I’m just doing some test content to see if this works the way I want it to. If you’re seeing this it means I’m still working on it! I am trying to get the footnotes to work exactly the way I want them to, which is to appear on the right there and look that way. I wonder if this is going to work. But maybe this time it will.
Here’s more text, and maybe an embedded image?
I was in high school. I was in the writer’s club. We read stories occasionally. I read one, which I rarely do. It was very long, but I read the whole thing. Afterward, the teacher said “thanks for the bed time story.”
I was devastated. I thought it was worth the time, but I was alone. My fellow students made no reaction that I can remember but subtleties were lost on me even then (less so now, but I’m still slow on the uptake).
I also remember somebody in high school throwing a very long softball pass to another student who had turned away at the last minute. The ball hit him squarely on the top of the head and bounced so high.
My memories from high school are like that ball, and I never see them coming. They hit me and I fall down. I am concussed.
These colliding memories are never nice memories. I have buried the nice memories deeply, instinctively, like a cat burying its turds. The bad ones all float at the top like watermelons. They take turns on the slingshot.
I don’t know how to rid myself of these. I don’t think I ever will. Maybe they serve a purpose. Maybe some day I’ll put them to use.
I have been obsessed lately with my age, with everybody’s age, with age and getting older. I have to turn the self view off on Zoom calls because I can’t stand seeing the bags under my eyes, or the silver in my hair. My beard gets whiter and whiter. My trademark, the half white mustache, just looks like an old guy’s mustache now.
This is just the top of the worry mountain. There are so many lurking under it–it’s too late to publish any more writing, it’s too late to have a fulfilling romance, it’s too late too late too late.
For a while after my father died, in the quiet moments before bed, I was aware of a presence. It stood just over my right shoulder. You know how you can be in a room with another person and even without looking at them or speaking, you can still feel them there? It was like that except bright and warm and directed straight at me. In my mind’s eye it was a sparkling sun, spilling all over with love.
Unlike dreams and hallucinations, it does not flee when I try to recall it — I remember it fully and completely. It was not either of those things but altogether different. I feel it return even now, as if to answer the shame and worries, or maybe because I’m writing about it. It brings calm and quiet.
Is it something in me that my grief has let loose? Is it the fading of the day’s anxieties and the encroaching night, my favorite time? I don’t know.
Something that I can’t explain is that it feels like attention, and like any other kind of attention, it waxes and wanes. I can feel it leave and then occasionally return. I’ve never felt this before, and I think I’ve felt most things.
I don’t know what the heck is going on there but I’m not going to dismiss it or try to think about it too much. It’s there and it’s beautiful and, to me, it’s a kind of magic.
I wrote the first draft of the first short story I’ve written in many years. It still needs work, but by god I did it and there it is. I even printed it out and got out my red pens for the revision, like the old days.
Also, Emmitt is my steadfast friend.
Let’s talk about baby steps. Let me hand it over to Julia Cameron:
“Doing any large creative work is like driving coast to coast, New York to Los Angeles. First you must get into the car. You must begin the trip, or you will never get there. Even a night in New Jersey is a night across the Hudson and on your way. A small beginning is exactly that: a beginning. Rather than focus on large jumps—which may strike us as terrifying and unjumpable—we do better to focus on the first small step, and then the next small step after that. “Oh, dear,” you might be sniffing, “where’s the drama in such baby steps?” Think about that for a minute. When a baby takes its first step, it is very dramatic.” Julia Cameron, Walking in This World
I already knew all that but I needed to remember it again.
I have discovered George Saunders recently. I don’t know how I wasn’t aware of him before. Someone whose writing I enjoy called him a master of short stories, so I bought his most famous book and read it really fast. His writing appeals to me. It’s literate without being stuffy or grandiose. You never get the sense that he’s showing off. I really love Victory Lap, which you can read behind a New Yorker paywall.
I also worry that his popularity is like a Thomas Kinkade kind of popularity, and I’m just a rube with bad taste. That’s okay, too. I’m a sucker for a good story, and Saunders provides them.
I hesitate to hit publish on this and bless (curse?) your inboxes with this. But I have multiple irons in multiple fires and I need to finish something and put it into the world where other eyes can see it and remind the universe that I’m here and I’m still writing and I haven’t given up yet. I’m still here.
My saving grace, my heroic flaw, is that I can’t give up, even when I probably should.
Hi, it’s been a while. I haven’t written to you since December, just before Christmas. A lot has happened since then, but a lot of happening keeps happening, so it doesn’t feel like much to talk about.
We all have pieces of our lives that are like this:
— — — — /BIG\— — — — >
from any point after the BIG thing, we can’t imagine what our lives were like before it. I mean, we might have photos or videos of what our lives were like, but that person don’t really resemble the person who’s looking at them.
They might as well be completely different people, twins we never knew we had, except in addition to sharing mothers, we share memories too. Take this dude, for example:
That guy was freshly divorced, working for an insurance company, and writing lots of fiction nobody will ever read. He took that photo with a camera that was high tech at the time (three whole megapixels!) but looks hilariously old now.
This was me, I guess, but I don’t really have a lot in common with that guy. I’m better at being a person, now. I’m less sure of many things than I was then, but more sure of different things now.
Here’s the same guy taking a very gauche mirror selfie 16 years later:
I’m a cat guy now? Unthinkable in 2006.
I’ve had a lot of those BIG things happen in the last few years. Some you know about. Some you don’t. But they all happen to all of us, and they’re all very BIG. How you handle the BIG things depends on the nature of the things, but the biggest part of that process, the most important part, is to learn that the person who made it through those BIG things deserves our praise. We must be our own biggest fans.
Even when you look at yourself in a mirror, you’re looking at your past self. You can never look at yourself exactly as you are at any moment because the light that makes your reflection bounces off you, and then the mirror, and then enters your eyes and then passes, eventually, into your conscious awareness.
The secret story of mirrors is that they are always a little out of date. They’re newspapers from a microsecond in the past. And, as anybody who’s been through a surprise BIG thing knows, even a microsecond can expand to such an enormous size that it takes up more space than a thousand entire days before and after it.
A very small thing can be incredibly significant, and a very large thing can be utterly ignorable. What matters more, the purring cat on your lap or the mountain on the horizon?
One of those could disappear and you would never notice.
The difference in time is tiny between the person in the mirror and the person looking at the person in the mirror, but that doesn’t make it insignificant. There is infinite power and change and transformation in that tiny microsecond, every tiny microsecond. Don’t worry if you missed one. The next one is coming just behind it. Every day, every hour, is filled with a billion chances. Be patient, and be kind to the person you were, the person you are, the person you will be.
Don’t go yet, I’m not done giving advice
This will be short, because I have to pee, but I want to share with you two things. One of them is a thing I learned to do, but that comes next. The first thing I learned was how to be satisfied with sufficiency. One reason I didn’t write one of these little newsletters is that I never felt like I had enough to say, until I realized that any amount I have to say is exactly the right amount. You’re reading it.
The second thing happened to me just today, and I wish I had learned it sooner, but you can’t learn everything at once, especially about yourself. It has to come in digestable portions or you’ll throw it all up.
Anyway, this is what I learned. My therapist knows that I tend to process things better when I write them, so the efficacy of this relies on me writing it down. It doesn’t matter what happens to it after I write it down. It’s the writing that matters.
I hereby revoke [everybody]’s right to have any say whatsoever on my moods, my opinions, my rights, my activities, or my work. They are officially and immediately banished from having any effect on me.
You are free to replace [everybody] with the person of your choice. I wrote it down for a few people, none of whom are allowed to place their opinions before my own. Well, they can do whatever they want in their own brains. This one is mine. I’m in charge here.
You are in charge of your own mind. Nobody else has any right to you.
I leave you with a song I love:
I went to bed the other night with joy in my heart.
My phone, and other devices I use, have immediate and unlimited access to millions of books. Books are my favorite things in the world. I always prefer things in book form over other forms. It’s not a contest—I love movies, music, and short stories, but books are my first and greatest love.
The joy I felt came from the vast piles of books I have not yet read. I will never run out of books.
I have spent the last 18 months depressed. I am in the deeps of it now, though some days are better than others. Don’t worry, I’m fine. I mean, this is part of being me. It happens. I say “I’m fine” because I’m not the kind of depressed that leads to self-harm. I always feel the need to say that, because I don’t want anybody to worry about me.
This particular bout of depression is notable not for its intensity but for its length.
Two mornings a week, I don’t have to get up for work, so I sleep. I sleep 12 hours, maybe more. I have almost no appetite, yet I’ve gained every pound back that I had lost just before it started. I am disgusted by the very sight of myself.
This is not the largest I have ever been, but it sits differently than it did. Rather than distribute itself around my body, it now sits reliably in my abdomen. I feel more like Orson Welles than I ever have, because I resemble him more than I ever have.
Orson was exactly the same age as me when he recorded this interview in 1960.
He was big, brilliant, big. There are other huge differences between me and Orson, but it’s the similarities that plague me.
Enough about that. There’s more to depression than the physical features. There is a spiritual toll, too.
The things that brought reliable joy no longer do. I find it hard to motivate myself to do anything that doesn’t keep the lights on.
Work is something I still am able to do, enthusiastically, as I find a great respite in the reliability and challenge of work and it is only during the work day that I feel distant from the cloud that follows me. Sidebar: I’m reminded of the many stories about David Letterman and his intense self-punishment and loathing that he endured in every hour of the day that wasn’t spent at work.
Spurts of extra motivation go to cleaning. I’ve never been very messy, but I’ve also never been very clean. The litter box and the bathroom and the kitchen and the living room and the laundry all get cleaned regularly, and when those tasks are completed I reward myself by doing nothing. I’ve gotten very good at doing nothing.
I work, and then nothing. I don’t do anything.
I spend many nights nights on my phone, reading articles on Reddit and Twitter. I have friendships that go unattended, hobbies ignored, movies remain unwatched, tv shows unbinged.
Everybody talks about how great a show is, and, rarely, I might watch a few episodes. I watched the entirety of Squid Game, but I found myself entranced by the difference between the subtitles and the dubbing (I watch everything with subtitles on, because I’m much more annoyed by loudness than I am by closed captions).
I didn’t really even watch the show for the plot, which I found unremarkable, or the characters, which I found familiar, or the message, which I found pedantic. I watched one episode, the one with the glass bridge, in bursts. I fast forwarded through most of that episode. The drama and suspense of the game itself didn’t thrill me.
I don’t say that to brag. I don’t think it’s a good thing to watch a popular suspense/thriller show and ignore everything except the subtitles and the dubbing.
When people who are being treated for depression and anxiety are stable and adequately treated, the brief bouts they get of their symptoms are called “breakthrough.” I have breakthrough happiness. It comes in brief blasts. It can come from many places, or, indeed, any place. My cat is a frequent source of joy. My family. My friends. The usual suspects. But it’s elusive.
I have felt lately that some of the fog is lifting, though I am reluctant to celebrate too early. Early signs are good that some of these struggles are becoming less struggl-y.
I wrote a bunch of new words for my second novel, which is almost done and needs only a great opening chapter (and then a great deal of editing, which I enjoy). That was impossible only a month ago.
I gained weight, yes, but I really just returned to the weight I was before. What is more alarming than the weight I gained was that I lost it in the first place. I was living under a different cloud then, one of anxiety. I was an anxious wreck. I didn’t eat. What was terrible for my happiness was great for my waistline. I would say it was good for my health except it most definitely was not. My current weight is bad for my health, too, and I have already made great strides to getting closer to where my body wants to be.
My life was extremely different when it was bad, and I am still trying to fix some of the things I broke. I fear that some of them never can be fixed at all, but that’s life.
I fully expect that the next edition of this newsletter will be about something other than me, because I’m frankly tired of myself. It took me weeks to write this newsletter, and I push publish with the relief of having finished something.
I direct you to the most recent League of Lensgrinders, where we discuss our depression specifically in the ways it intersects our creativity. We took most of 2021 off, but my friend Evelyn Pryce and my brother Robert Long Foreman are still excited about the League. It’s far too much fun for us to stop altogether. Frankly, I don’t think I could stop it if I wanted to.
I leave you with one of my favorite songs. I used to listen to this with my father, who is in my mind a lot lately. He’s still around, but, you know, getting old. Parents tend to do that, if you’re lucky.
In October of 2016, I published my first newsletter. Since then, I have finished 1 blog post, 0 short stories and 0 novels. This newsletter is the only substantial writing I’ve done that wasn’t work-related (where I do a lot of writing).
I can’t blame COVID-19, because that’s only been an impediment for 2 of those years. I can’t blame my brain tumor, because that didn’t happen until 2018.
I have not been writing the newsletter instead of those other things that ostensibly amount to my raison d’être, but the evidence is clear: I have not been writing fiction. I have only been writing this.
Sidebar: I have also been writing work-related material, as my primary job is as a content writer. The muscle gets exercise.
I started out writing these newsletters as an exercise to keep my juices flowing. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the intervening years since I wrote the first issue, which I called a pamphlet. Here it is:
If this newsletter seems disconnected, that’s because I’ve been writing a lot of different things and said to myself “this is newsletter content!” and then set it aside. I collect it here tonight for you to enjoy and to clear my drafts, as it were.
In 8th grade or so, we were given the choice between band and gym. Terrorized by communal showers and sports I didn’t understand, I chose band. I didn’t play an instrument during middle school band, but I was there for every practice, and I took a baritone home every night and enjoyed the travel of the keys for a few minutes before putting it away. During recitals, I pretended to play. If anybody noticed that my tuba never made a noise, they didn’t say anything.
For reasons I don’t remember, I played football in 8th grade. We never scored a touchdown. I played for an entire season and never learned what a down was. I didn’t understand any of the rules. I ran fast when they told me to, and threw my body against people I was told to throw it against. I was told to listen for audibles. I didn’t know what those were. I faked it. Nobody noticed.
I played on offensive, defense, special teams. I was good at it. I hated every minute.
The list of things I hated about the experience is also a list of waypoints through my 12 year old mental geography.
A List of Things I Hated About Playing Football
– competition
– proving myself
– “hitting the showers”
– running laps
– doing pushups
– committing violence
– having violence committed against me
Sidebar: I have a pet theory that one of the reasons football persists as a national game is because of the armor you have to wear. Sorry, I meant to call them pads. Whatever you call it, it still looks like armor. Every major civilization develops warfare to the point where people wearing interlocking plates heave themselves against other people wearing similar gear.
Like some instinctual regression toward armor, we’re drawn to both wearing it and watching people who are wearing it fight each other. Eh, it’s not much of a theory.
It won’t be long until we grind the gears
But carry on, we’re on to something here
– The Surprise Knock by The New Pornographers
Difficult People, the late tv show about my kind of people (I don’t think you’re supposed to like the leads, played by Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner, but I do anyway) made a whole episode around the idea of the participator. Billy starts dating a guy who eagerly volunteered to be a magician’s assistant while on a date at a magic show. Billy and Julie, the annoying, obnoxious, judgmental, insensitive main characters, are shocked and dismayed to find that out about somebody who they otherwise like.
I am not a participator.
I have always said that there are two kinds of non-participator who doesn’t like to participate in “can I get a volunteer from the audience” stuff: the “aw-shucks-please-don’t-pick-me-ha-ha-I-actually-love-it” and ruin your day non-participators. I am better than I used to be in that I will smile and go along with it but I won’t volunteer and I won’t actually do anything. I am not a Yes And kind of guy. I’m more of a “please don’t talk to me.”
I went to a private school in West Virginia for high school and junior high. In seventh or eighth grade, we were forced to spend a week at a camp with limited amenities run by hippies. It was not the best environment for 13 year olds.
I don’t know who might have thrived there but it’s hard to imagine that five days of “roughing it” to private school kids under the watchful eye of crunchy, early-90s granola crusties had much positive impact on anybody, including the crusties.
I had to do this at least five times that I can recall, each time for a week. This always took place during autumn, because that’s when school was, and it was always extremely muddy. There were communal showers.
These are three of my main memories:
1. five days of not bathing, as a teenager. The alternative, showering with other boys my age who were way farther along in adolescence than me, was unthinkable
2. a fellow student in my grade, shirtless, muscular, walking around the “dorm” (barracks) popping his pimples at the rest of us
3. another student, widely considered the strongest and toughest of all seventh graders (not the same one as number 2), picking his fellow classmates out of the crowd, at the cheers and encouragement of his peers, and bestowing upon them wedgies so atomic that they qualified as neutron bombs—I have memories of watching from behind a pile of firewood as he held up a poor victim’s underwear waistband, to the cheers of the rest of them
If there is a canonical story for non-parcipators, specifically those of us who were at the mercy of crusty granolas in the early 90s/late 80s, it’s this:
I was likely identified early, by the crusties (also called camp counselors or whatever) as a Shy Kid who kept to himself.
Whenever we were presented with an option to do something “fun” I always receded to the back. When participation was required, I was nowhere to be found. They were crusties but they were smart, and they clocked me early. They identified me as a Shy Kid Who Needed To Come Out of His Shell.
They initiated a Fun Game. They had a deck of cards and anybody who drew the one single Joker card in the deck was designated the “assassin” who was supposed to privately signal the other students (I think with an “ok” sign) whereupon the victim was to theatrically “die” as if struck by God’s disfavor or whatever. This is a great idea for bringing a kid out of his shell, I think. I don’t know if it would be tried today, but back then it made sense.
Having identified me as a Shy Kid, they arranged for me to draw the Joker and thus become the kid who would be the center of attention. They thought this would bring me out of my shell. It probably worked very well on the shy kids before me.
They had never encountered a Foreman before.
This story illustrates how we Foremans, in our larval stage especially, approach events or situations that others might find invigorating, interesting, or exciting (situations and events you might also call “new”).
This brother started at Linsly at around the same age that the rest of us did (I have four brothers, so you will never know which one I’m referring to unless I name him, and I won’t do that here).
Every day, this Foreman left the house and walked to school, for the first few days of his first year (this private school, with uniforms, is within walking distance of our house). He came back every day at the appropriate time, and seemed fine. Nobody suspected anything was amiss.
A few days into this incredible first week of school at a new place with new people where he had to wear a uniform, my mother was approached by the man she had hired to do some plumbing work in a part of the basement Where Spiders Are (and where my mother resolutely refused to go). It was not the spiders that kept my mother away from the work that needed to be done but the plumbing. It was the rare home improvement task that was beyond her.
Sidebar: my mother’s ability to do seemingly everything and anything related to running and maintaining a household is probably a big part of why the gender roles modeled for me are anything but traditional.
The plumber came up from the basement and said “ma’am there is a young boy wearing a suit in your basement.”
My brother, the Foreman, instead of walking to school, hid in the one place in the house he was pretty sure my mother would never look for him. He spent all day there and reemerged at the end.
No muss, no fuss, no tantrums, no drama. He completely, imperceptibly, declined to participate. Faced with a new school in a new place, he said “No, thank you” and quietly extricated himself.
The thing about tantrums and drama is that they bring attention right back to the person who’s throwing it. By making a big stink about how you don’t want to participate in something, you are, by default, participating in it.
I did not know that these crusties were trying to get me to participate, but it wouldn’t have mattered. No attempt to make me participate, no matter how clever, was ever going to work.
Instead of reluctantly shrugging my shoulders and joining in the fun and realizing that I could fit in anyway, as it should have gone, I took one of my few friends aside and asked him if he wanted to be the “assassin” instead. I didn’t want it.
If it was all secret, and I believed what they had told us — that it was completely random that I had been designated the secret center of attention, then nobody would know.
A perfect avoidance! My friend agreed and proceeded to “assassinate” our fellow classmates instead of me. I retreated to anonymity.
After his first few assassinations, the game was canceled. One of the counselors specifically singled my friend out, having identified him as the assassin, and said “you’re not supposed to be the assassin.”
The game they these granola crunchies had concocted, perfectly tuned to bring a shy kid out of his shell, shattered against the power of one kid who absolutely, unequivocally refused to join. They had never before encountered an anti-participator.
I don’t relate this to celebrate my family’s inveterate rejection of group activities. It’s not universal to every Foreman in every scenario. I’m using a shaky throughline among members of my family to make a point about myself. I don’t like being an anti-participator. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I think it’s okay, maybe even good, maybe even great, to participate in some things.
I very strongly dislike essentialism of any kind. People are unique. Who they are, where they were born, where they grew up, etc. can inform their lives but they don’t define them. I would never assume anything about anybody for what they are, because I don’t think those things are very instructive. It makes for lazy assumptions about people.
Having said that, when my 4 year old nephew acts like a Foreman, I feel a palpable delight. We’re inevitable.
Anyway, next issue will have a lot less navel gazing.
One of these days, I will dance again. I have danced a few times, but I have too much shame and a poor body image and other associated inhibitors to do so as often as I am dancing in my head. I love listening to dance music, especially anything that sounds like this:
The original title of this was “A Dirge for the Dead and Dying” but I thought that was a little too morose for what I wanted to write today, and not reflective of how I feel and also not the kind of energy I want to pop into peoples inboxes on a Sunday evening. Be warned, though, I’m going to talk about death, because it’s on my mind today, especially, of all days.
Today is the seventh year since my nephew, Miles, died in a car accident. He was alone but listening to music, and it was late at night. I have put myself in that car with him many times since. I sit with him as the end comes, and he’s not alone at all.
My brother, his father, memorialized him with a website of our memories of Miles and the gifts he gave us. I encourage you to visit anonymousish.com today and think about that golden-haired boy with us.
In accessing the mourning part of my tapestry of available feelings, I am reminded of my friend Elicia Parkinson, who also died young, and recently, and suddenly, and without telling anyone. Of course she didn’t tell anyone, she didn’t know it was going to happen, though I suspect if she had known she wouldn’t have mentioned it. I wrote about her when it happened and this is a part of what I said:
Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there.
We are blessed to experience time linearly, at a rate of sixty seconds per minute. Everything that has ever happened has happened already, and is currently happening. Imagine a long string held vertically, as if to entice a cat to play. Every event occurs along that string, stacked vertically, from the beginning of the universe to its end. Everything ends, you see, even the universe.
I take great comfort in this. Endings are built into the fabric of everything. Order and chaos are not opposed forces, they are best friends. Order knows that chaos wins in the end, but it still stacks up the blocks that it knows chaos will one day knock over. Even though chaos claims everything eventually, order keeps us safe until we can’t be safe anymore. Endings are inevitable, but the greatest glory is for those who fight for a lost cause.
Our office had a lovely little superlatives survey that culminated in a lovely little awards ceremony at the company picnic. It was a nice way to show our mutual admiration for each other, and more reasons for me to feel so lucky about where I work. Here’s my award:
Believe it or don’t, I’m known around the office for my relentless positivity. Having been faced with some challenges of my own helped me get to where I am, but it does not originate in a hospital bed. My secret is that this positivity does not come from that stuff at all but, instead, comes directly from Miles.
Miles and I both struggled with anxiety and depression. My tattoo is a constant reminder of the light in the darkness. It was pulled straight from a page of writing Miles had done. It stuck out to me because it was on a page by itself, as if he flipped over whatever he was working on and scribbled this down. It’s a mantra. It’s a prayer. It will be with me until my own story ends.
Well, unless my arm gets bitten off by a shark or bear or something. I suppose I could also lose it to a necronomical infection and chop it off with a chainsaw, and then replace the lost hand with the same chainsaw, but I’m not really a cabin-in-the-woods kind of guy.
Last night I was deep in my feelings (the bad ones), and then I happened to look at what day it was, and I instantly felt like a very large ass. I smacked myself (mentally) and told myself to pull me together.
It is tempting to dwell on the things we don’t have. It is easy to see another person enjoying what we wish we had and feel envy. It is especially infuriating to see someone squander something we value.
The cure for this is to make a list. It doesn’t have to be a long list. In fact, it can be just one thing that you have: rent money, a healthy body, a partner or a pet who loves you, etc. There is somebody in the world, probably not very far from you, who would love to have what you have. If you’re alive and reading this, I can name at least one thing for you.
When you next find yourself in your feelings and feeling down about whatever it is you’re down about, remember that you are alive, right now. Rejoice! Now is all that matters, and right now, you’re right here.
That’s something to celebrate.
If you know me, you know why I picked this noun to begin my first pamphlet in almost exactly a year (the last pamphlet was distributed on July 30th, 2017). On the week of Thanksgiving in 2017, I had surgery to remove an ependymoma from my brain stem. Ependymomas are considered cancerous because they can metastasize into other areas of the brain and spinal column, though they are not usually deadly. They are extraordinarily rare in people my age. Lucky me.
Trepanning
I had two brain surgeries (fun fact — I keep misspelling “surgeries” as “sugaries”). Tumor surgeries are not typically emergencies, but mine was. I spent four days in the hospital leading up to my operation because the neurosurgeon only does operations on Mondays and I went to the emergency room on a day that was not a Monday. This lag time also allowed my body to absorb roughly a billion gallons of strong steroids that shrank various structures in my brain to reduce the swelling from the backed-up cerebrospinal fluid. This kind of swelling often kills people when it comes on too quickly.
This might be one of the reasons why we occasionally find skulls up to 7,000 years old with big holes in them. The tumor on my brain stem caused a backup in the flow of fluid in my ventricles, which swelled up and got bigger, causing a condition called hydrocephaly. The pressure caused “intractable” headaches (the hospital’s word, not mine), which had become so debilitating that I nearly fell unconscious from the blinding pain. It was that incident that made me go to the emergency room the final time.
Had I been alive in 6000 BCE instead of our current age of miracles, I would have happily submitted myself to the intrepid protodoctor who thought, correctly, that a feeling of pressure in my head would be relieved by releasing some of that pressure.
The origin of the word “trepanning” is not, as I thought, from “tree panning,” or the practice of hacking open a hole in a tree and letting the sap run out, which is not even called that. I don’t know where that connection in my head came from, but there is a word for using words wrong.
Malaportmanteau
I just made that word up. “Malaportmanteau” is itself portmanteau that combines “malapropism” and “portmanteau.” A portmanteau is a word that combines two things to make up a new word (“cheeseburger,” for instance) while a malapropism is a word that is and sounds like another word, except used incorrectly and usually used humorously. Malapropisms are fertile ground for puns, so I love them and hate them.
Trepanning is not even a portmanteau, as I thought, thus my new portmanteau, which means “a word confidently mistaken for a portmanteau.” The word “trepan,” the root of “trepanation,” is apparently derived from the greek word for boring, like this newsletter.
That was a pun based on a homonym, which is not a malapropism. Homonyms are a variety of homophone — two words that are spelled and pronounced the same but mean two different things. Another kind of homophone is a heterograph like “to, too, and two,” or words that are spelled differently, and mean different things but sound the same. English can be confusing.
The Most Difficult Language To Learn
Don’t get too excited, it’s not english, which isn’t that difficult. This, according to linguists and other professionals who know such things. I’ve only learned one language, though I took three semesters of Russian in college, in a powerful case of Past Jim overestimating how much schooling depressed and anxious Future Jim would be willing to tolerate (thank you, Lena, for passing me when I most definitely didn’t deserve it). Thus, you could say that the most difficult language for ME to learn was Russian.
But the answer to the question is: it depends. For people who speak Standard Average English (or “unaccented” American english), the answer would be different from someone who grew up speaking Estonian, which has 14 verb cases. Bora, a language from Peru, has 350 noun genders.
The concept of gender in languages is confusing, as noted most famously by Mark Twain, who wrote this about German, which only has three:
Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.
This is true, if one thinks of gender in language as a biological sex thing, when it’s not that at all — it’s closer to the concept of genre, with nouns of similar shape or size or whatever occupying the same linguistic noun classification. Language is a living and moving thing so some languages have different classifications. My favorite is Dyirbal, which is spoken in Australia, and has a genre of nouns that includes “women, fire and dangerous things.” Brother, tell me about it.
The answer to the question was answered by The Economist, in an article from which much of the above was derived (you didn’t think I actually knew all this, did you?), is a language used by a dwindling number of people (it was about 1000 people in 2008): Tuyuca, spoken in the Amazon. I’ll let them explain why we would have so much trouble with it:
Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.
The Economist article ends with a sobering reminder that one consequence of our age of technological miracles and globalization is the gradual disappearance of languages as people drift toward a common tongue. Different languages make one think in different ways, and that kind of diversity of thought is something worth saving. Language is culture, too — if we lose one, we lose the other.
Hot Snakes
It’s one thing to learn a language, it’s another thing to speak it. Metaphors are fraught and all too common. If I were to tell a person who’s just learning english that I wasn’t feeling well and I had “the hot snakes,” they would probably be extremely confused. That’s a bad example, because it confuses lifelong english speakers, too, as in this memorable outtakefrom Parks & Recreation, which you’ll have to watch if you want to know what hot snakes mean (if you haven’t figured it out on your own already).
生肖
Speaking of hot snakes, I was born in the year of the snake, according to the Chinese zodiac. Specifically, the year of the fire snake. According to one website, this is what being a snake-person means:
In Chinese culture, the Snake is the most enigmatic animal among the twelve zodiac animals. People born in a year of the Snake are supposed to be the most intuitive.
Snakes tend to act according to their own judgments, even while remaining the most private and reticent. They are determined to accomplish their goals and hate to fail.
Snakes represent the symbol of wisdom. They are intelligent and wise. They are good at communication but say little. Snakes are usually regarded as great thinkers.
Snakes are materialistic and love keeping up with the Joneses. They love to posses the best of everything, but they have no patience for shopping.
Snake people prefer to work alone, therefore they are easily stressed. If they seem unusually stressed, it is best to allow them their own space and time to return to normal.
In other words, it’s nonsense. The above could describe anybody. Having spent many years in school with people who were born in the same year as me, which is how the Chinese zodiac is determined, I can confidently say that lots of people don’t have all of those characteristics.
As somebody who knows about these things will surely want me to know, the Chinese restaurant menu version of the Chinese zodiac that I’ve cited is merely scratching the surface. The true Chinese zodiac goes much deeper, going from months, to days, to hours (which are called your “secret animals,” which is awesome). It’s still meaningless.
A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.
James Randi on Nova
Early Jim lived in the dark ages before the internet (people often forget that on-demand video is an extremely new phenomenon), so he derived entertainment from shows like Nova. The best episode of that show probably ever concerned The Amazing Randi, a magician turned professional skeptic. It was because of that, and Carl Sagan’s books, that I am so annoyingly skeptical. This segment, specifically, inspired the person who wrote that stuff about the Chinese zodiac you just read.
Snowmelt by Zoë Keating
I wrote this on Facebook so I’m just going to repost it here: Zoë Keating, whose husband died of cancer that began in his brain, released this EP recently. They were together for 16 years. She calls it “four songs from the end of a long winter.” It’s such a gift to be able to follow an artist through these emotional tribulations. The song Possible, for example, has a note of hopefulness enveloped in melancholy and I can’t stop listening to it.
Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.
I’m writing this for two reasons.
1) to educate.
Many friends of mine have been in long term relationships (LTRs in online dating parlance) and are fascinated by how single people find other single people in 2021.
2) to vent.
I have come to the conclusion that nobody really enjoys online dating, and this is a way for me to complain about it. I think my complaints are weighed appropriately and not entirely baseless, but I encourage conversation!
Tinder was invented as a normie version of Grindr. Much lamentation is made about “hookup culture.” I can’t help but read some of this consternation as coded (and maybe unintentional) homophobia, since the “hookup” we twist our pearls about was, for most of modern western history, the only way our gay brothers and sisters could be anything resembling their true selves. I won’t do the gay plight the disservice of trying to summarize it, so I will stick to what I know.
Grindr was uniquely suited to the traditional bathhouse culture that gay men cultivated through centuries of persecution, finding mates in private underground clubs where they could be pretty sure the people they encountered were looking for the same thing they were.
There was no depth. Nobody was there looking for a relationship because relationships were punishable by death. They got what they could when they could. The digital version of this is a photograph and a few sentences of demographic information, maybe with some light contextualization.
Grindr was a way of simulating that process in a way that the traditional hetero apps simply weren’t doing. If these big dating websites weren’t outright banning same-sex relationships, they weren’t exactly endorsing them, either. Grindr allowed gay men to connect to other gay men. I doesn’t matter whether they used these connections for sex, as far as an external observer like me is concerned, because any relationship was (and in many cases still is) illegal.
As happens so often, the hetero breeders like me saw how much fun everybody else was having and tried to replicate it. Tinder began with the premise of Grindr (photo, a couple sentences, looking for sex) but for heterosexual men and women. There were other features of Tinder that gestured toward equality between the sexes—for example, both people had to select the other before any messages could be exchanged. Other apps try to limit the ability of men to be awful (because hetero men are always awful) by using a similar mutual matching, with an additional layer of security: a man cannot message a woman until she messages first.
If you approach these apps with a deep certainty of your own inadequacy then you will be rewarded with constant reinforcement.
This reinforcement does not come from anybody intentionally. Nobody is being careless with your feelings. But it feels like it.
Online dating has become a literal version of judging a book by its cover. The old adage also included the word “don’t” but online dating proudly and enthusiastically encourages users to judge the books only by their covers. A book cover gives you basic information: a title, an image, maybe a blurb. Tinder does the same thing.
To continue the metaphor, you can flip the book over and see a little more information. You might get a few more photos, or a whole paragraph. Don’t expect more than that, though. You won’t get it.
You swipe. You are presented with a photo and a blurb. You can immediately swipe left (reject) or right (accept). If somebody you accept also accepts you, that is a “match” and you can move to step 2.
For most men, this is rare.
I’m not complaining! This is how it’s always been, for a long time. Men are granted vast privileges by society, and one of those is the permission from society to be horny. Men are allowed, and expected, to approach women and initiate the conversation. There are many, many exceptions to this.
If you ask most men on online dating (OLD, in the parlance of online dating) what their experience is like, they will tell you that it’s a lot of right-swiping (thumbs ups) with very few matches.
Women will largely report the opposite. A woman on OLD gets a huge number of likes and it becomes their unenviable duty to sort through the masses of suitors for one that they find desirable and/or not a creep. This criteria is different for every woman, despite what some male users of online dating like to pretend.
That sounds fun, like a game, you might be saying. Sure, it can be. Except
Even Match.com, the old, reliable, venerable boomer of online dating, has succumbed to swipe-fever. If you use their app on your mobile phone, you’ll find the familiar interphase of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid and all the others. Every app does this, now. You might get more context from an app like Match or OkCupid, but the fundamental method of selecting mates is consistent across all platforms: here’s a photo, here’s a sentence they wrote about themselves, now decide. Left or right, you swipe. If you reject them, you never see them again.
This is the way of things in 2021.
Forgive me for the strident tone against these men, but their complaints are offensively reductive. Even a casual perusal of message boards dedicated to such expansive concepts as “relationships” will show you that these men are hopelessly cowed by the perceived superiority of men with abs.
Because these men lack imagination or, apparently, empathy, they are obsessed with the men they perceive as better than them. They see tall men with muscles and flat stomachs and think that these are the reasons why those men are successful and they, short schlubs, are not successful.
They attribute their success to physical characteristics because that’s all they see in the women who interest them. Attractiveness is all that matters to these men, so that means only men they perceive as attractive are successful in getting the girls they also think are attractive.
my skepticism more or less centers around the objection: after the age of 13, what woman actually cares about abs or muscles on a dude
— rax ‘leads with her crotch’ king (@RaxKingIsDead) August 12, 2021
Rax King is a good follow on Twitter, and she’s a great writer. You can read the whole thread to get context, but I think this tweet gets to the larger point I’m making: none of this shit matters to most women. She’s agreeing with me—it’s the rare grown woman cares about abs or muscles. Some might care about height, but if a woman rejects you because of how tall you aren’t, why would you be interested in them? I would apply this logic to every rejection: why obsess over somebody who rejects you?
Even the word “reject” feels too harsh to describe the action. It’s much harder to reject somebody than it is to swipe left on them. You can’t engage the feelings part of yourself in the process of using these apps, because if you do, you can all too easily interpret a casual swipe in either direction as far more than it is. A swipe feels like a slap. It isn’t.
I think this is why so many people hate it. I say that because I think that’s why I hate it.
The swiping method is great for its original intended purpose, but because every online dating app uses it, people stop using these apps for what they’re useful for (hookups) and try to bend the paradigm into a relationship-finder. This is bad. This is a mistake. It’s also inevitable.
The curve of dating apps in the hands of heterosexual westerners always bends toward finding meaningful relationships.
These apps aren’t good for that for all the same reasons it’s good for finding a casual hookup. If all you care about is one night of fun, you probably don’t care about their thoughts about having children, their religious preferences, or even what they do for a living. These things all matter tremendously when you’re looking for more than that. You can get that information on some of them, but it takes a few taps. This is not a process that rewards tapping.
Yet still, nearly every profile I see has some version of the statement “I’m not looking for hookups.” I’d say they’re using the wrong app, but since they all do the swipe thing, I would be wrong.
I had the most fun and the most success on Craigslist. This was many years ago (14?) and I could just write weird things that would get people to email me. I had a lot of success with that approach, for obvious reasons. I define success as a lot of first dates and a few relationships that I value. This is a great example of the stupidity I was posting. I was young and foolish then, I feel old and foolish now. But still, that foolish idiot had a dating app where being a creative idiot was rewarded.
When you’re faced with a situation you don’t like, you have two choices: participate or opt out. If you want to get a date online, you play the swipe game. That’s just how things are right now.
Dating online now is not how it always was. People will reject the swiping thing eventually because it just isn’t conducive to the pillars of strong relationships: sharing, affection, mutual understanding, chemistry. If your only criteria for the people you date is how they look, you’ll always end up disappointed. It’s fun at first. But it doesn’t last.
After the swiping thing runs its course, something else will replace it and we’ll have something new to complain about.
It’s true that Fiona Apple radicalized me against the myth of a forever partner, but I wrote that over a year ago and maybe I’m ready for something else. I dunno. Life is short and I am simply trying to enjoy it.
It’s been working for me so far.
Tell me I ain’t got no chance, I say “screw it”
Suddenly I’m not sick
Won’t you be and bring me home
I haven’t written one of these in a while. I haven’t wanted to. This is both good and bad. Looking at the schedule, I see the last one went out on April 18, making it almost two months.
Everything creative in my life has stalled the last two months. This is not unusual for me in times of change. As I readjust my life to external factors, I find it takes a little time for my internals to catch up. During times of high stress, my brain closes doors, battens hatches, locks windows, ties down the furniture, and other things that prepare it for lots of shaking around and instability. Things that aren’t required for survival are set aside.
The change in my life has been mostly change to my body, at least microbiologically, in that I was fully vaccinated from COVID-19 about a month ago, when the second dose of my Moderna vaccine has replicated enough S proteins to give me sufficient protection from our generation’s hundred year plague.
That change in me is happening all over the country. Some people are avoiding it, but that’s between them and their anxiety, and I am not one to challenge anybody’s reluctance. If you’re looking for hectoring or defending, you’ve come to the wrong place. I suggest Twitter for that experience.
The number of new cases in the area where I live, Allegheny County Pennsylvania, was 19 yesterday. This number has gotten smaller and smaller even as more places have opened up to maskless, breathing, disease vectors (also called “humans”). Just for the sake of contrast, the highest daily number for the county was 1074 in December. A thousand people six months ago were tested for COVID-19 in one small geographical area and that number is now 19. This is merely two years after the disease was discovered.
We are extremely lucky to live when we do. All evidence points to us having had a working vaccine within months of the discovery of the disease. How amazing! How thrilling!
I had a beer with other humans in an enclosed bar a few nights ago. We had masks, but we didn’t wear them. This reemergence of a social life and the freedom to, say, go to the store without wearing a mask, is as life-changing as the lockdown was.
It’s okay to take it slow when going back to society. It’s okay to carry a mask or even wear it whenever you feel like you want to. The lives we lost to COVID-19 are contrasted to the thousands of lives we didn’t lose to influenza. While there might be controversy about the effectiveness of masking and social distancing to preventing COVID-19 spread, there’s no question those are effective in keeping the flu from spreading.
I spent a lot of time inside. I don’t just mean I spent that time in my apartment, I spent it inside my head, as this newsletter can attest. I don’t think it made my life any better, but I think I know myself a little better than I did before. I spent an hour every two weeks talking to my therapist, which probably helped more. I spent a lot of time thinking about dying, but I think I understand why. If the answer is obvious to you, you’re probably right.
I think about brains a lot. This was true long before my own brain tried to kill me, and it continues to today. I started reading a book about human intelligence that has burrowed into my mind so thoroughly that I have to read it a few pages at a time or it gets to be too much to process at once. It’s called A Thousand Brains. It’s also about AI but I haven’t gotten to that part yet.
You have two brains. One is the old reptile brain and the other is the newer, fancier brain. The latter one is called the neocortex, and it covers our other brain like a catcher’s mitt on top of a baseball. The brain evolved from the inside out, layering advantageous new stuff over everything that came before it.
Evolution is a lot like that. We mutate, and if the mutation helps us survive and pass our genes on to the next generation, it stacks on top of all the other mutations that preceded it. Even the mutations that aren’t really helpful anymore stick around way longer than they’re needed. Our genes are not just a list of instructions for building a copy of us, they’re a map of what we were, where we lived, and what helped us survive.
We can see a similar thing happen in our minds, in a way. We grow up and learn behaviors and ways of thinking about things that help us survive. I have an overactive anxiety response to certain stimuli and part of my own evolution has seen me carry some of the things that comforted me as a child into adulthood.
I will write a lot more about this in my newsletter about this kind of stuff. It’s called Middlebrow and it has a fraction of the readers that this one has, which is funny because a fraction of a small number is still a fraction, but I will keep mentioning it here because it’s just like this newsletter except I use middlebrow culture stuff to talk about stuff.
I saw the trailer for the new Ghostbusters movie starring Paul Rudd and a bunch of kids. It was interesting to me because Ghostbusters has become entertainment for children while the original movie, which came out in 1984, is most definitely not for children. It’s full of jokes about being a grown up. I would say it’s a science fiction horror comedy about the unnamed pre-midlife crisis many of us experience when we change careers unexpectedly.
But it’s also a movie about a bunch of guys using lasers to capture ghosts. They have cool technology that looks neat and familiar but it’s not futuristic. Just look at this, a ghost trap:
It looks like something you could make in your garage. I love this aesthetic, though I don’t know what to call it.
Anyway, if you watch the trailer for the new Ghostbusters movie, it’s clearly made for kids. Grown ups love stuff they loved as kids. It’s tempting to think this is a recent development, because everything feels recent lately, but it isn’t.
Star Wars was made by George Lucas as a combination of all the stuff he loved as a kid (Flash Gordon, westerns, etc.). As my pal Matt recently showed on his twitter, the famous truck sequence from Indiana Jones is taken from something Spielberg loved as a kid, a western:
Happy 40th anniversary to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, best action film of all time, and happy 7th anniversary to the time I found this stagecoach sequence in Michael Curtiz’s VIRGINIA CITY (1940) that Spielberg copied/paid homage to with the truck sequence.https://t.co/2BlrkR58Fg pic.twitter.com/QQBaNsWJCg
— Alternate Histories (@AltHistories) June 12, 2021
I wrote all that stuff above to say this: we all carry stuff, some of it our own, some of it from other people. This stuff affects how we think about things, and it’s not always our fault or even in our control. The best we can hope for is to be better than we were before.
But it takes effort, and compassion.
Be compassionate to yourself. Do it for me.
Imagine it: a professional wrestling ring, full crowd going nuts, two wrestlers, sweaty and exhausted, shake hands over the limp body of an enemy they just defeated. Beneath them lies the body of Jim’s Fiction Writing. They are COVID and Low Self Esteem. They are bad guys.
Suddenly, music starts playing from the arena entrance and fireworks go off and entrance music starts playing for the old, reliable, long-lost team mate, Jim’s Unlikely Resolve. He charges into the ring and kicks the crap out of COVID and Low Self Esteem and pulls Jim’s Fiction Writing to his feet. They embrace.
Credits roll.
As I said to my pal Andrea recently, there’s something that happened to me when I got my first COVID vaccine. It was a Moment, one of those little events that doesn’t seem like much at first but soon reveals itself as a moment of change that leaves ripples in everything that happens after.
I felt as though I had written about it before and I had, in Deviations on Death.
I got the first dose of my vaccine recently, and it immediately made me glad to be alive. The ruminations on death dissipated.
This feeling settled in even more after I got my second dose a week ago. I realized that much of my reluctance to start (or finish) big personal projects (like my fiction writing) was embedded in a deep sense of impending doom. What was the point in working on something I would never finish before the world (or I) ended?
It feels a little more unlikely that the world is going to end imminently, but I think even this is a less enthusiastic rebuke of COVID-19 than these vaccines deserve. The vaccines are a tremendous achievement. The technology behind them signifies a humungous upgrade in our ability to fight our ancient enemy, the microbe.
That’s something to celebrate. No man lives or dies in vain.
I used to watch professional wrestling at two major points in my life. The first was as a kid, when the WWF became so enormous. I think everybody my age watched it.
The second was in college. Watching wrestling was something I did with my friends. It was fun to get invested in the silliness. Left to myself, I didn’t keep up with it, and my interest faded without their knowledge and enthusiasm informing and supporting my own.
The wrestling business is one with a sordid history. I would argue that it’s still sordid, and will remain so until it joins the 21st century. Considering the average lifespan for a professional wrestler is around 50 years, it’s in dire need of reformation.
Just taking a look at the lexicon of wrestling terminology is a dive into its origin as a carnival act. I find the word “kayfabe” alone is incredibly useful in other contexts and I’m delighted when I can use it and the person I’m speaking to understands it.
Finding out that wrestling wasn’t “real” was like learning the truth about Santa Claus or how babies are made.
While I don’t have an active interest in wrestling anymore, I appreciate the nonsense and glee. It exists as a weird nexus of performance and athleticism that doesn’t really exist in any other form. You can be unathletic and still be a great wrestler, but being a good athlete alone isn’t enough. Great athletes can excel in their sports at the highest levels without any charisma at all, and charismatic people are all over other entertainment industries. Wrestling is a combination of both.
I am not a Phish fan (which seems to be a whole identity), but there are a few songs that I like, and I like them a lot, which makes me a fan of a certain kind. This song, Sample in a Jar, came up in my algorithms somewhere, and it brought my feelings screaming back to college, which is probably what made me come up with the wrestling imagery. Anyway, I listen to this song and it paints a series of pictures in my mind.
I often come across these paintings-made-of-feelings coupled with memories of things that never happened, and I shared one in my last newsletter. That one was wholly positive, but my memory-paintings of college are fraught. I went to college at WVU in the 90s, just as the city of Morgantown and the school’s administration were cracking down most heavily on the party school reputation.
That gives you an idea of what kind of time it was, but the sense memories are largely unrelated to the parties. What characterizes most of my college experience was a lot of time spent in my own head, which should come as no surprise to anybody reading this.
The first one is a lot like the one from last time, except the feelings aren’t entirely good. There’s an edge of anxiety around it. Like the last one, it features a room in a house as its main component, a house that I’ve never been to and only exists in my imagination. There are blankets on the walls (as decoration) and handkerchiefs over the lamps. There’s a ratty futon against the far wall. It’s an attic and smells like one, but also like incense and weed. I feel a vibrating anticipation, but it’s not the good kind of anticipation, more that I’m expecting a shoe to drop.
The other one is the House Party Vibe, which is captured perfectly by this Freezepop song. It’s exactly my experience at most house parties at WVU, though often the band was replaced with a DJ or just a stereo with a bunch of CDs in it.
That song also reminds me of one of the most intense panic attacks I’ve ever had, on the bottom floor of 123 Pleasant Street, right by the big chalkboard and blessedly close to the bathroom. It was triggered by thinking a girl was interested in me. I wouldn’t become aware that my experience was treatable for another few years.
Anxiety was my constant companion for most of college and a lot of high school. It wasn’t until after it (around 2002) that I finally started to find a way out of it. I was desperately anxious, specifically, about intimacy and romance and everything around it. I was utterly adrift in social contexts of most kinds but the culture around male and female dynamics was particularly obscure to me.
I went to the biggest party school in the country for five years, spent 1/3 of the time drunk, and never once even kissed a girl. That milestone didn’t come until my mid-20s, after therapy and medication. I also didn’t learn to drive until that age, too. That probably tells you something.
For many years, I thought I was pathetically a late bloomer. In my 40s I know that I was only a few years behind. I didn’t have the high school experience that most others had. I never had a girlfriend. I was barely aware of any of it until my freshman year at WVU, when sex was everywhere around me, and then it was extremely on my radar.
Rather than meet those blips with joy and experimentation, I was repulsed and horrified. My reaction had nothing to do with sex or the people who were having it but with my inability to imagine how I was supposed to go from a crush to a relationship. The trajectory seemed so easy for everybody else. I didn’t know where to begin.
I got better, though. I learned a lot of it in my therapist’s office. That should tell you a lot, too.
Here’s another one of my patented pivots back to what I was talking about before. I didn’t invent the term but I like it and use it often. I use it as a reason (you can call it an excuse if you like, and you’re not entirely wrong) to keep myself abreast of all the pop culture stuff happening that wouldn’t normally ping my radar.
I find a lot of value in knowing about things I’m not necessarily interested in. When I make a certain kind of reference to certain people about certain subjects (it’s different for everyone), I’m always shocked by the reaction people have to push that stuff away (“I’m glad I don’t know what you’re talking about!”).
I don’t feel that about anything. I admit that some of the more obscure sports-related minutiae don’t do it for me, but I’m still up for learning. I find other peoples’ excitement infectious, and I really enjoy hearing somebody talk about something that interests them.
I bring it up only because I actively have to resist my urge to excuse my enjoyment of wrestling as a younger man, as if anybody needs to justify liking what they like at any point, ever.
I didn’t write any fiction today but I did edit the first hundred pages of my second novel and it’s shaping up to become something I might actually be proud of. Wish me luck.