I’m All Lost In, #132: Ani-marathon; the #8; Let Me Be. Plus this week in X>Y.
I’m All Lost In…
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#132
This Week in X > (is greater than) Y
Anker’s MacBook Pro Charger > Apple Charger $27.99 as opposed to $117.59. And also: Because it uses a USB-C cable instead of Apple’s finicky MagSafe attachment, I’m betting the cord on the Anker version won’t inevitably (and promptly) devolve into something that looks like your pet dog’s chew toy.
Dividing Your Poetry Collection into Sections > A Continuous Scroll of Poems I’ve been obliviously submitting my 69-poem-manuscript as one non-stop epic without realizing the wisdom—and energizing touch—of divvying it up into sections. Full credit to my friend Dallas, a high school English teacher and poet, who suggested taking this consequential action. “Great way to control themes and pacing,” he texted as we traded messages about submitting our current and respective magnum opuses.
I’d add my own take to Dal’s reasoning: Sections don’t merely help you manage a manuscript. They first help you clarify it.
Walking > Wallowing I was feeling so sorry for myself last Saturday night that I nearly induced cold symptoms. The psychosomatic blues.
Rather than moping all night, I made an 8:30-pm-decision to get off the beanbag and out of the apartment. I joined my pal Glenn and his out-of-town friend C__; they were hanging out on the back patio of the Lookout Bar & Grill [I’m All Lost In, #61, 12/14/24.] We had a lovely time bloviating about the topics of the day, but more noteworthy: Walking the 20 blocks to the bar was enough to jar me out of my imaginary cold right away.
Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. —St. Augustine
Walking also provided a dopamine antidote to the blues later in the week. I was gloomy on Thursday afternoon and wisely decided to walk it off, trekking home from Pioneer Square up Yesler to 12th and into Capitol Hill. Once again, my mood lightened.
And while, I wasn’t blue on Tuesday: An evening walk through the Olympic Sculpture Park to Pocket Beach made for an excellent time in its own right.
Pocket Beach, Elliott Bay, 4/21/26
None of this is a revelation. I’m a lifelong walker; I once even had a blog called The Pedestrian Chronicles.
This week’s obsessions:
1) The Ani-marathon
I saw Momoru Oshii’s 1995 anime cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell back in February [I’m All Lost In, #122, 2/15/26.] It was playing on the big screen at SIFF Uptown. Watching this breathtaking art film made me proud of the human race.
This week, at SIFF’s Downtown location, I got to see Oshii’s earlier anime epic, Angel’s Egg (1985.) I was awestruck again, captivated by the movie’s haunting images. For example, the ghostly schools of fish shinnying as shadows on the sides of ancient buildings and abandoned infrastructure. I actually hadn’t realized Angel Egg was an Oshii film. When the lights came up and I turned to XDX to say I thought the movie rivaled Ghost in the Shell as a cult masterpiece, she broke the news. I gasped. It was as if a fairy had just appeared in front of me.
The lairs of Angel’s Egg, 1985
Oshii’s Angel’s Egg imagines a Garden-of-Eden Bible story filtered through an anxious dystopian manga novel. Set to long stretches without dialogue, a determined young girl guards and cradles a mystical egg (as if it’s an infant) while she rummages through the wastelands of a world ravaged by an end-times flood: Gothic ruins; damp stone streets, alleyways, and marshes; underground caverns and dreary rain. Presumably it’s an underwater city domed by Noah’s capsized arc; that’s the other Bible story Oshii reimagines in the film.
Appearing as a cosmic messenger, a reticent caped boy with an electronic staff and billowing hair alights from a colossal, groaning space-rover and accompanies the girl on her sullen sojourn through the sodden cityscape. Rather than becoming her ally though, and despite the growing affection between the quiet pair, the heroic boy is calmly intent on cracking the egg. Noir mysticism ensues featuring Oshii’s array of hand-drawn cinematic images. Dripping lairs and cryptic stairwells. Steampunk machinery and a glowing, orbital electric-eye in the pink and orange sky. Glass water jugs and floating Greek shrines made of stone faces. Twisted trees and cracked embryos. Fossils of dreaming birds. Howling winds.
Sorry for all the melodramatic lists. But alongside an eerie experimental score by composer Yoshihiro Kanno, Oshii’s slow rush of symbols defines this fable more than the minimal though poetic script.
Angel Egg was screened as part of SIFF Downtown’s Ani-marathon, a two-week run of Japanese anime classics. The festival actually started late last week with a Friday afternoon screening of Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001). I saw that one too.
Millennium Actress is a sweeping love story about a fictitious legendary Japanese movie star named Chiyoko Fujiwara who, as a young teenager, fell for a mysterious revolutionary. Chiyoko is now an elderly woman and as she reminisces over the story of her desperate romantic pursuit, her recollections merge with the scenes she once played on camera as the heroine of mid-20th century, genre-action-films: Samurai movies, WWII epics, and late-’60s sci-fi.
Chiyoko’s narrative also meld’s with the story of a documentary filmmaker named Genya Tachibana. He’s interviewing her for a retrospective. And he’s desperately in love with her. Tachibana’s interview with the elderly actress serves as the conceit for the film’s narrative. And for its parallel-universe jump cuts as Tachibana and his sidekick cameraman are transported into Chiyoko’s dreamstate world.
As their audience, we are transported there too. Anime is good at dreamstates.
2) The #8
I love that Seattle has a Millennial mayor whose politics match the Millennial punk rockers Tacocat; or at least match their riotous 2014 pop-punk anthem demanding better public transit, F.U. #8.
Back in January, I wrote about Mayor Wilson’s plan to come up with a plan to upgrade the infamously slow and erratic #8 [I’m All Lost In, #118, 1/18/26.] It was the former-Transit-Riders-Union-Executive-Director’s first executive order as mayor of Seattle.
This week, she unveiled SDOT’s fix: Adding a dedicated bus-lane on Denny Way eastbound between 5th Ave and Fairview Ave. N, where the #8 inevitably gets stuck behind cars queuing up to get on I-5.
ECB reported the street makeover details on PubliCola:
On Wednesday, Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp that will divert cars off Denny at Boren, closing down the perpetually clogged pathway at Yale … Crews will paint nine new blocks of eastbound bus lanes on Denny between 5th Ave. downtown and Fairview Ave. N just before the freeway, where they’ll join up with an existing bus lane that will be shifted from its current location in the middle of the street over to the south curb. Yale Street, a notorious choke point, will no longer provide access to I-5; instead, southbound I-5 traffic will be funneled along Boren Ave.
The overdue War on Cars has finally begun as Mayor Wilson tries to re-balance Seattle’s streets; The Urbanist reveled in the nerdy transit policy details too.
I’m mostly reveling in how this great news maps my own transit life. Catching the eastbound #8 on Denny Way at the Cedar St./5th Ave. stop in front of Zeek’s Pizza has became a defining detail of my 2026 now that XDX lives three blocks away.
The #8 stop at Denny & Cedar St./5th Ave, 4/25/26
3) Let Me Be
I excised them from my feed once before [I’m All Lost In, #8, 12/7/23.] But the Beatles are back. For some reason. Persistently.
I was a Beatles zealot in elementary school. And I remained equivocally pro-Beatles throughout college. But I don’t need dudes playing Beatles riffs nor more clips from the Let It Be movie (original or restored version) on my feed.
Once again I’m clicking “not interested” and “not relevant” as I try to send my algorithm the message that I don’t believe in yesterday. My all-out effort also includes rejecting the related glut of classic rock reels that come my way. The Beatles. Nirvana. Same.
Perhaps it’s because of all the Sex Pistols footage I still fall for.