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  • excerpt from a christmas card from sweden

    i am sent a christmas card from sweden. i cry when i open it, standing at the stove, drinking black coffee with messy hair and a stomach ache. he was anxious about it arriving in time for christmas and i told him i didn’t care, but he did anyways. it arrives in time.

    the letter comes with his messy handwriting all over it, scrawled bible verses, just like the ones i sent to him when first we started to write.

    i remember friends calling in sick to my birthdays, blowing me off for movie nights and hangouts, and then dumping me completely when my father died. i cut myself open for people in my life who left me when i needed them most. and this swedish aries, who burns with a kind of fire that i am unfamiliar with, travelled the world for me. crossing time and ocean to hang out in my room and make friends with my cats and walk on beaches to look for bones and feathers.

    he says it is nothing to him. he says he doesn’t mind. he says he’ll do it again. he said he’s coming back. back to canada, back to me, and my little house and little life full of vhs tapes and cameras and thrift shops and handmade candles and soaps.

    i say i’m nothing special and he says i’m everything.

    he says it simply, no bullshit.

    he sends me christmas cards. we talk about god and grief.

    he knows the loss that haunts my heart because it haunts his too.

    i see it on his face and in his eyes sometimes.

    sometimes we talk about fathers. sometimes we don’t. we hold hands and eat brownies and look at bird taxidermy in the museum. we kiss by the old church and a lady on the street takes photos of us and says we are beautiful.

    we are beautiful.

    i do not feel so beautiful when i’m ugly crying by the stove clutching my christmas card from sweden.

    i don’t know if this healing and i don’t know if this is happiness, but, god, i hope it is.

    merry christmas.

  • my mother

    my mother. when i think of her, i think of cigarettes and french manicures. i think about her unwavering green eyes that i was always jealous that i did not inherit. my eyes, the same blue as my father’s. i think about my mother’s huge purse with an iphone inside. i think about her face the morning we watched my father die together.

    how many years had it been since i’d spent a night with my mother? and the one we spent was curled together on a rollout hospital cot listening to my father’s breathing slow. i think about her strength and her viciousness in the same moment and it takes my breath away.

    this beautiful complicated woman, my mother. she has always been my greatest adversary, the voice i hear inside my own head as my inner monologue. the leo she is, sits across the zodiac from my aquarius, just as she has sat across from me in life. she is and always has been governed by fire, the same rage that burns inside me, also burns inside her. but i am an air sign, i’m the oxygen that fire needs to burn. am i her adversary too?

    we go out today to do some shopping. we go to our favourite thrift store and she buys me candles and a vintage dress. we go for lunch and talk about my struggles and hers, too. the world rejected her just as it has rejected me. when i was diagnosed with autism, she declined to see it at first, and now, it is obvious where it came from. her brain, just like mine, fixated on justice that doesn’t exist, seeing patterns where others see oblivion.

    how can we be so similar and yet so dfferent? this dance of the mother and the daughter that we do has always seemed like a struggle for who will come out victorious. there are no girls weekends, not with us. but we make sauerkraut and pierogi and borscht. we talk about the abuse my grandmother went through, and then later dished out. we talk about the war and trauma.

    we have such a strange relationship.

    when we visit, we sit on the front step and smoke cigarettes and drink black coffee together and yet it can feel sometimes like we send messages back and forth from other planets.

    she is beautiful, but of course, like with everything, she doesn’t see it. i notice it today as she is handing me her roasting pan. i’m the one who cooks christmas dinner. a tradition passed on now to me. my mother talks about the best way to roast brussels sprouts and i realize how beautiful she is as she prattles on over carrots and potatoes.

    i realize how much i’m looking forward to christmas dinner with her this year.

    it’s such an odd feeling because there have been times since the death of my father where i haven’t been able to find much to look forward to.

    she sends me home with bags of food and a thrift store dress.

    i love her, so much, my mother.

  • into it: imchibeat, simon emanuel – “1704”

    so, not unlike the infamous/famous calvin klein perfume by the same name, you could call it an “obsession” with how i feel about the new track “1704” from swedish producer imchibeat and swedish rapper simon emanuel.

    ya girl has a bit of a thing for swedish hip-hop at the moment. it started with being introduced to the random bastards collective by some of my swedish friends and there’s something about that sound that just hits for me. this song in particular has scratched a very particular itch of mine, and i featured it on my december 2025 playlist.

    i’ve written about imchibeat before and as mentioned in that previous bit of writing – he has a very excellent way of creating these very interesting and emotional tracks – and “1704” is not an exception from this. this is gonna sound weird maybe but “1704” reminds me a lot of burial (one of my all time favourite artists)- just this very pensive emotional self reflection dripping off the production.

    so like, this emotional production of imchi’s is then overlaid with simon emanuel’s very smooth and just as self-reflective lyricism and composition, my guy simon can fucking write. of course, the song is in swedish, and i do understand that most of the people who come across this blog, may not read or understand swedish, but i do challenge you to go check it out and just let the song wash over you.

    “be för staden” is said several times through the song and it means “pray for the city“, and how fitting. i first listened to this track on a difficult day as i walked through the downtown streets of my city, i walked by signs for new restaurants, pretty girls wearing fashionable clothing, people shooting up, graffiti advertising drugs and drug dealers with the hookup butted up against flyers for bible study classes or alcoholics anonymous meetings. it was one of those grey rainy days that matched my mood perfectly, you know the kind where you breathe in and fill your lungs with the smell of the city, gasoline, and petrichor, cheap perfume, cigarette smoke, someone smoking weed somewhere, food cooking.. just this heady aroma of people together. one can be easily overcome by the life and decay all around us – absolution, deliverance, hell, and horror existing in this simultaneous and never ending struggle for dominance. and i love it.

    the same bitter romance that plays out in my city’s streets plays out perfectly in “1704” – there’s this grief, and loneliness in imchi’s production that stands right alongside the stubborn pride and self awareness of simon’s bars. i cannot stress enough how much this song has been on my mind. i play it over and over and translate the lyrics myself (though i do thank imchi for helping me with some words i couldn’t immediately hear as my swedish isn’t great yet).

    i don’t want to sound like some kind of crybaby or nothin, but i feel so very grateful to live in this time and to be able to experience music like this. i’ve felt very alone in my life, it happens when you grow up a fucking weirdo, an outcast, someone forever doomed to live on the edges, the fringes, and when i hear music like this, it makes me feel less alone knowing that other people have felt like i have, have lived what i have, and i think that’s special. not everyone experiences things like this. finding those who have, those who get it? it’s a headrush.

    spotify link

    anyways, it means a lot.

    thanks simon and imchi for the cool tunes.

  • december 2025

    danny schmidt – stained glass

    nicole sabouné – so far out

    billy opel – min egen sång

    mattis – joan didion

    vance joy – riptide

    snbrn, kerli – raindrops

    saint jhn – i can fvcking tell

    imchibeat, erik bo jonsson and the northern lights, adée – stick around

    fridlyst – komsikomsa

    au/ra – ghost (acoustic)

    shirley collins – hares on the mountain

    hindarfjäll – blodörn

    gigi perez – sailor song

    coyote shivers – sugarhigh

    erk, jonte montana – mental

    lisahall – is this real?

    kato – turn the lights off (feat jon)

    lord huron – love like ghosts

    addison rae – fame is a gun

    onerepublic, alesso – if i lose myself

    venturing – play my guitar

    hildur guðnadóttir – bær

    elliot smith – behind the bars

    ethel cain – inbred

    davron mananov – everything is

    jacub – jag vet, du är inte min

    badgrub, police in paris – katyushka

    viggo nobis – dimman

    chasing abbey – íorónta

    jonah kagen – god needs the devil

    anna graves – burn on

    tess posner – feral child

    marty robbins – big iron

    imchibeat, simon emanuel – 1704

    prison ghost – vultures

    86love, h!ckey – alberta big dick swingin

    seamus mckenna, swallows and crows – the parting glass

    ❤

    spotify link

  • thrift store angel wings

    i found home made angel wings in a pile of christmas garbage at the thrift store.

    someone made them out of cardboard and feathers and put little LED lights in them

    they remind me of twenty years ago when i was young and i would wear angel wings and white dresses and white and pink plastic rosaries to travel in shitty heavy metal vans to go out to fields with my friends and drink and party

    i always had a bottle of cheap champagne or a even cheaper rosé and i would run around shrieking like a banshee, screaming out all the rage i had inside

    i became “the angel girl”

    biblically accurate, maybe – all eyes and wheels, bellowing “be not afraid“

    i like these wings, they are silly and make me laugh and feel nostalgic

    i burnt christmas candles today that smell like cedar and cinnamon

    and i had some friends over for a christmas party

    when i was twenty and edgy, we called it “yule”

    we would wear white and make wassail and serve home made mead

    people would drop acid and one time some australian people showed up with a really fancy tropical fruit tray

    they weren’t invited but at least if you’re gonna crash a party, bring something with you

    they were really nice and we talked about goats

    i’m older now, so no one party crashed, but we shared chocolates and meat and cheese

    i made candles for the girls

    i wear my angel wings and make jokes and put glitter on my face

    in the two years since my father’s death, just before christmas 2023,

    this is one of the first times i’ve allowed myself to feel even a bit of joy about the holidays

    my girlfriend gives me a candle that smells like sage

    i feel normal, just for a while

    just a girl having friends over for christmas

    we play mariah carey and i dance in the kitchen

    joy can be foreign to me

    i savour the taste of it in my mouth

    it is a change from tasting blood,

    when i have spent the last two years, biting my tongue