And yet, I have never before published this piece itself. In fact, for these three years, I refused to even look at it, after I had it reviewed by the good people at Foster.

Usually that happens when a piece of mine is panned. I figure, “ugh, it’s a mediocre piece and not worth the effort to fix up.” But this piece was even harder, because the reaction was the exact opposite: glowing. This piece was doing something “real and honest”, doing something “truly special”—my reviewers’ words, not my own.

And for the next three years, I felt I could not live up to that, even though I wrote this in a mad dash of a Saturday night bender, finishing my initial edits the following day.

Maybe I still haven’t lived up to it. But at least I’m here, publishing regularly (if not regularly enough), and have been for more than a year and a half now. In fact, the first post of my Homebound Bound series, and maybe the first piece I felt truly proud to publish, was published a little more than a year ago. And now, exactly three years after writing it, I publish this one.

HOMEBOUND BOUND

I'm standing in a field
A field of questions
As far as the eye can see
Is this what it means to be free?
Or is this what it means to belong to the free?

To be free in bad times and good
To belong to being derided for things I don't believe
And lauded for things I did not do

If this is what it means to be free
Then I'm free
And I belong to the free
And the free
They belong to me

- Bill Callahan, Free’s

********

The present, Brooklyn, June 22, 2021

9:24 a.m. I've been up since 7. 

By “up”, I mean a sort of half-awake, half-snooze state. I hold onto the sensations of sleep, but I pretend I’ve already started the day.

This is how I pretend I’ve started the day: I convince myself I’m already thinking deeply about my project—the project you’re reading, right now. This project is to write something about my recent move here, to Brooklyn.

That’s what I decided, in my half-asleep state: “I’ll write about my move, today”.

I said to myself: “I have it in me to write something about my move, and for that something to be beautiful.”

So, readers, I’m trying to write something beautiful right now, about my move. We can start from that.

9:39 a.m. The feeling this project evokes in me: it's like a mine feels, when you imagine a mine. Deep darkness, precarity, rough wooden planks that buttress killing walls that could collapse upon us. But there's gold there. The gold is waiting to shine down there, magnificently, and yet it won't shine until we unearth it and set our lights upon it.

Down there is why I haven't written; down there is why I moved out here; down there is what I hope to find, now.

I'm writing, but I'm really looking for answers, for gold. My readers, my friends, you happen to be along for the ride.

My readers, my friends.

Who are you, anyway?

2:48 p.m. I’m back, over five hours later. Instead of writing about my move, I:

• Ate breakfast: muesli

• Responded to dating app messages

• Jumped on a work emergency

• Tried to write

• Went to the bathroom

• Ate lunch: red bean soup

• Read the news

• Got a snack

• Tried to write

• Went to the bathroom

• Got a snack

• Tried to write

• Vacuumed the apartment

5:33 p.m. I’m back again. Another three hours later. Instead of writing about my move, I:

• Went to the bathroom

• Took a nap

• Went to the bathroom

• Ate dinner: pasta with bolognese

Is this project doomed? Is the fabric of day-to-day life doomed to suffocate any attempt at writing? Eight hours have passed, and what can I say I’ve done? 

I try to write something worth saying, and all I have to show for it is a ridiculous set of bullets about my meal breaks and bathroom trips.

I thought about writing while cooking and eating dinner. I thought about what I'd say—about writing—when I came back here. 

Why do I need to say anything about writing, when I’m supposed to be talking about my move? 

Well, maybe if I found the right thing to say about writing, it’d explain, even redeem, all the hours I just spent failing to get a decent word written.

So what do I have to say about writing.

Well, what struck me, standing over my boiling pasta water, was that writing is infinite.

Yes, infinite. And that’s beautiful, but also a huge problem. Every single point along the way can be decided differently. Most writers and more writings don't, of course, hurtle off into unpredictability, because we have structures and formats and genres that set some conventions for the medium. Guardrails.

But we're not directing a movie here, stuck with whatever financial, technical, and human resources we have in front of us. We’re not sculptors, bound by the constraints of matter. At any moment, we could decide to add in whatever the fuck we feel like, follow whatever direction or whim we choose. To curse, to disgust, to rebel, to deviate completely. Every word in the English language is at the writer's disposal for such a task.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who I admit I barely understand, does have this one line I've always liked. It's his most famous line: "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom". 

(Søren is like a one-hit wonder philosopher, to me. He has his one, most popular ditty I love, and the rest of his opus is grating, to my ears.)

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom". You can understand this line, as I do, with no other context about the rest of his thought. All it says is, as we face more freedom—more choice, more to decide, more paths to take in our lives—we also have more opportunities for misstep, failure, and catastrophe. These can not only doom our efforts, but destroy our very lives. Financial failure, prison, ostracization.

My Saturday evening bed-bound writing is unlikely to financially ruin me or land me in prison. I have no plans to flirt with ostracization, either. But it's a far more conceivable danger. I could easily find something to say right now that, if I had an audience of millions of people, I'd be instantly beyond the pale—maybe outcast completely, maybe relegated to a misfit fandom, maybe left no choice but to dull each excess with another still greater, leaving people numb to my post-cancellation scandal cadence.

This scenario is a figment of my imagination, of course. I have no audience of millions, and while I'm indebted to my few readers for any excesses they do point out, I'm far more afraid they'll (yes, you'll) see my writing as vapid, unoriginal, turgid, unreadable, cringeworthy, incomprehensible—bad, in a word. "The dizziness of freedom": "All the words in the English language at your disposal, and *this* is what you write about?" the Judge in my brain fulminates.

And as a reader, how can you respond emotionally to a bad piece of writing except with pity? "It's a nice effort. Keep at it!" As a reader, this is your one consolation for reading a bad piece of writing. You get the schadenfreude of condescending encouragement. And, if you are the receiving writer, if you have any sense, you listen. Maybe there's a path to improvement. Or—frank advice to the successful doctor who is trying to become a fiction writer: "Listen, doc, I'm not going to lie... stick to your day job."

And there's the true fear, there's the heaviest irony in Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom". Because if our fear is all about the consequences of navigating this space of infinite freedom, those consequences are precisely that we lose this space of freedom.

We find ourselves disdained or ignored, and therefore never worth reading in the first place. We find ourselves canceled, and therefore no longer acceptable to read. We find ourselves pigeonholed and misunderstood. We find ourselves, even with an initial success, eventually “past our prime” or “a one-hit wonder” (sorry Søren).

We find ourselves, in any event, banished from that space which once offered us infinite freedom of expression.

Present in the freedom, there lurks the danger of the unfreedom. The anxiety is our recognition of this danger.

And so we so often avoid walking down the road of freedom in the first place. The fantasy of freedom, however false and frustrated, is sweeter than the disillusionment of freedom lost.

6:39 p.m. I break for matcha and dark chocolate. 

The decisions on how to continue swirl up in my mind. What path do I take? There are too many. I think: maybe those people who are most literally unfree—the oppressed, the refugee—might gain true, ultimate freedom more easily than those who are born into relative freedom. Maybe from a harder beginning, a purer absolute appreciation of freedom becomes possible.

Would that be because there’s literal unfreedom, like physical bondage, but also mental and spiritual, like delusion and compulsion? Or, because the unfree learn the value of freedom more than those born into it, and fight harder for it? Is it like the Christian hagiographies, where those who were the clearest sinners also had the clearest path to sainthood—the libertine Saint Augustine (“God, make me chaste, but not yet”), the prostitute Mary Magdalene?

But, really? Are those who are unfree, then freed, any freer than those who start out free? Am I diminishing the struggle of the unfree by suggesting they have it easy thereafter? Isn’t this an entirely individual experience, anyway? 

From what vantage point could I ever even begin to understand this question, writing while lying down on my $1,500 Nectar mattress in my fourth floor Brooklyn walk-up? Or how am I to even begin to define my terms: “freedom”, “appreciation”, “have it easy”?

Oh, there may be something here, friends, but am I qualified to give an answer, to even suggest the possibility of an answer, at this moment, or any? No. I don’t know. No.

This path, this thought, in its embryonic form, is one of many infinite paths of writing, and one I won’t take.

And then this alternative path pops up, another idea: Rejection is how you understand who your audience truly is. In love, in writing, even in your own life and personality. Your audience is who you resonate with and not who you don't. You're not for everyone. I certainly am not. So if you don't like what I write (the punk rock teenager in me suddenly pipes up:) fuck it.

Oh, but I can't blame you, reader, for some restlessness. I don't really know what I'm doing either.

6:55 p.m. I arrived in Newark past midnight on March 17…

6:56 p.m. Interruption. Distraction. Re-reading parts of this essay. Recapturing lost glories. Ah, it felt like writing flowed so easily once. Seems so long ago. Woe is me. Will I ever write that way again?

That was all of 45 minutes ago. Shut up and focus.

********

San Francisco → Newark, March 17, 2021

I arrived in Newark past midnight on March 17. First class flight, two legs, stopover in Houston, Texas, where I ate something called Catfish Opelousas at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. The server made me an off-menu Negroni, which she prepared in a martini glass chilled with ice slivers.

"Never had a Negroni with crushed ice, nice touch." She just smiled at me, as if the idea of a cocktail without crushed ice was incomprehensible to her. When I asked her earlier about the favorite drink among locals, she pointed me to the Cosmopolitan, then Budweiser.

The catfish was delicious, topped with oysters, shrimp, crab meat, and a rich brown garlic sauce, dirty rice on the side. Inhalably good. I downed it and the drink and left in time-is-tight search of my flight.

I had, in addition to the Negroni, two gin and tonics on leg one and two gin and tonics on leg two. They brought me those little liquor store shooters two at a time, so I didn't have to ask for seconds. Very thoughtful. My first class seat reclined into a completely supine position, and any adjustment I wanted to make—head up, legs down—I could do from a schematic of buttons that mapped to my body on the chair. I watched Glory with Matthew Broderick and Morgan Freeman and then, against my better judgment, Matrix: Reloaded. Next to me, a many-tattooed man with the hip dark urban style of a many-tattooed man drew a tattoo of something resembling a sea animal.

This was the purest, the best form of solitude. I was leaving my city of 10 years, moving back to "The City" of my childhood, the city I grew up 45 minutes west of. I'd gotten a steal of a deal on first class tickets for my flight out of San Francisco. I took pictures of my fully reclined feet and sent it to San Francisco friends, to East Coast friends, to my family. I read and I watched movies and I drank and I ate Catfish Opelousas and all this accompanied by what seemed like a consistently calibrated dimness of light, from airport to airplane to airport to airplane. Sometimes of a purplish hue, sometimes whitish/grayish, but always that uniform dimness, a light of pure, cinematic isolation, a light that imparts that nighttime airport feeling of leaving someplace behind and picking up anew in another world. A world where no one knows your name and you know no one else's, and you eat their food and drink their drink and feel satisfied.

Two days ago, in a covered awning at a restaurant called The HiHi Room in Downtown Brooklyn, I recalled the story of perching my 30 pound carry-on atop of one of my two 70 pound first class checked bags, and delicately wheeling the full ensemble around the airport. I managed, if comically, to move my whole existence from curbside to check-in desk, from baggage claim to rideshare zone, from coast to coast single-handedly. We laughed about it at HiHi, about the humorous figure I struck, but I also silently appreciated in myself a defiant solitude, an ability to make this move, my belongings all in hand, while reveling in this twilit night of travel and its heart-filling feeling.

Solitude gives way to loneliness as freedom does to unfreedom. That plane ride felt like a new world was ahead, opening up to me, full purely of possibility. Three months later, I write from my bed on a homebound Saturday night, unsure of how I'm supposed to escape my apartment and discover this new world I've supposedly entered.

********

Back to the present, 7:53 p.m. Word of the day: Quart. It dawned on me for the first time that this comes from "quarter", as in "quarter of a gallon". This is literally its translation in Spanish: "cuarto de galón". No great flight of intuition taught me that; my ziplocs just happened to include Spanish translations on the box.

Home economics tip of the day: You have to turn off the carpet brushroll on a vacuum machine before cleaning a yoga mat. Otherwise your yoga mat will look like a machine chewed on it. A few days ago, I learned a similar lesson about bath mats.

7:57 p.m. Oh and here's the fatigue. Wave 2. Wave 1 was doubting I could even get started in the first place, and exists nearly always at the start of a writing project for me. Wave 2 is the sense of, "Well, I've done enough now, haven't I?" And with it, the sensations of slumberousness, exhaustion—exhaustion from laziness and resignation, not from having exerted myself to my maximum capacity. 

I'm a ways away from that max exertion. In my desperate urge to feel like I'm not constantly catching up to my writing goals, I'd set a commitment to myself to write for 12 hours today. I've already cut that to 10. I'm four hours in so far, four hours of legit, no-nonsense writing. 2 a.m. is my stopping target. Six hours more.

And you were already thinking this piece was getting too long, weren't you?

My readers, my friends, I'll be honest, but you don't feel like friends. I don't know what you are, who you are. I don't know if you are my audience or not, yet, and what an audience even looks like if I were ever to find one. You're hidden, nameless, shapeless entities, just like those women I have yet to meet on the dating apps and the people I have yet to meet in new hobbies, activities, and social endeavors in this new city.

“But that is precisely life,” my better nature chimes in. An "X" marks the spot where we don't know about other people, and must roll the dice and see what we are given. 

I hope you don't regret rolling the dice in reading this. Don't worry about me or my feelings.

(But do, please, worry about me. my inner child yells out)

********

Brooklyn, May 17 - June 22, 2021 

I moved into this apartment approximately one month ago. May 15, the official move-in day. May 17, the morning they actually finished the repairs on the place. But I didn't move in right away, and instead spent a few days at my parents' place in New Jersey. The paint fumes in the new apartment were giving me a headache, and my parents were, anyway, leaving to visit my sister in California. Which meant I'd have their big suburban house to myself, a flavor of welcome high-class solitude not unlike that of my airport entr'acte.

May 27 is when I really moved in, meaning I've been in this apartment for 23 days. A week shy of a month, I remind myself, and this is a comfort. This means I've made decent use of my time here, that my life over this past month—not even a month—hasn't been a waste. I did a lot, truly. May 27, I had nothing more than a mattress on a large blue tarp. Now I have an apartment, complete with all the things one would have in a bedroom, all the things one would have in a living room, all the things one would have in a kitchen, all the things one would have in a home office. I have gas after three weeks of waiting on National Grid. I have an AC propped on two hand-hunked blocks of styrofoam and drilled directly into my window frame by my lazy super. I have a MacGyvered kitchen ventilation system using a window fan and air purifiers.

The final major installation was an attractive wooden West Elm medicine cabinet, which I wrapped up on my birthday. This required me to dig into the mess of a wall above my bathroom sink, full of geologic layers of hard shards and wall anchors and drywall and what may have been brick, hard and rough and snaggy and pale pinkish brown in its powderized form. I was terrified I might catch and cut a pipe with my drill, flooding my bathroom with water, and I texted the super after already drilling four failed holes in the wall and breaking two anchors on something metal.

"I'm planning on replacing the medicine cabinet btw, is there anything behind that wall I'd need to avoid?"

"Not sure"

"Ok, I'll just try to follow the holes of the previous cabinet maybe"

"Ok cool keep me posted"

Enough complicity to proceed. I couldn't leave this project hanging over me. Not on my birthday, not with the failure holes in the wall and the old medicine cabinet down in the trash bins. I drilled three more holes, and the last set finally took.

"Got it done no problem 👌🏼"

"Ok cool good job"

My super is very encouraging when it means he doesn't have to do it himself.

That day, my birthday, I found the first roach. He was an inch and a half long, stuck on his back and paddling his arms under my wheeled laptop standing cart. I was already vacuum-in-hand, cleaning the styrofoam snow that had accumulated in my room full of discarded packaging, so I just sucked the sucker up quickly, a bit nauseous but glad to have him so easily caught.

The follow-up roach, #2, I discovered later that night. Same size, but much quicker on its feet, and it fled under a radiator as I chased it with the vacuum end. Shit. Shit. I hated having to concede defeat to its dextrous intelligence. And now every dark nook of my apartment suddenly appeared to me a possible abode of fat roaches, on this night of my birthday.

"Happy birthday, JG. Welcome to your new apartment." - New York City.

********

Back to the present, 9:42 p.m. As soon as I think of them, I search for them. As I got up to go to the bathroom and walk around just now, I turned on every light, wheeled my laptop standing cart around, went into the kitchen, peeked around the refrigerator and around the stove. No sign of them. I'd only seen one more since my birthday. But that's still an average of one roach per week, with a landlord who still hasn't returned my calls requesting extermination.

I told my friend about the roaches over sushi, and she made me feel less personally gross by confessing her own occasional roach woes at her place. Then she made me feel even more alarmed by distinguishing between normal, small roaches and what she called, "bird roaches". Roughly as large as birds and, well, they can fly. I quickly Googled this when I found roach #3 and confirmed that I have what are called Oriental cockroaches, AKA waterbugs, which don't grow as long and don't fly, not American cockroaches, AKA enormous flying bird-sized fuckers.

The thing about roaches, though: they flee. You can't be too scared of something whose whole MO is to get the hell away from you.

9:53 p.m. If only I could flee like they can. If only I had a den of fellow fat roaches to call my home.

9:55 p.m. Wave 3. This is a deeper fatigue, a more gut-deep one. This one doubts the whole project of writing, regardless of whether or not the writing is any good. For even if the writing is any good, what is the point, even, of writing?

All the books I've read, I think of. How much of the time I spend reading is just a pointless quest to finish, to cross a book off of my list? By writing, am I just adding to some other poor sap's obligations, forcing my thoughts on them when they'd be better off doing something creative and writing instead (but then, better off writing for who—don't they just perpetuate the same cycle themselves?)

Of all those books written and read, do any of them, have any of them made any of us truly happier?

Oh and the thicket grows dense here. "Why happiness?" yes, of course that question, and, also, what a bar to set either way! How could we even begin to answer the question of whether a book, whether writing can make us happier? And maybe they have!

But this is Wave 3, these are the doubts it presents me with, and if they look like stupid questions and stupid doubts, I'm too stupid at this point to do anything about it.

10:10 p.m. Above all, the day-in-day-out bothers me. What do I do after I write one piece? Write another? My friend Elliott once complained to me of having to do all the daily things we have to do each day—eat, brush our teeth, shit, clean, sleep. At times, I've said to myself, well, we can and should find ways of embracing and appreciating even these mundane moments. Now I feel the opposite—what if even those activities that seem unique, unquotidian, creative, and singular, like writing, are themselves part of the cruel monotony of daily life?

A new unfreedom: I write, and may even find freedom and new direction in the writing. But the writing is today's piece, then tomorrow's, then the next day’s. Freedom is just a series on the TV, one episode after another. The content is different, but the form is the same.

Unless there's a reason. Unless there's something I can say I'm doing this for. What. What?

10:29 p.m. My momentum is flagging. I'm starving, and though I'm trying to slim up and lose a gut I gained in these past few weeks, I ordered myself three late night tacos for pickup.

And hey, what of it? I've already written for a solid six and a half hours, maybe the longest uninterrupted stretch of pure writing in years. I don't know what this whole piece amounts to, and what's next. I'll have to edit the damn thing, and that'll be its own heroic effort (editor’s note: it is). But there's a breathing vista here. I'm up in these craggy heights, it's nighttime, I see stars and town lights and distance from this rock ledge I'm on. The climb isn't over—it's really just begun—but I'm relaxed, I feel the ground under my feet. I even laugh, on this imaginary ledge.

10:58 p.m. One reason why I write: when I return to the world after a serious session of writing, the world is an order of magnitude more vivid. Everything glows with a more primitive aura. Everything is colored as if with fire. I ache with an awareness that I'm a divided individual, with a desire to unite with the vast and gorgeous world that surrounds me. Trite as the attempts to articulate this might be, the feeling is anything but trite.

Bill Callahan's song “Writing” comes up on the shuffle, unprompted: "It sure feels good to be writing again."

11:25 p.m. Full of taco and beer.

Why did I come out here, to New York?

Certainly not to be alone in a fully furnished apartment at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, eating tacos after forcing myself to write.

But much less so to be surrounded by unopened moving boxes with zero writing done, while still alone on a Saturday night.

Right? Alright, alright.

I'm out here, in this new city. That means something. It could mean something different, worse, or just different, but this is the story I'm telling. This is my freedom, to tell this story this way. 

My move, my new home, the home I was bound for, the home I am bound in. 

The home that I left. That year we were all homebound.

********

San Francisco, September 15, 2020

I wanted there to be something special, to at least remember the date.

We were six months. Is that an anniversary?

My curse, my story: I couldn’t hold down a relationship for more than six months.

(Well, come on. I decided to break it off both of the last two times. But: I respond: six years without a relationship longer than six months. That’s what feels like a rope around my neck.)

A relationshipless ogre. Like a relationshipless ogre. Look at you.

(Stop pitying yourself.)

I spent all night cooking. Twice fried Korean chicken wings, three kinds of banchan, stir fried potato and squash, caramelized walnuts and eggs, sesame tahini dessert balls. 

A magnificent, impressive meal. 

But I underestimated the work completely. 

I’d barely started cooking, and she was already at the apartment.

She was stressed with work and went to do her own thing.

She didn’t offer to help. I didn't want her to. Or maybe I did.

But I was in the zone. Whatever.

I cooked. My roommate silently browsed the web in his corner of the kitchen.

9 p.m.

I finally finished. Brought in the plates to eat.

Compliments. Yum. It is all very good.

We watch something. We go to sleep. 

Wake up, cuddle. 

But I get irritable as the morning goes by. We fight.

Stupid stuff. I cooked a meal, the least you could do is wash the dishes.

…

But I don’t care that much. I just want to be alone. It’s ok baby, I’m not upset, but can you go now.

Well we fight anyway, by text.

I expect too much. I act petty. I didn’t mention anything.

I told you. I told you twice.

I need a break baby.

When she’s not here, when she’s away:

• She’s fighting for a better future

• She’s fighting for a better future with her ex-boyfriend

• She’s fighting for a better future with her ex-boyfriend spending long days talking driving down to Half Moon Bay with him 

• She’s fighting for a better future with her ex-boyfriend spending long days talking driving down to Half Moon Bay with him learning about the fabric of reality he’s really a genius he’s really the best kindest wisest human being you’ll ever meet you’ll meet him eventually you’ll work with him eventually

• She’s fighting for a better future in a code only they know how to read

• She’s fighting for a better future and they fucked once but it was a one-time thing it’s complicated baby you understand

The next time I come over I discover his socks and underwear and pajamas in my drawer.

I help her to paint.

She’s already mostly done painting.

We have sushi.

She apologizes for the underwear and pajamas in the drawer.

She smokes. I turn my back to her. I’m in no mood.

Silently, short of sleep in the darkness.

I roll over.

I give her the best head I’ve ever given, she says she’s ever gotten.

Sorry baby.

One day later.

Two days later.

Three days later.

Something flies falling back into the sky from where it came.

--

It’s time to leave this place.

********

New Jersey, April 10, 2021

Suburban New Jersey. At my parents' place for almost a month.

I’ll soon be in New York. A world of freedom, choice, possibility lies before me.

But here, for now, I just take the world in. An envelope of natural noise surrounds you everywhere here. Tree frogs, crickets, birds, a thick organic drone.

I go on a long walk. It's lunchtime at work, and it's a slow day. So I walk outside, past the neighboring houses, down streets I hadn't walked directly on since my high school years.

These streets feel vast, teeming, wild in spite of the manicured gardens of these suburban tracts. It’s the trees. The sheer, looming bigness of the trees, more imposing than anything man-made could be. They feel eternally here. They make the houses feel temporary, almost unreal, dreamlike. Gone in a flash.

I frequently experience a strange flavor of memory. It consists of nothing more than an insistence of place. I remember one single slice of a location, as if looking at a photograph, almost always from my childhood. The memory is empty of people. It's timeless, static but also eternal. Above all, it's charged with some emotion or impression or nostalgia that I can't put into words, though my associations with it might be rich.

A hallway in my old childhood home, and a light switch that's long since been replaced. 

The kitchen table before the house was remodeled, a white particle board table mottled with little specks of color.

A nighttime stretch of undeveloped land between suburban yards and local highways, passed through once as a teenager looking for a high.

On my walk this day in my childhood neighborhood, I approached a certain bend in the road. This bend is snapshotted in my mind with this strange kind of memory, charged with inexplicable significance. Over the past several years, my mind has returned to this bend in the road again and again, unconsciously. For instance, I’ll think of it when I write something creative, like this thick, dense-aired poem I wrote last year, haunted by this bend. But I’ll also think of it alongside random mind garbage. When I think of the Beatles, especially their fluffy early songs, I think of this bend. "Baby you can drive my car". Instant callback. Why?

I approach this bend and the air grows thicker. The sky and the atmosphere and the immense trees bear down on me. The blue shade of the sky grows deeper, heavier-seeming. This feels like the depth you get on psychedelics, like you're "really seeing something". I pass through the bend and keep walking, the feeling building, sustaining, building, choking, invigorating, sustaining. I walk, I try to look normal to a man jog-walking a stroller with two kids, his eyes downcast, but then they don't look normal to me. Nothing is. Cora Lane passes Locust Drive and approaches Dogwood Drive.

An intersection, then. Then. The world collapses into this single window of my viewpoint. My feet keep falling but I stand stunned, amazed. What is this? I drive past this intersection almost every day I stay here. Trees, an intersection, the sky, the road, all the same. But here, on foot, I see them as if they are a universe away. They're their own vision, no longer part of a passing landscape.

Crushes. Crushing me. Primitiveness millions of years of age old. A thick breathing living undying thing. My eyes tight, unbelieving.

What is this?

Nothing more than an intersection, surrounded by houses, new houses, new families.

But no. These stone-and-matter houses are also eternally old, empty and forever occupied. Part of the green, green eons old, predating it all.

It, ever, ancient. This, unbridgeable, a breath-born world, unimaginably foreign, a universal birthplace, beginning.

I can’t. I can't live in an impression like this. It would end me.

It releases.

********

♥
JG

CAST: 

The narrator, me
My brain
An old man
Several women
A bug
A spider

ACT 1: AIRPLANE

SCENE:
Airplane, heading to Mexico, a 4 hour and 50 minute flight.

I idle my eyes around the plane’s long cabin.

I’m bored, and a bit lonely.

I notice things in my boredom. The people on the plane. The attendants of the plane. The women on the plane.

I notice the boredom of planes. Everyone plugged into their devices, bored and seeking remedy for their boredom.

I notice people sleeping, the weight of their boredom grown so heavy they needed to exit this world entirely.

I notice me, good ol’ me.

Anxiously mr. anxiety sits, stewing in his anxiousness. The anxiety shows itself at the tops of my fingers, the thick crusted blood on my cuticles.

My right thumb has it the worst. Two scars. One scar deeper, more set in, faded and healed; the other same-day-fresh, and large, clearly visible from a conversational distance, like the way certain man-made features can be viewed from space.

I wonder if others would size me up by these broken cuticles: this boy's really had a time of it, hasn't he, under that placid-seeming surface of his?

But I don’t notice me for too long. I notice the old man, soon enough.

The old man walks past me in the aisle of this airplane. He’s old, and walks slowly and haltingly, grabbing the tops of chairs and armrests along the way to steady himself. 

I think to myself: "This is how it will one day be. I will be old, I will walk slowly and haltingly, I will need to grab the tops of chairs and armrests along the way to steady myself. And then, sooner or later, I will die."

I think other thoughts, too, like whether I will be content with my life at his age, whether I’ll have regrets, whether my present miseries will still be with me, remixed or in their current form.

But mostly I think: “WHOA WE LIVE OUR LIVES AND THEN WE DIE.”

That’s probably pretty obvious, isn’t it? Yeah.

But no, it’s strange, strange. 

Why? 

Well, do you know the 17th century philosopher Leibniz? Has this idea of the “best of all possible worlds”? 

I’ll explain: we have our world, and it’s alright, it’s an alright world, but we wonder why we have things like evil and sin and death in it (no fun), and Leibniz wanted to explain all that, because God is supposed to be both perfectly good and perfectly all-powerful, so why can’t he create a world without evil and sin and death in it?

So Leibniz created what he coined a “theodicy”, or a defense and vindication of God, a solution to the problem of evil. And the solution, in short, is that even in spite of the presence of evil, we might still live in a world of maximum good (the “best of all possible worlds”). 

Indeed, the very contrast which evil provides makes the good all the clearer and purer. You can’t have good without evil, in other words, or at least you can’t appreciate the goodness of the good without the evilness of evil.

(Hear that? An early crack in the intellectual dominance of the Christian God, an early move to a world which answers to man, instead of to God. God remains omnipotent, but his omnipotence is now constrained by the laws of human experience—he can’t make a world where good can be purely experienced in its goodness without evil, because forces-lacking-counterforces run contrary to human experience.)

But this is the theodicy of evil, and what I really care about right now is this other Leibnizian idea: that there are many, infinite possible worlds that God could have created. This is what I ponder in this old man, what I ponder in my coming old age. Many, infinite possible worlds!

The sky's the limit for these worlds. Worlds and worlds and worlds could be out there, of any possible sort. There could be a world where there is an animal called an “unterbellistraka”, and there could be other worlds where the supreme leader of all beings is such an animal, and the supreme leader animal’s given name is also “Unterbellistraka”, because maybe all the unterbellistrakas are named “Unterbellistraka” in this world, or maybe in another even weirder world the unterbellistraka-king’s name is something like “Fred”, and how weird would that be? An unterbellistraka-king named Fred?

Therefore, here’s what troubles me: why this, why our particular world, our set of experiences, our menagerie of particulars? Why is our world the way it is?

Why do we become old men and women who need to steady themselves as they walk?

Why do we fly in big metal hunks that soar through the sky?

Why Europe? Why curtains? Why Viktor Orban? Why crocodiles? Why potatoes? Why trees? Why the sun? Why the color blue? Why not a completely different set of colors, a completely different visual system than the one we work with? Or maybe just every famous writer and thinker that ever existed is actually someone else—different names, different identities—but everything else is more or less the same? Why not completely different countries, completely different peoples, completely different words, completely different foods?

This oddness strikes me often, unsettles me. I leave this world for a moment, and take a step back, a mere step back, but it’s far enough back to find myself in a dimensional remove, like I have a distance, even if the tiniest distance, from the whole world. And from there I can look at it all and say, “wtf, goats?” or whatever I happen to be questioning at the moment. And this isn’t some intellectual questioning, some sophomoric acid trip pontification: “goats, maaaan, amirite?”. No, it’s as if reality itself speaks from itself and says, “look at me, aren’t I weird, I have these things called goats, and plenty else besides, and you might rightly ask yourself, ‘why?’” and I say “yes reality, ‘why?’ indeed, you are strange indeed.”

And then I ask myself, is this odd little reality of ours accompanied by many other sister and brother realities, or is it an orphan, a reality all on its own? Is it a lonely reality, forced to keep its weird idiosyncrasies all to itself, with no other realities to recognize it, provide it solace, make it feel like, no, you aren’t so awfully weird after all, just look at this other reality where all sentient beings are ruled by an unterbellistraka named Fred, who looks like (would you believe it) a goat.

An orphan reality! Is that what our reality is? And yet an orphan reality that experiences the possibilities of other realities! These other realities are indubitably there as possibilities, even if not as actualities. After all, my speculations, and Leibniz’s, prove just how easy it is to conceive of these possible realities beyond our present reality. So there is no denying their possibility.

And for that reason, our reality cannot be truly alone, but it is instead lonely. To be truly alone, the possibility of others can’t even be present: one needs to be entirely engaged with one’s self, one’s work, one’s focus, one’s thought, with no thought of another. Being lonely, on the other hand, means being hyperpresent to the possibility (but not actuality) of others: one feels the presence of the possibility of others, feels the reality of the actual disconnection from others, and therefore wishes to be connected all the more. (Social media, anyone?).

Being truly alone and being lonely are therefore mutually exclusive, though perhaps true aloneness is not a state that can be easily sustained for very long (much as hunger, soon enough, overwhelms a fast). Perhaps it is even asymptotic, a state that’s possible to get ever closer to, but never fully inhabited.

So if our reality is indeed lonely, does it play impish tricks on us, finding in us humans the only source of recognition and playful roughhousing and entertainment available to it? Does it love us or try to love us, as the only source of affection and companionship it’s likely to find? Does it try to forget the possibility of other realities, to save itself the heartbreak of its loneliness, its desires for the companionship of those possible but unreal alternative worlds?

What does reality think of itself, of the strange ensemble of things it is made up of? What does it feel? Does it ever feel ashamed of itself?

I feel lonely right now, on this plane, I’ll admit that. This is what gets me thinking about the possible loneliness of our reality, because it feels good to ascribe to an anthropomorphized metaphysical concept (a “lonely reality”) the emotional realities and struggles you yourself are experiencing (try it sometime!)

The plane jerks suddenly, quickly. The facial tension of everyone on the plane increases by 15% - 45%, regardless of whether they look up and listen to the captain’s announcement, “Uhh, hi folks, we’re experiencing a little turbulence, we’ve turned on the fasten seatbelt sign…”

Then they relax and go back to their boredom.

ACT 2: BEACH

SCENE:
A week later, a beach in Mexico. A high crest of sand, and waves and ocean beyond. The narrator sits and looks at the waves.

The waves are gorgeous here. The water is an unreal horizon of blue.

All I feel is the calm of a trip well underway, when the cadences of travel have replaced the preoccupations of everyday life.

A thought from the plane breathes for a moment.

What does reality feel? Does it feel boredom? Loneliness?

I see a small bug on me, then feel it.

The small bug starts on the bottom curve of my belly, and then crawls up it.

I feel it climb through the small thicket of hairs, edging into the sensitive skin underneath the belly button.

I get a small hard-on.

Moments later, it disappears into my belly button and, by now over the idea of jerking off on the sparsely populated but public beach to the sensation of an insect crawling through my stomach hairs, I bend over and look inside my belly button. She’s hunched in there, clearly taking rest or refuge.

I pull her out with my right index finger, let her carouse around on my palm, shining and vibrating her little feeler antennas around.

She looks like she's broadcasting something to some far off interlocutor, but also like she's just digging her time on my hand, getting a little dance on.

What does she feel? Happiness?

I wonder if she'll get a fast pass to a higher order of rebirth thanks to our little time together. She’s connecting with a higher consciousness right now, isn’t she (is she?), and maybe she’ll therefore come back as one. If not a human being, maybe a dog or a cow.

Or maybe not. When I place her down on the sand, she flubs around petulantly, buzzing and trying to get her balance, to get off her back.

Then she throws herself up and headlong into my face, aggressively, as if to get back at me for putting her down, for rejecting her, and then she flies away.

Annoying little fucker.

What am I feeling, right now?

I didn't know she flew.

ACT 3: AIRPLANE

SCENE:
Back to the present, the same airplane as before.

Reality, reality. I think of how it has elephants and squids and parakeets and pliers and snake plants and… all its myriad contingencies, all its infinite it-could-have-been-another-way’s.

But I eventually stop thinking about all this, because if I am lonely on this airplane it’s not because I am not friends with my anthropomorphized reality but because I am surrounded by actual others, actual people, whose possible companionship is here, right in front of me. Their mere human presence represents the possibility of human connection, but at the same they are, of course, in actuality, impossibly far away, impossibly distant from me. They lead lives I will never enter, never even brush up against.

I could be friends or lovers of any of these people, and I simultaneously absolutely will not be.

And in full honesty, I don’t really have an interest in most of these people anyway. There are the attractive women, and there is everyone else. The former are all I care about, bluntly, as a guy inhabiting his atomic solitude on this plane: I want one of these women—or rather, I don’t actually want any of them, because that would require work and pursuit and disappointment and the almost-certain likelihood that not one of them are actually all that compatible with me, or me with them. Rather, I just want to fantasize, fantasize about a different life, fantasize about encountering a life of another, about my life intersecting with the life of one or more than one of these women. Fantasy is both a tonic and a fuel for loneliness—what simultaneously eases it and keeps its flames stoked. The part of me that fantasizes knows this: it wants me to remain lonely in this particular, intoxicating way.

But loneliness is not loneliness is not loneliness. My sexual longing is the specific flavor, the only flavor, of my loneliness, at least right now. Do you think there’s only one kind of loneliness, one-size-fits-all? That we’re either lonely for everyone or not lonely at all? No, no, pay closer attention to the emotion. I’m not lonely for conversation, or fraternity, or guidance, or the opportunity to guide. If some eager young man stimulated by the possibilities of artistic expression was reading what I am writing over my shoulder right now, desiring to talk to me about my craft; if some curious, benevolent older person was ready to impart some encouraging words upon my no-longer-quite-so-youthful pretensions to artistic talent, I would not only not care, but I'd also be loath to entertain their conversation unless it opened the door to a connection that wasn’t purely intellectual, social, fraternal or paternal. I don't need more intellectuality! I've got more than enough right here, duh, too much. I don't need any more brotherhood or elder influences or friendship or even the serendipity of random human contact! I have these things in my ordinary life, and I’d rather just write and read my book while here on this plane.

But if such a conversation, any conversation, granted me a heightened sexual status, cachet in the eyes of the women who have caught my eye…

There's the tall lanky blonde of the sort you might see in an Andy Warhol movie in the 1960s, but no flower child dress and stoner slouch, instead white khakis and a black sweater and white Adidas Samba shoes with black stripes and yet still that long straight sheer waterfall of hair framing her equine face, those cheekbones set in high relief. She heads to the lavatory at one point and returns to a longish session of hand sanitizer wipes, and by the way she holds herself stock straight in her seat, a pure 90 degree angle of a body, it's clear her resemblance to the 60s flower child does not extend to her relaxation levels.

There are those women in the further distance, down the aisle of the plane’s cabin, those women that have gotten up to use the bathroom or grab something from the overhead bins, manifesting themselves out of the undifferentiated mass of the plane’s passengers into single individuals, shining back and forth past my field of view before settling themselves back where they came from, disappearing back into the obscurity of the mass. There’s the soft-faced young woman in black Lululemon pants, for example, a callowness in her expression that probably puts her in her mid-twenties, dirty-blonde hair still a bit damp from leaving the shower this morning, her gray workout shirt amply filled.

Or: The brunette with the sort of lean, taut physiognomy and build that seems a sort of eternal late-30s—perhaps reached before that age, but then anchored in that meridian of womanhood well after she passes it, her beauty amplified by the grace of experience. This maturity gives off a simultaneous impression: she looks like she could be with someone older and more staid, like the bespectacled salt-and-pepper haired man in his early-to-mid 40s sitting on her left, his seriousness set into a hard visage, but she also looks like she could be with his opposite. And indeed her boyfriend turns out to be the man on the right, younger, richly-maned, leonine, a specimen seemingly more out of an idyllic Rousseauian state of nature than our concrete modernity, who manages to inspire considerable envy in me, both on account of his own good looks and those of his girlfriend, whose attractiveness has increased in my eyes with the knowledge that her beau is the handsomer of her two possible companions, her seatmates.

And then: behind me, there’s the black-haired woman, late 20s or early 30s, who I previously stood behind at the airline counters over an hour ago, and then stood behind again at the ticket line some 30 or 40 minutes hence. She moves and fidgets and possesses a restless, dissatisfied energy not out of keeping with my prior impressions of her: On getting her ticket scanned, her world enveloped in a pair of huge headphones, a dark trench, and a chic clothing store tote almost as large as her, she didn’t hear when the ticket lady yelled after her to retrieve her ripped ticket stub. I hurried to return it to her, extending the ticket within her peripheral view behind her so she could notice it in the solipsism of her headphone’d world.

Now, on this third coincidental encounter, I am no longer behind her, she is behind me. And so she becomes the primary focus of my fantasy and imagination. I can’t see her without turning my head, so I instead imagine that she is reading over my shoulder behind me at an angle, 4:30 or 5:00 relative to my 12:00 front-facing gaze. She is nothing more than a blur of black hair and a vague shape of a slouching body in my peripheral vision.

Her presence provides both a frisson and a goad to what I write. As unlikely as it might actually be that she’s spying on my writing, I can imagine that I have an audience, and moreover an attractive audience who my fantasies can run with—who is she? what is she about? how tragic will our story be, as each of us, fantasizing about the other to whatever extent we do over the duration of this flight, get up after the plane's landing, politely and shyly avoiding talk or eye contact or undue hastiness of motion (the rigidity itself perhaps giving us away, in spite of ourselves), and we each go our own separate ways, never talking to each other again, not giving each other so much as a thought once we leave the airport and get on to whatever next chapter of life lies ahead?

And it doesn't matter that I likely share this fantasy alone, or that she is very likely a person very different than any I would ever find myself attracted to. It certainly doesn't matter that on boarding she tucked her ticket away in the travel bag of a male companion, who I immediately regarded with contempt for his tasteless brown leather jacket with the kind of design on the back that's cousin to the cliché appropriated motifs basic dudes will get tattooed on their bodies—East Asian characters, e.g., symbols from cultures they have no deep, non-appropriative connection to—who have never seriously experienced shame about their clueless and silly decisions in their lives, and are therefore blissfully ignorant of shame’s regulating effects.

(Contempt is all that keeps me from envying that blissful ignorance.)

It’s precisely the elision of actual personality and inconvenient details that lets me fill her or any of these other women with whatever my mind decides to fill them with, that makes it possible for me to find each of them fascinating without knowing very much about them at all, certainly without needing to know their career trajectory or the last concert they went to, or their favorite TV show, or their opinions on the latest pop culture scandal.

There is, here on this plane, here in my mind, a pure romantic surface that is not for that reason necessarily superficial, but a surface that operates on laws very different than those that comprise actual love, actual intimacy, actual romance. This romantic surface is, instead, the broad, sweeping realm of romantic possibility, instead of the constraints and particularities of romantic actuality. This surface is, in a word, desire.

But for all of its false fire of pure fantasy, its untethered and often illimitable energies, desire is still a force without which we don’t have romance, we only have a workaday, colorless, Hadean present. Desire is all the other worlds, when we’re forever stuck in our own actual world.

The latter couldn't properly exist, properly thrive without the former. Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds couldn’t exist without all the other possible worlds, just as good could not exist without evil.

Who we are could not be without who we could have been, who we still could be, who we’ll never be.

Who we love could not be without who we lost, who we left, who we never had.

INTERMISSION/SMOKE BREAK

SCENE:
A director’s commentary-style interview with the author.

Good evening.

I originally wrote this piece a full year ago. It has taken me that long to publish it.

Phases like “objectification” and “somewhat problematic” scared me in initial feedback. In response, I removed any references that seemed to risk crossing the line. I think I did a decent job of it. Rounding those edges made for a better piece—they were too crude, on-the-nose, and therefore unfaithful to my actual experience, anyway.

But it still scared me to publish the piece. And this wasn’t because of my admission to getting a hard-on from a bug or any of the other bodily embarrassments this piece might make mention of. I was simply scared of describing a sexual attraction. Describing women who are (there’s that word) the objects of that attraction.

No one suggested removing that whole dimension of this piece. But I wondered if I should, or had to, remove it in order to publish it. Would those words, “objectification”, “problematic”, inevitably accompany any written attempt to describe my subjective experience of desire?

Am I overthinking this? A wildly popular romance bookstore just opened up in my neighborhood recently. There’s clearly no shortage of desire for the written depiction of desire. But I am a man who is writing not to arouse the desires of others, whether women or men, but rather writing just to point out, “this is what desire looks like, in this ‘here’ and this ‘now’.” I am trying to represent desire, not stimulate it—which somehow, in some way, seems more reprehensible.

And because it’s my desire, because it’s first-person, because the words that could be leveled against any such a depiction are the paramount adjectival horrors for a liberal millennial male—”objectifying”, “problematic”, “cringe”, “rapey”, “creepy”—it seems so vulnerable to attack.

And so I stand out in the middle of an open field, naked and unarmed. At my feet I’ve laid all the weapons that could be used to lambast me. Rip me to shreds if you so choose, Furies. I have already done all the hard work for you.

(Titters from the audience:)
“Takes himself so seriously—Furies!”
“As if anyone is even still reading this in the first place.”
“Metacommentary on cringe… how cringe”

ACT 4: TOILET

SCENE:
The future, again, in Mexico. A shared bathroom of a travelers’ hostel, 5:30 a.m.

My tailbone pain has flared up—that pain that causes me to feel constipated, forces me to sit on the toilet for 10, 20, 30 minutes at a clip. It hasn’t helped that I’ve got a stomach bug from the local water. And so I sit in the shared bathroom of my travelers’ hostel, 5:30 in the morning, staring at its splintery slatted wooden door with my body hunched over and my elbows on my knees.

As I strain and mostly fail to shit, I see something in my field of vision which looks like an ocular floater, moving as I move. But it's too thick and chromatically vivid for that. I realize that it’s a small spider, dangling from my hair, a long bang on the right side of my face.

As I move my head, slightly or suddenly, he plunges along his silk thread—an inch, two inches, three inches or more. And then he climbs. Climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs. And he sometimes reaches the strand of my hair, seems to grab on, seems to get to the top and to safety. But then he falls again.

He does this for much of this time I spend writing on my phone, writing what you are currently reading, waiting for my light storm of bowel-bound pain to pass.

But he keeps making it to my hair. Why does he fall, then? It seems like it should be simple to climb up once he gets to the top. I’m not suddenly moving my head when he falls.

It eventually dawns on me: maybe he is playing. Bungeeing off, pulling himself back up, bungeeing off, pulling himself back up, bungeeing off, pulling himself back up. Again and again and again.

He's playing. He's practicing. What else does he have to do? He’s a spider at 5:30 a.m. in a travelers’ hostel bathroom.

And suddenly he's gone, after he makes his deepest plunge yet. He seemed to be climbing back up, well on his way. But then, while I had my gaze elsewhere, while my peripheral vision was no longer on him, he vanished. No trace of him.

No one in this world will ever know what happened to him, will they? Did his short mortal coil get shut off on his plunge or at some inevitable point shortly hereafter? A spider's life lasting, what, no more than a few weeks? Days? He is almost certainly dead, almost certainly long dead, by now, by this point of my writing this, of you reading this.

What is the disappeared spider, as a symbol? Confusion? Once here, now not? A spider life which could follow any infinite number of spider paths, and yet still from our human perspective would seem to have no meaning at all? (and yet that funny flicker: what if he is just playing, what if that is indeed all there is to do at 5:30 a.m., and what else is play except the meaning-making that happens in the gaps between the absolute, brute exigencies of life, those do-this-or-die demands? what can be more meaningful than that play, then?)

Or maybe he is the state before confusion. When everything is natural, everything is as it is. And then, as language starts expanding to fill every corner of our world, what's left unspoken grows in cramped intensity, a concentration of shadowed darkness that radiates through everything else, everything we thought explained.

We go to the moon and speak of going to Mars with our language, and yet the language of a young man (perhaps not so young anymore) trying to explain his internal experience of simple sexual desire on an airplane might sound like the most foreign and inscrutable language of all, or perhaps the most commonplace and self-indulgent: in our fierce egoism, we take anyone else’s ego to be mere cliché.

How do we break down the barriers we have between ourselves and our underselves, between ourselves and the insideselves of others? We can't go back to being spiders, pre-language. So our only solution is more language, different language, language that lives both in our words and in our bodies. 

Not more of the language of using up all the things we encounter outside of ourselves, exploiting the world as our dominion and resource, ever onwards to Mars. We've had enough of that. 

Now we need a language that figures out those things we encounter inside. A language that we’ve so long avoided articulating.

ACT 5: AIRPLANE

SCENE:
Back to the present. The airplane, finally about to begin the final descent.

I get up and go to the bathroom. 

The dark-haired woman behind me, ensconced in her full slouch, is reading something on her phone, headphones on, thoroughly immersed in the same world she was in when she forgot her ticket stub at the counter. Not paying the slightest attention to me.

In her own world, as I am in my own world, though I’ve made use of her tangential presence within it; I’ve desired that presence. She gives no sign that she desires mine, or ever did, or ever gave the briefest thought to it.

And the cabin lights go up, and we're about "ready to begin our final descent."

Now liberated from my fantasy about the woman behind me (which always comes accompanied by a certain oppressive vanity: I need to seem suave in case she actually is interested in me, even in the narrative I write unbeknownst to her), I can admit that while taking a nap earlier, I woke up to a dream that I had shat myself. A clear, fluid stream of diarrhea felt like it exuded from my asshole. It woke me up instantly and with alarm. The sensation was strong enough in my dreaming reality that I decided I had to actually check myself upon waking, discreetly putting a hand into the back of my jeans and edging in just far enough to feel some of the back fabric of my boxers.

Nothing, perfectly shitless.

When I return from the bathroom, I realize what made me have the dream. I had spilled some water on my seat midway through the flight, which is why my jeans were damp.

The sensation must have been enough to make me dream that I had done worse than merely moisten up my ass with my spilled bottled water.

Plus there’s the digestive distress I always experience in the air—the pressure constant, the whole flight feeling like I've got a rock in the bottom of my intestines, no relief to be found from sitting heavily in the airplane lavatory as I anticipate an angry growing line of fellow passengers waiting for me to finish up. 

My dream put all these sensations and impressions together and figured (I guess) wouldn't it be nice to just shit right now, free and clear and without struggle.

Better I didn't, of course, oh man better that I didn't. Here is the shitless world as it turned out to be—the possibility of what could have been is enough to make me plenty satisfied with what I have.

As we land, I gather my bags, and we queue, I hear my erstwhile black-haired seat-neighbor behind me talk on the phone with a friend. Hearing her is enough to know enough. The swell of my fantasy, already deflated, collapses. Actuality negates possibility—cold, hard fact cancels the vague unreal warmth of imagination.

Desire has had its moment, its space in my world. I’m in Mexico now, and it’s time to get on with reality.

I wake from a sleep. 

Outside there’s the same quality of late afternoon light as when I started my nap, which I am grateful for—no waking up after sundown, no concomitant disorientation, grogginess, sense of an irretrievable loss of time. 

My sleep was dark and elemental, as if I were in a deep, deep pool of blackness. I awake and here I am. Something felt necessary in the sleep, but I don’t know what.

I’m just glad it didn’t feel like a waste. There’s nothing good in that feeling. In it, there’s only the simultaneous burdensome obligation to somehow redeem that lost time and the crestfallen defeatism that whispers in my ear, “You’ll never redeem that time, you wastrel.”

A decade ago, I thought the real mark of discipline and maturity was not taking rogue naps or sleeping past 9. I’ve since learned it’s not beating myself up for it.

—

I started the day with high hopes. It would be another day where I not only intended to really work, but also to finish all my work. That tantalizing possibility! Getting to the bottom of the pile before more gets added to it! And then, the dream: free and open possibility, just room and more room, time and more time, to create, to do all the creating I’ve failed to do over the first 30-plus years of my life.

Of course there’s no chance of ever ‘finishing the work’, but my mind believes in it, holds onto it. So it seeks the next best thing: to always be a big step ahead of the work, to be so far ahead of it that no one can make any claim on me. Hark! A client wants a new thing! Alas, a new analysis, you say, prettier charts, you say. Well, it’s already done, and you don’t know it, and I’ll give it to you in two weeks, and in the meantime I’ll do whatever I want, I’ll write the Big Thing I Have Always Meant To Write.

But it never turns out that way. I never get that last set of things done and off my list. The very day I am on the verge of doing so—after so much time! 7 odd years I’ve been working to get here, done, ahead!—I lose all my steam. My lizard soul doesn’t want me to be free! It wants me to keep worrying and feeling behind and feeling ever and always like I have something else hanging over my head.

But to wake up and say, “Everything is already done, so I can choose what I want to do. What do I want to get even further ahead on today? Or what’s simply my vibe, my desire, my thirst, my drive?” What would that be like?

I walked around the block today knowing I didn’t have that, that I still live under constraint. I woke up and I exercised, and then I stretched, and then I ate, and then I walked around the block. Nothing about this should strike you as impressive, because all of this ends at something like 10:30 or 11 a.m., and if I’m lucky I might start work then, and if not one of a million things might have gotten in the way and caused me to start work at 12, or 1—some errand or another, some social preoccupation I need or want to attend to, something that needs to be done but cannot possibly qualify as “work” if I expect to actually get anything done with my life.

I walked around the block, and by now it was 12. I was happy in spite of the later hour and my preoccupations about the day; I had someone to share all this with this morning, someone who passed through my life reanimating areas that formerly felt inert, energies that had fallen into quiescence. Through the conduit of her particular practices of wisdom, she told me what I needed to hear today: “You need to master diligence, follow through, and consistency. Don’t get stuck in a rut where everything moves on autopilot without causing any effective change in your life. Make everything you’re doing a little more sacred, and watch it flow.”

I wouldn’t get into a rut, I resolved. I walked, and in my long grey coat and shabby grey track sweater and 4-day stubble I felt an I-don’t-give-a-fuck cool. And I listened to Tyler, the Creator, because I wanted to feel something and I wanted to ride the high of the conversation a bit longer. “I’ve been listening to Tyler since Goblin” I told her, because we were comparing our respective “I liked them before they were big” artists, and also because I liked the little thrill and frisson of admitting to my appreciation of Goblin, because Tyler was a foul-mouthed unfiltered 19 year old back during the album’s release in 2011 and the album offends every sensitivity it comes across. And it is also a dialogue between him and his conscience/therapist, the Mephistophelean-deep-voiced Dr. TC:

"Tyler, you're going to have to cut down on that "f******" word, that's very, that's a bad...

"I'm not homophobic."

"I mean, I don't think you are but..."

"F*****."

"Alright, well, since the last time we..."

Yeah, offensive. Enough so that he got banned from the UK for four years—though ironically, this was at a point in his career in 2015 where he had started publicly teasing the possibility of his own bisexuality and had long since gotten over the explicit homophobia of his teenage work, the target of the UK Home Office. His 2019 album Igor chronicles a love affair between the titular character and a man, and while he has declined to ever explicitly label himself as bisexual publicly, there’s no shortage of the implicit evidence.

And for all this (as he says at the start of Yonkers, “I'm a fucking walking paradox / no, I'm not / Threesomes with a fucking triceratops”) there’s something profound in listening to the raw but confused, insecure but fiery Tyler of the 2011 Wolf Gang era, if you know how to read between the lines, understand the context, and not take the slurs at face value.

Young Tyler’s fuck-you energy is obviously not unknown to hip-hop, but Tyler’s particular brand is somehow less performative, somehow more pure, for being the clear by-product of an angsty teenager who hasn’t yet learned all the tricks of performance yet. 

He is, as a result, emotionally honest in a way that lacks any presumption, any conceit. He lays down uncompromising emotions, packaged through these bizarro characters representing slices of his own psyche, without concern for how polished and mainstream his rap appeal is, so the emotions hang out there, full flourish. 

He bounces manically between extremes of his unapologetic self-expression and his unmoored sense of place in the world, always at a fever pitch, always making it deeply clear that he has no ground under his feet—even literally so, in a suicide by hanging at the end of his music video for Yonkers, his breakout hit from the album.

In it, he spits his rage while somehow simultaneously broadcasting his confusion and insecurity:

I slipped myself some pink Xannies
And danced around the house in all-over print panties
My mom's gone, that fuckin' broad will never understand me
I'm not gay, I just wanna boogie to some Marvin
(What you think of Hayley Williams?)
Fuck her, Wolf Haley robbin' them
I'll crash that fuckin' airplane that that f***** n**** B.o.B is in
And stab Bruno Mars in his goddamn esophagus
And won't stop until the cops come in

Stab Bruno Mars in his goddamn esophagus! And yet according to Genius, he just hated the song that Hayley Williams was featured in, in a song by the Atlanta rapper B.o.B. That was his whole beef—nothing apparently personal. And he’s a 19 year old who was getting enough exposure to broadcast his deep hatred for this song, and he broadcast it, because he could! 

Because isn’t that the goddamned dream today? That people will listen to the things that piss us off, and care because we’re so important? And not because you have oodles of money and own Twitter, but because you’re a talented, fucked up, pissed off, emotionally raw kid with no clear breaks in the world you live in. The album starts with this very self-identification:

I'm not a fucking role model (I know this)
I'm a 19 year old fucking emotional coaster with pipe dreams
Since Kanye tweeted tellin' people he's bumpin' all of my shit
These motherfuckers think I'm 'sposed to live up to something? Shit

You get your moment to be heard about stabbing Bruno in his esophagus, you take it.

Then there’s the She, about a young stalker and his object of obsession, with Frank Ocean’s lush voice singing the chorus with as much sinisterness as Frank Ocean can muster in his “He’s at your window”.

The blinds wide open so he can
See you in the dark when you're sleepin'
Naked body, fresh out the shower
And you touch yourself after hours
Ain't no man allowed in your bedroom
You're sleeping alone in bed
But check your window
He's at your window

And Tyler, on the bridge, captures all you need to know about this song:

I just wanna talk, and conversate
'Cause I usually just stalk you and masturbate
And I finally got the courage to ask you on a date
So just say yes, let the future fall into place (C***)

And what’s important to see in all this is not that this twisted kid is rapping about stalker fantasies. It’s that he’s rapping about stalker fantasies at 19 years old, and then managing some of the most emotionally-aware lyrics in hip-hop today, unafraid to go neck-deep into the space of emotional ambivalence and contradiction where we actually live most of our lives—whatever we present to others notwithstanding. Actually listen to the verse above and you’ll hear just how much of that same contradiction is present and latent in his early work. This is maybe the most vulnerable (in the original sense of “exposed”) utterance of the C-word you’ll ever hear.

Connecting the dots between his young insecurity and his mature awareness is to highlight something deep not just in Tyler but in human experience—maturity and connection may increase, but confusion and contradiction still remain. Take WILSHIRE, a story about a unfulfilled love affair he has with a woman who’s dating his friend: 

He see it, he know it's somethin'
We fronting like, "Ha-ha-ha"
Whenever we "Ha-ha-ha" we subtly press his buttons
Not on purpose, but, man, I found my purpose
If I fucked our friendship up for you, I think it's worth it
But, nah, I can't do that, that n**** don't deserve it
And plus y'all got depth
I'm just a n**** on the surface, for real
Surface

I said surface, like, 'cause they got roots
Like, I'm the new n****
You know, they be fuckin'

This is a reflection not just of one artist’s specific emotional awareness in a snapshot of time, but of growth over that artist’s—that human being’s—whole life. That’s what’s inimitable about seeing the full arc of Tyler’s career, and what’s so indigestible to our present culture. We prefer our judgments to be in the form of those clear snapshot judgments, which is why it’s easier, generally, to just ignore early Tyler completely, or to regard it with the kind of quizzical hedging embarrassment of “I mean, great artist, but yeah those takes…” and almost treat late Tyler as if he’s a different artist and person entirely.

But what’s more clearly honest, what’s more clearly emotionally real? A Tyler, whose teenage crassness got him banned from the UK but who evolved into the artist he is today, or one of our high-powered modern business leaders or celebrities who’s read a little Brené Brown and can now cry on demand for their employees or fans whenever it feels like the right PR thing to do.

And how can we tell the difference? Because we see the evidence, we see the trajectory. He’s not just a performative snapshot, vulnerability airbrushed on for the sake of the cameras and the social media optics. He’s shown himself, already, in all his ugliness and all his good, over the course of his whole career. We know who the fuck Tyler is, where it counts. There’s no mistaking that.

I saw a live-streamed performance of Tyler’s several months ago, and he had a moment of his show where he snuck in a few of his top hits from his back-catalog, with a wink to all those who were familiar with these songs and knew why they needed to be only snuck in, playing only a verse and a chorus or two of each of these. “She” maybe lasted for a minute and a half of its usual 4 minutes and 15 seconds. And this was right—this was appropriate. The lyrics of “She” are fucked up, still more so out of the mouth of a grown man no longer his tumultuous 19-year-old self.

But how many rappers even mentioned masturbation in this candid a way before Tyler? How many still do? This was an actual 19 year old, an actual kid coming of age in a disorienting world, a newly digital world, a world which in the space of a half a generation suddenly expanded its ways of reaching into our brains to mold, shape, manipulate, muddle, compel, addict, and confuse us by an easy order of magnitude. And this actual 19 year old was not willing to swagger falsely for the cameras, or to cut his anger and resentment with an iota of tact and discretion, much less concern for the mores of others. Because, at that point, he had nothing to lose anyway.

And of course those mores are important, they have their essential role to play. So, too, does acknowledging the fact that what Tyler described in Goblin is the lived experience of many, many young men. Resentment, anger, aloneness. They hardly have an absolute claim on these emotions. But everyone, everyone should see their specific emotional darknesses and difficulties captured and expressed unabashedly by someone else with the same identity and identity struggles they have, at some point or another in their lives. That’s the greatest role of music there is.

Because it’s only therein that we learn to grow beyond those darknesses and difficulties. To see them, to have them be seen by another, to let them go.

And to grow up.

—

What is it to be bored?

To tread water, floating on the sea of too-muchness that our culture swamps us in. An undifferentiated ocean.

To have the same select selves of ourselves continuously reflected back to us, reiterated and reiterated. The same ads preying on our same fixations. The same fixes, meted out to keep us in cultural junkiedom.

No growth. Static. A continuous fuzz that doesn’t let up, doesn’t abate. No clear view onto what might be new, what might reshuffle the deck, what might throw the whole deck up into the air.

Yet we have artists that are not just static snapshots, their public personas frozen in time.

Yet we have our own experience that show us that we are not said snapshots, not incapable of movement and change.

I will part with the words of the strange and beautiful man, poet, John Berryman, wild-eyed wild-bearded Berryman (in the words of his friend Saul Bellow, “meteor-bearded like John Brown,”) who jumped off a Minneapolis bridge in the dead of winter to his death at the age of 57.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

To all those who confess whatever is presently unconfessable, here’s to you.

The best description I can give for the genre is “surrealist post-topian science-fiction verse”—read the intro post if you want a full sense of the strange premise my oddball mind is capable of concocting.

Don’t try to make sense of it, just let it be, and hopefully get a little laugh or something to ponder out of it. And subscribe if you’re curious for more.

A Guidebook To The Unknown

Sweetheart! There’s no time (no time to (no time) (to to to)) so let’s! go! Yessiree, story time!

we’ll have a drive 
drive a drive
see the sign
see the the the

Look babe: Monster 1: ¿kay es estoh, como talle vooh? (crack your back  crack my back  let’s start again.) Flying daggers shave men too tall to shave themselves, their heads crowning through the cloud cover. This is Monster 1: the gutter where the daggers fall, their motion stilled but giving glow to the empty streets. A blimp will rise today, fed on this fuel, and it will burn a sweet magenta as the Real World slowly dies away.

Monster 2! Your great grace as you hurt me, smiling through 18 pair of teeth, troubled not by what happens on the telly but solely. dedicated. to. my. doom. and for that I snack on chips and sing a swinging ditty, my air an inverted image of the image I once was. I’ve got 2,000 trial verdicts and a hard-on but ain’t ain’t ain’t no going back now.

Monster. 3. Firehouses! A phonograph needle lodged in your! A mind that makes a mind that makes a mind! Listless Jon-Don Smith: “The road, my friends, is road”! Tie-die and nationalism! And you pull back your arm and I pull back mine and!  god we’re bleeding

monster 4 monster 4
trapezoid pumpcake underbelly gasstation
lexichristian cinnamon sourceking cawl
freezeframe ballyhoo wing’tbird singstride

earnest earnest boy earnest earnest earnest

Ok now take your hand and ok now put it right there
(no knowns know whether what’s known is unknown)
Saturday! Great munching farce of a fuck
Should the anger seep into the waterways, towns and towns will die
(hark those herald angels singe)
But “Smile!” (don’t smile) “Smile!” (don’t smile) “Smile!”
and if ever anybody was everybody, it was you.

Coward

Hello Muck. ‘Tis Delicious. Glad you found Satisfaction Street. Poorly marked the maps
  these days.
Been thinking about wartime in the Age of the Anvil, all those castle bastards
fathered in the ride-in-ride-out of the janissaries from the Renaissance Faire.

I saw one of them polishing a dixie nickel and humming the score of Cats
while snakes dripped from the refrigerators (the plight of a refugee in the 222nd century!)
A boredom descended like an aria of Callas—the remaining Cervantes burst into flame.

Friday: A screaming decline. Two hours. Joy ride. Marvelous. Muck, dear Muck,
I’d like to report that with the proceeds of the penny pond we now have enough
to buy a king-sized Snicker, or a small croissant.

Noh Alone

I am a knife-borne babe. Set in my course
I'm called to slaughter the kings and their paramours
the criminal hordes that crowd the voting booths
and 50,000 fly fishers named Jim.

Shuriken tucked away in folds of my flesh
America's Christmas kiddo. "Say sonny,"
says newscaster Cronkite, "Hey sonny."
Magazines print his picture with a picture of mine.

Noh blows it tho. Everything's fucked.
He sends me the fire emoji. He sends me the shit emoji.
I double down and end my life with a barbell.
All at once every tree combusts.

When the color returned to the sky,
Noh woke from a nap and thanked the heavens.
He took his niece down to the place with the wolves
where they fed the wolves, and stayed happy.
March was much warmer than usual that year.

Everything is beginning to open up, or has already. Sweat is dripping down the outside of my calf, a single bead of sweat.

A UPS truck idles on the corner of 7th avenue and 7th Street.

A giant blue truck with the fat letters PORKY rolls by, a hungry looking pig mascoting the inside space of the O.

It looks like the start of a blizzard in the seed-bearing air; it looks like the start of summer on the streets. It’s an easy 80 degrees, and the world is filled with life, passers-by in their new, light, summer styles.

And I, I’m beginning to recognize, really recognize, what it is to decide in any given moment how I will feel, how my world will go, what the path ahead will look like.

A springtime, a summertime path, growth, flowering; an end to winter rust in the bones and hibernation of the will.

I really, truly decide: this is the feeling. I’m writing for this feeling.

Accompanying my recognition—the recognition of this new-seasoned feeling, the recognition of the pregnant possibility of true decision—there is the recognition that this kind of decision doesn’t happen instantly. Instead it is a decision that is taken continuously, over a time, over more time, over maybe a long, long time. The decision of who I am to be, in short. Any truly fundamental, truly real decision is just this decision: the decision of who you are to be (think about it, think about it, think about it).

This decision includes many other tributary decisions. The decision of how I am to act, how I am to see myself within the world, how I am to see what I can create and make actual what wasn’t there before me. How am I to see others, how am I to understand what they are to me, to understand what I can be to them, understand how our separate worlds might meet, interact, intersect, perhaps intermix, interexist.

The world of another, of a you: a world that is not my world, a world seen from your eyes, not my own, never my own. But there is certainly such a thing as getting closer.

How close can we get? That’s what I decide to discover, to learn.

And to decide in this way, the decision needs to be decided over the longest period of time, over the greatest numbers of “yes, I choose!” and “yes, I choose!”.

We think of “free will” and we think of decisions that simply get made once. One and done. Buy that candy bar. Go to this specific college. Fly to Italy.

But no, no, there’s the mistake: true decisions don’t get made just once, they get made again and made again and made again. Again and again and again. An I, a new I: an I and an I and an I.

Outside the seeds pour out, the seeds cover the street. The passers-by watch and marvel.

My head rests against a painting on the wall of this cafe, which shifts inwards towards the wall crookedly but stably on its hook. I wonder what the painting is of, and I scrutinize it–is it cake? An abstract cake floating in a sea of white, topped by vertical extensions of its cakeness? More and more cake layers— topping it up, crowning it off?

No, no, it is a staircase, and those upper levels of the cake are nothing more than more stairs.

It’s just a simple basic painting of a staircase, a bit cartoonish even.

But I like it.

—

I haven’t been writing all that long.

In my life, I mean.

Like, I’ve been writing my whole life, but not really writing. I might have thought I was really writing before. But no, this—what I’ve been doing lately—is what really feels like writing.

Maybe writing is like love: when you finally find it, you no longer need to ask the question, “do I really have it?”

But I’m not here to talk about love or my history of writing. I’m here to talk about the decision, the “who am I to be?” Writing is what teaches me this decision right now, this awareness that the decision even exists. Maybe it isn’t the only teacher, but it is certainly one of the more insightful and empathetic ones.

It’s writing that shows me how to decide to be a certain way, to not be a certain way. Why would that be? Well, it is my experience that my writing is eminently a reflection of a given me at a given moment. 

To put a finer point on it (because what exactly does it mean to be a specific “me”?) my writing at a given moment is the function of a feeling. That feeling could contain multiple feelings, could morph itself mercurially into this feeling or that feeling. But if the writing works, really works—if I get to the end of a piece, give it a day or two to harden and set, come back to it and still feel like it deserves to see the light of day—that feeling will be consistent. It will be singular, able to stand alone. It could be the feeling of a memory, the feeling of a possibility, the feeling of a story, the feeling of a thought. It could just be the feeling of a feeling, the feeling of the me that I am right then.

Does a piece of writing—a real piece of writing—have a soul?

Is that what I mean by, “a feeling”?

“Playing with feeling,” “he’s got soul,” these kinds of expressions are familiar to music, at least jazz. Which, let me venture: isn’t that the most similar genre to autofiction? The improvisation, the riffing off of whatever’s present, the breakdown and deconstruction of primary motifs, the feeling like one is not necessarily going anywhere but just playing, and playing, and playing?

But I think it’s true of all art. What is art but the synesthetic transformation of feeling, of soul, in all its forms?

What is the artist except a bottler of fireflies? A chronicler and preserver of the endless fragments that we are made up of, that constitute our infinite experience?

—

Earlier this morning, I felt the resurrection of a feeling: European airport, or Latin American, or maybe Hawaiian. Warm, tropical even. Warm air, warm night, what’s ahead of me is still unclear, not made any clearer by the mind’s experiences, existing patterns and familiarities, existing expectations. But beautifully so, so beautifully so. Everything is open, everything possible in that empty night. Even if I don’t know it, I am free of those expectations and familiarities that will soon establish themselves, soon disabuse me of my innocence, as I explore the place I have begun to visit. There is an unknown, still, and therefore a thrill, fresh eyes.

When I first typed out this paragraph, I followed it with the question: “Now those patterns, once created, can’t go away, but they can be ignored, can’t they?” And I don’t think it’s a bad question. But it’s precisely the kind of cliffs-edge I start to notice as I reflect on the whoness of my present meditation.

I am not here right now to ask a question like this. I am not trying to pose to you the kind of statement that can be ended in a rhetorical “can’t they?” I have, to be sure, asked other rhetorical questions in this piece. But this specific one doesn’t work. I can’t precisely say why, beyond appealing to a sense of fidelity.

Fidelity to a feeling, fidelity to a tone, fidelity to an intentionality and comportment of self: this is what it is, spiritually, to write well—to be faithful to the feeling. This, anyway, is the thesis that incubates in the constructed nest in my chest—this is my heart’s thought, presently.

We talk of artists “having a muse”; one never talks of an artist having “many muses”. Inspiration comes from a singular source, a singular taproot of the soul, even when subsidiary roots might also grow therefrom.

Martin Heidegger: "Every great thinker thinks only a single thought.” Does every artist channel only a single feeling?

And if so, is there a way to teach precisely this sort of emotional focus? To cultivate it?

—

I wrote two completely different versions of this essay before writing this one.

The tones of those previous essays were not unlike tones I had written in previously. And yet they are dead wrong.

(I distract myself for a moment: on the maroon-colored wall I sit besides, on my left side, there is a small ant that crawls about energetically. I put my index finger to it, inviting it to crawl about on my hand. But it is wary of me, and the more I try to thrust my finger against the path his scurrying legs cut, the more frenetically he tries to avoid me and set his course firmly elsewhere—away from me.)

These tones, these tones have become stale. I started the first version of this essay thusly:

I’m STARVING.

(wtf am I really going to start out a piece declaring I’m starving?)

Oh but friends (my friends my dear friends) I feel not only hungry but like the very essence of nutrition has been sucked out of my muscles, my marrow, my very existence (corporeal incorporeal and, now, belletristic).

Stale, stale! Or, no, maybe the tone hasn’t become stale, so much as caricatured. My uppercase harangue of emotional description; my apostrophe to my “dear friends” as a way of addressing my diffuse and abstract audience; my parenthetical aside casting self-judgmental aspersions on what I said in the paragraph before—in order to provide narrative tension? to make clear my own constant self-judgment? to anticipate and disarm your own readerly reservations?

Have these devices already become unavailable to me? Have I already exhausted the potential of these aspects of my unique voice, my unique style?

Or no, no, have I just not had the discipline to realize that such devices are spices, not the meal itself? The inclusion of raisins in a salad: one cannot overload the salad with raisins, or they will cease to be the treat and contrast that they are.

My focus in both of these pieces was on hunger. You see, I had been sick with the stomach flu for several days, earlier in this week. I had intended to publish something this week, because I have had a streak of five weeks of unbroken publication so far, my best I’ve ever maintained in my writerly career (and I want that career to stretch long into the distance from here, friends! permit your Fearless Author a little boyish earnestness for a moment!). And, look, we writers need our disciplinary routines and superstitions as much as everyone else out there (more so! much more so!).

I decided to write about hunger, because I was hungry. I was coming back out of my convalescence, regaining my appetite, starting to eat again. I named it CLEARCUT because… I wanted to. Because I liked it. A little secret: that’s the only reason I ever write anything. Why write for any other reason! Want or die! Like or die!

And hunger: I wrote about hunger because hunger interested me, coming out of a period where hunger didn’t come simply. And because other experiences of life seem to follow the phenomenological logic of hunger—hunger for connection, hunger for meaning, hunger for life. And that was the thread I decided to follow in my second piece, to ask, what is hunger, exactly? What laws does it, and its cousins through metaphor, follow? What is its phenomenology? 

“Phenomenology” says: what are the laws of our actual experience? For instance, forget the argumentative wankery around centuries of debates around “is there free will” and “the existence of God”. Instead, start from the recognition that we experience such things regardless, and therefore, therefore, how do we describe such experience and its significance for us?

That’s all phenomenology is, and it’s the only philosophy worth a damn anymore. (Eat me, everybody!)

But this second piece, this phenomenology of hunger—well, I started writing that piece, started thinking about hunger, started writing about hunger… and what I wrote ended up even worse than that first piece. 

I titled it, “Sketch: A Theory of Hunger” and started it thusly:

Hunger! What in the world can a “theory of hunger” mean? You have hunger or you don’t, no?

No, no. It’s not to be. I wrote 1,246 words in this second draft, and I now repudiate them. I wrote 1,325 words in the first draft, the original CLEARCUT, and I now repudiate each one of those words. Without 1,324 appropriate words to accompany any given one of those words, they are all useless to me!

My eyes scan over the whole topology of these drafts without finding a single hook, a single sprout. The seed didn’t take hold in the soil. The townsfolk have abandoned their inchoate village.

Cut, cut. It’s clear to me: they both must be cut.

And in the way I need to be now, the way of my current I am, the way I was searching to find in myself all week, I can now say to you all:

Hi, friends. Happy Friday. Thanks for sharing a little time and space with me.

***

A little announcement: in the coming weeks, I’ll be doing a Substack Letters series with my friend and fellow Foster writer, the excellent Theresa “Sam” Houghton of The Journey Continues. We’ll be discussing the sometimes circuitous experience of finding one’s creative/life path and how spiritual exploration can help shape that path. Stay tuned!

And if you want to really get serious about your own writing, check out Foster’s Season 3.

This all repeats itself.

Repeats repeats repeats repeats repeats repeats repeats.

I stand up, walk to the kitchen, I get a snack.

I stand up, walk to the kitchen, I get a snack.

Stand up, I walk, I get a snack, I eat the snack.

Walking, I intend a snack. A snack is gotten.

I am in the kitchen. Why? Oh, a snack.

A snack! I get up, intent on the kitchen.

I sit, intending a snack, and keep sitting, though I want to snack.

Will I drink a cup of matcha with my snack?

Will it be too much caffeine?

Maybe a rooibos will be better? Maybe a bit of cacao in the rooibos?

If I have a piece of dark chocolate with my matcha will I for certain go overboard on the stimulation?

Will I lose focus for the rest of the day, bouncing around between tiny tasks and text conversations instead of doing what I need to do, in the frisson of over-caffeination?

Will it instead be ok? Will it instead be exactly what I need to get into a flow state and keep up the flow state throughout the day?

What is it that I am working on? How many things might distract me? How much energy do I already have? How much matcha should I pour out into the mesh strainer to sift into the cup, bright chlorophyllically green and enticing in that very pop of itself.

Will I drink the matcha? Will I make the matcha? Will I go overboard? Will I have a snack? What snack will I have? Am I gaining weight from all these snacks? How many dried figs have I eaten already today?

Death and death and death and death and death it’s the sound of DEATH.

(a little gray-green djinn peeps out from the battlement of my skull: it yells this word “death!!” because it doesn’t know what else to do; its appointed task is destruction, and this endless cycle seems a reasonable target for its energies, but those energies are not themselves all that reasonable.)

Oh sickness! Oh rot! Oh endless loop endless loop endless loop.

A stone falls. One story of a building collapses down into another story, sandwiching everything in between.

My mind suddenly, momentarily, has nothing to say: I’ve written itself into an open, but soundless, motionless, presenceless, even spaceless space. I’m here but there’s nothing here. I’m stuck.

Fuck you djinn. Some help you are.

--

Yes, I made the matcha. Bite me.

I put a rubber coaster on the bed, my matcha on the rubber coaster. I really hope it doesn’t spill. It could so easily. Green matcha powder, neon chlorophyll, this almost certainly would stain everything. I once stepped on a curcumin turmeric capsule on the carpeted floor of my former San Francisco apartment and it held the neon yellow stain for years, glowing with food-stain grossness anytime a healthy sunlight shone through the windows, until I finally did a thing you don’t realize you can do until you grow sufficiently “adult”: I hired someone to replace that patch of the carpet.

I took a bite of my toast with butter and sliced dried figs and, ugh, now I realize I didn’t bring a napkin with me, and my fingers are greasy with the residue of butter and I type on my computer’s shitty keyboard, and I’m afraid the butter on my fingers is going to make my keyboard even shittier, I already have a “Control ^” key that feels like it needs a 35% firmer press because of some particle of something that got stuck under its thin black square of a key and I took it into a computer repair shop last week and they told me they don’t replace individual keys, especially not those made by this particular computer manufacturer, but they could instead replace the entire keyboard at a cost of $135 and I said no it’s not worth it for my to replace my entire keyboard just for the sake of a “Control ^” key that takes 35% extra energy to press, annoying though it may be to me. By now I’ve forgotten that my fingers are greasy because they aren’t actually greasy anymore, I suppose I’ve degreased my fingers onto my keys and now my keys have a fractional distribution of the grease that erstwhile clung to the outer surface of my fingers, my right thumb and middle finger to be exact, those being the fingers I almost certainly used to pick up my toast, while my pinky and ring fingers splayed out and down in different directions in that posh toffish way (toffish! why doesn’t American English get derogatory terms for upper-class people?) that makes me feel like a silly twit (twit!), this isn’t a glass of wine, and meanwhile my pointer finger was almost certainly pointed up in the air in that sort of way that baby Jesus would stick his two fingers up in the air in medieval portraits with him and his mother Mary, and why I think of baby Jesus’s fingers as I hover my fingers over my toast in an attempt to recapture a faithful description of the precise way I ate my toast some 20 minutes ago, I don’t know, I do not know.

I take another bite. Damn it! I still have no napkin. And now it’s not just the butter but also little micro crumbs of the bread that stick to my fingers and ruin my keyboard typing tranquility.

But now I’m just lying to you, audience. I took a bite of that bread fully well knowing that I had no napkin. This was all a conceit! All a goddamned ruse! I have nothing better to say than to make a gag about my toast that, once-bitten, burdened me with the burdens of its butter molecules, and then—don’t bite it again!—but oh no it’s been bitten!—twice-bitten, and I didn’t learn my lesson the first time. Bite me once, shame on you, bite me twice…

Ok I’m going to get a goddamned napkin.

--

What is this drivel? Who am I to write about my matcha caffeine neuroticism and my damn buttery bread and figs and baby Jesus fingers and wacky djinns and my still-psychotherapeutically-unresolved ressentiment towards the upper class. Who wants to read any of this?

It’s BORING.

(or is it weird or is it inscrutable or is it bonkers or is it)

Boring boring boring my friends my friends I never thought I was one to get bored (John Berryman: “and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’”) but I am bored! am I bored? I am bored? oh am i bored.

Boredom boredom boredom boredom boredom boredom boredom (Tyler the Creator)

Oh I’m so utterly bored cuz you know why friends—it’s all the goddamned same.

Scrolling through RSS feed in the morning: Scott Adams says racist thing, Elon Musk does irritating thing, democratic hopes dashed in Africa’s most populous nation, Israelis kill a bunch of Palestinians, Russia does bad thing, Ukraine does brave thing, Democrats do a thing and Republicans do a thing and racists do a thing and woke elites do a thing and Havana Syndrome is still a thing? and on Tiktok people talk about how dating sucks and on Google ads Ketamine is being advertised to people who don’t want Ketamine advertisements and on campus it’s hard to be conservative and on campus it’s hard to be a free thinker too and on a train in Greece you might have just died in a crash.

(oh fuck I almost spilled my matcha on my bed)

And more death and injustice and inspiration and new beginnings and viral videos on Twitter, and movies and TV shows and causal beach read books and “this“ something “is the best” something “ever” on some blog or magazine or tweet or

time and again and time and again and time and again and time and again and time and again and time and again and time and again and time and again and time and again

And yet everything I’ve just written feels like a complaint lodged against the noise that itself immediately becomes part of the noise of it all, joins it as yet another fixture in yet another endless drumbeat, this one of ennui (“Now you come somewhere, like this, and it's beautiful, and then you take a picture and you realize that everybody's taken that exact same picture from that exact same spot, you've just made some redundant content for stupid Instagram” (Portia from White Lotus)). And then it thereby becomes another part of the whirr and cycle, yet another piece of the dopamine swamp pit of the internet: you get to read my writing at a point where you’re feeling the same boredom I’m feeling, and in that momentary bliss of recognition you can say, “yeah, fuck yeah, fuck the internet! fuck the news! I’m bored too!” And then we forget and move on, read the next thing, read the next thing, watch the next thing.

And we can take other byways out of this topic too, point out for instance that, hey, in my list of the repetitive rondos of the newscycle and socialmediacycle and discoursecycle there were and are real and present consequences—the fragility of democracy in Africa’s largest country! 213 million people’s lives impacted by where things go from here! Israel and Palestine still stuck in their oppressive stasis, the phrase we bandied about in the early aughts “peace in the middle east” long since fallen off our lips, its deferral continuing far too long to keep our pilot light of short-term attention flicking! And yet real lives lost, real hopes dashed, real civilian casualties, real train crashes.

But this is one morning, one snapshot, and by time you read this, weeks from today, these headlines will all seem worse than irrelevant: they will seem stale. These hopes have already long been dashed, these lives have already long been lost—come on, what’s new?

Worst of all, none of this soapboxing gets us any further away from the Big All-Encompassing Bubble Of It All than any of the rest of it. It’s all still all the Bubble! The comment on the Bubble is the Bubble! The critique of the Bubble is still the Bubble! The Bubble takes it all up, sucks it all into itself! There’s nothing real, here—nothing you can reach out and touch with your hand!

And yet, yet, even this, all this complaining, too, is so boring! Acknowledging this is boring! Diagnosing this is boring! Trying to get distance from it is boring! The oxygen seems to attenuate rapidly as we try to gain our distance from the Big All-Encompassing Bubble Of It All, as we try to assess it and understand it from what we imagine to be a remove. But there is no remove. As soon as you see it, you see within it. You have its eyes. Its eyes are the eyes of all of us, but all of us are taken up and plugged in and made to operate on a specific wavelength.

We’re all part of some massive AM radio operation, spitting out our voices into staticky frequencies that echo and concatenate in our poor little vehicle vessels wherein we putter down the Highway Of Life™️—and we yell back into it! into the radio! into and out through the radios of other puttery vehicle vessel people traveling aimlessly on their own damn highways, or the same highway as us, or who knows where. No one really knows each other, no one knows where the other is driving to, what it’s like in the cabins of their cars. They are all just as solo in their cars as we are, even if their radios might be turned up more loudly than ours, and sure as hell no one is carpooling together, or if they are no one is talking. Do we look outside at the scenery outside us? Do we dare? What if it’s only desert? What if only strip malls and endless road? But we don’t look outside anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Or maybe we do, but the scenery around us is like the green screen overlays that they’d insert in post-production into car rear windows in classic movies, Hitchcock’s and the such—silly-looking shots of San Francisco bending and arching too jerkily to have any real verisimilitude to it.

And now, now! after all this, I now dislike myself, after saying what I’ve said. Look at me, crusader! Fighter against… what? Everything? The very way we communicate with each other? The internet? Modernity? What am I trying to say?

A circle of children stand and stare at a blue ball in the center of them all, motionless. Solo, standing at a slight remove, voice cracking with the fear of brooking dissent, one of the children: “I don’t like this game.”

The rest of the children: “We don’t like you.”

Oh but if I could only articulate why. If only point to what in this vast tangle of overgrowth we’ve all grown ourselves into is malignant, and what by contrast, perhaps, is healthy, or at least potentially so. I could come up with a million different answers and theses and blog posts and tweets and insights, and yet they would still always, ever always, just be another part, and part, and part, and part, and part of it all.

Or would it? Have we just not been thinking enough, digging deep enough, pushing hard enough, imagining boldly enough? Have I, too, been part of the problem, part of those who don’t try hard enough to find the solution?

Stand right here, and look at my face. It looks confused.

--

I want to lie down and sleep. I don’t want to write. The full force of my dissatisfaction retches up to meet me: “What you are writing, son, is trash. Try doing something else with your time.” and the voice is that of a older male actor with a basso gravitas, a Morgan Freeman type, he’s telling me some hard truths, he’s seen truth in his day, he can give me the hard medicine while giving me the lapidary empathy I need for that medicine to go down, a deep human depth in his eyes all I need to know it’s there, that he cares, that he doesn’t want to see me do something stupid.

Do something else with my time. But what?

That’s the saving grace. That’s how I know the doubts have no weight: there is nothing else to do. 

“Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.” (Raymond Chandler)

Well, what’s rest is all there is ahead, isn’t it?

Mr. Bunch-o-Knots, face a skein of stress.

I feel a fatigue that has descended over my countenance like a thick draping curtain.

“Descended over my countenance” he says, soaringly, Shakesperianly! Rot rot rot.

Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh

(hand-typed ladies and gentlemen! no copy and paste shortcuts for the expression of my expression (of my compression (of my depression (of my dispossession)))! please read each oh   each oh is unique)

Someone is sitting at a bar next to me. Our knees touch ever so slightly. I feel sickened by the touch, irritated deeply by the intrusion into my loneliness. Why in god’s name sit next to me? The entire bar is empty, it’s an empty goddamn bar. And it’s noon and we’re alone and this is a sad bar, a sad empty alone bar where sad empty alone people go, and though it’s noon the only natural light in the bar creeps in around the silhouette of the exhaust fan over the back alleyway door.

(somehow there aren’t even street-facing windows here, the bar is just a box of bar-lit darkness)

This KNEE, this goddamn KNEE.

They turn to me and say, “I like how alone you are. It’s touching.”

—

2. ROT

My ass hurts. I sit in this chair even though it makes my ass hurt. I might sometimes sit in this chair for hours! My ass gradually turning numb, and then exiting my consciousness completely, until I get up and my ass is void of sensation, and I waddle around stupidly until my muscles regain bloodflow.

My ass hurts, as it does now, and then I think about my tailbone. I’m old enough to have maladies that evade medical explanation. About once a month, I experience a sharp, shooting pain just above my tailbone.

My tailbone is prominent. It juts out, a bony promontory in the canyon of the crack of my ass. That’s probably why my ass hurts on this chair, and probably why I experience this sharp, shooting pain once a month.

Bloodflow. Tissue. Raw nerve. Age.

My ass hurts and I want what any honest writer wants: I want you to experience my pain. But short of that—because that’s impossible—I want to experience your experience of my pain.

(Sorry pal: that’s also impossible.)

—

3. SILENCE

—

4. IN THE GROUND, THE KISS

I fell in love with you, because you reminded me of someone that wasn’t me, but wasn’t anyone else either.

In the ground, I lay a knife, a knife, a cardboard plaything, a chunk of particle board, and a post-it note you wrote to me.

I set it on fire, with the hopes you’ll see.

—

5. FEAR

A man takes me down past the place where all the crowds gather. 

The crowds are talking about things I didn’t even know could be talked about.

Yet, these conversations aren’t in the slightest bit interesting. These people aren’t in the slightest bit interesting

Yet, yet, they have a disturbing hold on me. Where am I? Who are all these others? Why am I so other to them?


We soon exit the thronging crowds.

And once we do, the crowd disappears suddenly, completely. It’s as if there are only two cosmic states: crowd and not-crowd.

I see them behind us, a tight and impermeable-seeming mass. The crowds continues doing their crowd thing, facelessly, motionlessly, a monotonous murmur rising from out of them.


The man keeps pulling me forward. In an instant we are completely alone.

The scenery permutes kaleidoscopically: rivers, trees, trails and paths, then deserts and deserts, then ice and tundra, then stark infinite volcanic rock.

And then we make it to a vast clearing, flat and unadorned but for a single dark figure in the center.

The cracked volcanic stone seems to undulate out from the figure in concentric waves.

We approach. She is a woman, the shadowy figure. The closeness doesn’t diminish the shadowiness.


We come up to her.

The man tugs on my arm.

“Say hi,” he says, shoving me towards her.

And she catches me and takes me by the arms and makes me face her.

And she looks me deeply in the eyes.

All I can see is her face, her eyes.

I can’t look away. I can’t shrink into nothingness.

She is looking for something.

She is looking for my fear.

How does this feel?

My neck hurts. I shouldn't write in bed. I have five different pillows I swap between to make my neck hurt less, though I still don't know which is best for what position, probably because I’m a lazy asshole and spend too much time in bed for any number of pillows to help. 

And they aren't cute pillows, they are utilitarian pillows. Who would want to fuck me after seeing all these random fucking pillows?

I am in a cave at the center of the earth. I've woken up (waking up, that's good, that's a start) but now I recognize that I have a hell of a journey to get from where I am to—where? The surface of the earth? I can't even really be sure what my destination is. What am I looking for? Who am I looking for? What am I doing here in the center of the earth?

Where am I? Where am I? Where am I?

--

When I was in high school, I lived at my parents' house, in a room at my parents' house.

In that room there were these small windows that would open up by twisting a rusted silver knob. The windows would stay static at the top and open up straight out from the bottom, forming a little triangular pitch. In the inside of the pitch, there was a window screen, to keep the outside world and the inside world apart.

Flies and spiders and moths from that outside world would still try to get in through the screen, would set up spider webs and moth sacs, would hang out to parasitize the light within my room, would live within and would die within the pitch behind the screen.

One night, I heard a horrid, fleshy banging within the pitch under the window. 

Stuck between the screen and the pitch of the open window was a Something the size of my fist. The Something flailed itself around, rapidly hurling itself in every direction, smashing into every surface. Its eyes were wild, desperately searching for an out. Monstrous, open, jutting eyes. Its hair and wings and thick bulbous body were all getting tangled and disoriented in this too-narrow space, this space it never should have entered into in the first place.

I don't even remember how it escaped. It must have been sudden, as sudden and unexpected as it got stuck. Before it escaped, for a helpless moment I thought I needed to do something. To help it out, to help it get out. But to help it out for my sake, to get this monster of a thing out from between my outer window and my inner window screen, so disturbingly close to the inside of my room,
this symbol of my inner life,
this room which claimed the plurality of my hours in childhood,
this room which probably remains the single place I've spent the most time in my entire life,
this room which is psychologically a part of me and about which I've kept dreaming about for decades hence, long after I moved out and my mother took over the room during a house remodel and made it her own.

And now, years later, I can name it, the Something. Probably a large moth, or a small bat. A moth-bat. 

And the naming does something—tames it on the most superficial psychological level, pushes the mystery below the waterline of my awareness. 

But the feeling I had while watching it still remains. That split second, where my stomach felt like one single giant organ stretching from the bottom of my bowels up through the gate of my throat. 

And that whole disgusted digestive complex of mine felt shriveled, powerless, in looking at this spectacle of the Something stuck in my window, and that shriveled powerlessness circulated its energies throughout my whole body—my arms, falling helpless, inert, my legs, falling helpless, inert, my face, shocked through with vertical sinews of nausea, and my expression, I can only imagine, a frozen rictus, a shock of "What the fuck?" in regarding the Something.

And then, it's gone, the Something is gone, and with it any memory of what happened thereafter. I can't even remember a split second after—all those memories are probably lost to me forever. Just another night as a boy alone in his room, replaying the same actions over and over again—reading, playing computer games, jerking off, doing homework, watching TV, going to sleep—this fabric of growth and repetition growing ever thicker, ever wider, until one day that fabric is my own adulthood.

But there are knots in that fabric, too, discontinuities, exceptions to the monotony. “Traumas”, I guess, though I feel like I understand this word less than most, or if I understand it, I understand it like I understand a word like "love"—in other words, not really at all, and still less so the more experience I have with it, the more awareness I've brought to the word. My traumas, if I can call them that, have all felt strange, unclearcut, self-incurred. My fault: no one else to blame. Just as all the deepest loves I’ve felt have felt strange, both beautifully clearcut and entirely contingent, as if they can be snatched up into the holy air as quickly as they fell into my arms. My failing: and yet no one there to tell me why.

My childhood home. My childhood room.

“NEVER AGAIN", “NEVER AGAIN".

“NEVER AGAIN" was carved once in black ballpoint pen on the white walls behind my wooden bed frame, visible only if you pull yourself up over the thick brown board which extended down the whole right length of the bed.

And also "NEVER AGAIN" was carved once in black ballpoint pen on the brown diagonal of the bed frame itself, right above my head when I slept, above my top right temple to be exact, whispering distance from my right ear.

Shortly after I wrote both of these "NEVER AGAIN" messages to myself, I obscured the one on the wall with two or three applications of White-Out; the one on the bed frame, already fairly hard to distinguish from the dark grain patterns of the wood, I strategically hid with a pillow.

So you couldn’t see either of them, not really, not for the rest of the time I lived in this room, slept in this room, grew up in this room.

Not like anyone else ever came into this room. Cave at the center of the earth.

I was 13 years old then, a freshman in high school. Start of freshman year, start of high school. There were new crowds of fellow students, new possibilities; there was the combination of the two local middle schools, a doubling of the school's population. There was a brand new building, brand new hallways. Hallways and hallways and hallways and hallways—some hallways that I wouldn’t come to be familiar with for years, some hallways that would lose their early familiarity years later as I ceased to travel them, and some hallways that were mainstays, there and there and there again, inflected with each new year, each new class I had nearby, each friend or group of friends I might see along the way or hang out with at lunchtime, and, above all, inflected by the constancy of visitation which would take place if that year I had a locker in that particular wing. My memory, my ghost memories, my dreams—all of these return and return and return to these high school wings and their respective hallways. Never to the classrooms, rarely to the gymnasium (though sometimes to the cafeteria and the library), never to the “smoker’s corner” where the smokers would smoke cigarettes behind the school in the parking lot and I’d hang out with them but insist each day I still didn’t smoke, that nicotine was a fish hook of the capitalist machine. But the hallways. So many, so many haunting hallways.

The high school was much brighter, whiter than the elementary school, the grammar school, and the middle school. My memories of those halls are all bright fluorescent white, bright white walls, whiteness all around, right down to its upper-crust suburban demographics. The elementary school and grammar school were dimmer, darker, a sort of burnt sienna hue, while the middle school was variegated, some halls hued with yellow, some halls colorless, too many colors to have a color, or else the color of “clear”, and this middle school is easily still the strangest educational locale of my ghostly memory. A time of life when everything needed to start making sense, and everything made no sense.

But why am I telling you about the hues of my schools?

I was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.

I got my stomach pumped.

That’s the story I’m telling here.

Let’s proceed with the cast.

Oh, friend: let’s call you “Ham”, your face bovine, your laughter stuttering and staccato and edged with sardonicism, malevolence, easy humor but cutting humor, eyes full of mockery.

Oh, friend: let’s call you “Slouch”, your body not so much thick but swollen, red, red, as if the blood pressed up right up to the visible layer of the skin, and everything about you is simultaneously blissed out and frenetic, a wind-up-toy’s kinetic energy imparted into a sloth-skin suit.

Oh, party in the suburbs: let’s call you “Fear”, your tempos wild, your energies a thick unbearable night leagues deep, leagues dark. A house, a suburban house, a garage—someone’s parent’s gone? a punk rock show?—all-of-it and none-of-it, because all I really remember was that driveway and that front lawn, driveway and front lawn, driveway and front lawn, dark dark dark as an eclipse dusk or a Lynchian night, and the anxiety haunting me like a fever dream.

Oh, girl: let’s call you “Squeeze”, your body tight tiny thin and well-wrapped, urgent and metallic, too much sexual presence for me to even process, much less respond to. Laughs-a-lot, laughs-a-lot—I laughed with? I the one laughed at? Driveway girl, garage girl, tank-top midriff long straight brown hair tight jeans tight girl. Because this is what happens here? I, you, we?

Oh: plastic bottle, let’s call you “Tequila”. Let’s call you “tequila” and “tequila” and “tequila” and “tequila” and “tequila”.

How it started, how it went, how it ended.

How we got there, how we left, how long we stayed.

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

All of it is locked in an endless present. A tape skipping over itself: Squeeze and smile and laughter and tequila, bottle and bottle, Poland Spring, tattered wrapper. Laughter but am I keeping up with the laughter, am I with the laughter or against it, the object of it? Ham laughter, Slouch laughter, Squeeze laughter. 

Fear is the night, fear is house, crowds upon crowds upon crowds, cool kids cool kids. Who all were they? Whose house was this? Do I know Squeeze? Did I ever meet her again? I small boy, weak boy, I boy who don’t belong, what all was this, who are all they, how was all of this to accept me or not accept me, on which terms, under whose orders? Party, fear, party, fear.

And under this knot of memory, this gripping knot, this parsimonious but pregnant memory, I can see nothing more. But I feel something. I feel the swollen pressure of wanting, wanting Squeeze. 

But I was years, literal years away from figuring out how to conduct myself properly with a girl, to not be such a scared little boy, to even know what wanting her might have meant, might have fully felt like, might have been to reach out and cradle my hand around the small of her exposed midriffed back and take her, take her, take her. 

And so, but no, I just felt (I just feel) a sensation in my groin, beneath the very bottom of my stomach: a skein of soft wire, wires as soft as fabric, conducting an unchannelable electricity through a triangle with points at my two hip joints and one at the base of my balls. A triangle inside itself, inside me, coursing a cloistered sexual energy with no outlet, no easy way to transfer this energy from there to my cock, my cock which might maybe know how to express this desire. But no, this desire instead was just contained and wanting, without even properly knowing what wanting was.

I boy with this useless sensation in his pants. I boy with the downcast eyes (how I imagine myself this whole night: eyes fixed to the ground! embarrassment my given name! shyness, non-belongingness, uncoolness).

I drink and I drink and I drink and I drink.

I drink and I drink and I drink and I drink.

I drink and I drink and I drink and I drink.

We end up back at my parents’ place, Ham and Slouch and I. 

These malevolent caricatures—Ham, Slouch—were not the actual friends I brought home with me. They are a gross, Boschian overlay, an associative logic I apply to the night, because that night was not filled with the friends I had with me, but with a sinister and evil energy. 

Squeeze is the only character I remember that night that, in the lacunas and fogs of memory, actually approximates a human wholeness instead of a streak of paint—smudged impressions, as my friends are.

I barely remember my friends that night. They may have shared some blame for all of this, all of what ultimately happened. Certainly my parents assumed they did. 

But, readers, I am sure it was I that opened the liquor cabinet, it was I that suggested of my own free will, maybe insisted, that we raid this liquor cabinet when we got back to my parent's house, this house being the designated destination for us to all spend the night (our smashed capacity for getting back to my parent's house undetected by some responsible adult remains a mystery to me, since we were far too young to drive or to know many older kids who did).

And raid that liquor cabinet we did, cover of night, sneaking into the always-dark/barely-used dining room where that same damn liquor cabinet remains to this day.

All I remember is the room, the liquor cabinet’s doors swinging out from the middle, and you have to close the left one first and then the right one or else the doors would not close properly, and chances are we gave that order-of-operations little thought that night. What we took, what we drank, who knows? Vodka, maybe. Cognac, maybe. By now our erstwhile conduit of intoxication, the party's plastic bottle filled to the brim with colorless tequila, was long gone, smashed and capless and binned someplace.

And I remember nothing else from here, from this opening of the liquor cabinet, from the vodka or the cognac or the whatever we stole.

But that final act of will, that raiding of the cabinet, I remember. Was this a rebellion? I don’t think so, just a desire to double-down on my cool—look at me, I’m shitfaced, and in spite of that I can drink even more with my pals!—or else an expression of my death drive through a headlong hurtle into the oblivion of a blackout: I’m here in a world I don’t know if I belong in, and it’s only getting stranger and harder to know whether and how I do. So let me drink myself so blotto that I forget all this.

I had no idea when I started drinking that night that this would happen, this oblivion—it was my first blackout, though definitely not my last.

But I think an instinct took hold. As I started drinking, I saw the window of experience and consequence narrow around me. The world grew narrower and more myopic, more singularly focused on the immediate present, on the annihilatory comfort of the darkness around it. I intuitively knew I could keep drinking until I forgot myself completely, until my world would collapse so narrowly into itself that memory would fail me. 

That's all a blackout is—the narrowing of time into a space so tight that that memory itself can't even squeeze in.

But I didn’t, unfortunately, forget my discomfort, forget my fear, forget my mistrust, forget my placelessness and unbelongingness. I didn’t forget all the things that I was actually trying to drink myself away from.

And, therefore, after we raided my parents liquor cabinet, and then

???

???

???

???

???

I wake up, and I see a strange orb. It's a hospital, and this is a globe light hovering around my head, but I don't know that, and so I mutter out something like “I am not a number, I am a free man” because back then I had been watching a lot of the 1960s television show The Prisoner and I, anyway, grew up in a household thick with conspiratorial paranoia.

And so I imagine myself strapped to this hospital bed under duress from some nameless entity, which has me trapped and is punishing me for my transgression, which I imagine to be some vague act of heroic political rebellion. And until I wake up a bit, within the span of a few seconds or a minute or a couple of minutes or more, I believe myself a prisoner, I remember myself a prisoner. 

Beyond this, my memory of this hospital is a blank. Though by now I’m awake, and supposedly stay awake, I don’t remember much of anything from there. I probably talk to my folks, who are there at my hospital bedside. 

But even the thought of what we talked about, or, God forbid, remembering the expression on their faces, my dad’s face in particular, is so deeply, deeply shameful that I can’t bring myself to recall it further. I explode with self-disgust; my shame spews from my solar plexus until my whole torso feels radioactive, an awful neon, and I have to look away only an instant after bringing it to memory.

Through the days and weeks following, I fill in some of the question marks: 

we kept drinking in the basement after raiding the liquor cabinet

at a certain point I just go strange, bezoomny, crossed over to some strange other side

hurtling into some madness I didn’t know I had instead of me

my friends try to force me to the bathroom to gag and throw up and release the toxic contents of my stomach

and they wake my parents up, and my dad comes down

and at some point I try to run away

fleeing into the dark wetlanded woods of my childhood home

fleeing and needing to be grabbed, tackled, caught, restrained

biting the hand of the paramedic tasked with getting me into the ambulance

wanting to leave, wanting to fight anyone who would prevent me from leaving

wanting to flee into that darkness

wanting an even darker darkness than I’d already attained in the depths of my blackout.

And that next day back at home, that next morning, wedded to the criminal safety of my bed's bedsheets and blankets, knowing I could stay here as long as I needed, but not a moment longer, that I’d have to go outside and face my parents, face what happened, face my soul-deep shame and their anger, or worse, their abyssal disappointment… 

well, something in me needed to beat them to the punch, to lash myself with my own excoriating punishment before they had a chance to do so themselves, or perhaps precisely because I knew they wouldn’t ever punish me with anything more than an expression of deep concern on their faces—an expression that, albeit, I’d remember for the rest of my life.

So I took out a pen, the sharpest and blackest pen I had.

And I scratched, scratched scratched, carving into the wall, line sharp line sharp scratch scratch scratch scratch.

an N  two lines  two thick middled pillared lines but their tops and bottoms splaying in loops and splinters  nothing approaching a regularity, and the diagonal bar between them  death descent from the top of the first vertical bar to the bottom of the second  plummet plummet plummet plummet SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH.

the E my hand holding the pen in my fist  the pen in my first ready to stab  ready to stab myself if I needed to  right in the heart if I needed to  and I attacked the wall, E, E, NEVER AGAIN, E, E, E  line line line big line! horizontal vertical horizontal horizontal!

V! down fucking LINE fucking diagonal fucking line  line line line meeting line line line carve carve carve carve carve  they meet at the base  they meet at the goddamned base  oh fire and line and fire and line  the splayed out death black of my line shooting lines and wires and loops and irregularities    V!   fucking V!

E again E again E like the first time like the first time oh god oh fucking god

R I barely had it  have it  had in me to make a proper loop   the cuts of the pen into the drywall making it difficult to do anything as graceful as a loop   and so I chunk chunk carved the top bit down and in   down and in and the bottom part up and in   up and in and they cross funny at the outer tangent of the R like a bunch of branches that converge on two sides of an overgrown path but are not grown intertwined together and then DOWN with the front diagonal foot and then DOWN with the big tall big tall down down down down carve carve scratch scratch scratch

AGAIN and oh friends oh friends I carved and scratched and carved and scratched each goddamned letter in goddamned block capital letters in GODDAMNED black and carved them again 
again every goddamned place I could
to tell my goddamned soul self ego will to never fucking fuck up again to never fucking do this again 
to FUCK UP
to WHAT THE HELL EVEN HAPPENED 
to WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME MONDAY WHEN I SHOW UP AT SCHOOL 
to WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME WHEN I LEAVE MY ROOM TODAY  to  what

what? what  what.

--

And now, decades later, long after I moved out, I wonder if my parents discovered these jottings on the wall, these "NEVER AGAIN"s in crazyboy scrawled block letters.

And if they did find those letters, in that moment did they feel the way I did about that moth-bat, that Something? 

Did they feel a helpless disgust, an awareness of a monstrosity in their midst, a recognition that they could do nothing for this monstrosity but let it find its own way to flee? About their own kid? 

Even if just for a split second, even if for no longer than space of time the Something took to untangle itself in my window and find its freedom?

They wouldn't have known when I wrote this mantra to myself, wouldn't have know when over the course of my 18 years I had had an experience so dramatic and traumatic to cause me to write like a madman on the walls of my room, to command myself to never again let something like that Something happen again. 

Or rather, they would have known when I had that specific liquor-cabinet-raiding-fleeing-from-the-house-getting-stomach-pumped-in-hospital experience, but they had no way of knowing if it was that experience, or another one, or one they hadn't the slightest notion of, that caused this writing. 

And, of course, they had no idea what "NEVER AGAIN" felt like, what it specifically meant, what was coursing through my body in shame and terror and infinite disappointment at the time.

Do they still remember, to this day, discovering these words, shortly after I packed up my belongings and went to college? Do they remember that feeling? Their feeling of discovering in their boy, a Something?

Do they still remember (of course they do) that night, when their boy went fleeing into the dark night

to escape from whatever he was trying to escape from, and had to be grabbed back again

to be put back in the safety of the triangle pitch between the window and the screen

the space he was beating his goddamned body against, his invisible soul, his young frustrations, his fledgling wings?

--

But what about me?

What in my soul remains stuck within the confines of this window forever, stuck there with the Something?

What might instead learn to fly away?

I might learn to unremember my Somethingness, I might return the memory of it to the place that originally left its mark on me, there to rest.

I might forgive myself my youth, let go of what in it marked me with shame.

But what of this “might”? I already have.

You’ve just read the record of the exorcism.

This is writing that in its writing is also a performance: the performance of a negation. A memory negated by the excavation of memory.

An exorcism, an exorcism.

The Something is captured in a word, a story.

I, meanwhile, go free.

MIDAS

You’re surrounded by death, and the possibility of death.

It’s nice, owning plants, because you are surrounded by life, by green. But then, when you’re least wanting it to happen—when it’s the dead of winter, and cold, and the skies go dark early—your plants start dying, and then you’re surrounded by both death and cold and darkening skies, and everything goes to shit at once.

Or worse, your plants start faltering, start preparing themselves to die. And you, busy, negligent, and depressed at the dismalness of winter (and, you fear, life generally), you think about whether you ought to look up a video on how to keep them alive, maybe refresh some topsoil, maybe perform a few repottings, maybe change the watering routine, maybe move the plants where there’s a bit more light. These are all things within your power, and with perhaps no more than an hour or two of your time (and a little discomfort when you read articles that label your worst-off plants “tolerant of neglect”), you might devise ways to save not just one but most of your ailing green pals.

But instead they die. You LET THEM die. You walk around your apartment like a Midas whose touch is death. There you find skeletal monuments to your death-giving power—the crisp thin fallen strands of the spider plant, the ash-stark gray of the calathea’s withered leaves, the ebbing strength of the anemic pothos, whose once impressive vine is losing a battle to gravity.

Like fetuses in vats of some disturbed scientist, you keep cuttings in a desperate attempt to propagate plants you’ve already let die. A silver inch cutting, with a long, coiling length of stem crooked around the bottom inside circumference of a water-filled Ball jar, a few fuzzy white roots reaching out from the stem joints swaying like kelp. But the leaves, tinged with sickly purple and green, give you little faith in the possibility of a future rebirth. The tradescantia nanouk with its beautiful pink-purple color that, however, quickly looks gross and unhealthy as the inner green stripe of each leaf grows to dominate, and that’s how the leaves look now, screaming green, with wilted dried patches forming around outside edges and consuming the leaves lower down on the stem.

But you have two separate jars with the tradescantia cuttings, and one of them sprouts a bodacious coil of root from out of its bottom. Hope. The leaves remain delicate and sparse. And you don’t change the water, and there is a thick brackish green to the water’s tint where the root coil emerges thickly and hairily from the obscured stem and circles itself around, following its own unknown Giottoesque logic in pursuit of a perfect circle. And there is a strange translucent mass that also emerges from this root bundle, looking and moving like a leaf except with a fragility, translucency, and mucus-colored grossness that clearly marks it off as something that ought to remain underground, out of sight. But in spite of the whole messy bunch of it, unpleasant for the eye to look at too closely, this natural monstrosity is what hope is, it is what you can bury out of sight under some soil so it can take hold and bring fresh life to this room where seven plants have died in the past year and a half. Seven! And what, maybe 10 in total, throughout your whole apartment? You are become Death, the destroyer of plants. How come they even let you in plant stores?

Maybe some of that death toll doesn’t count if you can keep these ones alive, if you can manage to bring to life a new tradescantia and a new silver inch. But you had to buy a new tradescantia in the first place, do you remember that? Because the first one grew a long vine downwards and then, suddenly, decapitated itself! Long stem, popped right off! Your first plant suicide.

Maybe some of that death toll doesn’t count because the world sent you death. A first set, beginning of last winter, when you went out of town for a mere weekend and the pre-war radiators turned on exactly then, scorching the aluminum plant and angel wing begonia (your favorite, reminding you of an ex you're still not fully over, because you gifted her an adorable polka dot begonia, the sister to the angel wing, the week before she left you). Both resembled over-dried herbs by the time you got back. And you had lovingly installed a shelf over the radiator, expressly to give these plants a platform to show themselves off, expressly, especially, for the heartbound begonia. Then you learned, relearned: heat rises.

Because the world sent you death: the lovely fiery yellow star croton, gradually covered over by white fuzz and sticky sap from mealybugs who clustered their little gray bodies on the stems right below the leaves, at the joints of the stems. They spread to the other croton, also a goner, and they seemed not to care about the Amazonian elephant ear but that one, in turn, was attacked by spider mites. And no matter how many biweekly applications of Neem oil later, no matter how often you carried the heavy pot up to the apartment complex roof with your black KN-95 mask and blue vinyl gloves and cheap beater shorts so the Neem oil wouldn’t fly all around your hands and clothes and mouth with a sudden gust of wind, the mites would return and spin their thin webs in the triangle cut-out in the elephant ears' large and impressive leaves with their thick-veined geometry, and the mites would gradually enervate them.

And a friend who babysat the plants during another trip missed one, so that one also died, and a cordyline “good luck” plant seemed to have bad luck from the get go with dried out, desiccated leaves that never really seemed in the peak of health, and the winter knocked it out swiftly, and when you saw the same plant proliferating down in Mexico the next summer, you wondered how it ever made it up to New York’s lightless winter climate.

And none of any of this would matter, but the death somehow finds a place in your breast, and nestles itself there. It’s a bird whose name is Death, who crows as you go about your day, as you run into your plants both living and dead, a bird reminding you that you are not just a human being who does the things that you do, makes the money you do, has the friends you have—but also a life trailed after by death. Responsible or not, you live in a haunted house, the life not returning quickly enough to replace the death, to obscure it, to remind you that while everything passes, the new is also eternally reborn—hope springs eternal.

But no, not right now. With life comes death, and there are those moments—there have to be—where all we see is the death, just as there are those moments where all we see is the life.

For now, in your graveyard, all you get to see is death.

It’s what you choose to see. But that kind of choice can't be so quickly unchosen.

HADES

I’ve secretly hated MIDAS since the moment I wrote it. It’s felt too melodramatic at times, too glib at others. “You’re surrounded by death, and the possibility of death”! “Fetuses in vats of some disturbed scientist”!

And I shudder every time I think of its use of the second person “you”.

But there was nothing I could change in it—nothing in it let me change it. I couldn’t give up the details of this piece, the tableaux of colors, textures, vegetality. I couldn’t give up the homages to my houseplants that have passed on; I couldn’t give up the universality that felt present in this experience—the experience of killing something, of letting something die, that everyone who has owned plants has experienced. 

I hate it, this piece, but it’s the kind of hatred that means I also love it—that variety of love that’s wormed through with disappointment.

So I refused to change it. Call this lazy editing if you want, but writing well means cultivating the right instincts and trusting them, even when that instinct tells you to not try to write it better, right now. There are infinite seemingly arbitrary decisions to make when writing, not least of which is “how much longer do I keep trying to edit this?”

Only instinct can make sense of those decisions. You can learn instinct better, by recognizing that you made the wrong calls, with time and distance. But in the moment the instinct you have is all you have.

(Oh look, our Fearless Writer takes a moment to soapbox about the role of instinct in writing: look at this man, this writer, this Writer, who thinks he writes so well that he can grandiloquize about the way writing is done! How many people read this publication, writer boy? Huh?)

And so my instincts told me that I couldn’t change this piece, couldn’t make it any better. I could only publish it. It got out there in that published form. And I continued to hate it.

There’s something else that pestered me about the piece, too, annoyed me every time I thought of it. Each time I would think of it, I would remember the title as HADES, not MIDAS. It’s not called HADES. It’s called MIDAS. So my memory was playing a trick on me.

And it’s not hard to see why. MIDAS, the piece you just read, is about death, about a sort of underworld of plants, an underworld that happens to exist in a 4th floor walkup in Brooklyn. Hades, of course, is the eponymous Greek god of the underworld Hades. MIDAS and HADES both have five letters, three of which, A, D, and S, they share in common, including the two most distinctive and prominent letters, which share the same position, **D*S.

But this wordplay is all a rationalization. Of course there are rational reasons why my mind misremembered this piece’s title as HADES. But excuse me while I thrash the straw man that I just created for myself: who gives a damn about the rational reasons why I thought of it? 

Something was telling me something: HADES. Listen. HADES. 

This piece has a HADES in it. It is not simply MIDAS. 

Lurking in it, lurking under it seeking expression, needing to be pulled out and brought to the light of day and shown, shown, shown, is this: HADES. UNDER this piece MIDAS there is a HADES. 

The UNDER-WORLD beckons. It calls. Underfoot, underroot, under each of these plants that populate the depressing menagerie of MIDAS, a dimensional unfolding might reveal precisely: the dead, the dying, the undead. There is a world under our world.

What would I do with it? How would I listen to it? Well, I’d write more, of course. I’d write HADES. MIDAS is no longer MIDAS, but MIDAS / HADES. One appears above the line. One conceals itself below the line.

What am I doing now, then? Am I Dante at his gate of Hell, «Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita», midway through life’s journey, anticipating a descent into the darkest darkness and a witnessing and recording of the same? What led Dante to his gate of Hell in the first place, anyway? What was running through Dante’s brain? What even ran through brains back then, before the romantics gave birth to the vibrant, tortured subjectivity that has metastasized into our present day emotional fabric? (Yes friends, yes, we haven’t thought the same way throughout all times and places, we haven’t felt the same way throughout all epochs and eras, we haven’t reached the end of the possibilities of our thinking and feeling!)

Well, fine friends, I will guarantee you one thing, one innovation I have on Dante, that in this descent into Hell my brain is open for you all to see, my heart is exposed so every goddamn vein and artery, blue and red, thick and throbbing and raw and vital can be seen and heard and watched and witnessed—I seek nothing more than that! As much as is possible! This is the goal, the burning star of my desire. Maybe this is why the second person tense of MIDAS, the “you”, felt like a cop-out to me: I tried to make these failures not mine, I tried to make these emotions not mine, even if unintentionally, even if through the accident of a stylistic choice. 

My plants are my fucking casualties, though. My accidents are my fucking accidents.

And so I embark towards HADES. What has been said so far has just been the line, the gate between them, the lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.

(This admonition applies to all my writing, by the way—get used to it.)

—

But first, a brief aside: On what it takes to listen well.

Listen to me here if you’ll listen to me anywhere fine folks: if there is a God (a spirit, a collective unconscious, a higher-than-us), this is one key place where God (Elohim, Brahman, She/He/They/Thou) is, or at least is witnessable: in these tricks our world plays on us, in the “HADES” that comes up when we think of “MIDAS”, on the uncanny little things and synchronicities that don’t need to have meaning but can have meaning if we decide to give them that attention. The muse, the daemon, in-tuition, in-spiration.

In-tuition: A word originally theological in origin, mid-15c, intuicioun, "insight, direct or immediate cognition, spiritual perception.” The “-tuit” shares the Latin root of “tutor”, tueri: "one who watches over, looks at,” a spiritual guardian.

In-spiration: An in-breathing of breath, a breath which is a spirit. Re-spiration: the breath. Latin spiritus: “the breath of a god.” Circa 1300, “inspiration” meant the “immediate influence of God or a god.”

We forget (as we pack off each day for our jobs that take a certain number of set hours from us and plop a certain amount of consumable exchangeable digits in our bank accounts in return) that our very words latently speak of possibilities that are no longer present to us. This is what it means to listen: to try to hear for such possibilities, that they might become possible again.

(Look at him, Fearless Writer, now thinking he can opine on the nature and possibilities of God, of language, of society! Give this boy a graduate degree in theology, in philology!)

—

Hades is not Hell, that’s worth clarifying.

Hades is more neutral, a place where everyone in the ancient Hellenistic world went after they die. Hell is where Christian sinners go, and therefore contains a moral valence: the good go to Heaven, the evil go to Hell.

I’m almost certainly simplifying this, I don’t know the exact moral-theological calculus that determines one’s admission ticket to Hell or Heaven. But you get it.

This distinction, Hell vs Hades, is also interesting, isn’t it? It’s interesting that there are different natures of different afterlives in different religious and cultural worldviews. It’s interesting that there are specifically different underworlds, bound by the commonality that they are the kind of places we imagine to be underneath us somehow, until we catch ourselves and remember that, no, that just earth’s crust and magma and fracking and stuff, no afterlives to be found down there.

But nevertheless where else is “Hell” but down below, where else is “Hades”? They may exist nowhere at all, but in our imaginations they still possess a location—we still situate them for ourselves, still feel a poetical, phenomenological presence of the place. In our imaginations, Hell is at least as real-feeling and visceral as Des Moines, Iowa, say. More so? Oh, more so.

So what’s in a Hell? What’s my Hell versus your Hell?

And are our Hadeses any different? If not for me, then for you? What’s in a Hades?

The first thing I think of when I think of Hell, of course, is the fire. Everything’s on fucking fire. I think of Hell, and it feels like I am looking at a bird’s eye representation, a painting done from some mountainous vista point, looking upon a few dozen or hundred denizens of this place and their houses, and the denizens are all kind of grotesque and demonlike, they don’t bear much resemblance to whatever human identities they might have had prior to their death and damnation, but they are also all in the midst of fire, or maybe everything’s just suddenly on fire at that moment (does Hell have “flash fires” like we have “flash floods”, everything just bursting into flame for some abbreviated period of time, horribly scorching and disfiguring and racking its victims with a sudden and unanticipatable pain?) Their houses are on fire (do they rebuild their houses every time? or do they somehow stay intact? what are they even made out of? why do Hell’s denizens even need houses? do they sleep?), their roads are on fire (what do they need roads for? do they have torture appointments they need to make? is there commerce in Hell?), fire lingers and hovers in the air, on distant mountaintops, underneath the ground, in canyons and ditches, on rivers that themselves might be rivers of fire (why even bother with the water?).

None of these questions are serious theological questions. They are nothing but questions of the impression that I have, which is a child’s impression, a thought of Hell derived primarily from cartoons and inflected perhaps by a handful of Hieronymus Bosch paintings. I have a notion of Hell that’s like a second generation adult’s grasp of the native tongue their grandparents would use at family gatherings. 

But it is precisely my experience of Hell, what Hell topographically feels like to me. I imagine it as something like a camping ground gone horribly wrong, hikers in their pitched tents and stony outcroppings looking monstrous in the night light and garish tints of the sudden combustions that have overwhelmed the whole place. I forget that if Hell is to be Hell, it must be far, far larger than this paltry little campground of my imagination. It’s got to be many times bigger than our whole world, right? Billions upon billions of people.

I just Googled this to confirm: “How many people have died, ever?” 109 billion, it says. 109 billion humans have died. So 6.8% of the world’s humans are alive today. Let’s say that 50% of people go to Hell (Conservative? Cynical? I don’t know? Get a moral statistician on this one). That makes Hell over 7 times more populated than our entire world. Sprawl and overcrowding’s gotta be a bitch, but what are you going to do? It’s Hell. Don’t like it, move to Des Moines.

And so it seems like Hell’s capaciousness absolutely dwarfs my impression of Hell’s capaciousness. But I suppose this is just a byproduct of how spatial memory works, generally. I have been to Washington DC maybe six or seven times in my life, but I still only have a handful of places that I’ve captured in my topographical memory: a friend’s old place that I believe was on 18th Street (but won’t bother to verify), one living room I visited once in another friend’s girlfriend’s place that maybe was near Adams Morgan (a neighborhood that’s a pure abstraction to me, a void with vague hints of hipster coffee shops), a handful of downtown coffee shops and restaurants, and the Capitol Mall, my individual, personal impressions of which are more than crowded out by the iconically domineering bird’s-eye view of the mall, with the Capitol building at its head, that you see associated with every march, protest, or ordinary photographic representation of the city. 

(How many of our memories are photographic representations of views we’ve never ourselves seen?)

Alright, enough about Hell, what about Hades? Well, Hades is just Hell without the fire, right? Take that impression of the catastrophically combustible campground that formed my mental image of Hell, remove the fire, and what do you have left? Grayness, darkness, rockiness, shitty tents, bad food. It’s just a campground you never leave, no hiking, no traveling, no campfire songs, just hanging out in your tent in one spot eating dehydrated food packets forever. That’s Hades.

And this is indeed my impression. I have the topographical representation of Hell that I already conveyed, that painter’s picture of Hell, and it’s the exact same topography as my representation of Hades, the only difference is that the former is orangeishly full of fire and the latter is just gray, gray, gray.

—

But what does any of this have to do with my plants, my damned plants?

I thought about this connection between my plant piece MIDAS and HADES all morning, about what else this connection was telling me. Not just what made me think of the word HADES (death, the MIDAS similarity) but also what this connection says, what makes it interesting.

I’ve been talking about the spatiality of Hell, of Hades, but I don’t think that’s where the connection is. And it’s also not what’s really interesting about either place, is it? What’s interesting is not the spatiality but the temporality of both.

They are both after-life.

They are both eternal.

They both lay claim to us forever, once they have us.

What does this temporal quality mean in practice, if one were to actually experience Hell, or Hades?

It means the same damned thing would happen day in, day out, every single day, for the rest of eternity.

It might be endless torment and torture, or it might be the relentless grind of a gray, colorless life. The fundamental temporal outlook, however, remains equally bleak: nothing will ever change, there is no ray of hope about a possible future redemption, there is not even a simple momentary break in the basic monotonous fabric of it all.

It’s a cycle, without end, without end, a tight and endless cycle.

Cycles fascinate and disturb me. This concept of cyclicality shows up explicitly in Hinduism and Buddhism: samsara is both the word for “the world” and the cyclical change that defines the world—life, death, rebirth, endless rebirth, endless reincarnation. The “afterlife”, therefore, is just the next life, the next turn of the cycle. And the highest aim is not to reach this afterlife (and the next one, and the next one) but instead to break this cycle, ending our chain of births and deaths, entering a state of nirvana, or emptiness.

Cyclicality, of course, also shows up in simple day-to-day experience. It shows up, for instance, in my need to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. It shows up in my need to exercise, to take a shower, to walk around the neighborhood to get some sunshine, to go to work. It shows up in my need to water my plants, to take care of them, to keep them from dying, to watch them die when they inevitably do.

Cyclicality is the texture of our time. It’s what it is to have days and nights, to have times of the day, to have life. And yet, it’s also related to what Hell is—a cycle with an amplitude of zero, a cycle that has collapsed into a vanishing point and has thereby become a singular eternity. Hell is the apotheosis of time’s cyclicality. The same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same.

And this is my own personal experience: when we’re at our most miserable, we see the cyclicality of the world most clearly. Sadness and anxiety reiterate the same woes ever more frequently. Depression is a jackhammer of woe.

When we are having a good time, riding high, trying new things, having rich interactions with people, or simply just staying happy and motivated by the work we are doing daily, we don’t notice the way that time churns through us, restarts us and restarts us again and again, each day. We don’t dread the many more tomorrows, the many moons that we’ll have to live through for the remainder of our mortal coil. We say, “time flies when you’re having fun,” and a flying feels nothing like a cycling. 

When we’re at our absolute lowest, on the other hand, we see nothing but the cyclicality. The bleakest thought of suicide is always: “this will never end”. Every suicide has that thought in common, I think. Every moment I’ve wrapped a belt around my neck and jammed it into the top of a closet door and slowly slid my feet down until the belt tightened around my neck and cut off my oxygen and began to make me lightheaded, I would be thinking, “this will never end”. And then I would give up the game, recognize how much trauma this action would cause others in my life, how much it would tighten the oscillations of cyclicality for them, recognize how I never have even a fraction of real intent to actually do it because my life is truly not all that miserable after all, open the closet door, stumble away from it, and reassure myself, “it will, it will end.”

(There aren’t so many of these moments, friends, but I did tell you I’d be Big Exposed Beating Heart fucking honest here.)

The thing is, both thoughts are right: “this will never end” and “it will, it will”. It will end, but it also won’t stop ending. It will end, and begin again, and end, and begin again. We are revisited by the same ghosts over and over again, the same miseries over and over again.

The question then becomes, simply, how can we push out those oscillations? How can we keep those ghosts from visiting us quite so often?

How can we apprehend these ghosts as they are passing through the threshold of our house, greet them as warmly as we can muster, and send them apologetically back on their way—we’ve already got too many guests over for dinner tonight, sorry pal, try some other time?

—

My plants had become part of my cyclical awareness. I was a proud plant parent for over a year. Moving to New York was the first time I had more than 2-3 plants at any given point, and I went all the way, filling up my place with 18 plants at its peak. I kept most of them alive, for a time.

And then they died, and I didn’t often know how they died, but as the death started building up I started losing faith in my ability to keep any of them alive, or at least thriving.

I wrote MIDAS with this keen awareness of the cyclicality of my environment, the sad entropy that my plants had fallen into at this stage of winter, and also the cyclicality of my own general life. (New York winters, man, am I right?)

And this all came with a keen awareness of neglect. Because it feels like neglect has been everywhere at this present moment, not just in my neglect of my plants. It feels like it shows up in my relationships, in my friend circles, in my family. It feels like it shows up in the way people treat each other, the amount of attention that they pay to each other, the fleetingness of their commitments to each other. I don’t know if I am the or a source of this neglect in my own life, or a victim of it, or both. I don’t know if this is something that is happening throughout our society at this present moment, if we’re all in a collective sort of crisis. I don’t know if I’m feeling all this simply because I am not a winner, and I am now reaching that phase of my life where this means I need to start bowing out of the whole game—society has other people to run its race, other people who will get to self-actualize and radiate with happiness while the rest of the world grows steadily more miserable.

(Don’t be so melodramatic, you’re not a loser either. Top 20%, maybe? Yeah, ok, I guess that’s still pretty loser-y.)

What does it look like to break this cyclicality? Is it to break the cycles of neglect? Is it to make a new thing, give birth to a new lifestyle, a new look? Think a new thought, write a new thing? Make a new friend, strengthen an existing friendship, text back the friend you forgot to respond to? Buy a new plant? Let go of those plants that haven’t grown, find new ways to care for the plants that remain?

I can buy a whole apartment full of new plants. I can revamp my whole wardrobe. I can fairly well start a new life. I have every goddamned advantage. I’m well educated, I can make money. 

But something about it all never feels like it’s enough. Somehow each of these actions just become their own part of the cyclicality.

Hell, and Hades, are so convincing and compelling for us because we all know what it feels like to see the past and future through the lens of a seemingly eternal, emotionally intractable present. Hell merely hypostatizes the belief we have at our worst moments: it will never get any better. Hades merely hypostatizes the colorless middle: this monotony is forever.

As long as we’re stuck in this cyclicality, the cyclicality will keep eating things up. We don’t even need to touch anything, as Midas did. We only need to look at it, and it turns to shit.

—

Here’s where I’ll get really weird. Right here, at the end.

Maybe Hades is actually a sort of paradise.

Think of it. You are a shade that lacks anything good at all, anything of value. But you also lack the very basis for valuing anything. You lack meaning. And you thereby lack expectation.

What is there to feel neglected about when you lack any expectations in the first place? What can possibly bother you about the relentless cyclicality of existence, when there’s no meaning to make that cyclicality feel empty? How can you even see this cyclicality, when there’s nothing else you’re expecting outside of the cycle?

Only our expectations of what could be different make us think something is currently lacking.

So maybe the dearest desiderata is meaninglessness, is expectationlessness, is hopelessness.

I’m sure this conclusion will disappoint you, readers. I hope it does. It teaches you to have any expectations of me.

Abandon all hope, I warned you so earlier: lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. It’s your problem if you didn’t Google the Italian, not mine.

And yet, can’t you feel at least a little of the comfort I feel, in this abandonment? In our abnegation of hope?

Doesn’t the air feel somehow—clearer? Calmer? Bracingly cold, yet refreshing?

Remember how many woes the world had to endure for the iota of hope that flew out of Pandora’s Box. Maybe if we forswear hope, all the rest of it will disappear, too.

(I wouldn’t hope on it.)

—

Or maybe, it’s precisely the contrast with Hell and Hades that we’ve lost.

In the current halting revival of a la carte spirituality we are seeing among the cultural cutting-edge, concepts of the afterlife are not the first ones to get resuscitated.

And yet, maybe they ought to be. Maybe it’s precisely the awareness—the threat—of a pure cyclicality that might help make us more aware of its opposite.

Aware that right now there’s a bird chirping outside of my window, the sun is streaming in and catching the broad surface of my monstera’s front leaf, my monstera propagated for me by a friend.

Its surface glows with a bright yellow-green, illuminating every outline of its thick healthy veins.

I hear the distant noises of the city behind me, rumbling on, and I feel glad for them, too.

The repose only lasts a moment—this space, my living room, is soon filled with the sounds of a screaming kid from some neighboring house, and my brow knits with irritation.

But what do I expect?

It’s time for me to start another morning, anyway.

How does this feel?

(oh oh)

(get up, sit down, shift around, grab my matcha, sip my matcha, pull the cell phone out of my pocket (too bulky), put it on the bed, pick up the rubber coaster (that I have inexplicably put on my bed), put it next to the matcha mug but not under it (which would take two hands), consider flinging the coaster like a frisbee into the other room (but no, no, that’s not really the best idea). shift around, again)

I’ve written so many words, in so many text files and online docs and publications, and I have so many more to write ahead.

And ugh, they seem awful, a godawful mess of words. I reach out and my hand gets stuck in them, the thicket of them, and they close in around my hand, suffocating it.

My phone rings.

“Hello!” Robot. I should hang up immediately. 

She’s so cheerful though. I haven’t heard anyone’s voice all day.

“Welcome to your new HealthFirst Plan! You should be receiving your welcome packet in the mail shortly. If you have any questions call us at One Eight Five Five Seven Seven Nine One Zero Three Six. Thank for joining HealthFii” *click*.

Why did I write this down? Why do I write anything down?

Why do I tell you about my godawful mess of words, instead of getting on with these words, doing what a good writer does and telling an actual story?

Look at something with me, here:

These questions (“why did I”, “why do I”) have boxed me in, leave me surrounded by the questions. I don’t know the path to what to write next, I don’t know how to get past these questions. This feeling: I’m in a room, and the room has no color—white walls—and I’m in a corner, not even just a corner but a corner that has a nook in it of more and smaller corners, a nook that’s perfectly me-shaped, and I squeeze into the little coffin tucked away this corner. Stuck, immobile, unmoving, cowering.

The questions lumber and flub themselves about the space of this larger room, huge amorphous entities simultaneously blob-solid and pervasive air. They are threats in poisonous purple and neon orange—their movements seem simultaneously natural and alien.

That’s this feeling, that’s what the feeling feels like.

What could I instead feel like?

I could be running down a silent, empty dirt road to who knows where, in the twilit darkening.

I could be floating in the air above some past memory, like ghostly Ebenezer and his spirit guide.

But my felt experience of my writing, here and now, is this coffin-y nook of mine, and these fucking blobby things.

We can feel a million different ways (can we? a million?) and this is just one of those ways. I commit it to writing but I will change and the feeling will change, perhaps only moments from now. The blobs will settle into quiescence, sink into the plain tiles of the linoleum-white floor, disappear into the abyss of my attention. Perhaps they will reemerge elsewhere, at some future moment, but maybe not. We change, and we change, and we change, and all that within the span of a minute or so.

Perhaps, like the quantum subatomic realm, my very observation of this feeling changes it, modifies it. Can I really talk of feelings that consist of aggressive blobs and coffin-like corners? “Backed into a corner” might already be a metaphor we pervasively use, sure, but *waves a dismissive hand* metaphors! Mere metaphors! You’re just making shit up, writer! You’re just writing, you writer! None of this is literal. None of this objective.

But, friends, what if language is everything, like the better philosophers have begun to say? (oh you’re so loose, JG, so carelessly loose.)

“It’s not literal.” Listen to the irony of this etymology: “literal”, “literary”. An etymology that has grown into oxymoron.

What if language is written in us so deeply that it is, precisely, literally, how we feel, not simply how we interpret? Precisely how we are, not simply how we represent ourselves? That we literally are as literature to ourselves?

(Come join me in my coffin-like nook, my pretty!)

—

So, what, am I here to chart the written DNA of feeling itself? Of the language that writes our feelings, our perceptions of the world?

No. Who knows. I don’t know. I’ve only just started writing this. Give me a goddamn break.

[Pinched-down brow    A cutting ‘V’ from the vertex point between the eyes, curving and bowing out along the outlines of the eye-sockets beneath the eyebrows    A ‘V’ like the flying wings of a line-drawn bird:    my irritation, when I spit at you, “give me a goddamn break,” straw man though you may be.]

—

There’s one thing I passed over, in describing my coffin-like crevasse surrounded by malevolent putties in the white-walled room.

This room is also a classroom from my elementary school.

I remember this classroom, and I perhaps remember this classroom often. Which isn’t to say that I deliberately think about it, that I consciously recall it to myself, “ah yes, the classroom, yes yes.” 

No, rather, it haunts me—it’s a specter that’s also a place. It spooks about below the waterline of my consciousness, but just below, a strange-faced, strange-toothed, strange-proportioned sea monster.

This isn’t the only such specter concocted by my memory. I could be walking down the street, and see a chunk of fence, and a ripped scrap of some formerly intact advert, and under my waterline of consciousness will spook about the impression of an alleyway. Why an alleyway? Why think of an alleyway of all places? Perhaps it’s not even one I’ve visited, but only my archetypal representation of an alleyway, derived, for example, from movies that have alleyways, and dramatic scenes that take place in them.

This is just one example. My mind often goes to certain rooms, corners, vistas, or positions in my old high school, or roads in my hometown, or the playground fields of my childhood, or any myriad number of other places besides.

It’s like a “ghost place”, or a “ghost memory”. Do you know what that feels like? I’m asking with authentic wonder and curiosity, because I haven’t heard someone ask this question of me. Sure, we describe things in memory, the contents of memory—an exhilarating hike, the moment you met your significant other—but what I am asking you to see is a memory qua memory, how memory itself feels. I don’t want to simply describe another alleyway for you, because what this alleyway looks like isn’t even what matters; what matters is the unique way in which it haunts me, the way it returns and returns. I talk of ghost places and ghost memories, and they fascinate me in their own right, but I also am fascinated to know if they are in you, and in you, and in you.

I think I am here writing, today, and maybe ever hereafter, because all I want to know is whether it’s the same for you, y’all, or at least similar, inside. Inside there. 

You know, what you call “here”, or “me”, or “I”.

I want to believe, however Quixotically, that by learning this about you I can break outside of my own “here”, my own “I”, to whatever degree, however momentarily.

(ek-static: “standing outside of oneself”)

I Google what “ghost place” is in German, because German is a better language to make words up in. I get back Geisterort, a portmanteau of “Geist” (ghost) and “der Ort” (place, position, locus). And I like it, but what am I going to do with it? I must already be trying your patience, readers. I doubt I can get away with mashing up random German words to explain myself.

And so let’s return to my elementary school classroom.

You know the first thing I think of when I think of this classroom? Printers.

Specifically, those old printers that we had when I was a kid in elementary school. There was this glorious, delightful window of time between when personal computers first became a thing and when they grew into demiurges that shape our entire existence. We did things like play Oregon Trail on those childhood-coeval computers, and we had clunky word processors like WordPerfect and would browse the internet on Netscape Navigator and the most spicy thing you might get up to is finding a free internet provider that would show you ads so you didn’t have to pay for dialup.

And the printers were especially delightful. They printed out sheets of your normal 8.5”x11” size, or roughly the same, but they didn’t have the same feeding mechanisms printers now have. So instead of feeding through a normal 8.5”x11” sheet of paper, the sheets of paper had two tearable strips on either side of them with little square holes, that the printers would use to pull the paper through by means of these rotating wheels with spokes on the outside instead of the inside. And when the page was done printing, you had to tear off the tearable strips from the paper, and of course you’d end up having little triangular tags of paper that wouldn’t neatly rip off, and you’d either have to tweeze those tags off with your pinching fingers or you’d just hand the papers in as is, who cares, I’m like 9 or 10, no big deal. And sometimes when you were done ripping the tabs off and you had these strips of long square-hole-filled paper, you’d fold them up, fold the holes on top of the other holes, try to fold all the holes on top of all the other holes and fail because the bends of the paper get too thick eventually. You learn about the properties of paper, and folding, and holes, or else you’re just a 9 year old kid and you’re bored and random shit like this entertains you and life doesn’t have as many worries and complications and problems yet.

I think of this, of these printers, in this phantom room that I am sequestered in, hiding in the corner of.

And of course, I think of the computers, the boxy things, looking like silly mute little beige TVs, because TVs are always black, and old-school computers are always beige. And both of them looked old-timey and silly back then. They were housed in fat, squat boxes and their screens weren’t flat, they bowed out, convex and soft and funny, something you couldn’t take all that seriously, not like the flat abyssal black of all screens today, screens you must take deadly seriously.

The computer lab of this elementary school arrayed the computers in a room-sized square, with each wall having a long table with computer in front of chair next to computer in front of chair next to computer in front of chair, and then a rolly-spoke-wheel-tearable-paper printer in the middle of each section of these adjacent computers and chairs.

And in my ghost memory it’s completely empty, otherwise, this room.

Completely.

No teachers, no other students.

No me, even, except as a spectatorial presence (a spect-ator within a spect-er of a memory, a ghost within a ghost).

My ghost memory is not of childhood me at a desk, doing a thing, writing a thing, ripping tabbed paper sides off of printer sheets, folding the tabbed paper back and forth repeatedly to ensure a clear tear-off. Nor socializing and being socialized with, nor being questioned by a teacher and answering.

This room is just a room, that’s mostly empty, and if this memory room is ghostly to begin with, it contains an even ghostlier set of computers and printers, barely present, translucent, opacity = 20% or 30%. They occupy the room, but barely, as if they aren’t actually occupying it at all, as if I could walk straight through them and feel little more than a breeze.

This room is just an emptyish room, and if I followed the antechamber of this room (for there was this little chunk of this larger room that you’d start in, a small rectangle of space about a golden ratio-step smaller than the larger rectangle of space, and for lack of a better word I’ll call this the “antechamber”) if I followed the antechamber of this room not into the larger room but rather back into the hallway of the elementary school, I could traverse my way to other ghost places, other ghost memories.

And all of them would be just as empty and unpeopled as this first room was, even if I hopped through all of them all the way back to my childhood home. Down all the still vivid school hallways and rooms I spent days and months of my student life in, down out of all the doors that led to all the outdoor recess spaces, to the lines that would queue for the school buses, to the gathering spots that would aggregate us waiting kids as we waited for the school buses to come, or provide roomier space for us in ones and twos and threes if it was after some after-school activity and we were waiting for our parents to pick us up, sidling up to the curb in their sedans and hatchbacks and SUVs in black and white and gray and red and blue (no yellow, those chromatic moments were reserved for the Jurassic parade of buses, so massively larger than us tiny-bodied students, semi-benevolent monsters that daily ate us and spit us out no more than an hour later, Jonahs each of us and all).

Down, too, through the narrow copse of trees planted on the median that separates the narrow entry part of the parking lot roundabout from the wider area where the cars would park on one side, the side next to the median, and where they would queue on the other, the side next to the school. Up, too, the hill that leads out away from this school and towards home, up the hill that leads away from this elementary school, grades 3 to 5, and past the younger kids’ school, the grammar school, grades K to 2, where my ghost memories are perhaps more limited—to two or three halls, two or three classrooms, to the cafeteria and the library—but hardly less clear and complete and whole for it, and with no hierarchy or distinction that would mark it as belonging to my “younger years” that I don’t, at least, insert through my own post hoc conscious identification.

And then through the town, my childhood town, from street to street to park to street to street to very long street to home.

And the burdens of these memories, these ghostly spaces, ballooning out as I allow myself to wander through them deliberately, with an effort at capturing and describing them—they start to make me ill, unsettled, overwhelmed.

I feel a nausea welling in my throat, a sinuous shock of nerves that crawl from that knot up through the top of my head, thick vines that encage my face and tell me, perhaps, that it’s now time to stop. To stop writing. I have to return to where I am. I need (have needed), for one, to use the goddamn bathroom, and it’s already almost 8 p.m. and I haven’t started dinner.

I feel strange as I get up, a heavy vapor in my brain, in the front of my brain.

Not unhappy, not anything, just… Where was I?

Where am I?

—

Batter my heart.

Batter my heart.

Where am I?

An opera at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. 2008, maybe.

It was my first adult memory of the city I would later live in for ten years. I was an undergraduate in Berkeley at the time. I probably went to this opera with my parents, possibly friends, but I remember neither.

We had the nose-bleedingest of seats, but I remember the performance as if I was pressed right up against the stage. I loved it. A strange opera, entirely in English—aren’t they supposed to be in Italian or French or German? Extremely dissonant, full of pulsating drama.

Before I started writing anything else, today, I heard the stricken voice of Gerald Finley from this opera by John Adams and Peter Sellars, Doctor Atomic:

“Batter my heart, three person’d God.”

“Batter my heart, three person’d God.”

You don’t know this opera, probably.

But you can listen to what I hear right now, in my mind, at least.

I would like it if you did. It’s only 1 minute and 58 seconds. I can wait. Here.

…

…

…

…

That character is J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” right on the verge of the world’s first atomic explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the culmination of America’s Manhattan Project.

The real J. Robert Oppenheimer later said, of this moment, “We knew the world would not be the same”:

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

The real J. Robert Oppenheimer named this 1945 nuclear test “Trinity,” a name which he attributed to John Donne’s sonnets, including this one taken for the Doctor Atomic libretto:

     Batter my heart, three person'd God;
     That I may rise, and stand,
     o'erthrow me, and bend
     Your force, to break,
     blow, break, blow, break,
     blow burn and make me new.

Oppenheimer’s memory: John Donne. The Holy Trinity. Three person’d God. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu. Creation, destruction, preservation.

My memory: a representation of Oppenheimer, John Adam’s representation of Oppenheimer, or “Oppie,” as the libretto affectionately calls him. 

My memory: my fascination with this moment, the birth of a technology representing mankind’s ability to destroy itself completely.

My memory: my identification with Oppie, how moved I was by Oppie’s tortured ambivalence about his role in this birth.

Oppenheimer’s memory: The Manhattan Project. Alamogordo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

Oppenheimer’s memory: The Bomb.

—

What is there in my memory, for you? What is there in any memory that the holder of the memory (the “I”), can convey to another (a “you”)?

It isn’t your memory, this memory of an operatic Oppenheimer. You can’t be touched by it as I was touched by it. You won’t have it come back to you at random moments of a day, revenant and beautifully haunting.

But can you get close? Can you get any of it? Greater than nothing? Can you get something filtered through me, through my impression of it? My representation of it?

Can I give you the full corpus of thoughts the memory has provoked, or its infinite mesh of visual images and connotations and associations and inflections, or the inexhaustible little imponderables that continue to plug the memory into my broader life and identity?

No, of course not.

But can I give you anything at all?

—

My heart swells. Uncomfortably. It’s hard to take. 

I don’t know why.

I feel filled with it, and it feels like it has nowhere to go.

Except, maybe, here, into what I’m writing, into what I intend to write. But that relief is so much slower than the relief I want right now.

Relief. Relief from.

A feeling.

Break, blow burn and make me new.

An unprecedented explosion.

Break, blow burn and make the world new.

An eternity stretching ahead of us.

Break, blow burn and make us new.

And yet.

And yet, here we are, stuck between the old world and the new.

Are we going to be ok?

That’s all I want to know. That’s all I really want to know.

Am I going to be ok?

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