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

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

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

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

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Nature vs Nurture Revisited

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

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

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

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

A small but manageable drinking problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addiction 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Radical forgiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m Not Done With Forgiveness

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

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

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

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

What more can I do?

I can forgive. I can do that.

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Anyway, that’s kind of a bummer.

Are we nurtured or is it nature?

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

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I’ve always been a version of the person I am today. There is a portion of matter, roughly Jim-shaped, that moves through the universe. I am a happenstance collision of events that became a person, fully-formed and one of the most improbable things in the universe. I am, as is every human, Dr. Manhattan’s thermodynamic miracle.

That’s how the story begins, but how much of the story that follows was determined at the beginning, and how much developed as I grew? Is everything I was ever going to think or do written down in my genes when the cell division started and I’ve just been acting out the script? I’m going to answer the question definitively, so warm up that Nobel Prize.

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“But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen

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If you follow me on my other social media, you might have seen me promise to tell the story behind this image. I interviewed my mother, the writer of those words, about what I was like as a baby, and will distribute the audio to you all via this newsletter’s capabilities. I liked talking to my mom and I think it’ll be fun to try it out, but I also know that I need to make good on my promise to show the photo itself. The audio is in the can and ready to roll so expect that in your inboxes soon.

I think that’s my father handing it to me, and one of my older brothers in the background. It’s a standard Christmas morning photograph. A little kid gets a new toy. Big deal.

But the “then cries” part is what I want to talk about, because it’s a tantalizing look into what kind of baby I was, and maybe what kind of grown up I am.

It’s Nature, Dummy

Little details about my childhood pop out at me as emblematic of who I am today.

If I believe that a large part of who we are is determined by our genes, then this can be explained by a certain kind of bias that has a name I don’t know, but the kind of bias where you only remember certain events because they reinforce your prejudices. My mother sees the man I became and the times I acted in a way consistent with that man are the events she remembers. There are two events that are canonically the Extremely Jim Things That Happened to me, one of which is mentioned in the short interview I did with my mom but I’ll mention here because I always talk about it and it’s very much me.

This is what’s supposed to happen when you’re a certain age: you try to get out of your crib. It’s a totally normal part of childhood development. But here’s the thing about me: I never did. Ever. Of the six children my mom had, I’m the only one who was satisfied to stay where he was until the arrival of the next brother in sequence, when I was around 4 years old. I stayed in my crib because I had to make room for the next baby, and I probably hated it.

This is exactly like me today. I get complacent and comfortable and I don’t like change. I also have a tendency to follow rules and respect the authority of those who expect me to stay where they put me. They say that the real test of a person’s character is what they do when unobserved, and when I was at the age that most kids try to leave the bosom of their comfortable beds and explore the tantalizing world beyond the bars of their crib, I stayed put.

Hobbity

The ultimate defining characteristic of any person is what they name their wifi network. It’s more reliable than tea leaves, more true than horoscopes. The name of my wifi network is Bag End. I describe myself as a hobbit when given the chance to talk about myself and Tolkien (two of my favorite subjects).

I am happy in the exact scenarios that make a hobbit happy. I like good food, good drink, a good smoke (well, I used to), the easy company of good friends and the certainty that tomorrow is going to largely resemble today. In the furry feet of Bilbo Baggins, I would have the exact same reaction to Gandalf in this scene, which is a truncated but mostly unmolested scene from the book, because it was perfect and even Peter Jackson knew not to tinker with a perfect scene:

 

“Sorry! I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Not today. Good morning!”

J.R.R. Tolkien – The Hobbit

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Or maybe it’s nurture

We can’t really study it in a laboratory, because it would be wildly unethical to intentionally subject a human being to a less ideal life. It would be like a dystopian Truman Show where one person is given advantages and the same person a complimentary set of disadvantages, and we see how similar those people are when they come out the other end.

This is fertile ground for thought experiments, for sure, but also an entire genre called alternate history (usually classified as science fiction). Some alternate history is a wild revision using time machines to alter the course of an entire war, while some is simply a look at what would happen if a regular person missed a train.

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Evel Knievel shot up from dead grass.
I loved him better each time that he crashed.

– Tin Foil by The Handsome Family

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My own alternate history

There are clear markers in my life when things could have gone differently. Here are two:

1. When I was twelve or so, I steered a go-cart off a cliff and into the Ohio River, though I hit a mound of dirt at the edge which stopped me from careening off the ridge and into the water, some 30 feet below. I don’t think I would have survived it.

2. When I was in college, and about to graduate, I was on the verge of going to graduate school and suddenly balked. I saw the path I was on and didn’t like where it was going, so I went to live with my Aunt Posy in Washington DC and discovered that the anxiety which had been my constant companion over the years was keeping me from enjoying the life before me and I retreated back to live with my parents and started taking Zoloft and going to therapy and got a job and a girlfriend.

If I had gone to graduate school, I don’t think I would have found the source of my suffering as soon. Academia, specifically the environment of Morgantown, would have sheltered me from the world for at least another few years, and it was that shelter that kept me from facing the demons crouched over me. 

Those are only two divergences, but I could name a dozen more that happened between my birth and today. I have no regrets about the way I navigated those incidents, or those jobs I said yes to or those decisions I made that seemed right at the time. No, all my regrets are in how I occasionally treated other people, and the times I was selfish or unkind. I try to be better, now, and sometimes fall short, but I have a target that I always aim for.

Who cares about all that, what Harry Potter house would you be in?

It’s fun to pick yourself up and plop yourself down in another time. We like to do the same with fictional worlds, which is a common source of online quizzes like Which Harry Potter House Would You Be In? The online quizzes all like to sort me into Hufflepuff, probably because I’m so hobbity.

Think about it for a while and you can entertain yourself for hours. What would my life had been like if I had been born fifty years earlier? A hundred years earlier? If I had the same parents, I likely would never have been born at all, since my mother required the RhoGAM shot when she had me. I was a very sick child, so any time before antibiotics would have been dicey. Even if I had lived through all of those infections, I would have been easily taken out by my brain tumor, though the cause of it is unknown so maybe under different circumstances I might never have developed it. 

Time Travel

Going back across my family’s timeline and placing myself into the different eras is a fun experiment for me, because my family has a solid thread of wealth and privilege going back at least to the Scottish royalty that I am allegedly descended from. This makes time travel along my family’s history a fun diversion rather than a terrifying exploration of the depravities of slavery, institutional misogyny and poverty that so many others faced, that face still today. As a white man with an education, I would have been fine in nearly any era of western civilization. This is privilege and I acknowledge it.

Even so, intersecting with that thread are Irish peasants and starving immigrants who married into my family and contributed to the line of heredity that led to me, so an arbitrary toss of a beanbag on my family tree would have seen me either as in the family of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence or an incompetent Captain who likely led his fellow impoverished riverside men into an ambush during the days of the eastern American frontier. Another toss and I’m either in the company of a mechanic in New Cumberland or a physician in Wheeling. Yet another toss, and I’m in a mental hospital and getting the occasional letters from my family in Tarentum. 

Even a privileged lineage like mine is fraught with eddies and backwaters and other water-related metaphors. What I mean to say is this: the unbroken thread that led from those first cells to me didn’t always make a straight line, and sometimes it doubled back, and sometimes it nearly didn’t make it at all.

Here I go, being maudlin again

It’s this tendency I have, to be maudlin and sincere in my optimism, that keeps me from being a great writer instead of a good one. I don’t have the killer instinct of a good salesman or great writer. I am too easily enchanted. Having said that, here I go:

To be alive is a privilege. This year, so terrible for so many, has seen me reconnect with my capacity for joy that I have not known for many, many years. Though I was an unhappy adolescent, and a mostly miserable adult, my middle age is marked by a nearly constant state of excessive, annoying joy. I sometimes have difficulty falling asleep because I’m so excited about all of the things I’m going to do tomorrow, and sometimes I have no plans for tomorrow beyond nailing a painting to a wall. I am thankful and happy to simply be alive, and I expect nothing more from myself than to remain that way.

I measure my mood every day. This is a snapshot of the last 27 days:

The unbroken thread through misery and hardship have at least resulted in this happy, slightly fat, slightly hobbity, slightly gray, slightly wrinkly man with a cat and a computer and socks that keep my feet warm. If this is all I ever have, then I have more than enough.

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Songs I listened to while I wrote this, that have nothing to do with what I wrote (except the first one):

 

I love this for two reasons: it, also, is largely unchanged from the book. One failing of the movie versions of the books is the leaving out of almost all of the music, which is unfortunate, because people in these books are constantly singing. The Hobbit is an exception, keeping a couple of great songs by the dwarves, like this one.

It has a monastic quality, heavily reliant on the deeper parts of the audio spectrum, because Tolkien’s dwarves are an (entirely intentional) examination of a society made from a single gender. All dwarves are male, though not all dwarves have the corresponding genitals of a man. One could encounter a female dwarf and never know it, because they all present as male. They have beards, deep voices, wear armor, fight in wars, everything the dwarves do. Indeed, any dwarf in the books could be female, but we would never know. They all have a single gender. Tolkien was ahead of his time in ways he could never have predicted.

I mean it’s like everything feels rickety and unstable all of a sudden.

This has taken me so long to write, and I don’t know why. I think partially it’s because I’m still processing everything that’s happening. I think there’s a lot of processing happening in the minds of a lot of people lately. Just when I think I have a handle on how I want to communicate how I’ve put everything together in my head, it slips away and I’m left with the jumble again. It’s a puzzle with slippery edges, the gears that skip. I’m going to try again.

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We thought, we lost you
We thought, we lost you
We thought, we lost you
Welcome back.

– Adventures in Solitude, The New Pornographers

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Lenses

I think a lot about lenses. When we started making good lenses, we used them to look at stuff that was far away and stuff that was really small. These lenses let us examine our universe with more precision and detail than ever. Just by pointing them into the sky at night and down at the little droplets of water in a slide, we discovered stuff we never expected.

By observing the motions of the planets, and how light bends around really heavy objects in space, and how molecules slide in and out of cell walls, we were reassured that those laws we had to explain things were still valid. Laws of gravity and mass and thermodynamics still worked on giant things like stars and little tiny things like molecules. Great!

Albert Einstein figured out the speed limit of the universe. The fastest thing is light, and nothing can go faster than it. It goes 186,282 miles per second in a vacuum (like space). Things can slow it down, but nothing can speed it up. It’s the absolute, unbreakable, universal speed limit for how fast anything can travel.

Except it’s not

Here’s where everything starts to fall apart in my head, but I’m in good company, because nobody really understands how it works. Richard Feynman, widely considered the father of quantum mechanics, said that nobody really understood it.

Imagine that. This is the guy who was most qualified to understand quantum mechanics and here he is telling a room full of people that he doesn’t understand it. We might be able to figure out how some aspects of it operate, but that still doesn’t mean it makes sense.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about quantum mechanics.

If you want to learn about it, there are tons of places on the internet to read or watch stuff about it. It’s interesting! It’s also maddening, because none of it makes sense. The pieces that click together when we consider the Laws of Thermodynamics refuse to come together when we look at subatomic particles. You can bang your head on it for days and it will never make sense.

Remember how I said nothing goes faster than the speed of light? There’s a thing called quantum entanglement that you don’t need to know except this: it breaks Einstein’s speed limit.

Two particles can be separated by billions of lightyears and when something happens to one particle, it immediately happens to the other one, no matter how far away it is. Somehow this information passes between them instantly. We have no idea how. None!

There is nothing in our scientific lexicon to describe this. There is no law that explains it. Here’s what I’m trying to say: the structures that we are so sure holds everything together, when examined closely, tend to fall apart.

Did you know that just by observing something, we can change it? That’s what happens when we measure the spin of a particle that’s entangled to another one. Just the act of looking at it, without actually affecting it in any other way, changes it.

How the hell does that particle know I’m looking at it?

We have no idea! The universe fundamentally no longer makes sense.

This is how I feel about everything.

In the act of scrutinizing the structures of the world, I have stripped them bare and found them wanting.

Example: Here are three thoughts I’ve had in the last thirty years or so:

1) God exists. I was a kid who believed in God, went to church, never really thought much of it, but still just took the existence of God as a given.

2) God doesn’t exist. I got older and skeptical. To me, the reasons for believing in God were nonsensical. The material universe is observable, and our material universe is so thoroughly understood that there’s no room for a God.

3) Maybe God exists. I have no idea anymore. I was very confident in my atheism. That’s not to say I’ve had any kind of experience that makes me rethink everything — I’m not born again, I have not had a revelation. I am just no longer certain. I don’t say I’m an atheist anymore.

I’m open to more ideas.

Human consciousness is a force of nature

I mean, it’s so rattling to consider this. We are no longer just hairless apes mucking about in the muck of the mud of the earth. The simple act of noticing something can alter the behavior of a particle on a different side of the universe.

I mean, when you look at that on its surface, it’s just one particle. There are about ten quadrillion vigintillion atoms in the universe, so it’s not a very big change.

But imagine the possibilities. If our attention affects the universe, we’re no longer as simple as apes knuckle-dragging around this little planet.

We cannot imagine the mysteries of the universe.

I have a theory that stories are the real fundament of the universe, and that the construction of stories is what keeps the universe together. I’ll elaborate in a future newsletter, but I wrote this one to say this: your systems are unreliable, and you should question every one of them.

I will leave you with an idea that I can’t shake, because it’s philosophically bullet proof and it’s fun to think about.

We live in a simulation

It is perfectly within the limited bounds of our imaginations to consider that we will one day soon have the ability to perfectly replicate every aspect of the human experience, from the point of the view of a human experiencing it, and such an experience will be indistinguishable from our reality, and it will all be constructed within a computer. A corollary to this is that if we CAN do this, we WILL do it.

Why would we do that? Because we can, yes, but a high-fidelity simulation has a ton of important applications for science. If you wanted to know how a population would react to a given scenario, you create a simulated version of that population and subject it to the pressures and challenges that represent your area of study.

Therefore, it only a matter of time before a population of human beings living out their lives from birth to death will be incapable of distinguishing their experience from what an actual human being experienced.

How do we know which one we are? If every dimension of a human’s life can be replicated flawlessly within the confines of a computer program, how do we know we’re not in one? Would the cracks ever appear? Would we know them if we saw them?

The bedrock of the simulation theory is this: if humans can replicate the human experience in a computer simulation, then they certainly will do that, and they can do so with near limitless fidelity and replication. Therefore, the statistical odds are such that we are probably living in one such simulation, because the odds of your specific subjective experience being simulated is vastly greater than the odds of you being a meat and blood human, because one could theoretically create an infinite number of these programmed universes, and infinity is greater than one. Statistics are a shaky proposition, so your mileage may vary.

But whatever argument you can mount to argue the validity of the simulation theory is easily outweighed by the reality of our lives. It does not matter if we are living in a simulation, because the laws of the universe are reliable and consistent.

Except they aren’t

But our stories are. Terry Pratchett, a frequent influence on the way I think about all sorts of things, actually depicted stories as a force in the universe, that narratives had a weight and power of their own. Here’s an excerpt from Witches Abroad that illustrates this nicely:

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling…stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.”

While he was writing fantasy, I think there’s some truth in there. Newtonian physics are a way of telling a story about how the world works. That story is made up of rules and laws and consistent phenomena, just like a regular story has consistent characters and rules you know it will follow. The rules change depending on the story. If I’m watching a classic fantasy adventure story, I know that the dashing hero is going to defeat the villain and get the girl. If I watch a Star Wars movie and the good guys don’t win in the end, I’m going to be upset. That’s not Star Wars.

If I’m watching a movie in the surrealism genre, all bets are off. If I don’t see something weird, I’m going to ask for my money back. Art is constantly challenging the boxes we’ve made for it, and that’s what keeps it exciting. Science isn’t like that. It follows specific rules.

Except it doesn’t

Everything is a story. Look closely at the systems in our lives and you see they’re just stories we tell ourselves, each other, our kids.

Here is one story we tell:

The police are here to help us, and if you call them, they will arrest the bad guy and justice will win.

This story is told mostly by white people. Brown people know better. This story doesn’t make sense to them. They would probably laugh if you told it to them with a straight face.

Rules are just the things we’ve agreed about.

Have you ever driven on a two lane highway, where one lane is going in one direction and the other lane is going in the other direction? Have you ever driven fast enough on one of those roads that if you collide with someone coming the other direction, you are all certain to die? Probably!

The only thing that keeps that horrific scenario from happening is a mutual understanding that two yellow lines are a nonpermeable barrier. The only thing preventing mutually assured death is some paint on the pavement. But it’s not actually the paint providing a barrier, it’s our faith that the other drivers will respect the boundary. We’re all in the same story, and we have to follow the rules or we both die.

Money is just a story.

Our currency used to be gold. We traded gold for goods and services because gold had an intrinsic value. You could use it to make beautiful, valuable things that would not tarnish over time. It was rare, and not easy to mine, and its scarcity made it even more valuable. We also traded bits of other precious metals, like silver, for much the same reason.

People got tired of carrying around heavy bags of metals, so governments agreed to hold on to the gold and gave us bits of paper instead. Those papers represented an amount of gold at some location somewhere, and we could exchange that piece of paper for some actual gold that, if we wanted, we could use to make a ring or something. This was called the “gold standard.”

But this limited the government. It couldn’t just create more gold when we needed more money, so they changed the system. Now, money is just guaranteed by the government. The government can decide how much dollars are worth, how many dollars are in circulation, and none of it ever has to make sense.

Money is just a story we tell each other. The stock market is just a running narrative about how people feel about how valuable companies are. The entirety of the American economy, maybe the world’s economy, is based on a mutually-agreed upon story.

It all adheres together and keeps going because of its own momentum.

The systems are breaking down because we’re examining them.

If your attention can alter the motion of a particle, then what else can you do?

This blog post talks a lot about a newsletter, which it is taken from. You can subscribe to it because, as of writing this, I’m still doing it. 

Part 1: A Thought Experiment

Programming note: you might have noticed that this newsletter is now coming to you from a different place. Worry not! It is still the same person behind it, your pal James “Jimmy” Foreman. I decided to switch to this platform some time ago, and I will explain further:

The Hazlett Histories

I was gonna make a series of newsletters about Pittsburgh-area history from the margins, and tell stories people don’t really hear. I really was gonna! I only published one of them because my process for it suddenly became impossible.

I didn’t just click through Wikipedia for my information, I used actual books in the Pittsburgh collection at the Carnegie Main Library. I used to sit in my little spot and drink coffee and look up cool stuff to write about.

I am a creature of process. I react well to schedules and structures. I also respond well to location-based stimulus control, like people who suddenly have to move their bowels when they go to a book store (this is a real thing, called the Mariko Aoki phenomenon, which I submit is caused by the association many people make between reading and pooping). I tried to write more Hazlett Histories without being in the Library, and it just didn’t want to come out of me. Rather than fight it, I let it win, and stopped.

Having tried Substack, this new platform, I found myself preferring it to TinyLetter, which is what I used before. Substack’s only game is newsletters, while TinyLetter is owned by MailChimp, which is much larger company with their newsletter as a smaller, less developed product. It was really hard to, for example embed a video.

 

This is a video of Werner Herzog hearing Paul F. Tompkins do his impression of him, which is a combination of two of my favorite people. Embedding that video was easy and simple, and Substack is interested in continuing to create features and iterate in its mission.

Anyway, that’s why this newsletter is coming at you from a new email address. Because this is the only thing I reliably write anymore (writing fiction is done in coffee shops and I’m trying to do it at home but it’s hard, okay?), I’ve decided that the energy put into this newsletter is worth examining.

Having examined it, I decided to improve it in ways that will become obvious over the next few issues, whenever I decide to send them, which is still an unanswered question. I would very much like for you to share this newsletter with people who you think might like to read it. I know I have possibly reached the apex of my readership for this nonsense, and I’m okay with that. As I’ve said before, this isn’t about you.

Anyway, I have a whole thing I wrote about some other subject, but today I’m going to talk about bathing suits.

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“He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no-one knew where he kept it.” — Terry Pratchett

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I was chatting with a pal who said she had bought a bathing suit online and I imagined myself being a woman and trying to buy a bathing suit and was laid low by the feelings that rushed over me.

It felt weighty and important, like picking your favorite color when you’re a kid, which is an important decision that one can never take lightly, except titanically more important than even that.

It made me think of having a body, specifically a body unlike the one I have, and it got me thinking about how unprepared I would be to engage with the world in a woman’s body.

Note that I am very much aware that not all women have typically female bodies. I am not trying to be exclusionary. I am not equipped to address those matters that I find also extremely important and interesting, and I feel like I am constantly learning. The human experience is a beautiful, transcendent prism with new colors I am discovering daily.

For the purposes of this thought experiment, I am talking specifically about the body of a person born as a female.

Puberty. The man

That’s a joke about the band and the weird way they spell their name which I find annoyingly obtuse, which is completely unrelated to the topic.

We reach middle age but we hit puberty. This phrasing is apt.

Though humanity is delightfully complex, we tend to be born as one sex or the other. There is a good evolutionary reason for sexual reproduction.

Why is sex?

Sexual reproduction happens when two creatures collaborate on the creation of a new creature, rather than simply popping off a clone once in a while, which is what life used to do (and some do still).

The benefit of sex is that a being created from the combination of DNA between two individuals is potentially more fit for survival than an unchanged copy of one. Our DNA mutates and diverges, and some of those mutations make us more likely to survive, and so those are passed on to the next generation while the less desirable traits tend to get weeded out. They die off.

While the methods of sexual reproduction are diverse, the way humans do it is what concerns me, because I am a human. Also, it’s fun.

Or so I’ve heard

I was born with a man’s body and I enjoy it, most of the time. While my body has betrayed me in one notable instance, and will probably do so again in the future, I have spent 43 years in it and we get along well enough.

Part of being a heterosexual cisgendered man is that I present to the world as a heterosexual man. This means that I am attracted to women. This is a complicated proposition. The sight of a body I find attractive triggers a physical response, and that physical response, though somewhat muted by my age, makes me want to behave in specific ways. This behavior was not always productive.

The reason for that attraction is not my fault. If sex weren’t fun, nobody would do it. It’s disgusting!

This is not easy to write

I’m struggling with my words here because I want to address something very specific and I’m taking great pains to get at it in a way that is respectful, because I have made enough mistakes because of my attractions to various people and the bodies they inhabit, and I am highly averse to making more! If I mess this up, it’s out of clumsiness, not malice.

Imagine suddenly having a body you didn’t have before

You’re a kid, minding your own business, doing kid stuff, when you hit puberty. It isn’t much fun for anybody. It is a biological marking of time. Within a few years, you suddenly have the traditional features of an adult, and you have within you the capacity to trigger the response I referenced above.

If you went through puberty as a female, then you already know what I’m going to say, so please bear with me as I say it for the men in the room: girls have a rough time.

Men don’t know when they become men, which is to say, there’s no clear demarcation between boyhood and manhood. Various societies have created different ways to communicate this. Traditional Judaism has the bar mitzvah. The great Joseph Campbell, hero to screenwriters everywhere, wrote about how when he was a kid, the passage into adulthood was in the trousers. No, literally — boys wear shorts, men wear pants. Men don’t wear shorts anymore.

The Maasai of Kenya have an elaborate ritual that is better experienced by reading about it rather than having me tell you what it is. Spoiler: it ends with a circumcision.

Campbell also posited that the lack of rituals for boys becoming men was a detriment to our society. This same concern does not occur for women, because their transition to womanhood is right in front of them, and suddenly extremely noticed by everybody else, too.

The Male Gaze

I don’t think I can add much to the male gaze discourse, because a lot has been written about it already by people who know much more about it than me, but just in case you don’t know what it is, the male gaze is exactly what it sounds like: a leer.

The leering is implied but I can’t think of anything but a leering man when I think of the male gaze and how many problems it makes for everybody.

Within a few years of reaching puberty, biological females begin to display this femininity to the world simply by growing up. Every single woman you know, and I mean every single one, has a story about when men started treating her differently. If there was not one singular moment, it was a constellation, and it probably never ended. Has never ended. As long as a woman displays her feminine traits, she has men all in her business. Catcalling is a common feature of any woman’s interaction with the public. That men feel entitled to women’s bodies is a matter of grave importance that, with the #metoo movement, perhaps we have begun to address.

But perhaps not.

I can’t say whether men examining their own attitudes about female bodies and how they interact with the people who have them is changing, because I’m part of the problem. Oh, I’m trying to be better. I’ve taken certain steps that might seem unfathomably ascetic to some, but I see it as my solemn responsibility.

How to Stop Being a Creep

Believe it or not, simply deciding to treat women as equals is considered a betrayal by a small but vocal subset of pill-color-obsessed men. I won’t treat them with any measure of respect by pretending that they’re anything more than a splinter group of coddled, entitled children playing at performative manhood.

Aside from this one big, secret trick of treating women as equals, there are other small things one can do, that I have done, that I think will go toward making myself a better friend.

1. Don’t talk about anybody’s body. I find that my thoughts follow what I say, in that the more I speak about a certain thing or in a certain way, the more that kind of thinking takes place in my brain. When I write more positive things, I tend to think in more positive terms. When I’m less critical of things, I tend to feel less judgmental. I didn’t do it a lot before, but I am doubly sure to not make comments, either in person or in social media, about what another person’s body. This cuts across all genders and is not specifically about women, but it certainly started there.

2. Stop thinking about sexual compatibility. This is often the first stop on our mental trains of thought, as men, especially when regarding women. This is easy and it follows naturally from the first one. If you stop commenting about bodies, you find that you’re no longer seeing other human beings primarily as sexual objects, or at least less often. It’s natural to consider these kinds of things, but a good goal is to have it be the fourth or fifth thing you think about someone.

3. Start treating everybody the same. The phenomenon of catcalling is alien to me, and it has often been dismissed as a cultural feature of certain populations. It’s often through this catcalling that women become aware of how men expect them to engage with the world, and with them. I have never catcalled but that does not mean I’m immune to this — I have jokingly talked about “crushes” I’ve had on people who didn’t want that kind of attention and who were too kind or too scared to tell me to buzz off. Had I known the pain I was causing by jokingly crushing on someone who was not amused by it, I would have stopped immediately. As any woman can tell you, my reaction is not the one they usually get.

4. Stop feeling entitled to anybody’s attention. Nobody owes you anything, least of all their focus. Lots of men react very badly to this news, and a man’s most common method of interacting with things they react badly to is to commit violence on it. No wonder, then, that women are reluctant to tell a man that she is not responsible for his feelings.

These aren’t ironclad ways to be a better man, but they’re steps in the right direction.

This all started with a bathing suit.

I started down this path by considering how paralyzed I am at the thought of picking out a bathing suit for a woman’s body. If that body were mine, I wouldn’t know what to do. Knowing what I do about how men are constantly, inevitably, pushing their penises against everything a woman does, I don’t think I could do it.

I don’t think I would ever show my body to anyone.

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Thanks for reading! Like I said, tell your friends. I’m not always this serious, but hopefully I am always this entertaining.

So, that was awkward!

When a noise woke me up the other night, I thought it was just my cat, Emmitt. But then I listened a little longer and the sounds you made while disconnecting my TV were much different from the sounds my tiny cat makes when he’s chasing a stuffed mouse. I confess you frightened me when you heard me coming from the bed room and dropped whatever you were doing. I saw you leave, but you were just a dark silhouette in winter clothes that passed my vision briefly. I don’t know why that feels like a confession, but I’m relieved that I didn’t try to chase you or say something. Frankly, I don’t know what I would have said.

I also don’t know what I would have done if I had gotten close enough to touch you. Tackle you? Push you into the unopened packing boxes piled up in my living room? Hit you? No, you were leaving empty-handed, and there isn’t much in my apartment I’d hurt someone for trying to take. Those items that mean the most to me, like a bulb from a string of lights or a framed fish skull, are not things you would have been likely to take.

I guess you were trying to take my TV, which is the only thing in this apartment that cost a lot of money, but it’s old and you broke it when you unplugged it, so it’s not worth even the vanishingly little it was worth when it worked perfectly. Consumer electronics are like that — quick to obsolesce and surprisingly fragile. My phone is worth more than the tv, but even it has a cracked screen, and it’s usually pretty close to me. You would have had to come into my bedroom to get it and that probably would have awakened me, which you definitely didn’t want to happen, because you left when I got out of bed.

I didn’t know you left empty handed until after I confirmed you hadn’t taken anything, so that’s another thing for me to confess. My initial concern was not to apprehend or stop you, but to calculate my losses. See, I’ve been robbed before, but that was much more traumatic. My ex fiancee’s child was there and spoke to that burglar, who told him not to say anything. That guy got away with a lot of stuff, but I got most of it back. The only thing I didn’t get back was my laptop, which would have been the other valuable thing in this apartment you could have taken. But even that MacBook Pro, expensive when I bought it, was getting old, too. Not only that, but it somehow survived being half-submerged in Cornwall, when a water bottle in my bag popped open and soaked everything in it. I was standing on the pier in St. Ives, holding a dripping computer, while seagulls swarmed the people around me eating french fries. I valued that computer for the memories of that trip, not for its utility (though it was a pretty good computer).

I’m not sorry you didn’t take anything, but I will confess to something else and I’m not proud of it: I feel sorry for you. Pity is a terrible feeling, and it’s almost never a good reflection of the person feeling it, or the person being pitied. Pity feels like mercy but it isn’t. Pity is motionless, selfish. Pity is an opinion, not an act. I’m sorry that I feel sorry for you.

I feel sorry for you because you broke into my apartment to take something valuable, probably to sell, but you didn’t find anything except a big, old, heavy TV set. You probably need the money for drugs, which is what people like me say when criminals do things that we wouldn’t do. I don’t understand being desperate enough to steal something, but my tiny experience with addiction, as a cigarette smoker in my 20s, makes me understand a bit of what drug dependence feels like. I also know, intellectually, how powerful addiction can be and how it can make you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. When I look at your unwelcome appearance in my apartment, I see a desperate person motivated by a racist and uncaring culture into an addiction he can’t escape, and maybe cut off from his usual source of money by the pandemic.

Oh, I can’t forget that part of this whole thing, the deadly virus that is keeping everybody home, because that’s what makes this whole situation even stranger. Common wisdom among non-burglars like me is that you don’t want to break in to a house with somebody in it. If there’s ever been a time that we can be pretty sure everybody’s home, it’s now. Like I said, I feel sorry for you because if you’re going to break into my home, while I’m probably in it, you must be pretty desperate for money. This pandemic has made money scarce for a lot of people, and scarcity makes us more likely to act selfishly.

I’m sure we live very different lives. I made choices that led me here, just like you made choices that led you here. I don’t doubt that my life is, generally speaking, easier than yours. This is not entirely because of the choices I made. In fact, my choice probably had very little to do with it at all. But yours did. And I’m sorry you felt like you had to take some of my stuff.

I guess I should be thankful that you didn’t hurt me, which is another thing people like me say when people like you break into our houses. I bet it annoys you, because maybe you’re just as avoidant of violence as me.

What happens to people like me when somebody breaks into their house is that they are suddenly, inescapably confronted with hard, cruel reality. We are so removed from the daily indignities of crime and violence that when they happen to us, we’re sent reeling. We find that we have to deal with what happened to us, and to deal with the realization that the line between an easy life and a hard life is terrifyingly thin. It reminds me that my proximity to violence and suffering is bound by a thin fabric of laws and agreements and luxuries. All it takes for this illusion of safety to fall is for one person to have a bad night and try to take some guy’s tv.

I’m sorry you are in whatever bad place you’re in that makes you take someone’s stuff. I hope you get out of it, and your life gets easier. I hope you make the right choices that I’ll never have to make, that I can’t even imagine ever having to make. I got all new locks and a fresh reminder of how I still need to use them.

So, thanks for that.

I am old.

Too often, this phrase is thrown around by people who are demonstrably young, when faced with circumstances that make them feel older than people who are demonstrably younger than they are. Sometimes, these judgements can come from external sources: I was at a party, had just turned 30, and a 23 year old said “I hope I never get that old!”

I don’t think she knew what she was saying, and I think she’s probably happy that she made it to 35, if she did. Not everybody does.

With that in mind, I will amend my statement about my oldness by saying what I really mean, instead: I am not a product of this era, I am the product of a previous era.

Because things change, it can be difficult to adjust to some aspects of the era in which we find ourselves, which is what caused me to have this thought (that I am old). For instance, I grew up being able to watch tv shows on one device (a television) and I had to either watch the show while it was on or hope that my VCR recorded it when I wasn’t there. Where I am typing this newsletter, from where I am sitting, I can count five devices on which I can watch a tv show, and only one of those is a television.

As a lifelong fan of science fiction, I am excited by the offerings of this era. I don’t just mean the technological ones, but the social ones, too. I believe that we are continually advancing as a culture, too, and correcting some of the things that we wish previous eras hadn’t done. I know I have evolved, personally, and an acknowledgment of this evolution is what prompted my thesis (that I am old).

GENDERS

I have heard people even older than me say things like “there weren’t so many genders when I was a kid.” Sometimes, they are simply making an observation without judgment, and I prefer to think that most of the people who I hear say that are saying it without malice. I’m happy that I don’t know many malicious people, and almost nobody I know has expressed malice toward people who eschew the relative simplicity of the two genders assigned at birth that those of us of previous eras experienced.

People like me, those who are lucky enough to live long enough to experience new eras, sometimes have difficulty with the features of the new eras. That’s what causes them to say things like “I’m too old to understand instagram” or, sometimes, “there weren’t any trans people when I was young.”

One kind of transition is the root word for those who identify as trans. It is factually incorrect to assert that trans people didn’t exist before our current era. This is like a person living in 1770 saying that there was nothing to breathe when they were kids, because oxygen had not been discovered yet. It was always there. They just didn’t have a name for it.

I am very sad that people who were gay, or non-binary, or trans, before our current era, were treated badly for it. I’m also sad for the way they are often treated in our current era. We have not yet arrived at a point in our cultural evolution where these humans are universally treated with the same dignity and respect that all humans deserve. This is true about a depressingly large segment of humans all over the world, but I am heartened by the tendency for our culture to become more accepting over time rather than less. There are bumps in the road, but the destination remains the same. I don’t know if we will ever arrive at perfect parity among all humans with the same dignity and humanity everywhere, but we keep aiming for it. This is a good thing for all humans, but it is a process that particularly suits me. I evolve. But it’s not always easy.

BARNACLES

I’m going to use a boat analogy. I’ve only ever been on a few boats, and generally avoid them, but I think I’ve read enough books and watched enough movies to have an idea about how they work. Wish me luck:

We all move into the future at the same pace, but we don’t control the winds or the waters. I went through a lot of changes in 2019, and not all of them were good. Some of them were neutral. Some of them were terrible. Some of them were fantastically great. Most of these things that happened to me were out of my control, and those are the kinds of things that are my chief concern here.

BARNACLES FOR REAL THIS TIME

Barnacles are little crustaceans that float around the ocean until they find the perfect spot. They secrete a really strong glue and then do some more secreting and surround themselves with a hard shell and a door that opens and closes depending on whether water is moving past it. Barnacles are hermaphrodites, and they reproduce basically by tickling their neighbors. This video is a good guide to how barnacles reproduce, but if the word “penis” makes you giggle, you might want to wait until you’re alone to watch it.

https://youtu.be/znlU8nR5hI8

One thing I learned from that video is that barnacles have the largest penis-to-body ratio in the world, bringing new gravitas to the name Long Dong Silver.

Barnacles need sea water full of plankton to pass through their feet in order to feed, so they like places with lots of moving water. Sure, that means tide pools but it also means things like boat hulls.

Boat hulls are great for barnacles but barnacles aren’t so great for boats. A boat moves through the water like an airplane moves through the air, which is to say that the smoother the surface, the better. The US Navy estimates that barnacles are responsible for 40% more fuel because of the drag they create in the smooth sailing of their ships. England’s use of copper on the hulls of their ships, which prevents barnacles from attaching, is one factor credited with that country’s domination of the sea during that period, but I won’t digress into naval history as much as it pains me to leave it.

Barnacles are also a pretty fun metaphor for the gunk we carry with us through life. They stick to us and make it harder to move cleanly through the water. The water in this analogy is time, or whatever you want it to be. In my version, it’s *life*. Water is life, yes, but water that our boats move through is also life. The water I move through comprises everything external to me, and it’s important to pass through it with as much ease as possible. This takes work.

THERAPY

Therapy is a way of getting rid of those barnacles. Luckily, time has a way of stripping them away, too, but there are usually more right behind them. It’s impossible to be an active participant in your own life and not accumulate emotional barnacles. Simply accepting that fact of life is an important step toward good emotional hygiene. Imagine the boater who refuses to acknowledge barnacles. It won’t be long before his boat can barely move.

This isn’t a blanket endorsement for therapy, because it’s not right for everyone. Sometimes people think therapy is just paying someone to listen to your problems (it isn’t) but even if that were true, what’s wrong with that? It’s better than burdening my friends and family with my barnacles. Therapy is also useful because it forces you to make an honest assessment of your state of mind. We all need to audit our internal lives once in a while and take a look under the surface. There might be barnacles there.

MY NAME

I wanted to keep this section as far from the section about transitions as possible to avoid any appearance of suggesting that using a new name for publishing purposes has any of the weight or importance of, say, a trans person’s name change. That’s not what this is!

I’ve explained before about my name. James Foreman is too common, and too much like other James Foremans who are more famous than me. If I want people to read my writing, and seek out more of it, then I want them to be able to find me quickly. The best way is to use a name that is completely unique.

Hazlett Foreman is the name under which I’m publishing everything new I do, from now on. It’s distinct from me, James Foreman, because he works and does marketing stuff and writes for money, and that guy is me and the stuff Hazlett Foreman publishes might not be the same stuff that James Foreman would publish. It’s something I should have done a long time ago, but I didn’t think of it until recently.

I remember when Google wasn’t as smart as it is now, and searching for me led to, well, me. It doesn’t anymore.

THE HISTORIES

If you subscribe to this newsletter, you already heard about the Hazlett Histories, so I won’t keep bothering you about it.

Except to encourage you to subscribe to it again. Don’t make me bat my eyelashes, because I will!

xxoo