James Hazlett Foreman

Blog

  • The Atheist to Agnostic Pipeline

    Plus a Week in Review

    Some weeks are like every other week. They are remarkable in their unremarkableness. They are identical to the weeks that fall behind and unfold before me. But some weeks, friends, I feel like opened a door to a new part of my life and everything after it changes.

    I finish work, I go home, read a book, have a couple of beers, take myself for a walk, and go to bed.

    Rowlf the Dog, The Muppet Movie

    How I Used to Be

    I used to be pretty sure about, well, everything. I knew how the universe worked. I trusted science and reason to lead me, and the entire human race, out of the dark. It went beyond just obeisance to reason—it was a whole hog dedication to the material universe and our ability to figure it all out.

    I had a song to sing, and I sang it. I sang it even when people told me to shut up. I was an insufferable jerk on social media and sometimes in person. Materialism, science, and reason provided me a convenient and loud drum. I sure banged it.

    When I embraced this materialist philosophy (in early adolescence, I think), everything that vexed me or confused me fell into place. The things that didn’t make sense were just waiting to be discovered, either by me or somebody. I believed that everything could one day be understood. We know why the sky is blue, and what causes storms. We learn more and more about how the universe works through observation, hypotheses, and experimentation.

    I read Carl Sagan and watched Bullshit and James Randi.

    • Magic wasn’t real, it was just sleight of hand and gaffer’s tape.

    • Psychics weren’t real, they were hucksters playing tricks with cold readings and boring old human psychology.

    • UFOs and ghosts weren’t real, they were just frail humans with fertile imaginations.

    • Bigfoot? Don’t make me laugh.

    But somewhere along the way, I let that perspective color everything, like the yellow tint they use in movies whenever the characters go to Mexico. Some part of me stopped questioning and adapting. In my youth it, was a comfortable and consistent way to approach the staggering, vast unknown.

    I rejected everything labeled “spiritual” as hokum. And in so doing, I lost something of myself that was vital and affirming. As I got older, and this is the important part, it became a boundary to empathy.

    Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
    – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

    I’ll tell you how I got to where I am today. But first, science.

    The Bone Prison

    One of the lessons science has taught us is that our brains are the seat of our essential us-ness. If you take everything else away except for the brain, the person is still mostly the same person with the same memories and feelings.

    Our skulls are protective prisons for our brains. We don’t experience anything directly. The only way to influence the brain directly is to pop open the skull and poke it.

    Our senses provide information and data to the brain via chemical and electrical signals from the organs of sense (ears, eyes, etc.) to our brains via internal network cables called nerves. Those senses are our only awareness of the outside universe.

    If you look at a human being now, right now, you only see the thing in front of you. You don’t see the billions of years of evolution and the millions of generations of reproducing creatures that made that person happen. Even that human itself knows their parents, and maybe their grandparents, but that’s usually the limit of their awareness.

    However this started
    It ends up just the same

    –Psapp, Orekche

    A Brief History of Seeing

    Way back a long ass time ago, a blind little creature mutated and its offspring had a novel new way of experiencing the world around it: light that came from the sun bounced all over the place and it could detect where it was brighter and where it was darker.

    This tiny little mutation let it survive even longer than its siblings, and then some generation later mutated so it could actually detect shapes, and so on down the ages until an eagle flying high up in the sky can see a rabbit from 2 miles away.

    Without that single mutation way back then, we wouldn’t have eyes to look at a beautiful painting or look at the faces of our kids, or anything else. Aside from the physics of light and eyeballs, even the vision you have is tuned to a particular way of seeing.

    For instance, some animals like owls and cats are really good at noticing things that move. This is advantageous to a cat because all of that light bouncing around isn’t as valuable to a cat as noticing when it moves. They have all the same data about the light, and are all seeing the same things, but the cat’s processing of that data is different thanks to a different set of mutations. You can hold up a sheet of music to a cat and he’s not going to understand it. If you hold up that same sheet of music to a person who reads music, and they’ll hear the music in their heads.

    I wrote all of that to write this:

    Holy shit. What the fuck. Are you kidding me?

    Big deal, you might say. Anybody who’s ever played with a cat knows that. But cats are animals just like us, right? I mean, eagles have such good vision it would be nice if we did, too. A ton more humans would have survived if we could see as well as an eagle.

    But we can’t because evolution never went that way. It was never advantageous to our ancestors to see better than we already do. This is the case for everything about us: it was enough for our ancestors to survive up to the moment they made us, and that’s it. Everything we love about ourselves, about humans, is either a direct or indirect result of that process. Humans are good at detecting patterns. Humans are really good at recognizing even subtle, small differences in the faces of other humans. Humans have language and walk upright because our ancestors who had those mutations survived.

    Did you know this: one of the reasons humans are so scary to animals is because of this upright walking. In most of the natural world, an animal is quite a bit longer than they are high. Look at almost any other creature that walks on four legs and its body is like twice as long as its head is high. Imagine if humans were twice as long as we are tall and you can understand why so many animals run away from us (aside from the pointed sticks and the friends we coordinate with).

    Anyway, this is where my mind goes: what kinds of mutations do we have that we don’t even know about? What kinds of mutations do we not have?

    The Last Blind Ancestor

    The little blind creature I mentioned? It didn’t know it was blind. Consider that for a moment. Until its offspring happened to mutate in that specific and random way, neither it nor any of its friends, family or acquaintances had ever heard about light. They didn’t know that there was a whole spectrum of energy in the universe that was colliding and bouncing off everything. How could it know what it didn’t know?

    Imagine that newly-mutated little creature trying to convince its parents that it can detect light. What’s light? They don’t even have a word for it.

    But then again, they didn’t have any words for anything because the peculiar ability for humans to communicate, and our incredible biological bias toward language and communication in very specific ways, is uniquely human.1

    We see the universe the way we do because of a million tiny mutations over the course of all that evolution, mutations that led us to our current us-ness. From the tips of our toes to the thinning hair on our heads, every little mutation in our DNA conspires in our bodies to make us who we are. We can’t be who we aren’t, and we can’t be what we aren’t, either.

    We look at the world, at the entire universe, with extraordinarily limited perspective. How much don’t we see? What kinds of things and spectrums and energies are out there in the humungous universe that we don’t even know we don’t know about? There might be entire symphonies playing in the energy of the universe but we have no idea because we can’t hear it. We don’t even know it’s there!

    Well, we have a pretty good idea about some of those things because we have ways of detecting the things we can’t see. We’re still discovering things we can’t detect without our tools. We know how planets work but we don’t know why.

    We know that gravity exists, and we experience gravity all the time, but we don’t really know what it is or how it works. All the stuff we think we know and one of the biggest most fundamental parts of existence is a big, fat, mystery.

    Here’s Where it All Comes Together

    Those realizations conspired within me to make a brand new person with a brand new way of looking at the universe and humans and everything in it. Well, that’s what it feels like sometimes but I’m still the same dude I always was.

    Instead of looking at the mysteries and dismissing it with “pshaw we’ll understand it eventually” I embrace the vast quantities of other things we don’t even know we don’t know.

    And it’s in there, it’s in the terrifying fullness of an unknown and vastly imperceptible mysterious universe that I find unending, overflowing, oceans of hope, love, and beauty.

    But Maybe It Wasn’t the Realizations

    I’m letting the intellectual deductions carry an awful lot of the weight here, but let me be clear: it wasn’t instant and it wasn’t recent. It was a gradual change in me that coincided with a lot of other things. One of those things is the death of my newphew, Miles. Another is the death of my father, and the death of my Aunt Posy. Another is the death of my friend Elicia. But it wasn’t all death, it was also the pandemic, and my brain tumor, and my relationships and my friendships.

    Through hard work and many years of struggle and medications (both self-medicated an prescribed), I have come to accept uncertainty. Actually that’s not entirely true, not only do I accept uncertainty, I love it. In some ways I fear I have overcorrected in the wrong direction, because I love it so much.2 Now I seek out the things that scared me as a kid, and nothing scared me more than talking to strangers. Now, I love talking to strangers. The stranger the better.

    But looming astride all of these factors is the unmistakable stink of age. I am 47. I am neither young nor particularly old. The things I did to my body and my mind in my youth have come home to roost. But I’ve also gathered up some wisdom.

    Instead of rejecting everything that doesn’t rhyme with my own song, I stop singing for a while and listen.

    The Parable of the Forest

    This isn’t something I read somewhere, it’s something that occurred to me when I was driving and thinking, which I love doing. I am recording it here because I thought it was a pretty good illustration of how I changed my thinking and because I love parables about animals. I might have read this somewhere or heard Alan Watts talk about it, but this version, at least, is mine:

    The worm in the ground knows only the dirt. It knows how it smells, how it tastes. There might be something in the air above it but the worms who go up there don’t come back. All that matters is the dirt. It has everything it could possibly need.

    But the beetle who walks along the surface of the dirt sees the worm and scoffs. You think you know everything there is to know but you can’t see the beauty of the world on the surface. The beetle has everything it could ever need under the roots of the tree. It knows its food and the enemies that want to eat it.

    But the warthog who snuffles and trots along the paths of the forest knows that there is a lot more than just what’s under the roots and in the ground. That stupid beetle is so sure that nothing above it is important, but to the warthog everything that matters is there.

    The monkey on the tree scoffs in turn at the warthog and its silly certainty. The monkey can climb up to the trunk of the tree and swing along the high branches. It sees the whole forest floor stretch out beneath it.

    But the eagle sees not just the forest tops and the warthog and the beetle and the monkey and the worm but the wide, wild lands even further afield. It sees the mountains, the plains, the deserts.

    Above it all are the most arrogant of all, the humans who make satellites and helicopters. Surely they know everything.

    The Week in Review

    I was going to start writing these newsletters weekly, but I don’t think my brain works in weeklies. Every two weeks seems like a more attainable goal, so let’s aim for that. So, this would be more light a fortnight in review but let’s focus on the week that was.

    Having said all that, I don’t have a lot to add that wasn’t what you read already. But there are these:

    This Week’s Obtrusive Thought

    I have recurring and, sometimes, relentless thoughts. I think of them as vestigial flailings of the anxiety that is always with me. Sometimes they’re loud and sometimes they’re quiet, but they’re always there. Imagine getting a song stuck in your head but it doesn’t stop, ever, and it goes on and on and on all the time.

    This week, I was worried a lot about choking. I live alone. I have been chewing my food extra hard, just in case.

    Things I Read This Week That I Loved

    Space Crone, by Meghna Rao

    I read this essay about Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog and I enjoyed it so much I subscribed to the writer’s substack. I’ll have more to say about the history of the internet and how the humble blog is still the purest and best mode of communicating on the web, and, of course, how I’ve been on the web and making stuff for it the whole time, but this is a great little piece of writing about it.

    Sobbing on the Subway, by Leah Reich

    I always enjoy reading Leah’s perspective and this issue of her newsletter is my favorite thing I’ve read in a while.

    This Week’s Passport Photo

    I’m taking a trip soon so I had to get my passport renewed. My old passport and the check to pay for it and the form I had to fill out is still sitting in an envelope in my bag because I cannot scape together enough minutes in a day at the appropriate time to carry sad envelope to a post office to mail it.

    I tried to take the photo myself but gave up and went to CVS. Before I did all that, though, Emmitt helped me.

    Interestingly, this is related to what I wrote about vision and stuff because before a few months ago, Emmitt couldn’t see screens. Well, he could see them, but he didn’t realize that there are things there that move around in a pleasing way. Now he can’t get enough and every screen I use is entertaining to him. What changed in his perception? What new pathways did his neurons make?

    This Week’s Song

    1

    Well, maybe not. There’s some debate.

    2

    I don’t mean physically dangerous scary things, so don’t worry, Mom

  • Love and Death, But Mostly Death

    This could be the title of my whole newsletter

    I have written a lot about death. Here’s some of it:

    Emmitt has a favorite spot in my apartment. It’s a heating pad on top of a big trunk that was made in my home town of Wheeling, West Virginia. There’s a blanket on there too, the blanket that was in the crate with him when we met. It was his only possession.

    Emmitt and I have at least two things in common: a love of treats and intractable anxiety. At least I have cognitive behavioral therapy and cymbalta to help keep mine somewhat tractable. Maybe Emmitt was born that way, and he was going to be an anxious cat no matter what.

    Equally likely is that he had a rough go of it during his first few years of life, when he was a stray. What struggles and danger he faced in those times makes me very sad, because I love the little guy so much. He’s fine, don’t worry. He’s staring at me right now as I write this. His anxiety is my anxiety.

    I think the real origin of his anxiety is probably a mixture of both, just like mine is. We were both going to be anxious, but life had its way with us and gave that anxiety a place to bloom.

    The smallest disturbance can set Emmitt off under the couch. A big disturbance sends him into the closet, as far back as he can squeeze his little body. When somebody visits, it’s always the worst day of Emmitt’s life. He can take hours to reemerge, hesitantly, after they’ve left and he knows the coast is clear.

    Sometimes Emmitt has bad dreams and he wakes up with an exaggerated startle response that sends him flying across the room. Nothing happened, and nothing is wrong, but whatever was threatening him in his dream was so scary he had to get out of there. He’s so small and goes so gently in his normal life that when he has a bad night I can tell because the blanket on his heating pad is askew when I wake up.

    Even though Emmitt’s not there, I know he was. Even a 7 lb cat with the lightest touch you ever saw leaves something behind. I began this section as a metaphor for death and it turned into a wistful reflection on my cat.

    I wanted to write about death because my dad died almost exactly a year ago and it’s been on my mind a lot. Since I don’t have a lot of experience with dads dying (I only had the one), it coughed up a whole bunch of other related feelings that I do have some experience with: a broken heart.

    Oh woe is me! My heart’s broken. Boo fucking hoo. I know, I know. It’s very cringe for me to be talking about this stuff but this is my space and you agreed to read it, so stop bumming me out and go bum somebody else out with your bad attitude.

    It sounds like I’m talking to somebody else but I’m really talking to myself. This is the annoying manifestation of my shame and self loathing that materializes in my own head and I start hearing that person scoff and I see them roll their eyes.

    But get this: the person who planted those seeds in me is dead! He was my dad. It’s a special kind of feeling to grow up and your biggest tormentor and origin of the worst feelings about yourself is your own dad. Peoples dads do way worse things than my dad did, but just because somebody else had a bad dad doesn’t mean my dad can’t be bad, too. And when I say he was bad, he was bad in a very specific emotional way.

    If you’re wondering what I mean, let me give you a single solitary example (I have a ton more).

    We would be having fun on Christmas morning, as kids tend to do. It probably looked like this:

    In the middle of all those joyful kids, my dad would get in his car and sit there with the engine running out on the street. Once we were sure we all saw him, he’d drive away and stay away for hours. He did this on more than one Christmas. Christmas was also his birthday. He wasn’t mad that we weren’t celebrating him, he was mad that we weren’t sad. So he made us sad.

    He couldn’t help it, I guess. His mom was even worse, if you can believe it. So he was dealing with a lot, too.

    And he died the day after MY birthday! The audacity!

    This isn’t a dad roast. That already happened, anyway, because he was cremated.

    He would have loved that joke, by the way.

    Despite how it sounds, I actually did love him a lot and that love grows as I get older and get to know myself a little better. He couldn’t help it, but sometimes he absolutely could help it and he did it anyway. He knew that being a passive aggressive shit to his own children when they were having fun was wrong, but he did it anyway. I don’t think he had the tools or the self awareness to help any of it until later, when he got therapy and prozac. He got a lot better, but I was an adult by then.

    I forgave my dad for what he did to me. Forgiveness is a process, and I am still forgiving him. But I’ll write about forgiveness some other time. This is about death and love.

    “I think the constant articulation of my own grief and hearing other people’s stories was very healing, because those who grieve know. They are the ones to tell the story. They have gone to the darkness and returned with the knowledge. They hold the information that other grieving people need to hear. And most astonishing of all, we all go there, in time.”

    ― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

    We are blessed and cursed to live, because everything that lives also dies. What’s worse than death is to watch other things die.

    Life prepares us for the inevitability of our own deaths by killing the people we love and forcing us to sit with the feelings.

    Life prepares us for those deaths in other small ways, too.

    For instance, we cannot survive without making something else die first. Oh sure there are some monks in some far off places that only eat fruit that falls from a tree and I suppose those same monks could also choose only to eat animals that died of natural causes, though that seems hard to sustain. It simply wouldn’t scale.

    But before I get bogged down on that train of thought, I’ll make the point I was making: love is death, is life.

    When we love somebody, we put a chunk of our happiness with them. We access that happiness by thinking about them, or looking at them, or making love with them, or simply sometimes just by remembering that they are there. If you’re really lucky, they gave a piece of their own happiness to you, too.

    Something happens to that chunk of ourselves we hand over to them, because we completely lose control of it. They have it, now. As long as they take care of it, it grows and changes, and enriches the piece of them we hold. But sometimes people move on and leave that chunk of us behind.

    They might place it gently on the table between you, or they might take it out and stomp on it, or they might simply leave it behind because something or someone drew them away. Sometimes they don’t tell you they’re leaving.

    After they’ve left you and your chunk of happiness is back in your hands and you’re figuring out what to do with it, they might not have given you a reason for it. Or maybe they did give you a reason and it was even more cruel than stomping on it would have been.

    In my experience, there’s no version of the breakup more preferable than another. They’re all bad. They’re all terrible. And sometimes it’s more terrible for you than it is for them and it makes you mad. Why aren’t they as sad as I am? How can they so callously leave us behind like this? Why did they have to go?

    There’s no reason for it. Sometimes. And sometimes we don’t want to hear the answer that’s true.

    And now you’re left with a giant absence. The beams of love and joy you fired in their direction don’t bounce back anymore. The light you shine isn’t reflected. It all disappears. The void swallows it all and gives nothing back.

    The real sad fact of the whole thing is that we’re all alone, all the time, and maybe they made us feel like we weren’t alone. Or maybe we felt like our whole life was over and they blasted into it like a rocket and picked us up with them and we flew so high and saw such amazing things from a vantage we thought we’d never see again and they dropped us off, not unkindly, and blasted off to their next adventure. And now we’re back on the boring old hard ground and we’re so lonely that not even our cats can fill the space.

    I can get wrapped up in metaphors so I want to bring this back to the point I was making before: we can’t make people stay with us if they don’t want to, and sometimes they give us reasons why they can’t stay with us and you know they’re just saying those things to save our feelings.

    Sometimes you want to shout and call them a liar and maybe when you’re young you do that because young people are closer to their feelings and haven’t made the right tools yet.

    When you lose a tooth, there’s a space in your mouth that wasn’t there before that you can stick your tongue through. It takes a while to get used to that absence, and after a little while a new tooth grows into the space where the old one was.

    While we don’t have an infinite supply of teeth, we do have an infinite supply of love. It springs out of us and spills over and gets everywhere. It makes no sense to keep it all inside yourself. That doesn’t do anybody any good. Sharing that love makes the whole universe better, even if it’s just saying something sweet to your cat.

    If it sounds like I’m not writing about death anymore, I suppose I’m not. I’m writing about love now, and how love is the thing that really matters.

    And she said losing love
    Is like a window in your heart
    Everybody sees you’re blown apart

    – Paul Simon, Graceland

    Anyway, losing love is one of the ways life gets us ready to face death, because falling in and out of love can prepare us for when the people leave.

    One big difference is that the people we love are still alive, and we have that little hope that maybe they’ll come back. When you spend a lot of time out here in this void with your cat sometimes that hope is all you have.

    And while it’s important to hold on to that hope, it’s best not to get too precious about it. And it should absolutely never keep you from lighting a new candle for somebody else. If you’re lucky you can get a whole bunch of candles burning all at the same time. Some will always be shorter flames than others, but it’s okay to keep them. We are, after all, made of fire ourselves.

    Losing love is like when somebody you love dies. That seems paradoxical, but it’s the way it is. You love them and they go away, and you’re left by yourself again.

    We don’t ever get over anyone. We just learn to live with their ghosts.

    this song doesn’t have anything to do with what I just wrote, but it’s nice little bop

  • Chase the things that scare you

    Unless you’re scared of wild animals. Please don’t chase wild animals.

    I got out of bad reluctantly this morning.

    I get out of bad reluctantly nearly every morning. I enjoy being in bed, going to bed, sleeping in bed, reading in bed. I love being cozy and there is no cozier experience for me than being in bed. Therefore, it is with great reluctance that I swing my legs over and stand up to begin my day, usually at the behest of my cat, who is yelling at me to get going already.1

    I am not going to tell you every little detail about my morning routine. It’s not interesting and I don’t think I could make it interesting, so I’ll skip ahead to the part that happened a little later: I sent my brother a text to wish him a happy birthday, and then I began writing my morning pages.2 I write them every morning, or near enough.

    This morning, I was writing what was on my mind, which is that I have a heck of a time motivating myself to write or really do anything on Saturdays. I can waste entire weekends sitting on my couch, scrolling through the same five apps on my phone, because that’s the next best thing to not doing anything at all. It’s the only thing I can bring myself to do most Saturdays, and I have struggled mightily with this probably for my entire life.

    Here’s a flow chart:

    1. get up, excited and motivated by the enormous possibilities of a day without work-related responsibilities

    2. do my ablutions, quickly, so I can get to one of the many things I want to do that day

    3. sit down in my living room with a cup of coffee and check my phone for any notifications that happened overnight, still brimming with excitement of the day’s possibilities

    4. put my phone down and write my morning pages

    5. close the notebook I’m writing in after writing the prescribed three pages, and then pick my phone up again

    6. the phone stays in my hand until the evening. I might get up and putter around or do a few housework things, but nothing very significant. I don’t even watch tv or movies or anything at all.

    7. Get mad and sad and angry at myself for wasting a perfectly good Saturday, and then lament all the Saturdays I wasted on this when I could have been working on one of my many projects. Concoct a few ideas to get me motivated, follow through with none of them.

    This is unsustainable yet I have been able to sustain it for quite some time.

    Here’s Where I Tie It Back to My Brother

    You know how I said I sent my brother a happy birthday text? It’s true! I did! I sent it to him and then wrote my morning pages, and then I felt the creep of the bad feelings I talked about, above, because here it was a Saturday and I had my phone in my hand and, well, I just told you what was about to happen. Except it didn’t! I started writing down this newsletter. I’ll get to some of the other things that occurred to me but the one that has to do with my brother is this: he inspired me!

    See, Rob wrote his newsletter and sent it out this morning and he described the exact problem I described with my Saturdays. I’m going to quote him here:

    “I spent a night alone in my house recently. Two members of our family were spending the night with a girl scout troop. Another spent the night with her grandmother. That left me alone in the house for the first night, I think, since we moved in seven years ago.

    I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried to do everything. I couldn’t sit still for more than twenty minutes at a time.”

    See!! Rob wrote about exactly what I had written about in my morning pages, and then wrote just now in this newsletter! He and I had the same experience. I even know what to call it: decision paralysis.

    Do You Suffer From Decision Paralysis?

    There’s so much to do that I don’t know what to do so I end up doing nothing at all. I do this every weekend. Maybe you do it sometimes, too! I think it happens to everybody, once in a while.

    The thing is, Rob inspires me all the time. He’s a great writer and I admire his command of the craft. But in addition to that, he’s figured out something that I have always struggled with, which is finishing things and writing stories and getting them published. He’s published books! He just had a story published that you can read.

    Rob inspired me because I didn’t know I needed to read my brother’s experiences with the very same decision paralysis I was feeling until I read it. This is a theme in my life. I will ignore advice from a hundred people until I hear it the 101th time and then it clicks for some reason and I go oh yeah, that’s right. I don’t know why I do that but I do! I’m working on it!

    Anyway, I know how to beat decision paralysis, and I knew that the fastest way to beating this particular decision paralysis was to do exactly what Rob does that I so often struggle with: just write the fucking thing.

    I know Rob has other struggles with his writing. I suggest you read his newsletter and he can share his insights with you directly, and I won’t try to speak for him here. But there’s one thing that he consistently does that I need to emulate, and something that I’ve done before with no issue but kind of stopped doing for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me: he writes.

    Writers Write

    Writers write. That’s all you have to do to be a writer. When somebody used to ask me for advice about writing (it used to happen!), that’s the one piece of advice that applies to everybody all the time. If you want to be an artist, you have to make art. If you want to be a photographer, you have to take photographs.

    It feels so simple, doesn’t it? But it can be the hardest fucking thing you do in your entire life. I used to say I didn’t like writing, but I like having written. That’s a quote often attributed to Dorothy Parker but she didn’t say that. She didn’t write it, either. I thought she did until I looked it up.

    But I actually do like writing. I love it! It’s really fun to me to put words together until they make a whole sentence. I love collapsing all of my wild, wandering thoughts into one single stream of letters. It’s therapeutic to me.

    Here’s the crucial bit: writing is its own end.

    Don’t Focus on the Deliverables

    You didn’t ask for writing advice, but I’m In a Mood and that mood is made for sharing my thoughts (it’s my newsletter, after all, and you don’t have to read it).3

    Anyway, that’s my advice. It’s the same advice that Rick Rubin gives in this interview that made the rounds a while back and that I’ve written about before, but it bears repeating!

    Work culture has this thing called a Deliverable. Work is all about making deliverables for other people. Sometimes it’s obvious. If you are a baker, then the stuff you bake is a deliverable for your customers. The deliverable of, say, a writer, is a written piece.

    How many writing careers have been strangled in the crib by the impossible, daunting idea of having to write an entire novel? They see the deliverable and they say “I can’t do that! It’s too much work!”

    When you’re just starting out, you have zeal. You haven’t encountered any obstacles. Every idea you have is new and great and nobody’s ever done them before. You can hitch yourself to that rocket and ride it all the way to a long, illustrious career.

    But if you let the obstacles pile up, as I have, suddenly there’s just a big mountain of excuses in front of you and you stop trying. You stop writing. How many middle-aged writers have stopped writing because that mountain stopped them, too? Am I going to be one of those writers? Maybe! I can’t rule it out. I haven’t published a single bit of creative writing in many years, so if I continue like this then it will be me, too!

    But I don’t want to do that. I want to write and share the stuff I write. I’m full of reasons and excuses for not having written, but any examination scatters them and they’re nothing but smudge on my glasses. They aren’t obstacles, they’re illusions.

    All the obstacles I have are created by me, in my head, and not imposed by anybody. There is so much great power in that one little conclusion that it staggers me.

    I’m a little less cynical than I used to be. I also believe in certain specific kinds of magic, the kinds that reveal a little bit about ourselves and our lives and how we move through the universe, the kinds of magic that are invisible to our materialist selves and sit right under the surface.

    I have a lot of things to say about the magic I have let into my life. The longer I live, the more of it I see, and the cynical bastard I used to be (or maybe still am) wears down a little and the romantic dreamer underneath shines through.

    I find this period of my life to be transformative and exciting. I’m rediscovering things I always knew but forgot about, trying new things I never would have considered, and sometimes just even letting myself believe in things I would have dismissed out of hand.

    Luck is probability taken personally.

    That’s another quote that doesn’t have a very clear origin. But it’s a way of looking at the world that I shared for most of my life. And while I still find that scientific, rational perspective useful for many things, maybe it’s just not enough anymore.

    For no clear reason that I can communicate, I have entertained that there might, indeed, be something unknowable and beautiful and incredible that we can’t see, and maybe the universe isn’t a cold, hostile collision of probabilities. I won’t give it a name, because it doesn’t feel knowable.

    What I mean to say is, I don’t know that Rob and I writing about decision paralysis near simultaneously, without discussing it or talking about it at all, might be pure chance. If it is, I am choosing to take it personally.

    I’m tempted to write a bunch of excuses and equivications about this discovery within myself, but I won’t. I have spent a not insignifcant amount of my life thus far criticizing, either openly or just in my head, people who believe these sorts of things. How silly. How selfish. How misguided, to think that the universe cares about me.

    I find it difficult to even write this. I want to delete it completely!

    But I won’t. I must chase the things that scare me.

    Okay, that’s one more bit of advice: chase the things that scare you.

    Here’s a photograph I took when I was in England. It’s just a street. But I felt something magical there, something just out of view, that spoke to me. I choose to believe in the magic of this moment, even if it’s just the brain tumor I had at the time (lol).

    1

    He’s a funny little dude. He eats whenever he wants, so it’s not that he wants me to feed him. He doesn’t particularly want me to pet him. He just wants me to be up and about, like a furry alarm clock.

    2

    Morning pages are not my invention. I wrote about them previously, and lots of people do them. The purpose of the morning pages is to get you writing. It works for people of all different artistic fields. It was popularized in the Artist’s Way, a book I’ve written about before.

    I am generally wary of pop psychology and self help material, even though I read an awful lot of it. I guess it’s more accurate to say I’m wary of believing any of it or practicing any of it, because it doesn’t ring true for me, personally. Some things I find in those books do ring extremely true for me, though, which is why I keep going back to that particular patch of clover–sometimes I find a four leaf one and I put it whereever you’re supposed to put four leaf clovers after you’ve found them (the metaphor kind of falls apart here).

    3

    Like all advice, when I say “you should do this” what I really mean is “I should do this” so remember that whenever somebody gives you advice. They’re talking to themselves just as much as they’re talking to you, and the advice somebody gives can be a little glimpse of their interiority.

  • Who Are You Supposed to Be?

    Happy new year, too, I guess

    I asked you a question.

    Who are you? Do you really know?

    Beginning, more like no kidding – LA Priest, Beginning

    How do you define yourself? I don’t mean in a what kind of tree are you kind of way, but where do you draw the lines between you and the rest of the universe?

    There’s a physical body that has your name on it. It’s the body you’ve protected, nurtured, grown, and abused all these years. It’s the only body you’ve ever had.

    You know that there’s a brain inside there and that’s where your memories are. If you took those memories away you’d still be you.

    When I had surgery once and they gave me a really strong dose of anesthesia, it erased all of my memories from the entire day leading up to it. They flashy-thinged me and somebody else was in my body for a while.

    I only know about him because my girlfriend at the time told me about him. That guy cracked jokes with the doctors and had conversations with people. He had opinions and feelings. But he’s gone forever. He only lived for 24 hours or so. I handed off our body for a while and then picked it back up once I was out of surgery.

    Who was that guy who used my body?

    Who am I?

    I don’t have an answer for you. Can you tell me?

    Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ve also been thinking about thoughts and where they come from.

    Let’s Think About Thoughts

    Do you ever wonder where your thoughts come from? You can just be sitting there, minding your own business, and suddenly a thought comes out of nowhere and before you know it you’re thinking about it so much that you can’t think about anything else. That thought creates more thoughts and they stick to each other — and to you — like limpets.

    “You spend a lot of time in your own head.” – my sister

    She’s right. She didn’t mean it unkindly, and I didn’t take it that way. But it’s true and not great all the same. I always have spent a lot of time thinking about myself, since I was a little kid. Writing has always been a way for me to live outside of my head, and I think my reluctance of late to write or to create or to even engage in anything that isn’t work work work is a result of this reflexive interiority.

    The Pandemic Destroyed Me

    I know, it sounds dramatic! But it’s the kind of destruction that leads to new things. You’ll see if you keep reading.

    I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what sequence of events led me to where I am today but I only have one answer: COVID-19. It feels like yesterday and it also feels like a thousand years ago.

    I’ve had to relearn things I already knew. I had to discover new bad habits that I knew were bad. I stopped going out, nurturing friendships, creating new ones. I stagnated and stuffed myself into my shell and spent many nights on my couch with no company except my little cat and an endless parade of my interior thoughts. Nothing comes easy anymore, and I’m starting to wonder if it ever really did.

    I have to work now
    At things that used to be like breathing
    – Wye Oak, It Was Not Natural

    When faced with a traumatic experience, I go back to where I’m safe and comfortable: inside. There’s been a lot of little (and big) traumas happening to me this year and in the years leading up to the pandemic lockdowns, and they have been really good at knocking me on my ass. No music, no tv, no podcasts, just me and the sounds of the appliances.

    It looks like I’m not doing anything but believe me folks, I’m definitely doing something. It’s not productive or fun. There are lots of terms in English for what this is, but here are a couple of my favorites:

    Brooding. When somebody broods, they’re enshrouded by shadows with just their furrowed brow visible in the slanting light from a single, bare bulb behind a dusty bookcase. Brooding is evocative. It’s what Batman does.

    It’s also what chickens do. That’s where the word comes from. We describe people going over and over their thoughts as brooding but it’s also used to describe a hen who sits on her egg until it hatches.

    The thing about my brooding is that it doesn’t lead to a new chicken or anything, it just leads to more brooding. It’s a loop of thinking about thoughts and I pile more thoughts on top of them. It’s like tetris except none of the rows clear and the blocks stack up through the ceiling. Speaking of the ceiling, It has cracks in the corners and the molding is falling off in a couple of places. Ask me how I know.

    Worrying is a great word, too, but it’s largely lost its other meaning, which is “to chew.” Isn’t that great? If you read an old enough book, you might find a dog “worrying” a bone. This is what I do to my thoughts when I worry. I chew on them. Unlike the bone, the worries don’t get any smaller the more I chew on them. Nothing good comes from it whatsoever.

    No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
    – Alan Watts

    These brooding worries are not necessarily bad, but they tend to be. I obsess about my shortcomings. Whenever life presents a gap in my knowledge, I fill that gap with all of the bad things I think about myself. Even after decades of therapy that worked in lots of other ways, no antidepressant can make those tendencies go away.

    If, over the last few years, you’ve wondered what James Foreman was up to, the answer was this:

    Every time I write about my feelings it’s a way for me to pull them out of my head, yes, but it’s not good! It’s not helping. It’s not the legacy I wanted to leave. I don’t want to be known as the guy who wanted to be a writer but all he could write was a newsletter about his feelings. To answer the question in the title of this newsletter: I was supposed to be a fiction writer.

    But that’s all okay. It’s okay! I’m not dead yet. The pandemic destroyed me, but I can build me back better than before.

    This Is All Leading to a Year in Review Section

    I’ve had so many false starts. I am the king of false starts. Even as recently as almost exactly one year ago, I was writing about new starts, about being a boulder, about gathering moss. I keep writing about the same stuff because it’s still with me. If you see a repeated pattern (I sure do!) in these newsletters it’s my feelings and they’re almost always negative. Enough!

    I’m happy to say that the start I vowed to make last year led to some really exciting developments. Oh you don’t need to know what those developments are, but they started with a book I read called The Artist’s Way. I read a lot of books in the self-help genre, specifically books related to writing and creativity, but when I started reading that particular book, it immediately made sense.

    When I start to write about this book I get so embarrassed, and I feel shame, as though there’s something to be ashamed about.

    The big mountain of goopy, gross feelings about myself are all some form of shame, and this book has helped me shed the shame about my writing and the writer I wanted to be and the writer I thought I would be by now.

    Writers Have to Write

    People have asked me for writing advice and I would always tell them that they have to write in order to be a writer. If nothing else, they have to write. There’s a lot to being a writer that happens after that first part, but if you don’t write then you’re just daydreaming, woolgathering, brooding, worrying. This is also the hardest part about writing. The writers in the crowd know what I’m talking about.

    Somewhere along the way, I forgot this. I stopped writing. I couldn’t do it. Depression played a part. But the slow accretion of bad habits, excuses and shame added up to one extremely blocked writer.

    I started writing the way Julia Cameron recommends in her book: three pages, by hand, every morning. It’s such a simple thing and a very small thing, but that’s why it works. It’s the slow but certain small steps that creates a habit.

    Gone is the shame of not having written, because I did. I do. Every day. I wake up and I write 3 pages. I’ve been doing it now for 4 months or so, and I haven’t missed a single day.

    What works about it? It’s like what Rick Rubin says in the video doing the rounds recently, about how treating everything like a diary, you can be free to create. I started to see everything I write through this lens and it freed me up.

    The morning pages, as they’re called, have made the biggest difference in my life, but there are other parts of the Artist’s Way that have helped. It says it’s a spiritual guide and there’s some spiritual stuff in there but I’m not particularly spiritual and I was not put off by it. So don’t you be put off by it, either! You should read it, if you’re interested in not being blocked. It’s wild how simple the whole thing is. Equally wild is how well it works!

    I’m a Master of Complicating Simple Things

    This year in review sure isn’t much of a year in review, is it? Should I list the books I liked? The songs I listened to?

    One of the guys I follow on Twitter does a running media list of everything he reads, listens to, watches, plays, that sort of thing. I tried to do it and — you guessed it! — false start. I made it all the way to June before I stopped. Part of that was bad memory — I finished something and I forgot to update my list. But an even bigger part of it is how often I simply don’t finish things.

    This isn’t a pandemic trauma response because I have always struggled to finish things. Work comes easily to me, and I have no trouble finishing that. I leave extremely good and enjoyable things unfinished, so it’s not a matter of whether it’s “good” enough to hold my interest. Likewise, I have finished many things that weren’t any good at all!

    It serves me better to see this capacity for not finishing things as a positive thing rather than a negative one. After all, it’s not hurting anybody and I can easily finish the important things.

    Are these more false starts? Maybe! Do I have ADHD? I ask myself that a lot. Many of the tips and tricks to coping with ADHD work with me (my favorite is body doubling).

    A Year In Review By Way of Two Books

    I will give two specific examples. I finished a whole series of books. They were short books, but I finished them (well, the ones that are out). I read every single word and then started the next one in the series. The last one comes out in May. They’re very well written in a way that I enjoy, and the author’s other work is delightful. These were the Singing Hills series by Nghi Vo. It’s safe to say she’s my pick for the new-to-me writer I enjoyed the most this year. I also read her story (another short one!) called On the Fox Roads that was also a delight. I can’t wait to read more.

    Contrasted to this is a book I started but couldn’t finish. I gave it a solid try before I gave up. It’s written in a way that’s fine but not my favorite. I’ll give an example of what I didn’t like about it from another book I didn’t finish:

    “I wouldn’t understand? I’m the one with the doctorate in engineering, Doug. Do you even have a high-­school diploma?”

    – Three Days in April by Edward Ashton

    Do you see what I see when I read that? People don’t talk to each other like that in real life. They don’t tell each other things they know about each other. TV shows and movies do this all the time, and that’s I think where people learned to do it in fiction. Sometimes you have to communicate things to an audience quickly. You can even see this in good movies and tv shows, but the best movies and shows find better ways to communicate important information.

    I submit this scene from Jurassic Park where we learn about chaos theory. Can you enjoy Jurassic Park without knowing this? Sure. But Steven Spielberg is so good at storytelling that he knows exactly how to communicate this to an audience: entertainingly!

    The interplay between these characters is flirty and easy, and I love how she stops in the middle of it to get Alan to pay attention.

    I don’t think about Jurassic Park all the time (it’s not my Roman Empire), but I’m thinking about it a lot because the book I started to read and couldn’t finish recently is very much in the mold of a Crichton book, because it’s about a science fiction concept that’s neat (intelligent octopuses).

    Here’s an example, from very early in the book:

    I see you know who I am.

    Did she? What did she know? Ha’s mind ran down the list of what Evrim was: Evrim was the only (allegedly) conscious being humankind had ever created. An android, finally realized. The most expensive single project, excepting space exploration, ever undertaken by a private firm. The moment, it was said repeatedly, that humanity had been waiting for: conscious life from nothing but the force of our own technological will.

    – The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

    I’m so reluctant to share writing I don’t like because I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings and we can be very protective about our creative work. Criticism is what keeps so many voices from being heard, and I want to make it clear that there are parts of that book that I thought were very lovely.

    But that? I can’t abide it. This particular book has it in a number of different places and I’m only 80 pages into it.

    This is called an “infodump” and that’s a great word for it. It’s an unloading of information. It’s hard to deliver that information in a way that’s still entertaining.

    So how would I do it? Well, that’s easy. I would omit it entirely. I don’t need to be told that Evrim is an AI in an artificial body. I can learn about him through context. I would argue that this is one of the joys of long form prose: the gradual discovery of how and what is going on. Long form gives you the space to drag things out. Nicholson Baker is a master of this–The Mezzanine is a book that takes place entirely in the span of a single escalator trip.

    I think readers like to discover things on their own, and if they don’t smell what I’m stepping in through the words I write then maybe what I think is important to my readers isn’t actually that important at all.

    Here’s how Nghi Vo tells us that our main character’s companion is a talking bird who doesn’t like them very much:

    “Something wants to eat you,” called Almost Brilliant from her perch in a nearby tree, “and I shall not be sorry if it does.”

    The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

    This is also the beginning of the novel. Look how much we learn in such a short bit of writing. We don’t need anything dumped on our laps by characters that already know what they’re telling each other about.

    I have a lot more to say about writing in general and this stuff in particular, but I’ll save that for another newsletter. If you find the idea of intelligent octopuses interesting, then check out the Mountain in the Sea. It has a hugely positive rating on Goodreads and Amazon, it was blurbed by the great Jeff Vandermeer, and it won a bunch of awards. Clearly, people weren’t put off by it as much as I was. Maybe it gets better. I’ll never know!

    In Conclusion

    That was a heck of a year, wasn’t it, folks? A lot happened! A lot is going to happen next year, too, so get ready for that.

    If you know anybody who would like to read this stuff, send it to ‘em, would you?

  • 🩳 Jim Shorts || Should I Go to the Hospital? How To Know For Sure

    take these steps and never wonder again

    Don’t worry, the question in the title is rhetorical. I feel fine.

    Here’s me at the hospital in 2017, when I manifestly did not feel fine:

    You don’t ever want to go to the hospital. Trust me, nothing good ever happens there. They poke you with needles and tell you things that you absolutely never want to hear. There is only bad news at hospitals. Even when they say something good, like “you’re not going to die” what they really mean is “you’re not going to die yet.” The good news is still bad.

    But sometimes you still have to go to the hospital. A hospital is just a building where all the people who can fix what’s currently wrong with you all hang out in. I’m going to tell you the steps you need to take in order to find out when it’s time to get their help.

    Note: this is only a useful checklist if you don’t feel very good and have some doubts about whether or not you should be going to the hospital. If you should obviously, definitely be at the hospital right now, please just go (for example, if you can’t walk, if you’re wounded and bleeding, or if another, unexpected person is coming out of you).

    1. Take a walk.

      1. It’s okay if it’s a short walk. The purpose is to “get the wiggles out” and “shake out the cobwebs”

    2. Drink a glass of water.

      1. You don’t have to be one of those guys crawling through the desert with vultures circling above him to be dehydrated

    3. Have a snack.

      1. Try to make it healthy and high in protein to get energy and fill your tum-tum.

    4. Take an ibuprofen.

      1. Tylenol or aspirin will do.

    5. Take a nap.

      1. Just a little one. Naps of around 20 minutes are ideal.

    If none of these things work, then you should probably go to the hospital, just to be safe. Alternatively, you can call one of your smarter friends and tell them what’s wrong with you and they will say “I’m sure you’re fine” and “you’re okay” or “you’re always worried about something” and you’ll feel better.

    Or, conversely, you won’t feel better and Life Is Just Like That Now. This can happen even when you do go to the hospital.

    COMMENCING PERSONAL ANECDOTE

    I had my brain thing and I had a neurosurgeon who was very good at surgery but not very good at other things (like talking to people, or looking at people in the eye, or being any comfort whatsoever). He retired and I got a new one who is very good at those other things (I don’t know how good he is at surgery, fortunately). He is so good at talking, they actually put him on video.

    I asked him about some of the lingering ailments I had after my brain surgeries and radiation therapies were completed. I told him I had memory problems, lingering and occasional headaches, balance issues, and an itchy shunt.

    His response: “Yeah.”

    I think I was hoping for something more robust. I don’t know what, exactly, I was hoping for. I asked if I just had to live with those things now.

    “Yeah. Sorry.”

    I think he elaborated a little further about how I was lucky I didn’t have some of the more irksome complications from brain tumors (for example, death), but I was busy making these faces as the camera slowly zoomed in on me.

  • Everything Ends

    So the new things can begin

    Well, the road is out before me
    And the moon is shining bright
    What I want you to remember as I disappear tonight

    Today is grey skies
    Tomorrow is tears
    You’ll have to wait til yesterday’s here

    – Yesterday is Here, by Tom Waits

    It’s Autumn, baby. This is my favorite time of year. Here’s a photo I took of me and Emmitt, my cat.

    It looks like I’m taking a photo of my humidifier or my pile of (clean!) laundry, but I’m not. Emmitt was hanging out behind me for some reason and I thought it was funny. We have fun, Emmitt and me.

    Anyway, on to the newslettering:

    Some memories are like planets. We don’t think about them very much but they’re always there, orbiting around us. We are under their sway, in the invisible certainty of gravity.

    When I picked the title of this issue, I thought people might think I’m announcing that I’m ending of this newsletter. Fear not! I’m not going to stop writing this.

    No, I’m just thinking about ends. And planets.

    I’ll talk about memory in a second. First, I want to talk about planets.

    Did you know that Jupiter has saved our little planet from disaster after disaster? It’s so far away but its gravity is immense. Rogue rocks come flying in from somewhere out there and Jupiter is so heavy that it bends space around the whole solar system. Those asteroids go spinning off away from our little marble. Our precious rock, our only home, under the watchful eye of big brother Jupiter’s big red spot.

    Is Jupiter there in the perfect orbit to defend us, on our perfect orbit, for a reason? Or is Jupiter’s perfect orbit a happenstance compliment our own earth’s happenstance perfect orbit? I don’t know anymore.

    Memories are Comets

    Okay, memory now: memories want to be remembered. It’s their whole reason for being. Sometimes you need to let them have their way. Sometimes they feel like the kind of comet that collides with our brains and makes us nuts, but not really. I don’t like that particular metaphor because it doesn’t capture the repetition. Comets come in and out of our solar system, though. Halley has a comet that does that.

    It’s okay to let those memories into our orbits sometimes and watch their stories, but this is the crucial part: we have to move them along. We have to make them start their orbit again. They’ll be back eventually. But they stick around too long and they cause problems. They mess with the gravity in our lives and by thinking about them too much we start obsessing. No, it’s vitally important to push them away. Crucially, this is also the hardest part.

    Something New Is Always Starting

    “Stars are not important. There is nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important, because they’re so rare. As far as we know, there’s only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys.” – Terry Pratchett

    Every morning when you wake up, and your eyes flutter open, and you have a new day, you’re one of the luckiest beings in the history of the universe.

    Life is so rare that it only exists in one place (as far as we know). We’ve visited a few other planets in the solar system and there’s no life there. Just here.

    When you look at yourself in the mirror for the first time in the morning, you’ve got a front row seat to one of the rarest miracles in the known universe: you.

    You. Yes, you. You’re the miracle.

    You don’t even have to do anything.

    But then you could say that everybody is a miracle.

    Alan Moore gets it. Just because we are surrounded by life doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.

    Carl Sagan got it, too.

    The thing about these miraculous lives we have is that even on the best days, they’re hard. Even lives we know would be easier than our own, if we had everything we wanted or needed, we would still struggle, just in different ways. Your life is immeasurably better than the lives of most people in the long, wild history of human beings. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy!

    As soon as you wake up, you’re in the thick of it. You’ve got a face full of problems before you even life your head off the pillow. My advice for you is simple to say but hard to do, and I know that but I’m still going to say it: it’s going to end, at some point.

    Do not despair! The end is coming. These terrible times will be over soon.

    The white winter peals away to green spring.

    Hold on.

    Everything is Ending

    Everything is happening
    Everyone is clapping
    – Everything is Ending by the Bird and the Bee

    This applies to the bad things, but to the good things, too. Some day even this planetary pattern will end. But not yet! Not today. Not tomorrow. Yes, the end is inevitable, but it’s not here yet.

    Just like everything has to begin, everything has to end, too. We endure our ends to make room for the next beginnings. Even a dead human body left to its own devices will also host new life, from bacteria to bugs.

    Did you know there’s a place not far from here where dead human bodies decompose out in the open? It’s true, and it’s called a body farm, and it’s in Fayette County. They use the bodies there to study how human beings decompose in different scenarios and environments. Sorry, true crime fans, it’s not open to the public. You can sign up to have your body decompose there, if you like, and maybe your ending can educate somebody.

    The Long, Slow Goodbye

    I close my eyes, I just can’t sleep
    Where have you gone again, my sweet?
    – The Long, Slow Goodbye by Queens of the Stone Age

    I feel like I’ve had a lot of endings lately. I don’t know if I’ve had more than my share, but there’s not much I can do about them. I try to remember that it’s important to endure endings, no matter how hard they are, so those new things can begin. Losing a parent is one of the big ones, maybe one of the biggest ones, that people have to deal with. There’s no new beginning behind a dead parent. It’s not like I’m going to get a new dad to replace the old one. Humans aren’t baby teeth.

    But the end of his story is the beginning of a new part of mine, so that’s kind of a new beginning. I don’t plan on joining him at the top of the long, slow, stairway just yet. I’ve got some chapters left.

    It might sound like it, but I’m not complaining about how many endings I’ve had lately. Endings are encoded in everything. The greatest gift we can hope for is a good end. Endings are not fun, but they’re important.

    Did you ever hear somebody say “I hate funerals” ? Of course you hate funerals! Everybody hates funerals! Somebody had to die for one to happen, and that’s terrible. It sucks. We don’t have funerals for the fun of them. Even though dying is inevitable, we still don’t like it when people die. It’s a shattering experience. I imagine it’s even more shattering for the person who died. But at least they don’t have to live without them. That’s the burden of the survivor. We get to watch the ends happen and mourn the people we lose.

    I think my father had a good end, as far as those things go. He was surrounded by every single member of the family he made with my mom, the family that held together despite everything, sometimes despite him! It’s the family that remains even though he’s gone and the family I am so thankful to have.

    This will change, of course. Another inescapable truth about the universe is that it changes. Change is built into everything, too.

    Throw yourself into the unknown
    With pace and a fury defiant
    Clothe yourself in beauty untold
    And see life as a means to a triumph

    – Achilles, Come Down by Gang of Youths

    There is nothing, literally nothing, that goes on forever.

    Forever exists only in our imaginations. That sounds like I’m downplaying it but I’m really not. The human imagination is what keeps us alive. It drives us ever forward. The real spark of humanity is right there in our imaginations, where new things spring out of the underbrush like startled rabbits.

    A Tiny Tincture of Tolkien

    Our imaginations have created a concept wherein nothing changes. Tolkien wrote about it a lot, with his elves. His elves did everything they could to preserve an ever-present past. Elves fought wars over gems that preserved the light of dead trees. While men sought to dominate and dwarves sought to accumulate wealth, elves wanted only to keep what they already had. When the rings lost their power, the elves were forced to “diminish.” Even Tolkien’s forever-obsessed kingdoms eventually went away to the West where they would live in harmony and beauty with the gods.

    But even that infinity is actually finite, because the gods and their elves only persist as long as the world exists. When the world ends, and it most certainly will, the elves all end, too. Forever isn’t so ever after all.

    I’ve Been Thinking About Death, Again (Again)

    You might have noticed that I think about death a lot. I felt guilty and selfish after my father died. It was mixed in with all the sadness, so they took a little bit of time to make themselves known against the backdrop. I felt selfish because I kept thinking about my own death.

    I talked to my therapist about this. He is unafraid to call me out on my bullshit, as all good therapists are, so I expected some castigation or excoriation. He said something I’ve seen echoed by poets and philosophers: every death we experience is our own death, too.

    It feels selfish but it isn’t, because something that’s universal can’t be selfish. That’s like saying you get “selfish” when you’re “hungry.” How dare you selfishly drink water when you’re thirsty or sleep when you’re sleepy. I’ve had my bad memory called selfish. Can you believe it? People have actually accused me of selfishly forgetting things. Thankfully, the relationships with those people ended. New relationships sprang into the spaces they left behind.

    That’s how these things go.

    May your endings be swift. I wish you sparkling beginnings. I wish you bountiful newness and joyful conclusions. Hold on, don’t let go. All you have to do is endure.

    May your endurance be easy.

    Thank you for reading.

    Programming note: You’ll see that the spelling of Foremanea has changed. Foremania was a term first coined (in my memory) by extended family member Leigh, who described a gathering of Foremans thusly. There are a lot of us, after all.

    I also liked how it kind of resembled the word “miscellanea,” at least by the sound of it. I like to capture both ideas with the archaic flourish of an uncommon “ea” ending.

    I want to lean more into the miscellanea part, so I changed the spelling of the name of the newsletter. I like it more. See? Even this newsletter changes!

  • 🩳 Jim Shorts || How Did I Become a Cat Person?

    Lots of cat pictures in this one

    I didn’t decide to be a cat person. It happened to me without my consent or my input. I’m happy it happened, but I never expected it.

    I grew up with dogs. All of my family members had dogs. My brother and mom were highly allergic to cats, so we never had one of those. Here is a photo of me with Molly, the first dog I can remember.

    Here’s another bunch of photos of me with dogs, to prove my point. Lots of dogs.

    I didn’t live with a cat until the 6 months I spent living with my aunt Posy, in the DC metro area, right after I graduated from college. She had a cat named Angel, which is a funny name for her because she was actually a devil. She was big, mentally ill, and feral. She hated me and she didn’t even like Posy very much. She hissed at me and lunged and made my life miserable.

    I didn’t think about cats for years. I visited people who had them, but I never cared much about them. I mean, sure, fun to play with but they bite and scratch a lot and they’re not big dumb goofy companions like dogs, right? Who cares.

    Enter Eli

    Eli was my pal Lindsay’s cat. He loved me. I’m sure he loved lots of people, but this was new territory for me. He loved me. Cats didn’t like me! I didn’t like cats!

    But Eli jumped into my arms whenever I saw him. He was the best cat I ever knew. He single-handedly changed my opinion about his entire species. He was like an ambassador from the Cat Kingdom. Eli was very wise, so I am certain that he knew how important cats would one day be me. Here’s a photo of me and Eli in Lindsay’s kitchen.

    Suddenly, Cats Everywhere

    In the last few years, my brothers all got cats. Will, Rob, David. My sister did, too. I met some more nice cats and I liked them. No offense to the dogs in the audience, I still love you. There’s room in my heart for more than one type of animal.

    I got a brain tumor and went through all that stuff and I felt like I needed something alive around, something to take care of. Something more demanding than a plant, silently withering away on the windowsill, but not as demanding as a dog, which is not allowed in most apartments around here.

    My brother Will had adopted a little cat named Emmitt that he couldn’t keep. This new cat didn’t get along with Turnip, who was there before Emmitt, and he had to live somewhere else. The rest is history.

    Thank you for reading The Collected Foremania. Please tell everybody you liked this issue. If you didn’t enjoy it, keep it to yourself.

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    Emmitt Is Very Small

    You’re not prepared for how small he is. People think he’s a regular sized cat, but he isn’t. Until Bryn got Puppet, Emmitt was the smallest cat most anybody had ever seen. He is 7 lbs. I don’t have a photo that illustrates how small he is. You kind of just have to see him in person, which you never will. Sorry.

    You Will Never Meet Emmitt

    Something you need to know about Emmitt is that he is scared of everybody. If Emmitt detects you before you detect him (and he likely will), he hides somewhere deep, down, and dark. If I surprise him (not hard to do), then he will hide under the couch or the bed. If a stranger comes to the house and makes lots of loud noises, the bed and couch aren’t enough—he needs something even deeper, so he’ll slide himself as far into the back of the closet that he can get. The thoroughness with which he has wedged himself is directly proportional to how frightened he is, and how well he thinks he has hidden.

    When my brother Will first adopted Emmitt, he hid in the most improbably small place in the room: under a dresser. He had barely enough space to fit his head. Will had a surveillance video that captured Emmitt slithering out from under a dresser in the middle of the night, long after the noises of the house had settled and he felt at least safe enough to eat.

    When Emmitt joins me on a Zoom call (rare, because my raised voice scares him), I tell everybody watching to get a good look because that is the only time they will ever see him.

    If I have a visitor, especially a visitor who likes cats, they’re always disappointed. “I thought you had a cat,” they say. Emmitt simply will not come out. The most ardent cat person can try every trick they ever learned but none of them work. One person even brought a can of tuna.

    But Emmitt is extremely patient. His play style is Ambush Predator—he watches and waits. This served him well when he was a stray, but it makes him frustrating to play with. He might chase a fuzzy ball or something across the floor, but only once. He stops, hunkers down, and watches his prey bounce, scoot, and wiggle.

    He ate that tuna, long after that person had left. Emmitt wins again.

    It Takes Time and Patience

    Let’s say you visited me a lot, and with a reliable frequency. It takes a while, but Emmitt might emerge eventually. In a couple of months, he might test the waters by sitting at the closet door. The week after, he might sit at the entrance to the bedroom.

    You might go to the bathroom, and in the hallway, see this:

    Look closely. (photo by Will1)

    Oh My God, There He Is!

    Eventually, after a few more weeks, he might finally come out and sniff around. He knows you can see him. He’s letting it happen. You’re a guest in his house.

    It’s tempting to get excited, but trust me: don’t. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be happy that Emmitt feels comfortable enough around you to come out of his hiding place, because you absolutely should be. That’s a huge vote of confidence! I’m just saying: celebrate quietly. And don’t look at him. Don’t even acknowledge that he’s there. If he sees you looking at him, you blew it for that week. Better try again next time and hope he forgives you. If you, god forbid, talk to him, forget it! You just set the whole process back months, pal.

    It takes even longer after that for Emmitt to let you pet him, and even then it’s a furtive permission. He needs the pets, and he wants you to pet him, but he’s also terrified. He’s being very brave, I hope you know. Terribly brave. Braver than the troops, honestly.

    There Have Been Two Exceptions

    Only twice in the entire time I have known him has Emmitt bypassed the process I described. One was when my pal Ben came to visit for the first time. Ben, at the time, had no interest in Emmitt at all, which might have factored into what happened after Ben came over and sat down on the couch.

    Emmitt walked out of the bedroom like nothing was different, like Ben had always been there. He even rubbed his face on Ben’s shoes and permitted Ben to pet him. This had only ever happened once before.

    With me.

    When Will and Molly brought Emmitt to my apartment in Squirrel Hill, to drop him off at the home of a man who never had a cat before, he had no anxiety whatsoever. He walked around, smelled things, and even jumped up on my lap. He was home. I was his person. He’s been my best friend ever since. Will and Molly couldn’t believe it. This is the same cat that had hidden under a dresser for days.

    I don’t know if I believe in magic, but something happened that day. It was my favorite kind of miracle, a little one, just for the people there to see it. We’ve been inseparable (mostly) ever since.2 He’s followed me to three apartments, multiple girlfriends.

    This is the first time we met:

    So Now I’m a Cat Person

    He annoys me sometimes. His little meow sounds like a rusty hinge. He loves treats, and I try not to give him too many. He has a bowl of dry cat food that he can eat from whenever he wants. Most of the time he just wants to be near me. He wants me to pet him. He especially likes it when I rub his face. We have our rituals, like he follows me into the bedroom every night and waits until I’m under the covers and jumps up and hangs out on my chest while I read.

    As far as cats go, he’s extremely easy. He uses his litter box, except when there’s a basket of laundry around, and if so he pees in that. I don’t mind, it helps keep me on my toes and forces me to fold laundry and put it away as soon as it’s clean. He doesn’t do rascally cat things, like knock stuff over or try to escape.

    We make a good team.

    1

    Emmitt lived with Will for months long before he came to live with me. Even so, he only sees Will once in a while, so he still hides. Will took this photo just as he opened the door to my apartment. Emmitt, of course, hid in the closet.

    2

    Okay, okay, there was a brief moment shortly after I got him that I half-heartedly asked if anybody wanted to adopt him because I didn’t think I was going to be able to keep up with his fur and dander and the person I was moving in with was allergic and it was weird and it passed quickly. Lots of relationships have rocky starts.

  • 🩳 Jim Shorts || The Store Timer

    I’m not decided on the title

    This is the first post from the section I’m calling Short Foremania. They’re shorter versions of the Collected Foremania and I will hopefully write them more often because there’s less pressure.

    I also made this logo.

    Anyway, here’s finally the actual newsletter I wrote:

    Whenever I go to the store, a timer starts. I don’t know how much time is on it until it hits zero.

    There are factors, but the weight of each variable changes depending on the day, time of year, or even how much coffee I drank that morning.

    The formula is invisible, but the march of minutes is inevitable. Something in me starts the stopwatch as soon as I step inside.

    Tick Tock Tick

    These are primary variables

    • which store?

    • time of day

    • my mood when I went in

    • how busy the store is

    • who’s with me

    • am I hungry?

    • ambient temperature

    When the timer reaches zero, I gotta get out of there. I beeline for the checkout, if I can. If I can’t, then I’m going to be grumpy. Sorry.

    The Weighty Variables

    The more I love a store, the longer I can stay there. IKEA trips can last an entire afternoon. I can spend a long time in Target, too. I will endure a Giant Eagle and I’ll be there for exactly as long as it takes me to get what I need and get out, like a burglar. I plan trips to Wal Mart like a heist.

    If I’m hungry, tired, over- or under-caffeinated, I probably should have just stayed home.

    My mathematical mind

    can see the breaks

    So I’m gonna stop

    riding the brakes

    – My Mathematical Mind by Spoon

    What Does This Mean?

    I have no idea! Maybe this is one of those things that happens to everybody and I live with this mythology about myself. It’s this mythology that led me to think myself a unique and pitiful creature overtaken by the anxiety and depression that plagued me for most of my younger years. That particular myth was dispelled by a therapist who not only told me I was not unique but that he could help me get better from it.

    I think we all carry this kind of folklore about ourselves.

    But we don’t carry it just about ourselves but about everything.

    Babies love to drive the grownups crazy with the drop game. From the lofty air of their high chairs, they drop (or throw) a cup or pacifier or whatever, over and over. This is not only an entertaining game, it’s a young brain learning about the world. Baby talk is not just cute nonsense, it’s a young brain mimicking the sounds it hears, laying cognitive foundations that will evolve into language pathways.

    We accumulate a lot of things as we grow. The fertile ground of youthful neuroplasticity is where stereotypes and prejudices grow. The things grown ups tell us, or things we overhear them say, plant themselves in our minds and, over time, turn into opinions and positions. We have a responsibility to dig up the bad ones and throw them out, or plant new ones. This metaphor is slipping away from me, so I’ll stop before I’m writing about picking fruit or whatever.

    What folklore is stashed away in your library? Isn’t it time to take it off the shelf and examine it? Yes, I think it is.

    Thank you for reading. Truly, thank you. Let people know you like it and I’ll give you a hug (or a hearty handshake)

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  • It's Summer, Baby

    Let’s try to have some fun

    When you swing in the tire swing

    make sure your socks are off. You’ve forgotten, I expect,

    the feeling of feet brushing the tops of sunflowers

    – if you get there before I do, by Dick Allen

    I’m going to try to be positive about summer. I know how much you guys love it.

    Generally speaking, folks seem to really love it when the wet, chilly spring slips into the sopping hot days of summer. You feel free, untethered, perhaps? You have more time to do the things you love, maybe? The weather cooperates with your hobbies, probably? You like the longer days, I think?

    You’ll notice the prevaricating1 because I don’t really know why people love summer so much.

    Summer: Great for Thee, Sucks For Me

    Summer is a time of immense anxiety for me. I can hear you groaning, but stay with me here. I’m going somewhere good.

    Thank you for reading. Click this button and share it, please!

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    Some of the stuff that I experienced in my otherwise wonderful childhood have made me inconsolably anxious when summer comes. These are the kinds of things that other people didn’t struggle with, or that didn’t cause anxiety in them. I think this is important to note because I want to be clear that I know how odd it is to be upset over a season (and one that is so universally loved, at that).

    Water, for instance. Specifically, bodies of water. I don’t like them. I was terrified of deep water for most of my early childhood. I never really reckoned with that, so as an adult, I never enjoyed water-based activities. I would rather have avoided them.2

    The old fear lingers, in the narrow spaces between anxiety, shame, and pressure from my father, who swam daily in the river as a child and didn’t understand how I couldn’t enjoy it as much as he did. I’m not sure he saw my fear as a weakness, but the shame I felt was magnified.

    Shame is a big theme in my life. My father and shame are like that meme from Predator with me in the middle. I can’t think about one without also thinking about the other.

    Anxiety is my constant companion. Anxiety is as much a part of me as anything else. This will come as no surprise to dedicated readers, as I have mentioned the word “anxiety” in 10 of the newsletters I’ve written. I probably mention it more in person.

    I have struggled mightily with the social variety of anxiety, dismissed by many (including me!) as “painfully shy,” which, while accurate, didn’t do much to help me get to the root of the problem. I know that the grown-ups in my life wanted to help me, but lacked the vocabulary. This was 1989. We barely knew what anxiety was.

    My Father Died

    I understand why people use language like “passed” or the dreaded “moved on” to describe when someone dies. The word “died” sounds so finite, brusque, sudden, unpleasant.3

    He died around 8:30pm on May 3rd, a day after my birthday. He was 80 years old, and it was 129 days after his.

    It’s hard to nail down an exact time, because the hospice experience was holistic. There were no beeping instruments measuring his vitals. There was no need for them, because his decline was obvious and inevitable.

    One minute he was breathing, the next he wasn’t. My mom and sister, who had been by his side for days, noticed that he was gone. It wasn’t dramatic. My father died like so many others do, quietly. He lived quietly, too, so it’s fitting.

    I’m not going to write about him a lot here, because there’s a longer piece about him in me. I’ll leave it with a story about the last few months of his life to illustrate my feelings without digging too deeply into them.

    Here’s That Story

    When we stopped to visit him, he never had much to say. He never, ever, had much to say, so it wasn’t unusual. One way a patient with dementia tells on themselves is a change in their conversations. The things they say don’t make the same kind of sense they did before. For somebody who doesn’t talk much, it’s harder to notice. We had to suss out his decline in other ways, and they made themselves apparent. Eventually it was impossible to ignore, and impossible for family to manage, so we could visit him in pleasant surroundings where people took care of him.

    Whenever we would visit, my siblings always gave him a hug. I found it hard to hug him sometimes. There was too much of myself in the way, and there was too much of my memories of him in the way, and they crowded at the entrance and I couldn’t get through. So I often left those visits without hugging him. The closer he got to the end, the easier the hugs came, and I was eager to close the distance between us. Too little too late, maybe.

    If there had been a person in him who could understand such things, I could have made him understand. He would have, in years past. But that’s not the guy I couldn’t hug anymore. Still there, but different. I still don’t have the right words, so I won’t rush them and make a mess of it.

    I read about some of the things peoples fathers did to them, and it was never as bad as those. But we had our own kind of difficulties, and he carried an enormous weight very quietly and where nobody else could see it, but when people carry really heavy things and don’t have the vocabulary to talk about them, it makes itself known to the people around them anyway, and it’s clumsy and hard for everybody.

    My childhood was happy, full of laughter, and I was always fed and sheltered, and loved. I have siblings and I love them, and my mom is the kindest most generous person who ever lived. But I had a complicated relationship with my dad, and that’s where I’ll leave it for now.

    The Long Staircase

    When somebody is dying, they’re walking up the stairs to a door. You can talk to them while they walk, but they never stop to chat. The last few steps are slow but certain. They go up when they’re ready. They might linger with their hand on the knob. After they go through that door, they close it behind them, and you can’t talk to them anymore. Well, you can yell through it, but they won’t answer you. Maybe they hear you, maybe not.

    Don’t worry, you’ll go through that door some day, too. If you’re lucky, you will help a few people through it first.

    Sometimes people run up the steps and dash through the door like they can’t wait to see what’s on other side. Sometimes people go through it before the rest of us are ready, and they do it when nobody’s looking, before we can stop them.

    “I’m not ready for you to go yet,” we say, to the door that slammed behind them.

    There’s a lot of metaphors for death, and I’ve written more than my share. I expect I have a few more of those in me, too.

    “‘And what would humans be without love?’”
    ‘RARE,’ said Death.”
    — Terry Pratchett

    The Summer Scaries

    Anyway, back to summer. My social anxiety and fear of the water converged at Linsly Day Camp, when I, weeping and screaming, was dragged into the pool by an upperclassman. I was 11 or so years old.

    I remember the feeling of his skin against mine as he pinned my arms to my side and heaved us both through the water of the shallow end of the pool (which I refused to leave) and into the deep end. I didn’t have that kind of intimacy with anybody, not my family, not my friends, certainly not somebody I despised.

    He let go of me and I scrambled to the wall. Even the bullies, taunting and laughing before, were stunned by my cowardice (or at least they were in my memory).

    It’s only now, with he 35 intervening years between me and that scared kid, that I realize that my early fears of intimacy could have at least partially come from that feeling, that closeness, that anger and rage and shame. What emerged in me as another panic attack or source of anxiety very well could have begun in George Sokos’s arms.

    My father hated unstructured time, and that passed to me as a deep, desperate anxiety. Summer, the season of unstructured time, was, in a word, fraught.

    While the anxiety over intimacy and closeness and romance is mostly gone, it comes back when I least expect it. Brain stuff is like that.

    This Was All 35 Years Ago

    I know, everybody has stuff that happens to them when they’re younger. Everybody has stuff that happens to them. Everybody. Nobody gets through life without Stuff Happening. Get real, Foreman. You’re not special.

    Okay so I’ve told you why I hate summer, but what does that mean?

    Think of the things you love about summer. I probably don’t like those things. I listed a few of them above, but “summer activities” also includes a whole constellation of activities, sensations and experiences that I just would rather not participate in. I don’t really need to name them all. If you associate a certain kind of activity with summer, I probably don’t like it.

    Fireworks don’t thrill me, though I admit I enjoy them when they happen. I like being close to them and feel the bangs and the smell the crackles. Fireflies are good, too. Riding bikes around my neighborhood was fun. Running through sprinklers. Playing outside. Getting a dog really stirred up and chasing each other around the back yard.

    That’s not a comprehensive list of things I enjoy about summer, but it covers some of the fundamentals.

    So you dare the plane to crash
    Redeem the miles for cash
    When it starts to dive
    And we’ll dance like cancer survivors

    Andrew Bird – Near Death Experience Experience

    Things I’ve Historically Blamed For My Summer Hibernation

    My reaction to the summer scaries is often sublimated into other areas of my life that are only tangentially related, or somewhat related. I label them as “historical” because they’re usually only somewhat accurate, and are artifacts of earlier ideas of myself. My current idea of myself is based on the most recent information I have gathered through therapy (twice a month) and a constant, ongoing internal assessment.

    – the weather (hot, humid)

    – bugs

    – sunlight

    – longer days

    I don’t like any of those things. I used to avoid them, but I’m trying to avoid them less. I always have more fun that I expected. I’m trying to remember that more often.

    Get more of this right in your very own inbox! Isn’t it lonely in there with all the coupons and forwards and stuff?

    Autumn Brings My Favorite Things

    I have no idea whether I like these things because I have always hated summer (for the reasons I noted, above), or because I like them on their own merits. As I round first base on my forty-sixth year, I don’t think it matters, because this is the life I have. My favorite things about autumn:

    – the weather (cold, crisp)

    – smells (cruncy leaves, campfires)

    – Halloween (spooky and dark and candy)

    – coziness (cuddling close to our people and our creatures)

    I love the longer nights, too, because I simply always have. I love nighttime. I’m most alive when the sun is down.

    I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

    – Sarah Williams4

    You might read all of this and say “so what?”

    I’m kind of ashamed that I ever felt so much shame.

    I Had a Dream

    I had a dream that I had a giant notebook. It was just a big, blank page. I drew a big “H” in one corner. I don’t know what that H means or what it stands for, if anything.

    But I know better than to ignore my dreams. They have omens and stuff in them, right?

    So I went out to the art supply store, which I love (I love the smells and sights and sounds, and the pregnant promise of so many things to make other things with), and I bought a couple of giant notebooks. I picked the one that felt right and I opened it and placed it on my favorite desk in my favorite spot in my apartment and put on my favorite headphones and used my favorite pen and drew a big H in the corner exactly like the one in my dream.

    The words came out. I wrote.

    After I was finished, probably an hour later, I felt hopeful. I have started things before. Let’s see where this goes, I thought. Good start.

    The next day, I wrote more. It didn’t stop there. It continued into the days that followed.

    I had a breakthrough. The dream foretold a recipe. When followed, the words stopped up behind the blockage came forth.

    The notebook now has hundreds of words. Maybe I’ll make them into something. It doesn’t matter.

    They didn’t just come out there, but everywhere.

    The thing about me is that I’ve never not written. Very little of it has been published, but I have been writing it nearly every day for decades. I call myself a writer not because of what I’ve published but because of what I’ve written.

    I occasionally send it out for somebody else to read and they publish it, but most of it is in notebooks and files. Nobody ever reads it. I’m going to change that, but it takes making myself uncomfortable at times when I would rather be comfortable, so I just gotta kind of make myself do it.

    I have to work now
    At things that used to be like breathing
    – It Was Not Natural by Wye Oak

    Jim Shorts

    Oh children
    Poor old Jim’s white as a ghost
    He’s found the answer that we lost
    – O Children by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

    I’m going to start writing more of these, but they’re going to be shorter and more frequent. So get ready for that. I’m trying a new feature (new to me, at least) on Substack5 that lets you create new verticals within the platform, which, to you, just means you’ll be hearing from me more. At least, you will if my plans match my actions. They don’t always.

    1

    I just realized that Substack supports footnotes, and the Pratchetterian in me is giddy

    2

    the thing about avoiding stuff you don’t like is that you miss a lot of good things, which is why I am approaching uncomfortable things more directly, these days

    3

    I’m tempted to divert into the history of words, because that’s what I do when the feelings get too big, and talk about how “passed” is more gentle and preferred in the same way that English speakers say “beef” instead of “cow” when describing the meat from the animal, and how that came from a similar desire to diffuse the language into more palatable words, but I’ll save that for a future Short Foremania, coming soon to an inbox near you.

    4

    this quote was on a print my aunt posy had, and it always makes me think of her, another person who ran up the stairs.

    5

    I’ve decided that footnotes don’t really work on the web, so I dunno if I’ll use them. I mean, are you supposed to click on the little number and go read something and then scroll back to where you think you were? Pain in the butt, if you ask me.

  • What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do

    Read to the end for a great TikTok

    I don’t have the answer to the question I posed in the title. It’s kind of a bait and switch that way, and something we never do in content marketing. One of the first rules of writing for the web is that you always answer a question you ask in titles. But that is work, and this newsletter isn’t work, even though it sure feels like it sometimes.

    That’s not true. This never feels like work, because sometimes work is enjoyable. This newsletter is a weight around my neck! But, and hear me out, that’s okay.

    I have learned that this resentment is a feature of the things we love and know we should be doing. I learned this from a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressler. I am only about halfway through it, so if it takes a weird turn into unpleasant spiritual mumbo jumbo or some other objectionable direction, I will retract my endorsement (he has already said some eyebrow-raising things about depression and anxiety, but I am choosing to overlook them). So far, so good. I like his approach.

    The Enemy is Resistance, and It Comes From Within

    That’s basically it: the obstacle to creating the art in our hearts is not big and scary and implacable, it is merely our own reluctance. It does not matter what form this resistance takes—we can overcome it. Here’s a highlight from the book:

    There’s a lot of power there! We are our own worst enemies, our own greatest champions. It’s all in us, baby!

    I haven’t gotten to the part where he explains how I can beat resistance, but I’m looking forward to finding out so I can start writing again.

    Oh, shit. I’m doing it now, aren’t I? Ah. Well, I’ll give him that one.

    Poetry Break

    the past is so horribly fast.

    —from I Have a Time Machine, by Brenda Shaughnessy

    How Do You Picture a Year?

    This isn’t a Rent reference, this part is literally about how we imagine the flat segment of time called a year, divided into the 12 months we all know and love. Here’s a TikTok about it: