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• 003 – Sadren and Beverages

  Anonymous wrote:

  To Sadren the Poet… do you enjoy a good beverage? What kind? Would you be open to grabbing one with a fan some time? (Return address is stated to be :just throw it bottled inta the ocean)

  My friend,

  What they don’t tell you about immortality is that your body forgets how to want. You won’t notice what you’ve become numb to until it’s too late. You will go months without eating or drinking and wonder why the things that once brought you joy have emptied themselves of meaning. My friends in the younger generation tell me that this is called “depression.” When I learned this, it came to me all at once, as if in a dream—why the gods of my ancestors slaughtered one another, why Old Mora chases disaster, why the Io must have their tyrannical heart devoured each summer. None of them have had a fruity drink in what I imagine to be hundreds of years.

  It’s perverse, and wrong, and I won’t stand for it. I am a hedonistic street-rat at heart and I believe this is my only moral calling. The moment god forgets the taste of honey mesquite is the moment god decides all other creatures are meaningless noise. What awful delusions we suffer when eternity stares us down!

  I am writing to you now while nursing a glass of non-alcoholic cidrecane. Addiction precludes me from the drink. I’m aware of the irony. After reading what I have written, my boyfriend sampled my cup and said “This is just apricot cider,” and then advised me to send this letter “without the diatribe,” which means that I will send it as it is.

  I’m getting ahead of myself. I enjoy a little bit of everything. My latest vice is vaatlil, a fizzy juice of berries, bitters, and caribou blood that comes from West Scaiuq. This is what they serve foreigners who can’t keep pure caribou blood down. It’s delicious, but even still I can’t drink much, because I have the “thin stomach of a farmer” in the words of my boyfriend. (I’m not young anymore. After my last brush with lichen cheese, I know better than to try to prove my “Sarikote-ness” to him.) 

  When I’m in the city, molchi and cha yen satisfy my sweet tooth. Herbal teas satisfy my need to seem sophisticated. I also enjoy coffee and maté, but I rarely drink them, as they cause me to become very stupid. I am now being teased because I drink “disgustingly sweet mocktails that would stop the hearts of lesser men.” This is untrue. I have made myself ill before and I will make myself ill again. “Spoken like a true masochist.” Can a man not write a letter without the dawn chorus crowing about his inability to distinguish love from pain?

  I digress. These days I am spending more time on the East Coast, where I grew up. Many things have not survived these past hundred years, and what hasn’t died is doomed to meet a more mediocre end. My favorite teahouse, for example, serves a tepid mockery of what I drank in my youth. Nahe. I miss it, but only a little. This is the other thing they don’t tell you about immortality—what grows in spring is watered by your winter tears, and it will be sweeter than you remember. I never had Sati-Xanti food until an elderly couple opened a bodega at the end of the street. They serve a miawe-flavored molchi that would make me forgive Motu.

  You must come visit sometime and try it. (The molchi, not forgiving Motu.)

  

  June 4, 2024

• 002 – Malakai and Music

  Anonymous wrote:

  To Malakai Nakamura of Mercasor: Hi Malakai, big fan. Years ago I illegally obtained your first album when I could’ve just bought it, and the ghost of this act has been following me ever since. Enclosed is an amount of currency that will hopefully cover the costs, but I don’t really understand what the conversion rate is over here, so it might be a little more or less. Cheers m8

  no worries

  i have an arrangement with my sister-in-law where i put a bean in the bean jar every time i deflect kindness with jokes. and if it gets full i have to eat all of the beans

  so bean with me

  to be honest the idea of anyone listening to my first album recreationally is bewildering

  maybe this is not a smart thing to say when im out here fighting for my life AKA begging people to buy my EP. but making vern was hard

  its also a fat crock of pretentious bull

  when i put it up it wasnt connected to my name and i wasnt going to release anything else under that handle. but then some fans found it and it became a meme and idk it felt like calling myself vern was the only way to take ownership of the situation

  but like it was in response to a dumb joke made at my expense

  if i could do it over again it wouldnt have been my first release. but hearing this makes me think “ok maybe it was good for someone even if it wasnt good for me” and thats like 80 percent of music lbr

  i say something that i think is pretentious bc only art can give meaning to the banality of whatever im going thru

  and basically what im saying is you are the only motherfucker who can listen to vern

  

  September 11, 2022

• 001 – Motu and Beans

  Blapalap wrote:

  dear motu: it’s bean time.

  

  Mizark,

  You should know that the courier was as unhappy to see me as I was to see him. I doubt you are aware of this, but I have left the minding of my mail to my old enemies, the Sentinels. It is part of the dues I owe Asthaom. They keep my daughter’s vigil, and that means monitoring my letterbox for members of the “old guard”—the extremists and loyalists who sought to fill the power vacuum I left behind. (Though I’m told so few remain, this practice is becoming incomprehensible to your generation.)

  I digress. What I am saying is that you must have made a concerted effort to get this message to me, and they must have decided it was worth my time. Mind you, I have kept the council of untold thousands through the years. You are in the company of traumatized footsoldiers, refugees, and widows—people too wounded in heart and mind to comprehend. To their suffering I have answered with silence. There is no other answer I can give them.

  To you I answer: Yes, it is almost fall. We used to harvest tepary beans this time of year. Why did you send this to me, an old fool living out his twilight years as a shepherd of the ash wastes? I have cast off the heavy yoke of agriculture with the rest of my people.

  Please do not answer that. This message has troubled me greatly and I am afraid of my own indiscretion.

  Never write to me again.

  

  September 9, 2022