and she had cancer, and she was going to die. I was on tour to support an anarchist prisoner, and I timed my travels around visiting a convent. A kind of sweet irony, I figured at the time. Looking back, the irony is gone and only the sweetness remains.
I drove up to the convent and threw on the crumpled suit I keep in a bag in the van I lived in. I don’t know that I’d ever been more conscious of not owning deodorant.
I walked in. They’d been expecting me. Sister Dominic had been telling everyone I was coming for days. She knew who I was. No one gave my strangeness a moment’s thought. I was welcome.
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