Erin
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evs11.bsky.social
Erin
@evs11.bsky.social
56 followers 410 following 9 posts
Cautiously pessimistic. Sports comms (20s), nonprofit exec (30s), existential philosopher (40s). Kansas alum, Northwestern mom. Ad astra’ing per the asperas
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evs11.bsky.social
It’s up to everyone to draw a line, and hold it.
The Doorman (Chris Pavone)
Oh he's not so bad, there are plenty worse. I'm just doing what it takes to survive, to get by, I'm just doing my job, just following orders, trying to get ahead, to earn a living, to provide for my family. It's up to everyone to draw a line, and hold it. If you keep pushing that line further, and further, eventually you're storming the Capitol, you're opening fire on protesters, you're shoving people into gas chambers. Or you're admiring those who did. Or you're selling them body armor. Or you're getting into bed with the person who's selling them body armor. Is evil transitive? That was one of the questions that kept Emily awake at night. A few weeks after that dreadful evening, Whit found the fortitude to publicly cut ties with Justin Pugh and Delta Canopy. It was done the way everything is done these days, on social media. The threats started immediately. The thing about getting into bed with a lunatic is it can be impossible to kick him out, and very difficult to leave. Sometimes the only thing you can do is set the bed on fire.
June 10, 2025 at 3:03 PM
evs11.bsky.social
“To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”

Martyr! (Kaveh Akbar)
Once, he showed me a picture of an ancient clay tablet, Babylonian or Sumerian, something like that, 4,000 years old. I expected it to be something holy, a poem to a fertility goddess, some ancient fable. But it was, Cyrus told me, just a lengthy complaint from a business transaction about receiving the wrong kind of copper. "The copper is substandard. I have been treated rudely. I have not accepted the copper, but I paid money for it." I never forgot that. Cyrus was laughing of course, he thought it was hilarious. "Ancient one-star review!" he said. I'm pretty sure I didn't even say anything. I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker. For weeks, I kept thinking about that tablet. Walking around the shavings, hens running from my boots, the image of that ancient stone hung in my mind. For all our advances in science chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down-weve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper deliv-ery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating. Maybe it's because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn't do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn't teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness. Go to work. Dig through shavings, find the eggs. Eat. Clean the eggs. Put down new shavings. Clear the driplines. Go home. Eat with Cyrus. Put on basketball, put on a movie. Drink. Dreamless sleep. Medicine-deep. Go to work. Find the eggs. What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back? The wrong grade copper? Living happened till it didn't. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.
May 5, 2025 at 2:23 PM
evs11.bsky.social
The Concert by Edna St. Vincent Millay (pub. 1923)
The Concert No, I will go alone. I will come back when it's over. Yes, of course I love you. No, it will not be long. Why may you not come with me?-You are too much my lover. You would put yourself Between me and song. If I go alone, Quiet and suavely clothed, My body will die in its chair, And over my head a flame, A mind that is twice my own, Will mark with icy mirth The wise advance and retreat Of armies without a country, Storming a nameless gate, Hurling terrible javelins down From the shouting walls of a singing town Where no women wait! Armies clean of love and hate, Marching lines of pitiless sound Climbing hills to the sun and hurling Golden spears to the ground! Up the lines a silver runner Bearing a banner whereon is scored The milk and steel of a bloodless wound Healed at length by the sword! You and I have nothing to do with music. We may not make of music a filigree frame, Within which you and I, Tenderly glad we came, Sit smiling, hand in hand. Come now, be content. I will come back to you, I swear I will; And you will know me still. I shall be only a little taller Than when I went.
April 27, 2025 at 2:53 PM
evs11.bsky.social
Wellness (Nathan Hill)
him tomorrow. And maybe that was good enough. Maybe she didn't have to be certain of anything. Maybe the human heart was just that messy, and all romance was deeply precarious, and the future was unresolved, and that was fine. Maybe that's what true love actu ally was: an embrace of the chaotic unfolding. And maybe the only stories that had neat and certain conclusions were lies and fables and conspiracies. Maybe it was like Dr. Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of liv-ing. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive. And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don't know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving. Was Jack her soulmate? Sure, she thought. Why not? Finally he saw her. She was waving at him, and he waved back at her now, just as he had waved at her the night they first met, when he rushed over to her in a darkened dive bar and asked her to come with. She smiled at him, and both their faces were lit brilliantly by the fire, and as they stared at each other, separated by the length of the alley, they were both asking the same thing —though they did not know it- exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. They were asking: Coula you ever love someone as broken, as pathetic, as me?
January 25, 2025 at 4:22 PM
evs11.bsky.social
The Little Friend (Donna Tartt)
With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see." Well: Harriet would not see. Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
January 15, 2025 at 5:22 AM
evs11.bsky.social
Crushing (Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell)
November 24, 2024 at 4:20 AM
evs11.bsky.social
Well damn, Elizabeth Strout
November 23, 2024 at 2:26 AM