James Hazlett Foreman

Author: jim

  • I Sing a Song of Solitude

    I love the passing of time

    I love being by myself. There is no place I would rather be than alone. I almost don’t even care where it is, as long as there’s nobody else around. 

    I wouldn’t mind being in London again, though. 

    Lindsay took that picture because obviously I was busy taking a picture of myself in Trafalgar Square. 

    I don’t mind having my cat around, though I am at my happiest with nobody else near me, even an animal with very few demands on my time and attention like Emmitt. Knowing that I have something to take care of, even if it’s a cat who also likes to be alone, keeps me just on the wrong edge of complete relaxation. It’s a wonder I can sleep with this animal on me. 

    Having largely worked from home this year, I would never call that alone. I have coworkers and bosses and clients and people whose jobs rely on me doing mine, which means they need a way to contact me. Even the loose tether of an email keeps me from feeling completely alone. Zoom calls and Slack channels eliminate solitude entirely. 

    The only time I am completely alone, and utterly unavailable for almost any contact of any kind, is the 30 minutes I spend every year inside an MRI machine. The only person who can communicate with me is sitting in a room nearby. They tell me when the machine is going to start its clamoring. It’s very loud. I have to remain completely still during the process, because the machine is taking a picture of the inside of my brain. I have a perfect record of never moving once during my MRI. I am extremely good at not moving.

    I know a lot of people find this experience upsetting, but not me. Like a little rabbit wedged into his little den, I am content, even with the noise.

    This subject has taken on fresh significance to me today because Tom Hanks said solitaire was a waste of time.

    When I first saw the headline, I thought it was going to be about how you shouldn’t waste time doing leisure activities that have no value beyond their entertainment value, an argument I am used to hearing. That wasn’t exactly what he was saying, as he surprises us at the end of his essay with a line about playing cribbage instead, because that was something he played with his son. 

    So he wasn’t saying “don’t waste time” he was saying “if you’re going to waste time, don’t do it alone,” which I think is also bad advice. 

    I am hostile to arguments against both leisure time and doing nothing, both of which I find extremely enriching and defend against all comers. I’ve heard it from success monsters who see all time spent not pursuing a goal to be a waste. I’ve also heard it in the Lake Woebegone old time wisdom like we get from our Tom Hankses and suchlike.  

    It’s perfectly okay to waste time and accomplish nothing completely by yourself, because being alive, simply breathing and taking up space, is a shattering rebuke of the darkness. Life is a delicate, precarious tightrope. It is valuable and precious beyond any measure. Every thought, even the tiny thud of “I’m thirsty,” is a fanatical celebration of quantum improbability. The simple, passive experience of any of our senses is a riot of chaotic yet coherent chemical reactions that, individually, are no more complex than a spark of static on your sock but collectively create symphonies in our heads. I find it impossible to consider a living, thinking, being as anything less than a precious miracle. 

    I didn’t expect to rhapsodize about the preciousness of human life but it’s all wrapped up together for me whenever people talk about wasting time, or suggesting that anything could be a waste of time. Nothing is a waste of time. In fact, if I were to ask you what you’re doing and you said “wasting time” you are probably actually doing something pretty remarkable. I would define remarkable as literally anything. 

    A rolling stone gathers no moss, unfortunately.

    The saying I invoke above implies that gathering moss is a bad thing. But I think a rock with moss on it is magnitudes more interesting and more beautiful than one without it. I submit that if we were rocks, moss growing on us would be something to aspire to. Look at these rocks with moss on them. Gorgeous!

    Loneliness is not Solitude

    Anyway, back to my point: I love being alone. It is perfectly possible to be alone and yet not lonely. I wrote before about the loneliest man in the world, and I’ve also written about how being alone both delights and depresses me, on alternate days. I’m not unique. I’m sure this happens to everyone.

    For every quiet evening spent with a book or just with the patterns of cracks on the ceiling of my bedroom, and the meandering tributaries and capillaries of little thoughts and diversions, I have nights where I wish that I was sharing that space with somebody else. I crave intimacy, the kind you get when you are completely yourself with someone else who is being completely themselves. 

    Being alone and being quiet are my favorite pastimes, and they don’t much lend themselves to expanding beyond the frontiers of familiar feelings. 

    I’m not worried about it. Life is a gift, even the life I spend by myself, and I won’t squander it. I fully intend to spend the rest of the night doing exactly nothing of any worth, with nobody else but my cat.

    A memory I can’t get out of my head

    I’ve had this memory in my mind for most of my life. I return to it when certain moods hit me. It’s a memory of something that never happened. It’s a collection of sensations and images that stabilized into a specific tableau. 

    A sparsely-furnished house, a bedroom, a woman in a dress standing at the window, a breeze blows past her with the smell of something floral, maybe the outside air, maybe a fragrance she’s wearing. The feeling this makes in me is peace, ease. I’ve found my place.

    It ends there. It’s like a painting made out of feelings.

    I include this sidebar purely as a counterpoint to the solitude thing. I am happy being alone, but I find myself emerging from the pandemic, however slowly, as a person who wants to share his space, if only for a moment or two.

  • Deviations on Death

    Alliteration is Accidental

    I wrote the following a bit ago, and I’ll get to why, but I’m including it here mostly as I left it. At the end, I’ll go back to Now. The first bit, about death, is from the Before (a month ago, or slightly more).

    —

    I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it so much I tweeted it:

     

    Where Does This Death Come From?

    When Rush Limbaugh died, a lot of people were talking about death, how he deserved to die, or that they’re happy that he’s dead. 

    While I intellectually understand why somebody might be happy when certain people die, and I agree that he was a garbage person, I could not participate in the glee. This is not a new insight brought to me by life’s meandering surprises, because I think my relationship with death has always been complicated. 

    This is also not an indictment of their reaction. I was never a target of Limbaugh’s awfulness, even remotely, so I have no horse in the fight. That probably influences my reaction. I was never his target, so I had the privilege of not having an opinion. Being free to not have an opinion on something is a privilege I have only recently come to understand.

    Death Was Cool?

    When I was in junior high, I would intentionally write extremely violent or gross things for vocabulary words (for example), knowing that they would get a reaction. These would invariably involve death or murder. I understand now that it was attention-seeking behavior, and not a sign of something deeper that was happening in my life or in my mind. I wasn’t a threat to anyone, I was just a middle child with crippling social anxiety who sought the most efficacious opportunities for attention. I think my teachers knew that, too, and entertained me as much as they could. 

    I reign with my left hand, I rule with my right

    I’m lord of all darkness, I’m queen of the night

    I had been caught up in thoughts of my own death. I am versed in mental health, so I know what “ideations” are and I was not thinking about killing myself. I’ve never been tempted to end it all early. Suicide has never approached my radar.

    I feel like that’s important to disclaim early in any writer writing about death, and his own death particularly, especially when he has a history of writing about his challenges with depression, cancer, etc. I’m fine. I was just thinking about death.

    Vivid Ideations

    My thoughts on my own death centered around these two scenarios. Skip this part if you might be bothered by graphic depictions.

    Scenario 1: me, in a violent accident. Blood-soaked whiskers. Red snow. It scared me. When I thought about driving somewhere, that image invaded my mind. It passed as the anxiety-induced imagery it was. It was not a portend. I have had so many anxiety-induced “glimpses” into the future, since my very youngest memories, that know none of them can be trusted. Exactly none of them have ever come true.

    Scenario 2: how my family and friends would behave in my now-empty apartment, after my death. If I were to leave here and die, I would leave behind this apartment exactly as it is. Having experienced this from the point of view of a loved one exploring the crypt-like remnants of another person’s life, frozen in time, I can easily spiral into obsessive thoughts about what my heirs would encounter. 

    “I found another power strip that wasn’t plugged into anything!”

    “How many socks did he have?”

    “Why is this here?” X 100

    “How much did he spend on this?”

    They will see the things I bought or kept in case I needed them in the future, in a future I will never see. They will comb through my diaries, and journals, and find things in them that might make them blush, or cry, or remember me fondly. They would divvy up my belongings though I think most of this stuff would go to the auction or the garbage. I could write more about the value of another person’s valuables, but I would not blame anybody for getting rid of anything they inherited that they felt no connection to. I know, from experience, that there are plenty of things remaining after a person dies that not every single thing they touched has the same weight. I value and treasure items from Posy and Miles, and they will always have more value to me than anything with a price tag on it. 

    But Not Yet

    I’m here, and taking up this space, and eating this food, but some day I’m going to leave this place and never come back, and my family will have to go through it all. What will they think? What will they find? 

    I am confident that they will find nothing scandalous. One joke among people my age is “delete my browser history before my mom sees it” but I could show my unfiltered browser history to everybody who ever mattered to me and not be even slightly concerned or embarrassed by what they would see. I am both very predictable and not scandalous.

    Dying To Live

    I read a short story about time travel. The time travel actually didn’t really matter to me as much as other parts of the story that I found far more compelling. Within this story about time travel was a secret society of magic-practitioners who discovered the confirmable existence of an unavoidable afterlife. Heaven and hell were real, and you went to one or the other when you died.

    Because they were a secret society of very nasty people, they weren’t very interested in spending an eternity in hell, so the majority of the story involved them looking for a way to obliterate themselves. 

    I don’t just mean “obliterate” in the physical way, I mean it in a wholesale spiritual way. Faced with an afterlife of suffering, they were looking for a way to make themselves cease existing, as if they had never existed.

    The complete erasure of identity or selfhood that we all fear awaits us in death was something they actively wanted, because oblivion was preferable to eternal suffering. The story is a novella I read called Salvage and Demolition.

    Not Existing 

    The sudden non-existence is frightening to us, as creatures who have existed. The fact that we may some day return to the nonexistence we experienced pre-birth is so unsettling that we have created entire belief systems around it (or, about it, at least). I don’t know if religion exists because of a fear of the obliteration of permanent death, but I wouldn’t be surprised. 

    Death is a funny thing 

    It happens to everybody. Nobody on earth has ever escaped it. It is a fundamental part of life. There are things that live a long time, but they die eventually. Everything has a lifespan, from bacteria to stars, measured in minutes or billions of years. 

    This inevitability has made it creep into every culture, in some way. The more appealing cultures, to me, embrace it and celebrate it, or at least they don’t try to hide from it. 

    The religion of my upbringing, presbyterianism, teaches that we are all destined to die, and then wake up again (?) in the afterlife we deserve determined by 1) how much we believe in Jesus and 2) whether we were good people, though 2 was not as important as 1. This thinking led to Pascal’s Wager and other inadvisable digressions.

    Consciousness is a tenuous experience

    I spent a lot of time watching documentaries about science and the brain. They were looking at human brains in an MRI, trying to find the source of consciousness, of that experience we all have, that sense of “me-ness,” that identification of who we are and how we relate to the world

    We like to think that what we experience as our day-to-day, standard average life is the one we will carry into whatever afterlife we hope lies beyond the veil. It doesn’t take long to find that the consciousness we think is so emblematic of our experience as human beings is tenuous. A shot of vodka under an overpass with friends who stole a bottle from their parents is enough to show us entirely new ways to experience the world around us. 

    When one of the scientists investigating the seat of consciousness was asked about the physical location of consciousness in the human brain, he had no satisfying answer. It wasn’t, say, in the pineal gland.

    Instead, consciousness was a flickering wave of neuroactivity that swept across the brain like a passing breeze or flashing fire. Consciousness, the essential you-ness, the experience of now, the intersection of sensory data and our current thoughts, was not a place but an event, constantly moving. The similarity between this and the revelations of Zen Buddhism are not lost on me. But this is not the place for that.

    “‎Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.” – Richard Dawkins

    —

    Back to Now

    As I said, I wrote the preceding at an earlier time. I was unclear about how much thoughts of my own death had interrupted the steady flicker of MY consciousness. I would stumble and trip over invisible ottomans and blame something or other for the difficulty.

    I got the first dose of my vaccine recently, an injection that everybody will hopefully soon be getting, and it immediately made me glad to be alive. The ruminations on death dissipated.

    The systems in place for getting the vaccine, like all systems, are apathetic. Systems are designed to serve the most people, harm the least, for the most net gain. Systems are not overly concerned with how anybody feels. This makes most systems hostile to human happiness, but we have no choice but to endure them.

    The thoughts of death I had before disappeared a few hours after the shot.

    I wish this relief for everyone.

    I’m hitting Publish on this one, just to get it out of my drafts. I’ve been working on it too long. It’s enough. No more ruminating tonight.

    I love this video with my whole heart. It’s an incredible 20 year anniversary of Andrew WK’s first album, I Get Wet, which mixed heavy metal vibes with party anthems and traditionally-metal-adjacent topics like death and killing and victory.

    There were a bunch of weird conspiracy theories about him that are fascinating to read and bonkers and intentionally played up (if not directly started) by Andrew himself. He maintains this mystery in interviews, mixing a weird performance art aesthetic with relentlessly positive messages of self-acceptance and a celebration of life while also somehow being completely genuine. He is a force of goodness and unapologetic cartoonish glee and I am so very happy that he has a new song out.

  • My Body, My Burden

    Finding All New Bottoms

    My original title for this was My Fraught Relationship With Pain, because I had a couple of jaunts to the emergency room and they were both pain-related. I’ll elaborate in a minute, but I ditched that title because I realized that nobody has a good relationship with pain. The title I settled on is high-school-writing-class-awful, and I know that. I’m sorry. It fits my mood too well to change it now.

    I Have a Blog Now, Again

    I used to blog. I had that blog for years. Before other internet-based methods of communicating like Twitter, I blogged a lot. It’s gone, now. I have no idea where I put it.

    I shuffled it around from domain to domain, a big shambling mess of personal anecdotes, song lyrics and Star Wars memories. The last place I remember putting it is empty. The Tumblr blog I had for almost as long is still there, for as long as Tumblr is still around. I’m annoyed at myself for not saving it but I’m also arsed if I can figure out what I was ever going to do with it.

    I’ve lost all of my writing before. Before cloud storage put everything that matters in redundant server racks accessible on a dozen devices I don’t even use anymore, we had hard drive crashes, clicks of death, power surges, and botched back-ups. I’ve lost more writing than I’ll ever publish.

    I go back and look at my Tumblr and I don’t remember writing most of those things. Part of me thinks it would be nice to have all that writing, but the larger part of me asks “why?” I don’t have an answer.

    Here’s the Blog

    My blog is at jameshazlettforeman.com which I have finally settled on as my writer name. Yes, I was influenced by my brother Robert Long Foreman, because he had the right idea from an early period in his writing career, which was to use all three of his names. I am only now realizing that this was the correct move, and you can add it to the list (ever growing) of things I have learned from my siblings in general and Rob in specific.

    When I feel more like writing it, I’ll be adding shorter form items to it. This newsletter is the delivery mechanism for longer content that tends to be more personal. The blog will have other content more focused on science fiction and fantasy and writing and things like that, but for now you can read this post about my name.

    I said I would get personal, and I will not let you down.

    There are three body-related things happening to me, or have happened recently. If you have been following my writing, you know why I might be particularly attuned to what my body does.

    This is My First Body Crisis

    Anyway, we were visited recently by the neighborhood outdoor cat, whose name I mention in this video, and whose attention Emmitt is absolutely deranged by. I did not expect Emmitt to do what he did in this video, because he has never so much as scratched me, and only hissed at me a couple of times when I cornered him in order to put him in his cat transporter.

     

    He bit me, I did not take it very seriously, and I was rewarded for this with a trip to the urgent care, where I was given a powerful antibiotic that handily eradicated the infection.

    This is my Second Body Crisis

    Shortly after this event, my shoulder started hurting a lot. Here’s a photo of me showing my brother in law and extremely capable physical therapist where, exactly, it was hurting. He did his best, but when I have a lot of inexplicable pain, I take myself to an emergency room.

    I went to the emergency room despite being pretty sure that the pain was from my very bad posture. I stopped sitting in the chair that was causing my pain and it stopped, which was enough to convince me that Derek was right, that it was, actually, not something to be worried about. A simple change in lifestyle was enough to eliminate the pain entirely. Mischief managed.

    This is my Third Body Crisis

    I used to think my memory problems were because of my brain surgeries, but I’m no longer so certain. I stopped drinking recreationally because I realized I was doing it as a way of marking time, which is one of the many reasons not to drink.

    I occasionally will have a drink or two after work, and I am angry at myself the next day every time, because it interrupts my sleep, which is the number one contributor to me having a more difficult day than I would have had before. Alcohol also contributes to my memory erasure. It can make things fuzzy that weren’t fuzzy before, and I don’t remember having those issues before the pandemic.

    I don’t know what causes it, but I do know that imbibing certain substances, including some of the drugs I’ve been prescribed to help mitigate my anxiety, may have been blurring my memory. When you watch a loved one go through the rigors of dementia (more than once, though they were different people), you develop a different relationship with your memory.

    Of all the unpleasant things to experience during the treatment of brain cancer, an overzealous application of general anesthesia is one of the worst. I don’t remember any of the day preceding the first surgery. My only memory is waking up after it.

    Did that first experience with general anesthesia have a permanent effect on my memory? It’s not unheard of. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that certain chemicals can make my memory worse, and it’s best to avoid those. Also, I am less prone to bouts of Goose-ish behavior:

    I will be blogging more, but I will also be using this newsletter to talk to you, dear reader. Please read both, if that would delight you. If you derive no delight from either this newsletter or my blog, do not read them. I won’t be offended.

    Please be kind, and forgive yourself. Please give yourself permission to be flawed and human and imperfect. You’re a thermodynamic miracle. Treat yourself like one.

    But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come…dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.

  • A Note About Names

    My name is James Hazlett Foreman. That’s the name I was given by my parents, though I suspect my mother had more to do with it than my father. I say this not because of a lack of fatherly interest in child-rearing but because of a great deal of interest in names on the part of my mother. She cares a lot about names, something I inherited.

    I resemble the man I’m named for. I will share with you a photo of him, my grandfather James, though you might not see much of a resemblance:

    my grandfather

    I don’t think I look very much like him, though people who knew him say I do. I think if I do resemble him, it’s deeper than simple physical appearance. We have similar mannerisms, interests, ways of speaking. It’s funny that of all my siblings (and I have a few), I most closely resemble the very man I’m named after. Why is that? How did that happen? Pure, random chance. There can be no other explanation, unless you want to get spooky. I rarely want to get spooky, so I stick to the material realities. He was like that, too.

    It’s All About SEO

    Why I chose to blog under this name, James Hazlett Foreman, is because I finally settled that, at the age of 43, on a name to put my creative writing under. I was content to be James Foreman, but Google has made it very difficult. My profession is in SEO, or the business of ranking pages higher on Google search results.

    The name I was happily using, James Foreman, was terrible for my personal brand.

    When you search for James Foreman, Google doesn’t think you’re looking for me. It thinks you’re looking for James Forman, a famous civil rights leader. If not him, then you’re probably looking for his son, James Forman Jr., a famous lawyer. Even if you put my name in quotation marks, Google doesn’t think you’re really looking for me, and gives you the results for the James Formans anyway.

    There’s Only One Me

    I am the only James Hazlett Foreman, and I am using this website as a way of firmly establishing my own brand of me-ness. It will grow as I continue to blog, using this as another distraction from the business of writing, which is what I should be doing.

    Note: I had a feeling I had written about my choice of names before, and I was right. I have an unreliable memory, but sometimes it works and coughs up something true.

  • The Joy of Being Unmoored

    I don’t know how else to describe how I feel, so I went with something nautical.

    The nautical thing is an affectation, not an endorsement. I like nautical things in the same way I like wars that never happened—nobody was actually hurt, and it’s all just imagination (the star wars, for example). I like the culture of sailors from the 19th century, when ships were wooden. I enjoy the romance of those ships, despite knowing next to nothing about them and, not likely to enjoy the water. My relationship with bodies of water is entirely one-sided. I have no interest in them, and they leave me alone. 

     

    It took me days to write those first few sentences (not the tweet, the sentences before it). I spend all day writing and yet, when it comes time to write for fun, which I used to do with some regularity, I am all stopped up. I wish I could yank out the cork and chug the champagne of creativity, or whatever, but the cork never pops. I have taken some steps to shake the bottle, which I will further relate to you below. 

    Ugh, extracting every word of this is like pulling my own teeth. You hear that phrase a lot, and I’m certain that it was first written by a person describing the act of creation when every part of you is reluctant. I resist every tap on the keyboard. I don’t want to do this.

    It’s so much easier to give in. The easy path begs for my footsteps. 

    This Is Not New

    I have never been able to simply sit down and write. This has not been true for writing assignments, like homework and actual work—though some days it’s harder than others to write about subjects I don’t personally care about, I’m never so stumped that I simply give up.

    For the fun stuff (which I define as anything that I’m not being paid for), writing itself is an insufficient reward. Some people say they enjoy writing, but I don’t think I do. It is hard, and it is taxing, and I am prone to avoiding things that I know are going to be hard that offer no reward. All humans are. If we ran into every hard thing, just because it was hard, we would constantly break our noses.

    Everybody who does something hard does it because there is some reward for doing it. The satisfaction of a job done well is not enough, or I would throw a deck of cards into the air and put them back in the deck in order, over and over again, each time satisfied by the excellence with which I had accomplished the task. 

    I suspect that anybody who claims that they do something unpleasant simply for the satisfaction of having done the task is surely being disingenuous. I don’t need to get money for my work, but I do need something. I would love it if that “something” were money, but I would gladly trade it for attention. 

    This is true about painting a room, organizing a sock drawer, or making a sculpture. Nobody does those things just to do them. If they didn’t get a painted room, an organized drawer, or a sculpture after the work was done, they wouldn’t do it.

    Specifically to my writing, I want people to read what I write because they enjoy reading what I write. I want to write things that people want to read. I am repeating myself. 

    I am in a constant state of repeating myself, into infinity. 

    I am not alone in this. Many people would gladly trade money for attention. The evidence is all around us, but definitely on the internet. Have you seen Instagram? It’s an endless scroll of attention-seeking behavior. The more strenuously they deny it, the guiltier of it they are.

    The words you just read are a deck of cards I threw into the air. Now I’m going to put them back in order. 

    Reward for Writing: Early Childhood -> College

    Casting back my memory like a fishing lure, specifically for the reward I received for writing I did when I first started writing, it was attention, and good grades, not dissimilar to what I receive for my writing today (a paycheck and thankful recipients). A teacher is a captive audience. They have to at least pretend to read what I’ve written because that’s what they’re getting paid to do, by somebody, if not me. I got good grades in writing classes, but more importantly, I got a pat on the head and told that I was good at it and that I should continue to do it. Eventually the praise piled up and I could no longer dismiss it. My low self esteem causes me to ignore praise far more often than I accept it.

    Reward for Writing: After College

    I used to say that I did not smoke cigarettes while writing but that I wrote while smoking cigarettes. This was a glib way of avoiding the question of why I didn’t want to quit smoking when, in fact, it was because it was too hard and the reward not as immediately apparent. When I entered the dating pool in my early 30s, I cut my hair and quit smoking, and I was afraid that at least one of those things would impede my creativity. I didn’t smoke while I wrote, I wrote while I smoked.

    Reward for Writing: After Quitting Smoking

    I was successful in quitting smoking. I have not slipped in 14 years, and I rarely want to. I find that if I do feel a craving, it is because I feel like I’m not in control in other areas of my life. Habits like smoking are compulsive gestures toward control. They make us feel like we have control over our lives. This part of my newsletter isn’t about smoking, it’s about what I do to reward myself for writing after I took cigarettes away. 

    Reward for Writing: Booze

    At the beginning of the pandemic, when my beloved coffee shops and libraries had been cruelly ripped away from me, I would pour a rusty nail every Friday and write something that always, eventually, passed through the foggy banks of incomprehensibility. I would write, but it wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t rewarding. I was writing while I drank, not drinking while I wrote. 

    This, thankfully, only lasted a short time. After a series of poor decisions marked by texting people who didn’t particularly want to hear from me, I revised my lifestyle and went back to my much happier relationship with alcohol: passing, and only in social occasions. In our current climate, this means I very rarely drink. That’s okay by me.

    But without the reward of a buzz, I was back to where I started.

    The Third Place and Body Doubling

    I can identify two rewards, two aspects of my writing in the past 14 years that did not require cigarettes, scotch, attention, adulation, or money. Until recently, I didn’t really have a lexicon to describe these things, but now I do. 

    The Third Place

    Wikipedia has given me insight I did not have before, though I knew the outlines of it. I knew that the coffee shops and libraries I went to in order to write were “third places” but I didn’t really know what that meant. I now know that it’s part of a discipline called “community building” and people who study such things have identified places like the ones I described, often associated with leisure time, as “third places,” in order to differentiate them from first places (where we live) and second places (where we work). Some people find it difficult to, for example, do second place stuff when they’re in their first places. This is a problem that many of us have had to address recently.

    Body Doubling

    The great McKinley Valentine, Australian writer and author of one of my favorite newsletters, the Whippet, recently wrote about the concept of “body doubling,” a technique for productivity specifically for people experiencing ADHD.

    These patients find that a person sitting nearby, accomplishing tasks of their own, make it easier for them to focus on their own work. There need be no communication between these parallel processes. It’s because of this preference in me that I reached the conclusion, as I started to work a full time job from my First Place, that I “do better in offices.” I don’t have ADHD, but it still applies to me.

    Bodies in the Third Place

    I realized that I do better in offices because of one of those things (the body doubles around me) and that I write more easily in coffee shops because of these two rewards: the third place, with its coffee, or tea, and its body doubles, or other people doing their own work, act as passive rewards. These two things delight me, for reasons I can’t determine (nor am I particularly interested in dismantling them, for fear of ruining their effectiveness). My process involved going to a Third Place and having Body Doubles around. The pandemic took those things away. 

    Shaking the Champagne

    Until I can go back to those places and recover some sense of either Third Places or Body Doubles, I have to find new rewards. One of them is the occasional “good job” I get from you lovely readers. That helps. It keeps me going. 

    Another reward is that I refuse to listen to my favorite music except when I’m writing. I’m listening to Andrew Bird right now, and enjoying it immensely. I don’t listen to any music except when I’m writing something for fun and when I do, I use my best headphones. This helps, a little. 

    I drink seltzer all the time, but especially when I’m writing. That helps, too.

    Masterclass, Goddamn It

    I have returned to this newsletter because David Sedaris compelled me to. He’s one of the dozens of contributors to Masterclass, a walled garden of lectures by people in a wide variety of fields. I was skeptical that this product had anything for me that could not be supplied by a few YouTube videos, which are considerably cheaper, but the relentless advertising eventually won me over.

    I have watched as their roster of teachers swelled and incorporated more people whose insights I could see myself benefiting from. I was pretty sure that I would encounter these things:

    • a lack of depth. I don’t need to see Neil Gaiman talk about things I already know about, I want to hear something I might hear in a class

    • content for beginners. I am not a beginner (at least as a writer), and while every teacher has beginner-level lessons, they also get pretty deep into the catacombs of their ideas and processes.

    • extremely niche content, or content that wasn’t niche enough. I want a writer to talk to me like another writer would talk to a writer. But I also want to watch Penn & Teller talk about magic and learn something about my own creativity from that, too.

    I am annoyed by Masterclass because it is providing what I hoped it would. I don’t know why a company doing exactly what it says it does annoys me, but it feels like it makes it harder to identify the scams. I paid around $200 for a year of access and I already feel like I’ve been privy to education that I couldn’t have accessed without spending even more. I feel like that enormous sum is a good value.

    Among some of the insights I’ve collected, after only a couple of hours worth of classes, include the following:

    • David Sedaris talks to his sister in a lesson about writing about your loved ones. Sedaris talks about what he does when he writes about his family members. They have a very frank conversation about how it makes her feel, though she is largely happy about it. One lesson I learned that I hadn’t really considered was that if you write with love as your first motive, then it can guide you on the path of what you should and shouldn’t tell.

    • Salman Rushdie is a pretty decent artist, and supplements his writing with sketches. He also seems to have a booger lodged in his left nostril and is constantly scrunching his nose in a fight with it (or it’s just a tic).

    • David Mamet shares the wisdom, not from him, that anybody can write a good first act and that a second act often ends with a reinvigorating confessional by the main character. I never thought about that before.

    • Penn & Teller do an extremely simple lesson about how to do a “French drop.” I can do a French drop now.

    I can only watch the writing “lessons” for about a half an hour before I get excited about my own writing again and have to hit pause and go back to my notebooks. Neil Gaiman suggested writing everything you know about the story you’re going to write before you write it. That all changes as you develop it, of course, but I wasn’t doing that before. David Sedaris shared his habit of keeping a daily diary. I was doing something similar, but stopped because the bland description of my day was boring and repetitive. But now I’m going to write a little story about my day and see what that does for me. I wasn’t doing that before.

    My progress is slow. I’m not back to writing the way I was before, but I’m getting closer. The reward I feel for writing this stuff is the delight of writing again. This will not last, but it’s nice for now.

  • A Year in Review: 2020

    There’s a lot of “happening” happening and frankly I’m sick of it. 

    Oh man. Oh jeez. Where do I even begin?

    There’s no central narrative to Jim’s 2020, though COVID will dominate. That’s just the A Plot. The B and C Plots for your 2020 were different depending on who you are—maybe you lost your livelihood, or lost your favorite hang out spot, or lost someone you loved, or lost your coping mechanisms. Nobody’s getting out of this year unscathed. Some of us are more scathed than others, but I’m glad to have shared the struggle with you. I’m glad you’re still here. Have some coffee with me.

    I don’t want to fail you so
    I tell you the awful truth
    Everyone faces darkness on their own
    As I have done, so will you

    Forgive me if I run to the maudlin side of the room so early (that usually happens later). I think everybody deserves to be maudlin sometimes. Hey, it’s 2020. We all need a little extra this year. 

    2020 was the year of A Lot of Stuff. The writers of the simulation really packed a lot in, like they had to use up their extra budget on the last episode of the season. 

    2020 Was the Year of Letting People Do Things 

    It’s 2020, so you should give yourself permission to [whatever]. Be lazy. Eat something you shouldn’t. Play video games in your pajamas. Indulge in something you normally go without. 

    2020 Was the Year of Kindness

    It’s 2020, so we need to worry about each other more than ever. 

    2020 Was the Year of Forgiving Yourself

    You probably did something you’re not proud of, or acted selfishly, or hurt somebody’s feelings, whatever. It’s 2020. Give yourself permission to be a flawed person. 

    2020 Was the Year We Discovered Everything We Should Have Always Been Doing

    Empathy, kindness, sacrifice, mercy, patience, especially for ourselves, is the lesson of 2020. You don’t have permission to be good to yourself because it’s 2020, but because you always had the right to those things. We lost some things we can never get back, people we can never see again. 2020 took a lot out of us. We must give ourselves permission to be ourselves.

    The Story of the Year 

    On a purely personal level, it’s hard to get a firm grasp on the narrative for Jim’s 2020. 2018 was easy: tumor time! 2019 was a year of collapse, both personally and professionally. So much happened in 2020 yet nothing really happened, too, yet everything actually happened and it’s still happening. It was hard in ways I didn’t expect and nothing was easy, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Fate’s cruel finger never found me.

    Using Garbage as an Analogy for Writing

    There’s a huge pile of cardboard boxes sitting in my living room. This often happens after the holidays. I have to break this stack down and take it someplace to be recycled. I know every single step. I know what I need to do and how to do it and in what order.

    These three things are simultaneously true:

    1. I have decided what I need to do.

    2. I will do it when I’m ready.

    3. I will never be ready.

    The fact that there is not a pile of cardboard from last year is evidence that I will do it eventually, before I’m ready. That’s because there is no such thing as “being ready.”

    Every fortress falls
    It is not the end

    If Not Now, When?

    I was in therapy, many years ago. I had been working hard on my social anxiety with my therapist, who was helping me toward the goal of being able to talk to strangers without having a panic attack. I had made great progress in his office, I had done my homework every week, and I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to get over my social anxiety.

    “So, how did it go?” he asked.

    I was speechless. I probably made a face like my favorite emoji: 🧐

    I explained that I hadn’t actually done any of the things we had practiced. Why not, he asked. Because I’m not ready. He didn’t quote Hillel the Elder to me, but what he said was a gentle, therapisty way of saying the same thing. I’m paraphrasing, but this is what he said:

    “There needs to come a point when this stops being theoretical. You won’t feel ready. You have to take those steps anyway or you’ll never get where you’re going.”

    It was such a simple lesson to learn but it has informed every part of my life since I learned it. Like any lesson, I have to remind myself of it periodically. Sometimes, I have to rediscover it, like a book I forgot I owned and bought again.

    What does that have to do with writing?

    When I think about My Writing Career, it’s like looking at the sun. It’s like thinking about what happens after we die. It’s like moving a giant rock out of my yard so I can plant a garden there. I don’t know where to begin, and I don’t know what I need to do, and I’m not ready. I don’t want to confront it. I don’t want to answer the question lingering at the edge: should I just give it up?

    More than once this year, I’ve considered throwing it away. I write every single day for my lensgrinding job, so it’s not as if I’ll stop writing words. But as far as my career as a fiction writer goes, I feel like I’ll always be a person who tried for a while but gave it up.

    It ain’t if you fall
    But how you rise that says
    Who you really are

    I Decided to Continue

    I decided that I was simply being dramatic, as I often am. Stop being dramatic, I told myself. You’re just having a hard time of it. Save some of that sympathy for yourself.

    I rediscovered that lesson I learned in my therapist’s office twenty years ago: I just have to do it. The only way to get through something is to go through it. All those doubts and fears and questions have one answer, a clanging, loud, ringing of a very large bell that says, in the language of bells, “just fucking do it.”

    So I will. I’d rather be the dumb schlub who didn’t know he wasn’t any good and kept trying anyway than the person who stopped before he really got started.

    Do you hear the bell?

    I’ve Been Here Before

    My memory is a tattered, unreliable thing. Stories I hear about people and who those people are don’t always converge, so somebody will tell me about something that happened to them and then bring it up later and I’ll have no memory of it, at first, but then they reframe it with a rough outline of what they already told me once instead of whatever signposts they thought were the important signifiers and I’ll remember it (usually).

    Somebody might say “it’s like when Guy stole my air conditioner” and I don’t remember the story but then they’ll say “I told you about this, Guy stole my air conditioner on the hottest day of the year and drank all my seltzer, too” and then I’ll remember the story because the signpost that remained with me wasn’t the air conditioner at all but the seltzer. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.

    The point I was trying to make is this: I already wrote about giving up writing. It was over a year ago! Here we are again. I think all creative people can relate to that feeling, so it’s natural that I should experience it again.

    Sometimes I Get Lost

    I don’t mean literally lost, though that does happen, even in the age of GPS and omnipresent tracking, I mean in my own head. It’s not enough to simply forget things, I also enjoy worrying about forgetting things. Worrying is one of the dumbest things I do. Sometimes it pretends to be “planning” but it’s not.

    Dementia lies heavy on my family tree. It doesn’t hit all of us, but when it does it hits hard. Some of us, like my great aunt, lived a very long time and only slightly lost her edge right at the end. Some of us, like the paternal grandfather I barely knew, died from Alzheimer’s. The paternal grandmother I knew very well died of vascular dementia, which is the medical term for a gradual, inexorable atrophy of the brain. People who die of dementia do so usually because their bodies simply forget how to sustain them. It’s an awful, terrible experience for everyone.

    If you’re wondering if I’m going to pivot into how I worry that my memory problems stem from early onset dementia (and it would be extremely early, though not impossibly so), then you must be a subscriber.

    I don’t have early onset dementia. One of the (few) benefits of having had a brain tumor is that I have a neurosurgeon, a radiologist and an oncologist examine a very detailed MRI scan of my brain once a year. They are specifically looking for bad things. They would have noticed if my brain had atrophied.

    This Was Supposed to be About 2020

    I wrote a year-end post for 2019 and in reading it again, a year later, I am chagrined. Some of the things I wrote about ended up being far worse than they appeared at the time. Many of those things I was thankful for went away. Such is life. Good fortune, bad fortune, they move in and out like the tide.

    2020 is over, and some great things happened for me. I got a job I love during the worst pandemic in a century. I’ll stop there, because even if the last twelve months had good parts for me, I can’t ignore the suffering going on around me.

    We are currently living through a massive humanitarian crisis. Even those who haven’t been killed or debilitated by COVID are under enormous threat. I won’t innumerate all of those, either, because if you’re reading this then you’re living through it, too, and I don’t want to be a bummer. For so many people, 2020 is a giant bummer, the worst year of their lives, and my problems shrink in comparison.

    The truth is, I’m fine, I’m actually great, and if you’re not, I will help you as much as I can.

    2020 can die in a ditch. Even if 2021 isn’t markedly better for you, at least it will be different, and that’s something.

    If your fortress is under siege
    You can always run to me
    If ever your fortress caves
    You’re always safe in mine

    All the quotes in this newsletter were from a song by Queens of the Stone Age called Fortress, which you can watch and listen to here:

  • What It’s Like to Have a Brain Shunt

    This isn’t going to be gross, I promise.

    On this, the eve of the third anniversary of my second brain surgery, I am going to tell you about my shunt. 

    I have a peritoneal shunt installed inside my brain. Here’s what it looks like: 

    It’s a straw inside my brain ventricle with a long tube that goes down into my peritoneum. If I have any extra cerebrospinal fluid (that tastes like bananas, weirdly enough), it is siphoned off by the shunt and goes down the tube and empties into my abdomen. The first surgery I had, a little over three years ago, was completed after a week of heavy steroids and visits by my friends and family. Here’s a photo of that:

    My memories of those days before my first surgery are actually pretty nice. I can’t deny that I enjoy being the object of attention, and nothing much gets peoples attention like the big C, and it was nice to hear from so many people and to know they were thinking about me. My girlfriend at the time was great, and extremely attentive and calming, pretty much the perfect person to have by your side when you’re going through the ringer of brain cancer. I’m sorry things didn’t work out in the long run, but she was amazing when I needed her. Here’s a photo of us together. I’m not using one of her face because that feels like a violation, somehow. I dunno. Her name is Kate and she’s great. 

    It’s also hard to be in a bad mood when you’re on massive amounts of steroids. I never would have thought that steroids were necessarily mood-elevators, but I think they were in my case. Also, the nurses were truly lovely, and if I could remember their names or what floor or what department I would thank them personally. 

    HUMOROUS ANECDOTE: For an unknown amount of time (months, maybe), I told people I had a “perineal” shunt. Your perineum is not your peritoneum. You probably knew that. I didn’t. 

    You can touch my shunt. It’s my party trick, if there isn’t a Rubix cube around for me to solve. There’s not much of a trick to it, except some people get a kick out of pressing the squishy device just under my scalp. That it’s connected to a straw deep inside my brain makes it even cooler.

    The shunt itself is bolted into place in my skull, and probably will remain there for the rest of my life. I asked my neurosurgeon about whether I’ll ever get it removed, and he said it was unlikely. Unless there’s a problem with it, they leave them in, even if you never need it again. Hopefully, I’ll never need it again. 

    AN ADDITIONAL HUMOROUS ANECDOTE: There is no drug on earth better than the absence of pain that was previously unrelenting. I had spent months with intense headaches, and the first surgery I had eliminated them. The implantation of the shunt ended the squeeze of my overflowing ventricles. I was also taking pills for the pain of the surgery, so I was, for all intents and purposes, high as a kite. I had to stop at a Burger King to pee, and I stopped to look at myself in the mirror. What I saw made me laugh so much I took a photo. I have no explanation except that I thought a man with an obvious head wound wandering around in a Burger King, laughing, was hilarious and absurd.

     

    Both surgeries I had were free of complications. Double vision plagues many brain surgery recipients. Not me. I had an easy tumor to remove, right on my brain stem. Yes, it was cancerous. Yes, it was malignant. It didn’t spread. I was lucky. It happened to be in a place that was easy to access. Not everybody is so lucky. The next time you’re tempted to say “at least it was benign,” remember that. Benign tumors in the wrong place are just as deadly as the other kind. There is no good cancer to get. It’s all bad. 

    My memory isn’t great. I forget things sometimes, so I use my notebook more than ever. I have little headaches every day, but Advil takes care of them pretty handily. I get bouts of tinnitus more frequently than before, but it doesn’t last. I am extraordinarily lucky. 

    There isn’t much slack in my shunt tube. When I stretch a certain way, I can feel the tube tighten against my skin. It’s visible when I turn my neck. Sometimes it itches and there’s nothing I can do about it except think about something else. 

    That’s what cancer is, and that’s how you deal with it. You go from one day to the next, one scan to the next, until your story is over. 

    I’m so very grateful that mine isn’t yet.  

  • Me and The Baron

    I only mentioned cancer once this time

    I am writing this from my latest Instagram impulse purchase: a surprisingly inexpensive (at least it was when I ordered it—I see they’ve substantially raised the price since then) and extremely responsive e-ink tablet with a pen. I can write long hand, with decent character and handwriting recognition, for a fraction of what an iPad costs, and this thing is also thinner and lighter than a notebook of similar size. I’m pretty amazed, I don’t mind admitting, though it definitely qualifies as a silly impulse buy. I don’t need this thing. I have more paper notebooks than I could ever hope to fill. I even have one of those iPads, and it does more stuff. I can’t watch movies on this tablet. 

    Even so, I am a believer in e-ink. When it got good enough to replicate paper on a functional level (and in a way that made reading still feel like reading), I shifted most of my reading to a Kindle. There is something to be said for electronics that feel like analog. Maybe that’s only true for people like me, digital adoptees, not digital natives. Would a kid who only ever had iPads get the same kind of enjoyment from these almost-devices? I don’t think so. 

    What’s Old is Old

    There’s a tendency for implementations of new technology to mimic what already exists until someone who doesn’t know any better comes along and breaks all the rules they’re supposed to follow because they don’t know about those rules, and everything changes. That’s why the earliest movies resembled stage plays so much. 

    But those things never really completely go away. We still have plays. Almost exactly three years ago, I was in London watching a production of Much Ado About Nothing (the link does not go to the version I saw, but it was at that location and with some of the same actors) at the Globe that would solidify it as my favorite Shakespeare play and, in Beatrice, see something of the kind of woman I’m drawn to most. Aye, there’s the rub. If you know the play, the relationship between Beatrice and her beau is a bit, uh, contentious at first. That’s the fun of it. 

    Here’s an empty stage:

    I promised someone I would stop writing about relationships, so I won’t break that oath here. Whenever I do, on other platforms like Twitter or what-have-you, this person swoops in to smack me, nicely, but not too nicely. I always take their advice, except when I want to cause trouble on purpose. 

    Where Ya Been

    It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, but I can’t say that I’ve done much of anything to justify it. I’ve been in what my ex wife (and now dear friend) calls a “bulking phase” — rather than write much, I read. I know others have said they have trouble reading books in Times Such as These, but I have not had the same experience. In fact, I’m more voraciously reading than ever. Those same people often report that they watch tv shows and movies instead. Weirdly, I’ve found it almost impossible to watch anything except documentaries about English history, for reasons I can’t explain. There’s something exotic and yet familiar about them that I can’t get enough of. 

    I’ve been reading books, and watching documentaries, and working, and petting my cat, and talking to my cat, occasionally streaming on Twitch with my cat, talking to my family, a few friends (but not enough) and very little else. I’m not depressed. I bathe as often as I did before and still brush my teeth twice a day and wear deodorant, even though Emmitt doesn’t care. I order food from Target and pull up in a parking place and someone very kindly comes out of the store with everything I ordered and puts it in my trunk. The only time I ever have to go into a store is to pick up my medications from the Giant Eagle, which also allows me the chance to buy some of the few fresh produce items that Target doesn’t really carry. 

    That’s all I do. I might occasionally play a video game, listen to a podcast, or take a walk. I certainly don’t write anything that isn’t a work assignment. 

    Do I Have a Fever or am I Just Cold?

    I play that game with myself almost every day, and I have yet to have a fever. I lost weight (and then found some of it) at the beginning of the pandemic, so temperatures that would never register before are suddenly making me put on my housecoat. 

    This video popped up in my head as I was writing something for work (it is related, but only tangentially) and it is both still funny and also cringingly dated. To paraphrase Paul F. Tompkins, there was a period there in the 1990s where “he’s gay” was an adequate punchline. You didn’t need to do anything except imply someone was gay in order for a joke to land. We are thankfully beyond that, or at least I am, and any comedy I enjoy is. 

    Anyway, this sketch has that quality to it, unfortunately, and is also inexplicably racist in its depiction of someone speaking an African language. Adding random pops or clicks to your fake African dialect was, alas, also enough for a punchline. 

     

     

    Oh, That, Too

    I also celebrated something I’ve come to think of as an additional birthday, celebrated only by me and Emmitt (who gets more treats): the anniversary of the brain surgeries that saved my life. I have noted in other places (social media, mostly) about how difficult it is for me to write about my experience, despite putting “writer” next to my name a lot and mentioning the whole cancer thing whenever I can plausibly work it into a conversation. I can talk about it, but writing about it requires a deep dive into my memories and they’re still too fresh. I suddenly find that I’m experiencing the terror and pain again and I’d really rather not. I’ll take my occasional dizzy spells, bad memory, daily little headaches and an optimistic neurosurgeon any day. 

    Baron Samedi

    There’s a pivot for you, but I’m allowing myself to write about one of the memories I have of my experience that is more interesting than “oh yeah, that hurt a lot and I thought I was going to die slowly and in pain.” On the night after my first surgery, I hallucinated that Baron Samedi was dancing around the edges of the shadows of the doors and windows.

    For the record, this is the person I saw: 

    Here’s a relevant passage from his Wikipedia page: 

    He is noted for disruption, obscenity, debauchery, and having a particular fondness for tobacco and rum. Additionally, he is the loa of resurrection, and in the latter capacity he is often called upon for healing by those near or approaching death, as it is only the Baron that can accept an individual into the realm of the dead.

    This was not exactly on the forefront of my mind, and it was not an otherworldly experience. I can’t explain the appearance of Baron Samedi, a character out of my memory, whose appearance also happened to be extremely appropriate to the circumstances. Is it spooky? Yes, it is, in the telling of it, but not in the moment. 

    When I say I hallucinated a dancing vodou god, associated with death and resurrection, what I mean to say is that it was an extremely peaceful, almost joyful thing to see. I had survived a surgery I was convinced was going to kill me and I knew that I was hopped up on a lot of powerful painkillers and steroids and it was in the middle of the night and hospital was very quiet, and I couldn’t move my head, and I was a captive audience to the cartoony dancing. I was alive. I had made it through the first half of the journey, through the first surgery, and it was just me and the Baron. I was not scared, because I knew it was a figment of my imagination. It was fun? Yes. Maybe a little.

    That’s Enough

    I’ve had enough writing, and I’m boring myself, which is a terrible sign. I will leave you with two things:

    One of the things I’m doing is my podcast, which is delightful and fun and I get to talk to two of my favorite people. I forgot to include that in the things I’m doing. I’m putting up the newest episode tomorrow, so subscribe etc. 

  • Interrogating the burden of delight

    Eye Roll Emoji

    The title means nothing. I’ve recently found myself using those three words a lot and when you put them all in a line like that it looks like an extremely pretentious version of this newsletter (that can already get a little pretentious, if I’m honest). 

    It’s incredibly goth of me to even suggest that I could approach the topic of “interrogating the burden of delight” and I confess that the concept appeals to me. But that’s not what I’m writing about today, because I don’t feel like asking too many questions about my feelings. They are what they are and I deal with them.

    My dear friend, during a conversation about Fetch the Boltcutters, said she was delighted by my Thou Doth Protest Too Much denial of my own romanticism. She pegs Fiona and I as hopeless romantics who have been pressed into self-imposed asceticism by our own need to, say, interrogate the burden of our delight. I asked her if I could relate this observation, and she allowed it, but then told me to go for a walk. What she meant was “stop spending so much time in your head, dum dum, you’ve done enough of that already.” And, of course, she was right. 

    “I didn’t smile, because a smile always seemed rehearsed
     I wasn’t afraid of the bullies, and that just made the bullies worse” – Fiona Apple, Shameika 

    Nature vs Nurture Revisited

    When we’re babies, how much of who we are will be who we are as adults was the topic of the last newsletter, so I won’t dwell much on it again, except to say that I heard from some of my pals who had similar stories of their young selves very closely resembling the adult versions. 

    My favorite was this one, from Andrea, lately of the Washington Damn Post, but also a great newsletter that deserves your attention. If you know Andrea (and I just gave you a couple of links to do so), you’re as delighted by this as I am:

    “A bunch of my cousins went sled riding and I tagged along. I went down the hill one time, and then at the bottom, I put one hand on my hip, leaned on a snowbank and said, ‘Hey girls, why don’t we go back inside and get some hot chocolate?’” 

    Even Little Andrea knew what was important and it ain’t sledding.

    A small but manageable drinking problem

    After Howard Stern left terrestrial radio, he was replaced with David Lee Roth. I enjoyed the show, because it featured the surprisingly good storyteller, David Lee Roth, telling interesting and occasionally funny stories from his storied life. He didn’t last long, but I listened to it, because I was working a boring data entry job and had nothing better to do. I remember his advice to becoming a rock star included the heading, which he alluded to having.

    “I used to jog but the ice cubes kept falling out of my glass.” ― David Lee Roth

    I worry that I have one of those. It’s small because I don’t drink every night, just most nights, and manageable, because I don’t drink a lot. As any alcoholic will tell you, that’s how every large and unmanageable drinking problem begins. 

    I have only ever been addicted to two things, coffee and cigarettes. I quit one and the other will be with me until my life depends on not drinking coffee anymore, which is not beyond possibility, but at least has not happened yet. 

    Addiction and dependence are two different things, though one often follows the other. Casual use becomes constant use, which becomes problematic. One’s life starts to take a turn for the worse because the small amounts you take in the beginning to get high are no longer enough and you take more than you did before and you’ve gone from one drink at night to relax to, well, a lot more. 

    The rough guide for alcoholism is more than 14 drinks per week, though it’s not the only sign. Worrying that you might have a drinking problem is one of the first warnings. 

    Addiction 

    Being addicted to something has two features: physical and mental. The physical addiction occurs because, and this is a radically oversimplified version of the mechanisms involved, your body gets used to having a certain chemical in it, because you’re using it to get high, and it crosses an invisible boundary where you no longer use the chemical to get high but to keep from feeling bad. 

    There’s a mental element that covers non-chemical addictions, like sex, love, relationship, etc. They might have chemical factors involved but the addiction is in the feelings you get from the behaviors you’re addicted to. 

    There is some debate about whether an addiction to anything that’s not a chemical counts as an actual addiction, but that seems to be missing the point. Much like people who like to dismiss cancer that doesn’t spread as “not real cancer,” the real measure of an addiction is not in what caused it but how it fills up your life. 

    The pursuit of that thing we’re addicted to is the problem, because if it were as easy as just setting it aside, it wouldn’t be a problem. This is compounded by addiction to chemicals that are dangerous to the body using them. Drinking til you’re blotto might be fun (or so I’ve heard, I never enjoyed it much), but you tend to make very bad decisions when you’re uninhibited by alcohol. You do things drunk you would never do sober. 

    The removal of inhibitions brings out those parts of your character that you might not want anyone else to see, parts of yourself that you’re embarrassed by, or that might be hurtful to other people. We all carry with us the capacity to inflict damage on the people around us, and we wisely keep those feelings inside, where our better angels can isolate them and browbeat them into silence. 

    “Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.” – Dr. Who

    Radical forgiveness

    There is nothing worse, no personality disorder, no mental illness, no personality quirk, worse than an unrepentant addict. An addict who wants to get high and have fun and doesn’t care who gets hurt is one of the most destructive forces one is likely to encounter. Add to this the layer of whatever their drug is doing to them, and it’s an unspooling ribbon of disaster. The ribbon ends, eventually, the same way every time: death. 

    There’s no use pretending otherwise. An addiction ends with a snuff of a candle. Either you stop doing what you’re addicted to, and acting like an addict acts, or it kills you. Untreated addictions always lead to death. Always.

    I have turned away very close friends who diverted into unrepentant addiction and refused to even consider trying to get better. They chose death, and I am not going to watch anyone die. You can do that on your own time, and I don’t need to see it happen. 

    A person who is trying to surpass their addiction, and is really truly honestly making a go of it, deserves understanding and compassion. They are fighting for their survival, in a very real sense. They are struggling in ways I can’t imagine. 

    Every addict began as a person with a small but manageable problem. We shouldn’t see addicts as others, but as ourselves. 

    The title of this section is “radical forgiveness” because sometimes that’s what it takes. When a person who has done you wrong comes along, maybe long after the damage has healed, talking about their sobriety, or asking for your understanding, or apologizing for what they did, they are expressing a desire to live. They might not be ready to apologize, but they’re ready to live. 

    The minimum you owe any person is to allow them to live. You don’t have to let them move in, but you do have to let them survive.

    I’m Not Done With Forgiveness

    This discussion makes me think of the topic that has occupied many minds lately, especially on social media, and the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” which is what it’s called when someone makes comments or engages in behaviors that are reprehensible to polite society, or at least a segment of it, and that person is therefore “canceled,” a term borrowed from entertainment, where a show that doesn’t perform well is canceled, and is no longer produced.

    You can’t really cancel a person in the same way, because a person is more than just a bunch of opinions or actions or statements. Even those who apologize are often questioned even further, and their apologies aren’t enough. They didn’t apologize adequately.

    I’m not sure what an adequate apology is, but I don’t think anybody else does, either. We demand one but then the person apologizes and it’s still not enough to quell our desire to see them punished. I don’t even think we could ever reach a consensus on what transgressions earn cancelation and which ones we can forgive.

    I think we should be open to forgiving anyone who appears contrite. Everybody should get a second chance. And then a third chance. More, if we’re feeling generous. I think we should always feel generous. It’s easy to say this as someone who is of the ethnic group that most often gets canceled in the modern sense. Some would say that this was appropriate, since so many generations of vulnerable people had much worse things done to them by people like me simply for existing. I don’t support what happened. I want to fix it, if I can. I am trying to be better than the people who came before me. I am imperfect. I am trying.

    What more can I do?

    I can forgive. I can do that.

    Anyway, that’s kind of a bummer.

  • Jim Cries – An Interview with Mom

    Podcast

    For more context, read the blog: Jimmy accepts Grover – then cries.