James Hazlett Foreman

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  • Death

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

    Death is a character in Pratchett’s work, and he always speaks in all-caps. He is a tender-hearted being who likes cats, but is very serious about his job, which is to help the dead get to their final destinations. He tends to be blunt. People who die in Pratchett’s work often encounter Death, who is usually sympathetic, but being a personification of a concept, can’t really relate.

    Terry Pratchett himself died recently, of Alzheimer’s. He got it much earlier than most people, and it finally killed him at age 66. That’s 24 years older than me. I have a history of dementia in my family. Alzheimer’s is part of that terrifying constellation of diseases that slowly, inexorably rob you of your ability to think. Many people think this is a worse fate than slowly losing your physical faculties and dying, infirm but aware of your surroundings. Having seen both processes of aging up close, I cannot say that I prefer one to the other. The looming, large, intractable similarity they share is that they only happen if you get old. We cannot overlook this.

    “Hard times? I’m used to them,
    Speeding planet burns? I’m used to that,
    My life’s so common it disappears.”
    — Paul Simon, The Cool, Cool River.

    Everybody knows someone who died young. Everybody knows lots of people who died young. It’s so common and tragic that most of us won’t traverse our childhoods without losing someone. But you can’t build an identity around it. It’s sad and it’s terrible. That’s not what this is about. This is about me.

    At the age of 42, I have succeeded in not dying young.

    I don’t think about dying very much. I don’t fear death. This is not a result of any experience I had. I’ve been ambivalent about death for most of my life. At some point I realized that dying is, at worst, going to sleep and never waking up. As someone who enjoys sleep, I am not bothered by this.

    A new wrinkle in my worldview has been the grudging acceptance that I might be wrong. Wrong about what? All of it. For most of my life (let’s say 13 to 35), I was convinced of the impermanence of the physical universe, that human beings are all happenstance conglomerations of matter that get to live for a few decades of interrupted nonexistence, after which we return to a state of not existing. The more time you get, the better. But, fundamentally, we are all animals. We are (mostly) hairless apes who managed to live long enough to receive the genes of our successful ancestors. Consciousness, rather than some kind of end goal of evolution, is a bizarre side effect of the combination of beneficial cognitive variables. Consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, is just a byproduct of the adaptations we developed to survive the conditions of the African savannah. We aren’t even the only ones — Neanderthals and Devonians were pre-human (or protohuman, if you’re feeling deterministic) that emerged around the same time we did, and likely had the same existential questions we do. The actual qualities of being Homo sapiens that made us the dominant hairless ape on this planet are lost to history and are far beyond the scope of the point I’m making which is this:

    I’m not so sure about that stuff anymore

    I don’t mean I question evolution, only that the physical universe is all there is to it and we hairless apes have the vast mystery of the universe all figured out. I don’t know what caused the spark of doubt in my own certainty. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t the result of any singular moment. I experienced a slow skepticism of orthodoxy, all kinds of orthodoxies, that I could no longer ignore. My thirties were a decade of big changes for me, none of them very visible to someone on the outside, and none of them were spurred by astounding revelations. I just kind of thought about things more and found I was less certain of the old certainties.

    I learned more about Zen Buddhism

    It feels like a cliche but I was a white man in his mid thirties who got really into eastern philosophy. My doorway into this world was Alan Watts. I happened to be looking at videos on the internet somewhere and happened upon a video somebody made using a bit of one of his lectures. He talks about the fundamental Buddhist concept of existence as a function of being, and the nature of choice.

    Watts says this (emphasis mine):

    You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups.

    And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. “Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration?” And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.

    So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth.

    You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.

    For someone who deals with anxiety and indecision as frequently as he breathes, this is a shattering concept. This is a shaking of the foundations. This is a tectonic shift.

    This is a revelation

    I hate to mix my religions, but I will anyway. The concept of the revelation is integral to Abrahamic theology. Sometimes the revelations are personal, and God speaks directly to the stunned listener (the listener, I imagine, is always stunned; nobody receives a communique from the divine and thinks “yes, this is exactly what should be happening”). More often, they are second-hand: an Angel, a messenger, comes down to earth and speaks to them for God. Even more potent, and I think more effective, is the public revelation, a kind of celestial music festival where the main stage is, for example, a guy handing out commandments.

    Moments of revelation are a reliable narrative device that gives me endless pleasure. I love when a character realizes something that alters the course of his life and, thus, the story. The music swells, the camera zooms slowly in, and the neurotransmitters for pleasure hit me like a brick. God, I love it so much. Here are two of my favorites:

    Luke Skywalker is a kid in over his head. A plucky rebellion short on able pilots gives him a rickety old star fighter because an old friend and one of their own can vouch for him. He is just one among an entire fleet, doing his best. He’s given the fifth position in a squadron of five, tasked with defending far more experienced bomber pilots who have to land the football directly into the arms of a receiver so far away and so small that even otherwise hopeful rebels can’t imagine hitting such a small target. Luke watches in horror as every other experienced pilot is put out of action and he, alone, can save the rebels from certain death. He can’t do it. How could he do it? He just watched veteran pilots try and fail. It’s hopeless. He squints into the unfamiliar bomb viewfinder. The galaxy is doomed to fall as the rebellion’s secret base is blown to pieces by the Death Star.

    Until a voice pops into Luke’s head. It’s the Jedi who just died at the business end of the sword of the guy who’s also blowing up all of Luke’s friends. We watched Obi-Wan Kenobi give Luke some rudimentary lessons on the true nature of the universe. It’s nothing very complicated. Use the Force. Luke knows what that means: reach out with his feelings, and don’t rely on what his machines tell him. Kenobi even tells him not to trust his own eyes, to trust his instincts, his connection to the universe, the energy field surrounding everything. It’s ridiculous, but it suddenly makes sense. It’s a counter factual, unmoored and against everything he was previously led to believe. So he turns off his targeting computer and trusts his feelings. [1]

    Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/zR7CeC-rqiE

    That’s the first one. The second one is much more recent and not nearly as famous. It’s a revelation in a very religious sense, because it’s happening to a pastor who has lost of faith after witnessing the death of his wife. She lived just long enough after being struck by a vehicle to unleash a string of nonsense non sequiturs. The pastor interpreted them as the meaningless words of a woman dying a meaningless death in a meaningless universe and abandoned his faith. But the universe of the movie Signs is anything but meaningless.

    It’s not until the pastor’s remaining family is threatened by an intractable, deadly creature from another planet (!) that his wife’s revelation is revealed to him. They spend a terrible night in the basement, menaced by these beings who try over and over again to get to them. The pastor calms his terrified daughter with the story of her birth, the first of every person’s revelations, as the monsters close in. The morning brings hope that they lived through it, until the shocking reveal where we finally see one of these creatures in full view, in stark daylight, cradling the body of the pastor’s asthmatic son. Here comes the second revelation, as the Pastor flashes back to the meaningless babble of his dying wife, which now suddenly has context. One of her utterances was “swing away, Merrill.” The pastor looks over at Merrill and sees him standing below the mounted trophy he got for hitting a ball extremely hard for the longest recorded home run. We know from earlier conversations that Merrill was an unparalleled talent, but struck out more than he hit. “It felt wrong not to swing,” he explains in an earlier scene, unapologetically. The pastor repeats her words to him, and suddenly that night she seemed to speak nonsense makes perfect sense after all. These are three revelations in one scene. It’s like this movie was made for me. [2]

    Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/bjv7CVhZXNs

    My own revelations

    I do most of my best work when I’m thinking, and thinking about Alan Watts‘s words was, I suppose, a kind of personal revelation for me. I had never heard what he was saying before. It made sense. It was an explanation of the universe that, to use a word heard most in creative writing classes, resonated. It’s tempting to use the word “resonate” because it has an attractive physicality. It’s an accurate description of the way a revelation bounces around inside you like an echoing musical tone bounces around inside the body of a violin.

    Alan Watts has a nice, English-accented voice with the bristly edge of a tobacco habit. A quick perusal of his biography shows a man of many dimensions, just like any of us. He died young (58, only 16 years older than me), of complications from alcoholism. Even a man who spoke so eloquently of the freedom from the chains of a mortal existence was bound by them. He addressed this in many of his lectures, so it’s not much of a revelation — we are all creatures of the universe, and that sometimes includes destructive habits. His choice to drink his heart to death (he died of heart disease, technically) was spurred by an addiction, but he made his choices. It is the rare person with a drinking problem who does not suspect that they have a drinking problem.

    Alan Watts, warts and all, gave me an excuse to not worry about things. He gave me a reason to stop the spinning brain cycles I spent worrying about things I could control and things I couldn’t. The solution to indecision is to decide. The cure for anxiety is information. Even more startlingly, the enemy of worry is action.

    Don’t sit and stew, plan and do

    The above is a quote from my therapist, who might have gotten it from somewhere else, but I learned it from him. It’s a nice summation of cognitive behavioral therapy. Rather than baste in our own juices, or masticate the gristle of our worries, devise a solution to your problems and execute it. When I learned this, when I really absorbed this lesson, it was likely the first of many revelations I would have in that office. This is how it works: you’re worried about that mole on your arm, the one that looks funny. You can sit in misery and worry about having cancer, or you can go to a doctor. This won’t prevent you from getting cancer, but it will eliminate the worry. It might lead you to additional worrying that you might die from the cancer you might have, but there’s a long way between a diagnosis and death. The point is nicely summarized by this quote from Alan Watts: “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

    If I dig a bit deeper in my own biases, I can see a tendency toward Zen Buddhism specifically for its similarity to the cognitive therapy that has been responsible for so much of my personal growth. They both speak to the importance of reason and clear thinking. My life got measurably better when I started internalizing those concepts.

    Thank you for reading, dear reader. This is the longest one yet, and I hope I didn’t bore you.

    1. What we don’t see is another revelation — Han Solo changes his mind about the Rebellion and comes back to rescue Luke. He, too, trusted his feelings.

    2. People like to criticize this movie for the apparent plot hole that aliens vulnerable to water decided to invade a planet covered in it. I take issue with those who take issue with this because they’re missing the entire point of the movie: there are no coincidences. They picked a planet with water so they could be defeated by clever humans who noticed they were vulnerable to it. The Pastor’s wife had a dying revelation that her husband had to “see” and that Merrill needed to swing. Their daughter left glasses of water around the house specifically so Merrill had a ready supply of ammunition. Her brother had asthma specifically so his lungs would be closed when the alien unleashed its poisonous gas into his face. The unlikely coincidences of the final act of the movie are entirely the point the movie is making: there are no coincidences, and the universe might actually have some meaning behind it after all.

  • Transitions

    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

  • The James Foreman Unified Theory of Snobbery

    Everyone gets to be a snob about something.* You can certainly be a snob about more than one thing, but it’s easier to limit yourself to one, and when we identify the One Thing in another person, we should accept it as part of their personality. Like the right to speak freely without worry of violence and the right to worship whatever gods you wish are enshrined as basic human rights inherent to all people, so, too, is Being a Snob About Something.

    Before I get into what I’m a Snob About, I’ll discuss what I’m not a snob about. For one, music. My list of most-recently listened-to songs is made up of music I heard in commercials, on tv shows or in movie trailers. For instance, my most recent Favorite Song is Cosmo Sheldrake’s Come Along, which I first heard in an Apple commercial: https://youtu.be/d8LJXcQhD0k

    I like Metal

    A friend once asked me what music I was listening to lately and I said “metal,” and he, being a fan of the genre, interrogated this further. I listed mostly Megadeth and Metallica music over 20 years old, and he laughed at me. I don’t know if he’s a Snob about metal, but I’m definitely not. I know that there are people who would not consider the “metal” I like metal at all, or at least a very old and dusty version of it. I have listened to what metal fans listen to nowadays and I can affirm that what I heard is not for me.

    I am also not a snob about food. When someone asks me where I want to eat, I rarely have an opinion. I have yet to encounter a restaurant where the menu did not include at least one dish that piqued my prandial curiosity, so I’m agnostic about, for instance, where we’re going to eat tonight. I don’t care. You pick. I really don’t care. I’m not being difficult. I won’t shoot down the first thing you suggest. My claim that I do not have an opinion is true. Pick a place and I will go there, with no complaints. I will not blame you afterward if I don’t like it, because by surrendering the decision to you, I have also surrendered my right to complain. I understand this is a fact of basic social arrangement. If I have a preference, I will state it. Tonight, for instance, I crave the fast casual Indian food of Choolaah, and stated that preference to my partner. It is up to her to state whether she wants it or not, and negotiations can progress forthwith.

    Gimme the Garbage

    More important than accepting what Someone is a Snob About is accepting what I will call accepting what Someone is Extremely Trashy About, though I don’t want anyone to think that I’m denigrating Trash. Trash is beautiful, wonderful, delicious, amazing. Artificially cultivated trashiness is often detestable, because many of the people who would do so also look down on actual trash as beneath them. I am here to say that trash is not beneath any of us and that we must think about our own visceral reactions to what we consider “trashy” and ask ourselves whether we’re missing something that somebody else might enjoy.

    Here’s a for instance for you.

    My friends were once enjoying the outside air of Pittsburgh and encountered a small family, obviously tourists, who asked where the closest Olive Garden was. They were told about the incredible delectable delights available at the International Food Festival occurring mere blocks away from their current location, full of authentic Italian food from families that probably still spoke Italian in their homes and definitely would never use a microwave or reheat frozen pasta, as Olive Garden does. But this family was completely disinterested in the Festival or authentic food. They wanted the Olive Garden. How trashy!

    Indeed, I understand the instinct to reduce these people to hick tourists from across the rivers who probably lived in the suburbs, of all places, and had such unsophisticated palates that they could not enjoy the authenticity of actual Italians producing actual Italian food. That was my first instinct, also. But that interaction has stuck with me, much like the Rule of Snobbery, and thinking about it made me think about how snobbery and trash are simply social codes for how we relate to what we consume and the value we place on them.

    Tell the man looking for Olive Garden that Toyota trucks and GMC trucks are basically the same (a perfectly valid opinion for someone who has no use for a truck), and you’ll probably find out that this person is actually capable of an informed, nuanced opinion about something. It just isn’t about Italian food, or maybe food of any kind.

    The family looking for Olive Garden isn’t looking for a challenging dining experience. Their relationship to food is different from mine. They don’t really care about how authentic their dinner is, or how Actually Italian their Italian food is, they want a familiar experience. They’re traveling and are probably not in a comfortable emotional space, so the familiarity of an Olive Garden is an oasis of easy expectations. They don’t have to worry about choosing the wrong thing, or making some social faux pas, or accidentally being rude to a culture unfamiliar to them, or stress about navigating streets they don’t know. They just want some breadsticks and some soup and pasta that probably has a lot of butter in it. Can I really blame someone for seeking comfort when they need it? Never.

    The unironic enjoyment of trash is a freeing step to take. Remove the idea of “guilty pleasures” from your mind and simply enjoy things without guilt.

    Enjoyment is not binary.

    Siskel and Ebert used such a scale for their movie reviews, and sites like Rotten Tomatoes continues a version of that tradition, but it does not work as well in practice. I propose a scale.

    At the top of the scale of enjoyment is Snobbery, an indelicate term for an indelicate perspective. I am a snob about science fiction and fantasy. I have a high basic expectation of stories in those genres and I will judge harshly a story I find lacking. I can’t simply turn my mind off and enjoy a bad or unoriginal science fiction or fantasy story. It has to have something redeemable to me, as a snob, in order to enjoy it.

    That does not mean I don’t enjoy trash in those genres, because I do! There is nothing original about the movie Soldier, but I still love it. It features mid-career Kurt Russell as an obsolete super soldier discarded to a planet of garbage, where he finds himself finding new purpose as a defender of a community of marginalized refugees. I love the movie with no shame and will happily defend it, but I freely accept its flaws. It’s probably Trash. There is nothing original about the story, but it is executed in lean, myth-like segments. The journey of the main character is telegraphed and predictable, and this is what I enjoy about it. I admire a good story told well, and Soldier fits the bill. https://youtu.be/4g2G5POuZCY

    I had the opposite reaction to 2009’s Star Trek movie. While exciting and well-made, it had nothing of what I love about Star Trek while also emphasizing aspects of Star Trek that never belonged in it. Star Wars is about fathers and their legacies, but Star Trek is not. The 2009 movie included James Kirk’s father, and had a character lament that he was not more like his father. The biological destiny implied by My Father Was a Great Such and Such So Therefore I Must Also Be is a sad remnant of feudal, middle-age thinking that has no place in the optimistic, egalitarian futurism of Star Trek. That is just one of its many sins that I won’t bore you by writing about.

    These themes, as I said, are perfectly apt in Star Wars, which is steeped in fairy tales and Arthurian myth. I liked the second movie in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi, because it subverted and deemphasized familial legacy so common in fantasy stories and added a little note of the much more exciting and modern idea that Anyone Can Be Great. Both ideas can coexist in Star Wars, and that movie was full of new ideas for Star Wars while also rhyming with bits and bobs from the movies that preceded it.

    Finally, Here is the scale I propose:

    • I’m a Snob About This

    • I Love and Defend This But I’m Flexible

    • I Have No Strong Opinion About This, But I Usually Like It

    • This is Fine, I Guess

    • I Have No Appreciation For This But That’s Fine If You Do and I’m Interested in Hearing You Talk About It

    • I Don’t Like This At All But I’m Glad You Do and Please Don’t Try to Get Me To Like It, I Already Know I Don’t and I Don’t Enjoy Hearing Anyone Talk About it, But Please Don’t Take it Personally

    • This is Terrible and I Hate It

    This scale is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many thin layers between these discrete levels, and some of these layers might be different for different people. For instance, one layer I could add to the above would be “Talking About This Around My Sister Will Make Her Leave the Room,” and “I Like This a Lot But Please Don’t Tell My Cool Friends.”

    Also note that this is not meant to cover political opinions or things that matter to you on a different level from what you consume for entertainment. Those values might factor into what you’re a Snob about, but this scale isn’t meant to cover anything you might vote about.

    Relationships

    I touched upon this briefly earlier, but I think it bears further examination. An additional aspect of the scale of snobbery is the idea of one’s relationship to the object in question. It’s important to acknowledge these tendencies in ourselves so we can see them in others and, I think, gain a better understanding of why someone might like something we consider Trash. For instance, my relationship to Marvel comic book superheroes goes beyond whatever surface qualities might exist.

    I began reading about those characters as a child, and carried a love of their stories into adulthood. My relationship to a character like Captain America goes beyond the simple, escapist enjoyment of his adventures. They were my companions through the most difficult and the most joyful times of my life, and some of some of them helped me process aspects of my life that were too complicated or nuanced to wholly encompass with my little mind. Captain America, for instance: while you might see a goofy ultra-patriot with an A on his head, I see the best parts of my dad and the values important to him: honesty, honor, truth. It’s not as simple as “me like when man punch other man.” I’m bringing my own beer to the party.

    When people ask me my opinion of something like the newest Marvel movie, I give my most objective opinion possible, but with the caveat: I cannot judge these movies objectively. I’m going to enjoy watching Spider-Man fight Mysterio, full stop, so don’t rely too much on my opinion to figure out whether or not you’re going to like the new Spider-Man movie. My relationship to these superheroes is such that movies about them can commit many crimes that I will happily overlook because there is a loud, boisterous child in me that can’t stop bouncing up and down in his seat just at the sight of Spider-Man fighting Mysterio. I have a childish glee about the Marvel superhero movies, but I’m not a mindless consumer. I can excuse a lot of Trashy aspects of the things I love, but only if the soul of it is intact. The 2009 Star Trek movie was Trash, but it also showed a lack of understanding the very things I love about it.

    Finally,

    Writing these newsletters is always very illuminating to me. I learn more about myself when I write each one. Self-analysis is an important part of being a functioning human in our society, I believe. It’s important to check our biases and preconceptions. Sometimes we need to stamp them out, sometimes we need to embrace them, but we always have to give ourselves permission to have them.

    This is the first newsletter I’m publishing in the new year, but I wrote most of it piecemeal over the last few days. I’ve always been skeptical of traditions based around arbitrary dates, but I have also come to the conclusion that everything, in the end, is arbitrary, so why not celebrate one? So while I still eschew the New Year’s Resolution, I will happily celebrate the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. My fondest wish for you and for myself is peace, joy, beauty and understanding.

    —
    Footnotes:

    1. When I was much dumber, I used to read Penny Arcade a lot. It also used to listen to ICP. Enjoyment of either one was not ironic in any way, and I’ll defend my liking them both at the times I liked them as Better Than You Think but definitely emblematic of my headspace when I liked them. I feel an intense need to defend my liking the things I like, which is a sideways way to approach the topic at hand: being a snob. My theory is based on the idea I first read about in something Penny Arcade wrote or drew, but I can’t find it anywhere. Anyway, I wanted to make sure that they were sufficiently cited as first tossing the idea into my head, where it has rattled around for years and I am only now examining.

  • More on Writing: My Process

    Yeah, I’m throwing another one of these at you this soon. So what? You got a problem with that? Only 3/4 of you even opened the last one so I don’t even feel bad about it. I wrote most of this the other day, not today, but it is an accurate guide to my headspace when I’m not feeling like doing anything, which happens.

    This is what I write when I don’t want to write. I’m writing this and sharing it with you, which will probably result in a bunch of you unsubscribing. There’s nothing offensive or objectionable under this paragraph, but it might not be what you want in your inbox. This isn’t about you, anyway. This is about me.

    Anyway, this is what I write when I don’t want to write.

    I am writing this completely against my will. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be in this chair, I don’t want to be typing this, I don’t want to be worried that my butt crack might be visible in this chair in this coffee shop (it probably is), I don’t want to be drinking this DECAF flat white in this Starbucks because I’m old and if I drink caffeine after a nonspecific hour I will spin around in bed all night, I don’t want to be creative, I don’t want to have to write this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.

    I don’t want to be writing and listening to my music and it’s making me sad. It’s making me angry, too, and I’m hardly ever angry. I have a headache, probably because I fell asleep on the couch avoiding doing anything and now I’m angry that the afternoon nap will probably make me have trouble sleeping tonight, too. I need sleep. I get a lot of sleep, because I don’t set an alarm and I don’t have any reason to get up at any specific hour. I got a lot of sleep when I do have a reason to get up at a specific hour, but not having something to wake up for means I get extra sleep I probably don’t need. Getting enough sleep is important for your health, but getting too much sleep is bad. You have to get the right amount. This is true for everything in life. Too much of anything is bad. Too much oxygen will kill you. Too much water will kill you. Too much sleep will eventually kill you, maybe. As suicide goes, it’s not the most expeditious route.

    I bet BJ Novak could get this published.

    The reason why I don’t want to write is because I have to. I am forcing myself. I sometimes have to force myself to do things. I don’t simply mean that I have to do things I don’t want to do but that I feel a push and pull occurring in my mind. My need to feel productive, my need to not waste the day, my need to feel valuable, grasp my motivation by the shoulder straps and pull as hard as they can but my motivation, digs its heels down and pushes against the forces pulling at it. It wants to go back to bed. It wants to lie down. Once deployed, my motivation can do really cool stuff, but sometimes getting it to move takes effort. Sometimes that effort comes from external expectations. When I have to motivate myself, well, that’s a whole thing.

    I imagine my motivated self wearing overalls because it works hard and overalls are what workers wear. I imagine those needs (to feel productive, to feel valuable, etc.) as weaker. They can’t do much on their own but if I get enough of them involved, they can move my motivation. It is big and blocky, like it’s made out of cement. It scrapes along the ground. Set to rolling, my motivation is a powerful force. The corners fly off and it turns into a ball, and it’s hard to stop. But sometimes it doesn’t want to move.

    I blame a book I can’t remember for making me think of my mental processes with such vivid pictures. The book was about Grover, or at least featured Grover, and it depicted various bodily functions as factory-like stations, depending on its function.

    No, that’s wrong. I’m combining two different memories. The factory-bodily- functions thing is from a cartoon and the Grover book is this one.

    I distracted myself from writing by researching the world of Grover books. There are a lot. The one most people know is The Monster at the End of This Book, which one published novelist wrote about. He wrote more about that Grover book than anyone has ever written about anything I’ve written, but I didn’t write anything as brilliant as The Monster at the End of This Book, so it’s okay. I’m in an okay mood. Not great, not terrible.

    I imagine my mood as a light just over my right shoulder, a few feet back. It is clouded and dingey, like an old street lamp. The color of that lamp reflects my mood. It’s different all the time. I turn my mind’s eye to that lamp to see how I feel. When somebody asks me how I am, I check that light. The color has nothing to do with the mood. I look at it and it tells me what my mood is, but not with words. I just know.

    This is another weird visualization that I experience, but there are a lot.

    Another one is the calendar. I just tweeted about this (another great way to not write). When I was in kindergarten, the calendar was displayed over the chalk board. We spent most of our day sitting in front of that calendar and that chalk board. It is seared into my brain. This calendar begins with September on one side and August on the other. It’s a feature of my mind’s landscape, a monument to the easy permanence of childhood experience. If I think about it too long, my interactions with children are paralyzed, because I don’t want to say something that they will inexplicably remember when they’re 42 years old and not writing.

    Did you ever think of what is behind your eyes? I mean, it’s just brains and bone but sometimes I imagine it’s a huge apparatus that stretches into the sky. How do I know that I don’t have one? Of course it disappears in mirrors and photographs. Maybe we all have them, in the sideways universe that sits just beside our own.

    This is what I write when I don’t want to write.

  • On Writing

    The title is stolen from Stephen King, and I am shameless in my theft. I have a pet theory that he stole The Green Mile from an episode of Amazing Stories (a man on death row heals people is not exactly a common trope), so I have zero shame. It is also title of the only book Stephen King wrote that I enjoyed. This is not a controversial opinion among people who write, though I know a few who adore his work. I don’t hold that against them. Opinions change over time.

    But some of them don’t. They attach themselves to us and never leave, while some interests flit in and then out of our minds. This seems to happen with more frequency in the young, when everything is more flexible, wits are fast, these things come and go. A year ago a child was obsessed with garbage trucks, but now he can’t be bothered. Is there a time when these interests calcify and define our lives thereafter?

    I would say that writing is a phase that I never grew out of, an interest I never gave up, a distraction that captured me completely and became a vocation. I did not wish to become a writer. That life, or whatever vision I had of it, never appealed to me. It still does not, as I write this on an iPad in the same coffee shop I’ve been visiting semi-regularly for the last six years, unemployed and drinking coffee in the afternoon, looking exactly like the person I never wanted to be. Having said that, I like the person I am. I’m happy with the choices I made that led me here. I don’t regret anything. Given the same life to lead again, I would have done everything the same. I made choices that were inevitable for me to having made them. I know me. I was always going to do those things.

    Writing is one of those things that everybody thinks they can do, because literacy is a requirement for participation in modern society (though a few seem to somehow get by without it). To me, this is as senseless a summation of one’s abilities as would thinking that learning algebra made one able to solve the Riemann hypothesis.

    But life is not that simple, and human endeavor is not that simple, and “making it” is not that simple. One likes to think that good work will be recognized, eventually. But this is not the case. Well-connected work will be recognized while unconnected work can easily be lost in slush piles. The role of privilege and the circumstances of one’s birth play a part here.

    Great work goes unrecognized constantly. The greatest living writer could be in this very coffee shop, writing words nobody will ever read. I don’t know how people find out about these podcasts they listen to that I have never heard of, but random chance seems unlikely. The world is not a meritocracy.

    We are so often told to reach for our dreams. People accepting awards love to tell anybody watching to pursue their dreams, because they, too, were once watching an award show and some celebrity made some similar declaration. It might be true that nobody who never makes it ever did so by not trying. Effort is an assumed factor. Perhaps less assumed is privilege.

    I was at Target the other day, and I saw a children’s book by BJ Novak. I know he had other publications, but this was the one in front of me. I know who BJ Novak is, because I used to watch him on The Office. BJ Novak was a literature major at Harvard, so he has at least a passing familiarity with written words. I don’t know if his writing is good. I will never read a single word BJ Novak has written. He got his start as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, and was cast based on the act that producer Greg Daniels saw him perform. Greg Daniels also went to Harvard.

    It’s entirely possible that BJ Novak could have produced great literature and would have been widely published had he not appeared on the Office. We will never know.

    I got mildly angry at the sight of seeing BJ Novak’s name on a book at Target. It was not the kind of anger that makes its mark, but if you had been there you would have heard me say “blech.” I moved on and went to look at humidifiers. Our apartment is very dry.

    Publishing a book is a dream of mine. BJ Novak is a rich, award-winning television writer. Publishing a book might have been his dream, too, and I can imagine a scenario in which he worries whether he is actually worthy of having books published, had he not been on the Office. I have no ill feelings toward BJ Novak. His success takes nothing away from me.

    I used the p-word, so I should address it more clearly. I enjoy a certain amount of privilege. My mother has three signers of the Declaration of Independence in her heritage, and an august name respected and admired by many people in Wheeling, West Virginia, where she and I grew up. Some of that admiration comes from who she is related to, but she also made a mark herself. The previous generation of Wheelingites would ask me if I was related to James Hazlett, who was a physician and treated many of them (he was my grandfather). This current generation asks if I’m related to Anne Foreman, my mother. They know her for her art, for her charity, for her kindness, generosity. I do not materially benefit from those famous signers, but my mother’s journey through life has eased the way for us, her children. There is a certain privilege in having a great mom, and that defies class or wealth.

    I am blessed with many advantages. But I did not go to Harvard. My father was the first member of his family to go to college, and then to law school. A lean Christmas for our family was fewer presents under the tree, but there were always a few. If I don’t get a job soon, I will not starve or lose a place to live. My worst case scenario was never destitution but temporary reliance on the charity of my family to get me through — a wound to my pride, but just a glancing one.

    Jealousy is a disgusting thing. It’s slimy and cancerous and it makes us miserable. There is never a reason for jealousy. I envy BJ Novak having published books, because I want to publish books, but that feeling, that emotional weight, is without purpose or benefit. I banish that feeling when I feel it, sometimes with a “yech” or an “ugh,” or a brief rant, but I get it out of me as soon as I feel it. We have a finite amount of energy. My true love, Shyloh, has worked for a singular goal since before I met her, and recently achieved it. No amount of privilege led her to that achievement — she worked, very hard, and very smartly, for that goal. She is an inspiration to me, and for creative people anywhere. Her art form is hair, but she’s a writer, too. She understands the struggle. She also understands that it takes struggle to make a dream come true.

    Because our stores of energy are finite, the sensible thing to do is use them to pursue the dreams we have our own way. I wrote a novel, and I’m proud of it. I still think it’s good. Here’s what I say about it when I send a sample to prospective agents (which is how one publishes books the way I want to publish mine). This was written for me by my brother, Rob, who has a newsletter, too, and a thriving career as a writer. That’s another layer of privilege to acknowledge: a helpful brother who writes better than I do.

    Edolphus Pierpont is a luckless smuggler who has been living in one of the Only Worlds, an interlocking complex of simulations of the major eras of human culture and society. To escape a threat on his life, he goes to Vegas, an Only World full of vice and folly where a man called Peachy has taken his stolen family heirloom, as well as his stolen girlfriend. His journey there propels him on a voyage to more Only Worlds than he knew existed. Events escalate until he is faced with a truth long since hidden from him: that he himself may be the creator of these artificial worlds, gone so deeply undercover that he has been made to forget his identity. As Pierpont peels back layers of the truth, he recognizes a cataclysm faced by the Only Worlds, and does everything he can to try to save them. At 90,000 words, THE WALLS OF THE WORLD is a fast, witty science-fiction adventure in a carefully imagined, high-concept universe.

    So far, no agents have wanted to represent me and this book, so I have taken to writing other things. Another book is in me, and I work on that. I have also given myself until the middle of January to finish a story I have only recently begun. The story is called The First (And Least) Erotic Story Ever Written, and it is about how heaven handles good people who enjoy a little suffering. There are some scandalized, pearl-clutching celestial beings and some leering ones, too, and I enjoy the premise so much that I can’t wait to make a story out of it.

    This is the moral of the story I’ve spun for you today: I write because I love it. I get an enormous burst of joy from having written, even if the process of writing is not always very fun. It is work, and it often feels like it. I don’t write to become famous or to become rich but because I am compelled to tell stories, even if nobody ever reads them.

    But it’s even better when they do.

  • 2019: A Year That Happened

    Well, that happened.

    As I write this, there are still a few days left in the year, but I’m calling it now. 2019 was awful. But it was also amazing. Despite some setbacks, I would overall say that 2019 was a good year. How is this possible? The truth is, most years fit this paradigm. The only major exception to this would be the year of one’s death, providing a handy guide to whether or not you had a good year or a bad one. Ask yourself at the end of the year, or close to it, “did I die?” If the answer is no, then it was a good year. Full stop. End of sentence. Congratulations. You made it. Pop the sparkling beverage of your choice.

    ENDINGS

    I’ll start with the endings, because those are at the top of my mind today, because yesterday was the memorial for my friend Elicia, a friend whose value to me I did not fully appreciate until she was gone. This is true for most people we lose, even the ones we know we appreciate, like our parents or spouses. People travel across our lives and leaves grooves in the landscape where they traveled the most, and sometimes we stumble across one of those grooves where we didn’t expect it to be. “I need to tell Elicia about this,” is one of those stumbles. Oh, right. I forgot we shared that particular interest.

    Those grooves wear down over time, but never completely, at least not for me. I still think of my nephew Miles when I encounter anything involving photography or skateboarding, and he died five years ago. My Aunt Posy, gone now for ten years, is, daily, on my mind. These memories are sad, and they can stop me in my tracks when I least expect them. For instance, I cannot listen to Into the West, from the Lord of the Rings movies, without feeling like I might cry (which is good, because I like having the option), because it reminds me of everyone I loved who died. It’s a song about death, and being okay with it, so it’s a good one to have on hand when you need a cry.

    My job at Carlow also ended, and that was also a thing that happened. It was both good and bad, as so many things are. I’m sad to not see the people I like every day, but I’m happy that I get to try something new now. The best endings are the ones that make us change ourselves for the better.

    ENGAGEMENT

    The origin story of my relationship with Shyloh has been shared elsewhere many times, but I’ll return to a brief version of it here: she slid into my DMs, I answered her, and we’re perfect for each other. She has a son named Shark, who is a whole person I get to watch grow up. He’s hilarious and loving, like his mom. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. Shyloh hates surprises, so I gave her plenty of warning. I have never met anyone who I feel like I completely understand yet who is always delighting me in ways I don’t expect. She is fun in all the best ways. She likes many of the same things I do, but we tease each other about the interests we don’t share. She is blunt and honest and takes care of me. I try to take care of her. I am excited to spend the rest of my life with her.

    PROZAC

    I tried two new brain medicines this year, and the first one was good but the second one has stabilized my mind in ways I did not expect, or think was possible. I have spent most of my adulthood on Zoloft, then Lexapro, but I branched out this year. I tried Viibryd, a drug that was great for depression but not so good for anxiety. My psychiatrist and I settled on Prozac as a good one to try, and it has allowed me to interface with my feelings in exciting new ways.

    The point of good brain drugs is that they don’t change you, they help you be a better version of the person you already are. Lots of people are afraid to take drugs to help with their depression or anxiety because they’re afraid the drugs might attenuate their creativity, or transform them into a person who is unlike the person they are now. This is an understandable fear, but ultimately foolish. After all, how can an amelioration of suffering hurt you more than the suffering does? Imagine what a man like Abraham Lincoln could have accomplished if he had drugs like Prozac or Zoloft. If Isaac Newton could have taken a few milligrams of Lexapro, maybe he wouldn’t have spent ten years alone and closed up in his room instead of publishing his discovery of calculus. What genius has mental illness robbed us of? It hurts to consider.

    Anxiety, my lifelong companion, has become a thing I can grasp. This is as radical an announcement about myself I could make as if I said “I can breathe underwater.” I feel like I have been given superpowers. This is a feeling I have not had since I first started taking brain drugs, twenty years ago, or when I first started wearing glasses in fifth grade. I have the upper hand, now. I seize my anxiety by the throat, push it up against a wall, and demand it identify itself. Where do you come from? Who sent you? Why did you come here?

    The biggest, worst bully I have ever encountered, and who has battered and abused me my whole life, is finally under my power. I can yell and stab it in the head, like Eowyn before the Witch King. I’m in control.
    It’s not just the Prozac, though it has smoothed the way. I can also deploy the support of my loved ones, and the skills I learn in therapy. I would never claim to have fully mastered my anxiety. The war is still being waged. 2019 tested my anxiety and mental health in ways I could have never predicted, so I will sidestep the implied hubris of claiming I have conquered my demons. They’re caged, for now, and that’s something.

    OTHER BODY THINGS

    If you’re one of the lucky ones who gets to have a good year often enough (see above), then eventually you’ll get to the point where your body will change. Our bodies go through one major change when we move from childhood to reproductive vigor (this is called puberty, and nobody enjoys it). The end of a woman’s reproductivity comes via menopause, which has the word “pause” in it, as if reproduction will some day resume. Men have no such signifier or end of their reproductivity, which might be some kind of half-baked consolation for not being able to literally create new life inside them.

    It is this year that I have discovered exciting, new ways my body can change. Like an old house, the plumbing starts to show wear and tear. The simple things like reading, micturating, even eating are no longer as simple as they once were. New factors have to be considered. Timetables have to be adjusted, often without warning. Activities once enjoyed as simple pleasures, like tying one’s shoes, can cause a debilitating pulled muscle in one’s back so one has to miss one of his favorite bands for which he bought tickets, damn it.

    Aging reminds us that our bodies are just pumps and pipes. Millions of years of evolution have created these bodies we stumble around in, with big heads and big brains bobbling around on our shoulders. The lucky ones manage to make it long enough for the machinery to break down after an acceptable amount of time, not too early. One way to make the body last longer is to exercise it, which is a ridiculous concept that would have baffled our ancestors. I have increased how much I do this, but I’m still struggling with a consistent schedule for it. The evidence, below, speaks for itself.

    As I age I also watch Shark, who is almost 6, and Ollie, who is already 6, reach thrilling milestones in their respective cognitive development. They are old enough to understand some things extremely well, while other things simply bounce off their brains and they shrug and go back to the familiar boing of a ball or click of a LEGO. If you listen closely, you can practically hear the brain cells dividing and the dendrites growing. No, wait, that’s just Teen Titans.

    I WAS ENTERTAINED

    Speaking of superheroes, I enjoyed watching them fight and run around and talk and stuff. Our entertainment seems to be dominated by these characters lately, as noted by people who also seem to have a problem with them. It’s just a phase. I’ll enjoy it while I can, but it won’t last forever. We’ll get tired of this eventually. The characters of the Jersey Shore were ubiquitous not long ago, but I challenge anyone reading this to name more than two who aren’t Snooki.

    A fun game to try this holiday season, as you spend time with family members you might not see very often, is to ask anyone younger than 20 to name the Beatles. The next-hardest level of this game is to name any of the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger is only half credit). Ask them if they’ve ever seen a movie with Gene Hackman in it. Try not to cry when they ask you who he is.

    Here’s my favorites from the year. They all tickled me in all the ways I like the most, but I refuse to give more details than this [all links go to wikipedia, except the last one]:

    TV SHOW: Season 3 of Legion

    GAME: Untitled Goose Game

    MOVIE: John Wick 3

    BOOK: My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel

    SONG: Life on Earth by Snow Patrol

    NEXT YEAR

    2020 is coming! It’s a new decade. It’s a new year. It’s bursting with opportunities. I have plans, but they will unveil themselves over time. I leave you with this song, which makes me very happy:

  • Feelings

    First, a list of things I am not anxious about. This is not comprehensive, but it is illustrative.

    Flying

    Snakes

    Spiders

    Strangers

    Heights

    Public Speaking

    Some of these things are because I’m a white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male. I am largely free from the social fears that plague many members of our society. I acknowledge that privilege.

    Mood is a weird word that carries a morose weight — simple, short, with the long double o. It’s a word derived from Old English. Fittingly, it sounds like it oozed out of a bog. It’s hard to associate the word “mood” with a positive feeling, and it’s even harder to use it in the first person. How often does one say “I’m in a good mood?” Usually we use it to describe somebody else. Is this because it’s easier to gauge another’s state of feeling than it is our own? It feels that way.

    Feelings. Why do we have them? They never did anybody any good. They just lead to broken hearts and bad days. How many crimes would simply cease to exist if feelings were taken out of the equation? Crimes of passion would disappear entirely! Road rage would be a thing of past times. Nobody would ever have their feelings hurt again, so comedians could stop complaining about how sensitive everyone is, and nobody would be sensitive about anything anymore anyway. Cold, clean, clear logic would rule our lives, and everybody would be better off.

    Of course I’m a Star Trek fan, and I’m describing Vulcans. They’re an entire race that, as an entire race, decided, after a period of strife and war, that feelings were doing more harm than good and it was time to get rid of them. They developed a whole big philosophy and it rocketed their society into a many-thousand-year golden age. Nothing illustrates the crappy influence of emotions better than this episode of Star Trek, when Kirk has a transporter accident and it pretty much sucks for everyone. Watch this sequence.

    Spock is trying to be helpful but he acknowledges his privilege as an emotionless being. He can solve the problem at hand (Kirk has been split into two complimentary but opposite emotional beings) but he can’t really relate to what it FEELS like. Spock understands what Kirk is going through only theoretically, but he’s been around humans long enough to know when they might get angry at him that he isn’t more sympathetic: “If I seem insensitive to what you’re going through, Captain, understand – it’s the way I am.” Poor Spock, we’re meant to think. He can’t feel the feelings that everyone around him is feeling. Not me. Lucky Spock, I say! He’s not missing anything!

    I have a severe allergy to evolutionary psychology, but even that broken clock is right once in a while. It’s in that treacherous morass that we find some of the reasons why we feel the way we feel.

    SIDEBAR: why don’t I like evolutionary psychology? Because it’s reductive and easy to manipulate. I know it helps people to imagine that their feelings or thoughts or behaviors are endorsed by Mother Nature, but it’s too often used to abuse people who are already marginalized and to excuse intolerable behavior by the people in power.

    The human internal experience can be broken into three simple states that start big and get smaller: personality, mood, and feelings. Personality stays pretty consistent throughout a person’s life, mood changes with some occasional but reliable regularity, and feelings can vary from moment to moment.

    The one objective fact we can hang our hats on is that the experience of an emotion is universal: anger in one person, no matter what culture they come from, is the same anger in another person. This anger might be expressed differently but the experience of feeling angry is the same for all humans.

    SIDEBAR: Not everybody agrees about this, of course, but not everybody agrees that the earth is flat, either. We have to draw some lines, and for the purposes of this discussion, I’m prepared to draw a line around this.

    SIDEBAR TO THE SIDEBAR: I do not mean to say that the scientists who disagree with the objective quality of emotions are intellectually equal to flat-earthers. They are not.

    We have six distinct emotions, a nice, simple number that is the closest to consensus we’ll get. It’s so common, here’s a graphic for it:

    In 2017, there was a new study that suggested that there are actually 27 different emotions. They aren’t really new discoveries, just more granular segments of the 6 we already have words for.

    This whole thing reminds of me of light. See, there’s just one kind of light, and we call it “white.” It’s a byproduct of lots of important chemical reactions, like the nuclear fusion happening at the center of our solar system. We evolved eyes that can see all that light bouncing around, though we can only see a certain slice of segments with the eyes we’ve got. Other animals evolved ways to detect some of the segments we can’t see. For instance, reindeer evolved the ability see in the ultraviolet spectrum, because the lichen that sustain them in the frigid north glow like rave kids in ultraviolet. If a reindeer could talk, it wouldn’t say “yeah, I see in ultraviolet,” it would just include ultraviolet stuff in the list of its own visible spectrum.

    Feelings are like light. We’ve always been feeling these feelings, but only recently have we come up with names for the segments. For many years, six segments was enough. The 27 “new” feelings are just segments of the same feelings we’ve always felt.

    Wouldn’t it be neat if it turned out there were a whole bunch of feelings we had no access to, yet still existed in the experiences of other creatures? Some scientists think this is exactly what happens among humans and some of us just aren’t capable of feeling some of the things that other humans feel. Our list of 27 (or 6) feelings is just the broadest human approximation of the roughly 276,000 reactions they collected (read more about the experiment at this link https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2017/09/09/here-are-the-27-different-human-emotions-according-to-a-study/#595a22a13359 ).

    I still haven’t answered my question, bellowed into the sky during a bad day: why do I have feelings?

    We’re pretty sure we know why we evolved feelings: to survive. That’s the easy answer. Not everything we’ve evolved was to increase the likelihood of us living long enough to have sex and raise our offspring, but it’s safe to say that feelings are, since they dominate so much of our lives.

    For something like anxiety, I’m prepared to accept that explanation. There is a huge physiological component to anxiety. Play the anxiety home game: give yourself a panic attack by taking 30 deep breaths in rapid succession. It’s guaranteed to work! That simulates the sudden stress of being chased by a hungry tiger. The blood rushes from your extremities to your internal organs. Your bowels release. You might vomit, too. Your pupils dilate, letting in more light. Your body turns off everything that won’t help you survive the next few minutes, from reproduction to digestion.

    Imagine feeling that all day. You know how allergies are your immune system behaving on false information? That’s what anxiety disorder is. It’s your entire body acting like a tiger is going to jump out at any moment, despite the lack of tigers or tiger-like creatures in the vicinity. I have it, so I take medicine that helps regulate it.

    We’re not entirely sure how these medications work, and some of them work better than others on some people and don’t work the same way in everyone. That’s a maddening fact that is crushingly familiar to anyone who has experienced chronic illness (which, if we’re being honest, is most people). If you’ve ever taken an antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication (and if you’re an American, chances are pretty high you have), then you know the experience well. The first one you try probably won’t work, or it will kind of work in some ways but not in others, so the doctor tries another medicine that does more of the stuff you like and less of the stuff you don’t like. My own experience with these medications is common and nonlinear, and supplemented with drugs like benzodiazepines and beta blockers. Clonazepam is the chemical throat-punch that stops anxiety before it gets out of hand, while fluoxetine is the long-term levy that I use to keep the flood of bad feelings in control. I mixed my metaphors there, but you can follow along.

    When I lament the burden of feelings, anxiety is my primary target. I highly recommend the book My Age of Anxiety, by Scott Stossel, if you’re interested in learning more about anxiety in general and Stossel’s anxiety in particular (he has it, too). There are two lessons from this book that I want to share with you.

    The first: anxiety as a disorder is very new, and, like ultraviolet light to a reindeer, was probably always there but we didn’t have a word for it, and using what we know about how anxiety was treated over the years, we can see how many people probably had it.

    The second: one story of anxiety that sticks out to me, personally, is that of an anonymous World War 2 veteran. He was so fearful of his panic attacks that he told his therapist that he would gladly trade them in for the experience of storming Omaha Beach again.

    First, the second lesson: this man’s anxiety about his anxiety was so great that he would happily exchange it for the experience of traversing a beach while an enemy army tried to kill him. Anxiety, as a force in this man’s mind, was stronger than the German army, stronger than bullets and mortars. If you’ve ever seen the Normandy scene from Saving Private Ryan, imagine two doors: one leads to a panic attack, but you choose this door instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBEyitJ7Qc [warning: graphic!].

    The other lesson Stossel teaches us is that anxiety existed for all of human history, but without a name that encompassed all of its fun iterations. Of the many physical effects of anxiety, a common one is diarrhea and general gastrointestinal distress (see voiding bowels as survival tactic, above).

    Here are some famous historical figures who suffered from anxiety:

    Charles Darwin. By Stossel’s estimate, based on Darwin’s copious notes and letters, spent roughly a third of his adult life “either vomiting or in bed.” He suffered terribly during the voyage of the Beagle, but eventually published his discovery.

    Isaac Newton. One of the greatest geniuses the world has ever seen (if you didn’t know already). He discovered calculus but didn’t tell anyone for ten years because he was so anxious and depressed.

    Mahatma Gandhi. While working as a lawyer, froze during his first case and fled from the courtroom in terror.

    Emily Dickinson. She barely left her room after age 40 or so.

    Samuel Johnson. Britain’s greatest academic. He was crippled by anxiety and found it especially difficult to get out of bed at a reasonable time.

    Imagine what these people could have accomplished without anxiety hampering them? Look at what they accomplished despite it!

    So what’s my excuse?

    Again, it comes back to me, like a spotlight at a stage in a dark amphitheater full of people judging me. Or, even worse, struggling in silence with incessant feelings of low self-worth and stupidity to an empty hall. I’m a bad writer. I’m not good at anything. Even my skills at competitive first person shooter video games have been surpassed by younger people with faster reflexes. I don’t even have a job! Woe is me, etc.

    I am a modern day Ælfric, the commander of English forces in a battle with the Danes whose anxious vomiting led to the slaughter of his leaderless forces in 1003 AD.

    I wonder what scenario Ælfric would pick, given the choice between his anxiety and reliving the battle that he so decisively lost. What would he had been able to accomplish if he had been able to pop a couple of Xannies as the screaming, blonde, Danish invaders came over the hill and hacked his men to pieces?

    I am again faced with my original premise, unswayed from the finality implied by it. Feelings are the worst.

    My own age of anxiety began when I was in grade school. I was so terrified of the social pressures of 4th grade that I refused to go. My father promised me anything I could dream of from Toys R Us if I went to school, but I could not. It would be many years after this that I would start therapy and medication that turned my life completely around, but the intervening years were marked by almost constant panic attacks at the prospect of intimate social activities. For instance, I did not learn to greet people by name when I saw them until practicing that very activity with my therapist at the age of 27. I’m still reluctant to do so, to avoid the horror of calling someone by the wrong name.

    Fatefully entwined with feelings of social anxiety are feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. Socially anxious people are more acutely aware of nonverbal signals but are much more likely to misinterpret them as negative. People like me are hyper aware of the moods of the people around us because we’re absolutely certain that they hate us, or think we’re pathetic, and would rather we weren’t there.

    There are some signs of hope, however. Anxiety often falls apart when confronted with facts. It’s simply a matter of reminding ourselves of those facts, and letting ourselves believe them, that give us victory over anxiety.

    The lesson we can all learn, one that echoes down the ages from Ælfric: don’t be so goddamn hard on yourself.

  • Routines

    Author’s note: I really enjoy this opportunity to share my thoughts with you. I have a journal (that I’m not very good at keeping, to be honest) but this is a good outlet for me. Thank you for reading it.

    I am unemployed. A day job provides a reliable routine, around which one can construct a life that suits them, and I have decided that I am one of those people who needs a routine. Without it, I am set adrift. My mind becomes a Raft of the Medusa, which is terrifying to consider but also startlingly accurate: my thoughts feel like they’re eating each other and I am paralyzed.

    This is leading me to a tangent so skip to the part where I say it’s over if you just want to read about me.

    This is a tangent about art

    The image I used, above, is not a photograph of the famous painting by Théodore Géricault, which would have been the obvious choice. Instead, I used a photograph of people re-enacting the photograph for a video project in 2009. Rather than restate what is on the artist’s website I’m just going to paste it:

    In late 2008 Adad Hannah received a telephone call from an old friend in British Columbia. Gus Horn, a rancher, community activist, and art collector, wanted to stage a version of Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) in 100 Mile House, a community of 2000 people in central BC. Although Hannah initially tried to talk Horn out of pursuing the project, explaining that it would be difficult and expensive, the details for remounting this tragic scene were finally worked out in early 2009 and Hannah flew to BC to get started on the project.

    The full details are at the above link, but it boils down to this: the whole dang community got together to make sure this project happened. It sounds like a Christopher Guest movie. They posed in front of an audience, in front of a painted backdrop, with props they all created, staying mostly still for up to ten minutes at a time. Snippets of the video are at the link.

    The original painting was a representation of an actual event: the tragedy of a ship called the Medusa. 150 survivors from the wrecked ship piled onto a raft and, two weeks later, 15 people were left. Cannibalism happened, along with other assorted horrors.

    Géricault painted the Raft of the Medusa right after the actual event, and he did a ton of research, even going as far as viewing bodies of dead people to get the colors right and interviewing two of the survivors. Although the work has been interpreted as a contemporary critique of the people in charge (the wreck of the Medusa was likely the fault of the captain of the vessel, who was a political appointee and apparently incompetent), I’m more inclined to see it as the 19th century version of a True Crime podcast.

    Here’s why: Géricault painted it at the age of 27, and it is enormous, clocking in at 16 by 23 feet. He debuted it at the Paris Salon, a vastly popular show of art where every inch of wall space at the Louvre was covered with art. Young Géricault intentionally painted a well-known and salacious tragedy in an unconventional style as big as he could make it in the biggest art show in the world, to attract the most attention possible. He knew exactly what he was doing, and it worked. The painting was a smashing success for Géricault, who nevertheless died only a few years later of tuberculosis. The story of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa is a saga itself, involving insane asylums, severed heads stored on roofs, rotting limbs nicked from hospitals, and other assorted misadventures.

    How is Géricault painting the Raft of the Medusa like a true crime podcast? Ask Sarah Koenig.

    Back to the image of the video of the recreation of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa: I have no idea why they did it, but that’s the great thing about art. Who needs a reason? The point of art is only itself. It doesn’t serve a purpose, though it can. It doesn’t have to be useful, but sometimes it is. It doesn’t even have to be pretty.

    End of digression

    I have developed a roughshod routine that serves me well, most of the time. It is vulnerable to the joyful vicissitudes of life with a kindergartener and his mother, the love of my life, but it serves me nonetheless.

    I begin each morning in the morning, which is important. As a person who lives with depression, I could easily spend an entire morning and most of an afternoon in bed, should the mood strike me. Part of the purpose of this routine is to keep such moods as far away as possible, and routines are good for that.

    What time I get out of bed differs, but it’s always around 9, which is the best possible time for me to get out of bed. Being unemployed means I’m not making any money, but it also means I get to stay in bed exactly as long as I want.

    Shyloh, the previously mentioned love of my life, has usually already risen and made coffee. Sometimes she is still there, sometimes she is not. Sometimes her son is there, sometimes he is not. What I do next is wholly predictable and is unaffected by who might still be around: I drink coffee.

    The joy I derive from coffee cannot be overstated. I like my roasts light and my coffee black. I relish each of the two or three mugs I drink over the course of the remainder of the morning. It clears my mind and gets it moving, so I can do the next things as well as possible, because they are important.

    I spend a portion of each morning on the job hunt, usually while drinking coffee. Sometimes this can take the whole day, sometimes it only takes a few minutes — it depends entirely on the opportunities available to apply to. A good opportunity isn’t posted every day, but I’m highly prepared for ones that are. This is a task that historically generates the most anxiety of anything else in my experience, so I address it each day immediately and with verve.

    Let me be clear: applying to a job I am perfectly appropriate for is the most stressful activity in my life. This is not a sensible thing to be anxious about! I have spent hours dissecting this anxiety with my therapist, so I have a pretty good idea where it comes from. As such, I know how to navigate it. What’s funny about this process is that the actual things that make people the most anxious in job searches generates little to no anxiety in me at all. Interviews are fun! I love talking to people. I love being the center of attention. I love talking about things that interest me (and, luckily, what I do for work is extremely interesting to me). In fact, the ease with which I slide into interview mode is a hard point upon which I attach a rare piton of self-confidence (navigating anxiety is often as simple as finding enough things to attach good feelings to and using them to swing through the hard parts).

    What happens after the coffee and job search activity is highly variable (see vicissitudes, above). Some days, I drive somewhere to get things or to get people, or take things to people, or take people to things. There are destinations and objects and people and they are always configured in different and exciting ways. This makes me feel that I have purpose, which is also good for staving off the unwanted moods.

    Usually before or after the above, I use the energy derived from successfully conquering my anxiety by completing job search activities and drinking two to three mugs of coffee to do house work. This can be laundry, dishes, dusting, cleaning up after the cat, cleaning up after the kindergartener, cleaning up after myself, etc. It is work that must be done and it, like the transportation I provide, makes me feel useful, and without a job to give me the daily affirmation of purpose, I like doing it. That’s not true. I don’t enjoy doing the laundry, but I very much enjoy having done the laundry.

    As the day draws to a close, I usually make dinner. We have been using services like Sun Basket, which ship a week’s worth of ingredients and instructions and I do the requisite tasks to turn them into edible food. I also find myself enjoying this far more than I ever expected, though I also equally enjoy not having done it, so it’s not like I would, given the choice, cook a meal every day instead of having the meal made for me. I am not insane! I like cooking, but I also like it when someone else cooks. On days that nobody quite feels like making food, we order food from a place that will, with unpredictable levels of accuracy, bring ready-made food of our choice to our door.

    above: an actual photo of food being cooked by me

    One thing missing from the above list that might jump out at you is this: writing. I gotta do it, and I do it every day. Sometimes I do it at great length, sometimes I only have time for a little. Sometimes I don’t feel like writing at all, which is when I make sure to write something, even if it’s just a few sentences. I don’t know if my favorite things to write, book-length things, will ever be read or distributed to wide audiences, but I’m trying! That’s all I can ever do.

    If you read the last issue, you know that’s a step in the right direction for me!

    A final digression about writers

    Writers are a good source of historical information because they tend to write things down. Writers are people just like any other, so it’s a good bet that their favorite subject will be themselves. Because of this, there’s a lot of information about their routines, just as I’ve provided information about my own.

    One commonality in nearly all of them is that they spend some portion of their day writing. Another one is the ungodly early hour that they ply their trade (writing). I mean, it’s ridiculous. Hemmingway always started “before dawn” so that’s kind of a moving target. Maya Angelou began around 7. W.H. Auden started at 6am. Kurt Vonnegut started writing at 5:30am. Haruki Murakami and Barbara Kingsolver start at 4! FOUR! What insanity!

    I need my sleep, man. I don’t think I have it in me to get up at 4. Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who woke up at 3 and immediately started doing cocaine, drinking Chivas, and wrote for 8 hours starting around midnight. I don’t like drugs, so that’s out. I guess I’ll stick to my own routine of writing when I can, as often as I can.

    This is the last digression, I’m serious

    My friend Elicia died between me starting this and now, over the weekend. It was sudden and unexpected and accidental. I hate it when people post about somebody dying and don’t mention how they died, but in this case it’s very boring and medical, so it doesn’t merit details. Everybody is still stunned. It’s a weird thing that happens when someone young dies suddenly. You know that scene where Obi-Wan has to sit down because Alderaan exploded and he felt it through the force? It’s like that. You get whacked by the news and and then you keep going and rescue the princess anyway because life is like that. Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there.

    I’m only mentioning her here because she was a big fan of this dumb little newsletter, and she would have hated me mentioning her. She was always encouraging me to write in general and this specifically. Steinbeck’s writing advice included the encouragement that I’ve taken to heart for years: you can’t write for everyone — that is a paralyzing thought. Instead, imagine one person and write to them. Elicia is the person I wrote for. This one’s for her.

    Elicia Parkinson was the best of us. She will live forever in my heart, and I will always be thankful that I got to know her.

    Here’s proof that she would also hate me sharing:



    That’s it. I’m done for now. Thank you for reading!

  • That Was a Close One!

    How I almost stopped writing. Forever!

    I tweeted this:

    I have invented many ways to torture myself. I am an expert at destroying my own self worth. In the span of one short afternoon, I can go from stellar mood to debilitating self-criticism. I am my own worst everything (enemy, critic, etc.).

    THE PARAGRAPH THAT WASN’T

    I nearly began writing the list all of the things I am punishing myself for, but I deleted the first sentence and thought better of it, and wrote this paragraph instead. I was excited that I was able to work in a reference to Pushing Daisies, too — I started it with “The facts were these,” which is a line the narrator would deliver at the beginning of every murder mystery. This paragraph is better than the one I was going to write because it is not a list of everything I haven’t accomplished, which is what this paragraph was going to be when I started writing it. This one turned out better. That paragraph-that-never-was began with a Pushing Daisies reference, a show about solving murders, and would have contained all the ways in which I was going to murder my self esteem. It would have been a bloodbath!

    THE LIST OF THINGS I HAVE NOT ACCOMPLISHED IS INFINITE

    …so what’s the point in picking out a few and hitting myself with them?

    This is true for everyone who has accomplished anything, even those who have accomplished the things I want to have accomplished, also. The feeling that There Is More I Could Do haunts all creative people. I remember an interview with Chris Rock, the comedian. He is incredibly successful and influential, admired by his peers, loved by his fans. And yet he is not immune to this Ghost of Feeling Like a Failure — he looks up from his palatial estate and sees Eddie Murphy’s. He’s Chris Rock, but he’s no Eddie Murphy. The Ghost haunts even him.

    My list of things I want to accomplish is very small.

    I WANT TO PUBLISH A BOOK

    More specifically, I want to publish a book of fiction. I’ve already written one, and I have sent it to agents for their consideration, which is what one does with a novel and one does not have representation. I also want to publish an essay, or even a book, about my experience with brain tumors. If I accomplish these two things (or even just one of them), I would be very happy. Note that I did not say “I would be rich” or “I would be famous” or “I would have no more problems” because none of those are true. All I would have accomplished is that I would have written a book that was published. There are also a million other little, tiny things I could accomplish that would make me feel like I had accomplished something. I am not hard to please.

    I had an appointment today with my therapist, who told me to recall my most important writing teacher. That person was Miss Hofreuter, my junior high English teacher. Before her encouragement, I had never considered writing. It was something I had to do, and I never really enjoyed it. I’m not sure I enjoy it now! I feel like it’s something I should do, because I am good at it.

    BUT IS HE REALLY?

    There is no objective measure of good writing. I can find out if I’m a good runner. I can find out if I’m a good golfer. I can find out if I’m a good cook. The proof is in the running, golfing, or pudding. There are benchmarks. What is the benchmark for good writing?

    This might surprise you, but it’s not “getting published.” If bad writing never got published, I would never have considered writing anything longer than a to-do list. A great book gets me excited about good writing, but a bad book gets me excited about MY writing. I don’t know if I’m a good writer, but I know I’m better than a lot of the stuff I read from the science fiction and fantasy shelves. If you were to look at my Amazon book purchase history and compare it to my Goodreads (which lists the books I actually read), you would see that I only actually finish 1/4 of the books I start. I simply can’t finish a bad book. I don’t read very fast, so it’s a decision that reverberates down through my life for weeks. Why waste those precious weeks on bad writing?

    A SMALL VICTORY

    When Twitter recently used a tweet of mine in its ad campaign at the Union Square subway station, in New York City, I didn’t get a lot of followers. A couple of people tweeted to tell me it was there, or that they agreed with the sentiment, but that was the extent of my exposure. I didn’t expect more than that. I’ve had tweets go somewhat viral before. I’ve had people more famous than me encourage other people to follow me. None of it has ever really translated into anything substantial. I say that with zero regret or surprise. I never used Twitter as anything but a place for me to write little things. I met a bunch of people I’m happy to call my friends (good ones!) but after 12 years on the service, I’m pretty comfortable in my place. My enjoyment of twitter is not diminished or enhanced by the number of followers I have or how many likes or retweets I get. All you must do is look at the popular twitterers to know that popularity is not the reward for quality.

    But it was still pretty awesome to see one of my tweets printed out to super size and glued to a wall. Somebody at Twitter read what I wrote and liked it enough to make it part of their ad campaign. That’s a very long way from having a book published, but it’s a benchmark. I have to collect my benchmarks.

    MY NEMESIS

    My partner, Shyloh, says that everybody needs a nemesis. A nemesis is not an enemy, per se, but somebody who is doing what you want to be doing. You can even be friends with your nemesis, and you probably have more than one. Who is your nemesis? Mine is a writer named Dana Schwartz.

    First of all, she’s a great writer. I don’t know if my writing is any good (it depends on the day), but hers is great. She’s a journalist, a fiction writer, memoirist and podcaster. Her new podcast about royal scandals is already hugely popular. She’s written three books: a novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction. She’s also 27 years old.

    I have not accomplished those things, but I would like to hit at least one of those milestones. Again, and I cannot say this often enough, the list of things I have not accomplished is infinite.

    THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE UPLIFTING

    Some people would end this with a hopeful wink. Some people would list all of the people who accomplished great things in their middle age (like Susanna Clarke, who published one of my favorite books when she was 45). Some people would reassure themselves, by reassuring their audience, that life is about more than accomplishments or meeting career goals or reaching some arbitrary pinnacle. Maybe I’ll publish a book. Maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter.

    What matters is the friends we make along the way. I want to live a life I’m proud of, and create good things, and make the lives around me better. That’s all that matters. That’s all I want.

    That’s not true.

    I want to publish a fucking book.

  • And Now, We Pivot

    And Now, We Pivot

    I’m sorry if you like the old version of this newsletter. It’s dead and it’s not coming back. I did ten of them! That’s perfect. The Amazing Electric Ephemera lives on in archive form.

    I’m shifting this into something more personal, focused, and shorter, but also still entertaining. I have another one I’ve written and it’s ready to go, so I’ll probably send it out next week? I don’t know. I don’t want to give anybody any unrealistic expectations.

    Check out the end of this newsletter for information you might find exciting.

    I didn’t meet my favorite writer.

    Let’s Start with Mickey Spillane

    I saw an interview with Mickey Spillane once. He was old and gnarled and scrunched up, like my dad’s baseball glove. He was talking about being angry about something someone else said to him once.

    Why was he angry? Someone had called him an author. He wasn’t an author. An author makes books. Mickey Spillane was a writer, goddamnit. Writers are, authors do. Writers write, authors make books. There’s a difference there if you think about it.

    I bet he said “goddamnit” a lot, all one word. GODDAMNIT. It feels good to say it when you’re frustrated and you need a word that bounces out of you.

    My favorite writer (he’s not just an author) is Neal Stephenson. He is, I think, good at writing exactly what I enjoy reading, and what I want to write. I got to hear him talk to a group of people that was 1/4 the size of the crowd I saw Roxane Gay speak to, which I find interesting to consider.

    Who Shows Up?

    Neal Stephenson is a mega-writer. His books sell millions of copies. His audience is enormous. Roxanne Gay is accomplished and widely read but I suspect the sales of her books are small in comparison to Stephenson’s. Stephenson rarely makes public appearances, while I think Gay is more accessible. How is it that an arguably more famous author is relegated to the small Carnegie Library Lecture Hall while Gay was able to fill the Music Hall to capacity (the former seats 600, though I estimate only half that number attended, while the Music Hall seats 1900)?

    Roxane Gay is active on twitter and is an accessible person. If you tweet at her, she’ll probably respond (if it interests her). Also, her audience trends younger and I think young people are more likely to seek out these kinds of things whereas old people like me would rather stay home. Also, I think that Stephenson’s reputation works against him.

    Not a Luddite, But Looks Like One

    Neal Stephenson was briefly famous for something other than his novels, kind of. It was a weird modern kind of experience where someone whose work you enjoy and whose name you know does something that brings them into the larger zeitgeist and everybody knows about them for a little while. It’s like finding out one of your friends went to school with your brother and you never knew. It just never came up.

    Neal Stephenson would not answer emails. He didn’t do interviews. Social media didn’t exist yet, but there were things on the internet that kind of resembled them, and he was not interested in any of them. He believed, and still does, that his primary mode of communication with his audience was through his novels. If he spent time doing these other things, he would never have time to write his novels, which is what these folks were wanting to communicate with him about. In a time when everybody who could connect was suddenly connecting, and the internet was growing, the people who wrote about what it might look like in the future were the people you‘d think most likely to participate (like Neal Stephenson, whose cyberpunky Snow Crash was like the flashy little brother of William Gibson’s less accessible Neuromancer). But here was a guy whose major contribution to pop culture was a book that half took place in the internet, and he refused to use it! He had a website where he spelled this out and used a phrase that stuck in my head: slabs of time. He needed great slabs of uninterrupted time in order to work on his novels, so don’t expect to communicate with him. This is the Neal Stephenson I know about, which makes it even stranger that I had an opportunity to speak to him and for some reason elected not to.

    There are a few factors involved here, so watch me as I unpack them and dissect myself:

    Reason 1: I don’t like bothering people.

    I know Neal Stephenson is uncomfortable with communicating with his audience. I’m making that up. His reason for not emailing has nothing to do with comfort. I’ve decided that it is true because it justifies my decision to not bother him by asking him to personalize my book (it was already signed). The purpose of personalizing a book is 1/5 to acquire a book that is personalized and 4/5 to have a personal interaction with the author. I saw a photo of Neal Stephenson shaking hands with someone on Facebook and immediately regretted my decision.

    This led me to put myself in his situation, and I would absolutely not be bothered to meet a succession of people who liked my writing so much that they would spend money on a book of mine they hadn’t read yet. I would be touched by every single person. I would be thankful that they came to see me and happily exchange a few words and a handshake with them, not because I wasn’t interested in longer conversation but because it would only be fair to the rest of the people in line to keep it short.

    You can see where this is going.

    Reason 2: My breath was bad from not having eaten all day.

    Reason 3: I didn’t have anything interesting to say.

    So what? He wasn’t going to remember me. I look like the statistically average person who likes Neal Stephenson, and anything I said would have been pretty close to the statistically average words someone like me would say to him: I love your work, it means a lot to me. That’s pretty much all I would have to say to him, and then I would regret not saying more, or not saying something more meaningful, despite not having much more meaningful things to say.

    His writing did not lift me out of depression or “save my life” as I’ve heard people say about writers they particularly like. His writing consistently gives me great pleasure, and has done so since I was very young. I don’t think anything I said would have been meaningful enough to make him remember me.

    Reason 4: I don’t like waiting in lines.

    This is true and unavoidable. I have likely missed out on a few pleasurable or interesting experiences because I saw the line of people going into it and said “forget it.” Actually, I probably just thought that and what I said was “ugh.” Lines are not just inconvenient, they are also fraught with social danger. What if I’m stuck with someone intolerable? What if they have bad breath and won’t shut up? What if that person is me? What if they want to talk about Neal Stephenson? That’s probably what they’d want to talk about, and I would gladly talk about Neal Stephenson in any context other than a Neal Stephenson reading. It’s like wearing the band’s t-shirt to see the band. It’s obvious. I don’t like being obvious, either.

    These reasons all add up to one final conclusion: I never was going to line up to mutter a few words at my favorite writer and shake his hand. I saw a photograph of a friend’s teenage son shaking Neal’s hand. He looked thrilled. Neal wasn’t sitting behind a table, he was standing behind it, and had his sleeves rolled up, sharpie in hand, clearly enjoying himself. I immediately regretted all of those stupid reasons and wished I had stood in that damn line.

    —

    I love writing about things that aren’t me and the Electric Ephemera thing was a fun way to do that. I want to make more things like that, so I’m working on a new project called The Hazlett Histories. I’m going to use Substack.com for that (Substack is popular currently for its monetization, but I’m not monetizing any time soon – I just like its editing tools). It’s under my new pen name, Hazlett Foreman (which isn’t really a pen name since it’s my actual name). It’s going to be about the history of the Pittsburgh region, but told from the corners. There are so many interesting facts about Western Pennsylvania/Eastern Ohio/Northern West Virginia that I want to tell you about!

    If you get this newsletter, you’ll get an invite to the new thing, so look out for that. Subscribe if you want. I don’t do this for you, I do it for me! I’m still working on what it will look like, but it’ll be a lot like the Electric Ephemera. I want to have a bunch of them ready to go before I launch it, so it might take me a couple of months. Anyway, here’s a link: The Hazlett Histories

    Thank you for reading!

  • Pamphlet 10: “Name”

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER 10: NAME


    In modern American culture, names are assigned by our parents shortly after we’re born. We don’t get a say in it at first, but we can always change it later. A name defines us, if we let it.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas.

    Lots of people have just one name and everybody calls them that one name. Most people have a nickname, maybe a different one for every circle of friends or acquaintances.

    My given name is James, the latinization of the classic Hebrew name Jacob (Iacomus). My name is জেমস in Bengali, Kimo in Hawaiian, and जेम्स in Hindi. It’s the most common name of American presidents. It was in the top 5 most common names for boys in English-speaking countries during the 20th century. Lately, it’s fallen into the top 20. James just isn’t as popular as it used to be. There are many diminutive variations of my name, and I’ve heard most of them. Did you know Jay Leno’s name is James? Jay! That’s one I don’t hear very often but I do once in a while.

    Here are some of my names.

    Brojay, Seamus: this is what my mom called her late brother, also James, and I kind of remind her of him. She calls me this occasionally.

    JamesForeman: the whole thing, both words. Some very dear friends call me this, because they know me from social media, where I am universally known as James Foreman. They see both words together when they think of me, and that’s great!

    Foreman: some people call me by my last name. I used to hate it, because it reminded me of the middle school and high school, the locus of many of my worst memories, and I don’t like being reminded of things that remind me of my worst memories. But people I love very much started calling me that and middle school was 30 years ago, so I got over it.

    JF (JayEff): people who know me from social media but don’t want to say the whole thing often call me this.

    James: those who know me from social media will sometimes call me James. People who knew of my name before they met me via an in-person introduction tend to call me James. This includes a lot of people I know from school or work. I went through a period of preferring to be called James because I was watching Top Gear a lot and it sounded so much cooler and more British. This is a pretty good guide to whether or not the person addressing me knows me informally, like a solicitor or person from a doctor’s office.

    Jim: This is what most people call me. It’s the standard American name for people named James. It’s what Spock and Bones called Kirk, when they were being informal or insistent.

    Video: Every time Spock says “Jim”

    Jimmy: This is my Real Name. This is what I grew up being called, and what I prefer. My siblings still call me this, and any friends I have from before high school. Most of the people I meet through my siblings use this, too. If you call me Jimmy, I automatically like you. I can’t help it.

    Among the other names I’ve heard include Jimmy Jimmy Co-Co Pop (Linsly Day Camp c. 1987), Jee-um (WVU c. 1995-2000), and Mister James (2018-present).

    “I call everyone ‘Darling’ because I can’t remember their names.” — Zsa Zsa Gabor

    Fake Names

    I’ve decided to rebrand myself, because my name is no longer an SEO slam-dunk. It used to be! When you searched for James Foreman, I was always the top result. But then Google got smarter, and started correcting our spelling mistakes, and most people who are looking for James Foreman are actually looking for James Forman, a famous civil rights hero who died in 2005. If you’re not looking for James Forman, you’re looking for his son, James Forman Jr., a legal scholar and prolific writer.

    Other James Foremans who are more famous than me include a Nova Scotian businessman and a British YouTuber who really, really wants to be famous https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9O8_OjSAnKGJxQBFs1Sj-w. My search stopped there, because I’m the fourth result when you tell Google that you are really, actually, trying to search for James Foreman and not James Forman (but even then, Google thinks you’re really actually looking for the Civil Rights leader, which you probably are). The result goes to a thing I wrote in 2004, for McSweeney’s and one of my proudest moments as a creative person. It’s not a big accomplishment but it’s mine.

    Call me a Pollyanna but I still think I might one day publish a book, so I’ve started signing my writing as Hazlett Foreman. It’s still my name, but it’s not James. Hazlett isn’t a first name, but it’s my middle name, my mother’s maiden name, and the surname of a vast quantity of cousins. It’s a good name. If you’re from Pittsburgh, you probably know it, because there’s a street called Hazlett and a theater, too.

    Hazlett

    Those things are named after Theodore Lyle Hazlett, who died at age 60 but was a champion of the arts under Mayor David Lawrence (there’s a convention center named after him). I don’t know how closely I’m related to him, but not close enough that his descendants show up at my family reunions, and I had never heard of him before looking up the theater. I have heard that Hazletts who are occasionally seen in the vicinity of the Hazlett Theater are descendants of Theodore and rightly correct people on the pronunciation of the name: Haze-let, not Hazz-let.

    Previous to my research, I thought the theater was named for Charles Hazlett, a Lieutenant during Gettysburg, commanding artillery on Little Round Top and being pretty ineffectual because they were getting peppered with sniper fire and it’s hard to load, aim and fire cannons when Johnny Reb is picking off your men with squirrel rifles. Charles himself was killed by a sniper, probably because he was wearing a colorful hat that everybody told him to stop wearing because it made him a target to the confederate snipers who fatally wounded his General before taking Hazlett out.

    Artillery

    My grandfather was also a James Hazlett, and he was a world-renowned expert on Civil War artillery. He wrote a book about it. He probably got interested in artillery because of the family history, but I can’t be sure about that (he’s not alive anymore or I’d ask him). The artillery commanded by our relative, Charles Hazlett, consisted of six 10-pounder Parrot rifles. But I thought rifles were things you held in your hand! And they look like they weigh a lot more than 10 pounds! Well, you’d be right. These guns were made out of iron and weighed a lot more than 10 pounds. It was the ammunition that weighed ten pounds, and a rifle is any weapon with a “rifled” barrel, or one that has ridges carved on the inside. Those ridges spin the projectile, like a football, making it more accurate. I have one of those projectiles in my closet. It’s not dangerous. They aren’t bombs that explode, they’re just big bullets. Well, some of them exploded, but I don’t have any of those.

    The point of any weapon of war is to kill people or destroy their stuff. War is a grim, disgusting business. The inert, heavy ball of metal in my closet, when thrown out of the muzzle of a cannon at 440 meters per second, destroyed any life it encountered. It also does an excellent job holding down the papers on my desk when the wind picks up.

    Recommendatus

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment

    Before Hamilton, there was another musical about the founding of the country: 1776. It was huge at the time of its initial run, which was right around the bicentennial. My favorite song from it is this one, a simple little song from the point of view of an American soldier guiding his mother to find his dead body under a tree. Because so many great things are also about something else, it’s a powerful indictment of Vietnam which means it also works as a powerful indictment of war in general.

    Anecdotus

    There is a tantalizing note in Charles Hazlett’s Wikipedia entry about a court martial while he was at West Point (he graduated anyway), but I haven’t read the book that mentions it. My uncle and fellow James C. Hazlett namesake, my mother’s brother, was famously misbehaved in college, too. The family legend is that he was the inspiration for a number of characters in Animal House, as he went to Cornell with one or more of the filmmakers. I don’t know enough of them to ask if the story is true.

    Anecdotus Continuat Personalis

    I, too, was almost kicked out of college. My freshman roommate brought a water balloon launcher, which was just a big slingshot that one person held on each side while the person in the middle pulled the water balloon back and let it fly. We took the screen out of our window and launched some watery artillery of our own. We were on the seventh floor of Bennett Tower, with a perfect angle to the main entrance, between Braxton and Brooke Towers, where the taxis let off the drunks. We made the mistake of doing this in the middle of the day, and some kids across the way in Braxton saw us, and fired an empty airsoft gun in our direction. Lunch ladies taking a smoke break saw the gun, called the police, the kids in Braxton ratted us out and the police came looking for us. I went to class, but my roommate was there to take the heat. He got expelled. I had to write an essay for the Tower newsletter about how dangerous water balloons are. I was told very clearly that I was nearly expelled, too, even though all I did was hold one side of the slingshot. As a person who rarely misbehaves, this incident made people Worry About What College Was Doing to me. Their fears were unfounded, because I behaved very well after that.

    Sources

    Wikipedia entry for Charles Hazlett: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Hazlett

    NY Times Obituary for Theodore Lyle Hazlett: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/10/archives/theodore-lyle-hazlett-jr-at-60-was-head-of-aw-mellon-trust.html

    A small group of large men in Civil War garb firing a gun like the ones commanded by Charles Hazlett: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AOH_BF6V5qQ

    Colophon

    composed electronically at coffee shops.

  • Pamphlet 9: "The Moon"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER 9: THE MOON


    The moon is a big, gray disk in the night sky that gets smaller and smaller until it looks like a clipped toenail right before disappearing completely. It comes back gradually, growing from splinter to disk again, and starts the process over.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas.

    Asteroids

    Space is mostly empty. For every cubic centimeter of nothing, space has about 1 atom of hydrogen. Sometimes space has more than that. A whole lot of cubic centimeters of minerals is called an asteroid, and they’re flying through space, minding their own business, until gravity shows up and sends them toward us. Thankfully, earthlings are protected from most by a complex defense grid, a wholly accidental, happenstance pinball board of gravity wells and eccentric orbits known as the solar system. The moon is part of that defense grid. More good news for us: an asteroid with earth’s name on it has to hit a very small target in a very big field — 49 billion square miles. On its way to our little planet, it is tossed and spun among our big buddies Jupiter and his gassy pals named after other gods from the Greek pantheon, and then, if it makes it that close to us without being diverted, encounters our moon.

    Luna, the Greek goddess’s name that we picked for our own moon (to distinguish it from all of the other 180 moons in the solar system), is our second-to-last line of defense. Its gravity diverts some of that space debris, which is why it’s so battered and bruised. It takes the hits so we don’t have to.

    Our final defense against asteroids is our dense and oxygen-rich atmosphere which is so thick it causes a lot of friction with objects that approach it too fast. I also create a lot of friction when people approach me too fast, but this part isn’t about me. Things that are too big to burn completely up get through, and when they hit the surface cause things like mass extinctions, insane YouTube videos, and mysterious Siberian explosions.

    Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. — Carl Sagan


    The Tunguska Event

    One thing that got through that defense grid was the comet that struck Siberia in 1908, near an area called Tunguska. Luckily for us humans, it only killed wildlife. Unluckily for trees, it flattened about 80 million of them. The conservative estimate for how strong the explosion was is 15 megatons of TNT, which would make it 1,000 times stronger than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Humans weren’t able to match that destructive power until the US detonated a bomb with roughly the same strength in 1952. These are just abstract numbers on a screen, but let’s examine it in more human terms.


    The Tunguska Event covered 770 square miles. Even a glancing blow on any major metropolitan area would vaporize millions of people. Humans had to invent bombs that use nuclear fission to match the frisson of a comet strike.

    The impact of a comet on a planet is so common it’s not even worth mentioning, galactically speaking. Something much more interesting happened in the wilderness of Russia, and it’s very spooky.

    The Dyatlov Pass Incident

    In 1959, Igor Dyatlov asked 9 other students from Ural Polytechnical Institute to join him for a bit of a skiing expedition, a common pastime for people living in the Ural Mountains, where there isn’t much to do that doesn’t involve a) the mountains and b) snow. They were all experienced hikers and familiar with the rugged, rocky, snowy terrain. Upon returning from this expedition, they would each become Grade III mountaineers, the highest possible rating. That would put each of them in the highest skill tier of anybody in the Soviet Union. In other words, and this is important, they knew what they were doing. They also knew how grumpy the weather in the Ural Mountains could get in February, so absolutely none of what happened to them should have happened.


    The facts are these: all 9 people (the tenth went back home after unrelated health issues flared up) on this routine skiing expedition died under mysterious circumstances, probably all within 24 hours of each other.

    They started on their trek and were making great progress through an unnamed pass in the mountains when the weather got bad enough to make them lose their way for a bit. They realized this error and decided to just stop where they were, on the mountainside, and set up camp there. They had gained some altitude and, since that was kind of the point of the exercise, the leader of the group (after whom the pass was later named, Dyatlov), decided to stop where they were rather retreat into a wooded area 1.5km away that offered better protection against the elements. These were experienced outdoorspeople (two of them were women). They weren’t new to any of this.

    The only reason we know anything about their expedition at all is because they had diaries and cameras. This is the last photo on the camera found with the bodies and, well, it’s creepy:


    There’s no record of what happened to them or how they died, but 5 bodies were found after the families insisted on a search a month after they were due to arrive at their intended destination. There was one tent in the campsite, which they all shared. There was a hole cut in the tent from within, and two bodies were found a short distance away with the remains of an attempt at creating a fire. Between those bodies, under a tree, and the tent, they found three more bodies. Everybody was severely underdressed for the weather (a couple of them didn’t even have shoes on). The theory was this: something happened that made them all lose their damn minds, cut their way out of the tent, and run into the wilderness. One group of five hid under a tree and tried to make a fire. Three of that group tried to get back to the tent, but collapsed on the way. The little fire wasn’t enough to keep the other two alive and they died, too.

    But wait, that’s only five! What happened to the other four? They found those bodies two months later (there was a lot of snow), at the bottom of a nearby ravine. Three of them had massive injuries consistent with a car crash or other force. These folks seem to have lived a bit longer, as some were wearing the clothes of the others, leading naturally to the theory that some had died before the others and the survivors took their clothes in a futile attempt to stay warm.

    So what happened? Nobody knows! There are theories. Some of those theories are more plausible than others, but even the most plausible ones seem extremely implausible because of the very nature of the disaster. Here are some theories that have been disproved:

    • Yeti attack. Besides the fact that yetis aren’t real, there’s no evidence of any animal activity in the area at all.

    • killed by the local natives, the Mansi. They’re peaceful and there’s no evidence that anybody else was there.

    • killed each other after a romantic dispute. Nah. They were friends, and the massive wounds were not caused by human hands. That also doesn’t explain why they fled the tent in their underwear.

    I invite you to read more about the incident (or, like me, read everything you can about the incident) and come up with your own theories. The one that makes the most sense to me is this:

    The Soviet military was known to be testing parachute bombs in the area. That scared the living crap out of them, and they ran for their lives in a blind panic. One of the bombs got too close and the blast mortally injured the three who ended up in the ravine. The survivors in that group didn’t survive long, but long enough to put on some of their clothes in a futile attempt to warm up.

    If that weren’t spooky enough, investigators recently exhumed the remains of one of the victims, Semyon Zolotarev (also the oldest of the group, at 38). As records from the Soviet era are unreliable, they confirmed that his wounds were consistent with a big concussive force (like a parachute bomb) and that he shared no DNA relationship with Zolotarev’s known surviving relatives. That means the person who lived in the Ural Mountains area of the USSR and was going by the name Semyon Zolotarev was not that guy at all and had, at some point, replaced him. The leading theory on that mystery is that Fake Semyon knew the real Semyon during the war and stole his identity. VERY SPOOKY.

    My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet. — Neil Gaiman


    Anastasia Romanov

    In 1918, the Bolsheviks won a very short civil war and took over the Russian government. Because nobody ever accused the Russians of doing anything halfway, they didn’t just kill the C(t)zar, they murdered his whole family. Well, maybe.

    There were immediately rumors that one of them had survived: the youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. That is, until DNA tests on a mass grave known to have the remains of the royal family was tested in 2007 and conclusively proved that she was in there.


    Ten women claimed to be Anastasia over the years, the most famous of whom was Anna Anderson. She had a lot of time to claim to be Anastasia, toiling in the German courts from 1938 to 1970, though they eventually decided that she didn’t have enough evidence to prove her claim — that one of the Reds who shot up and stabbed her family noticed she was still alive, took pity on her, and smuggled her out of the area.

    The story of Anna Anderson isn’t spooky, it’s just sad. She was hospitalized for a suicide attempt in 1922, and her claims to be Anastasia came after. Nobody who knew the real Anastasia was convinced that Anna was her. As early as 1927, the dead Tsarina’s brother (Anastasia’s uncle) funded an investigation that concluded that this Anastasia was actually a polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.

    Anna died in 1984, never backing down from her claim and supported financially off and on during the intervening years by people who believed her, including her eventual husband, a history professor known as “Charlottesville’s best-loved eccentric.”

    DNA won the day again, proving that Anna’s mitochondrial DNA matched that of a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska, and making a lot of people feel pretty dumb about it.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

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    One person fascinated by the story of Anna Anderson was known goddess Tori Amos, who wrote and recorded an awesome song about it that you don’t haver to listen to but you should anyway:



    Is it because of Steven Spielberg that I love the mixture of suburban simplicity and High Weirdness or did our mutual upbringing in suburban environments foster a love for it in both of us? Who can know? I only know that this love also extends to a man named Simon Stâlenhag, a Swedish painter who combines weirdness and suburbia in his paintings and whose book, The Electric State, is a joy. Joy is good.

    COLOPHON

    Composed entirely on a notebook computer, often in coffee shops, but finished at home.

    Sources:
    The Kuiper belt [Wikipedia]
    The Tunguska Event [Wikipedia]
    The Dyatlov Pass Incident [Vice]
    Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia [Wikipedia]

    This week was the anniversary of my brain tumor diagnosis. I am happy to be able to write this for you, unfettered by headaches or tumors. <3

  • Pamphlet 8: "Brain"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SEVEN: BRAIN

    If you know me, you know why I picked this noun to begin my first pamphlet in almost exactly a year (the last pamphlet was distributed on July 30th, 2017). On the week of Thanksgiving in 2017, I had surgery to remove an ependymoma from my brain stem. Ependymomas are considered cancerous because they can metastasize into other areas of the brain and spinal column, though they are not usually deadly. They are extraordinarily rare in people my age. Lucky me.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas Trepanning

    I had two brain surgeries (fun fact — I keep misspelling “surgeries” as “sugaries”). Tumor surgeries are not typically emergencies, but mine was. I spent four days in the hospital leading up to my operation because the neurosurgeon only does operations on Mondays and I went to the emergency room on a day that was not a Monday. This lag time also allowed my body to absorb roughly a billion gallons of strong steroids that shrank various structures in my brain to reduce the swelling from the backed-up cerebrospinal fluid. This kind of swelling often kills people when it comes on too quickly.

    This might be one of the reasons why we occasionally find skulls up to 7,000 years old with big holes in them. The tumor on my brain stem caused a backup in the flow of fluid in my ventricles, which swelled up and got bigger, causing a condition called hydrocephaly. The pressure caused “intractable” headaches (the hospital’s word, not mine), which had become so debilitating that I nearly fell unconscious from the blinding pain. It was that incident that made me go to the emergency room the final time.



    Had I been alive in 6000 BCE instead of our current age of miracles, I would have happily submitted myself to the intrepid protodoctor who thought, correctly, that a feeling of pressure in my head would be relieved by releasing some of that pressure.

    The origin of the word “trepanning” is not, as I thought, from “tree panning,” or the practice of hacking open a hole in a tree and letting the sap run out, which is not even called that. I don’t know where that connection in my head came from, but there is a word for using words wrong.

    Malaportmanteau

    I just made that word up. “Malaportmanteau” is itself portmanteau that combines “malapropism” and “portmanteau.” A portmanteau is a word that combines two things to make up a new word (“cheeseburger,” for instance) while a malapropism is a word that is and sounds like another word, except used incorrectly and usually used humorously. Malapropisms are fertile ground for puns, so I love them and hate them.

    Trepanning is not even a portmanteau, as I thought, thus my new portmanteau, which means “a word confidently mistaken for a portmanteau.” The word “trepan,” the root of “trepanation,” is apparently derived from the greek word for boring, like this newsletter.

    That was a pun based on a homonym, which is not a malapropism. Homonyms are a variety of homophone — two words that are spelled and pronounced the same but mean two different things. Another kind of homophone is a heterograph like “to, too, and two,” or words that are spelled differently, and mean different things but sound the same. English can be confusing.

    The Most Difficult Language To Learn

    Don’t get too excited, it’s not english, which isn’t that difficult. This, according to linguists and other professionals who know such things. I’ve only learned one language, though I took three semesters of Russian in college, in a powerful case of Past Jim overestimating how much schooling depressed and anxious Future Jim would be willing to tolerate (thank you, Lena, for passing me when I most definitely didn’t deserve it). Thus, you could say that the most difficult language for ME to learn was Russian.

    But the answer to the question is: it depends. For people who speak Standard Average English (or “unaccented” American english), the answer would be different from someone who grew up speaking Estonian, which has 14 verb cases. Bora, a language from Peru, has 350 noun genders.

    The concept of gender in languages is confusing, as noted most famously by Mark Twain, who wrote this about German, which only has three:

    Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

    This is true, if one thinks of gender in language as a biological sex thing, when it’s not that at all — it’s closer to the concept of genre, with nouns of similar shape or size or whatever occupying the same linguistic noun classification. Language is a living and moving thing so some languages have different classifications. My favorite is Dyirbal, which is spoken in Australia, and has a genre of nouns that includes “women, fire and dangerous things.” Brother, tell me about it.

    The answer to the question was answered by The Economist, in an article from which much of the above was derived (you didn’t think I actually knew all this, did you?), is a language used by a dwindling number of people (it was about 1000 people in 2008): Tuyuca, spoken in the Amazon. I’ll let them explain why we would have so much trouble with it:

    Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.

    The Economist article ends with a sobering reminder that one consequence of our age of technological miracles and globalization is the gradual disappearance of languages as people drift toward a common tongue. Different languages make one think in different ways, and that kind of diversity of thought is something worth saving. Language is culture, too — if we lose one, we lose the other.

    Hot Snakes

    It’s one thing to learn a language, it’s another thing to speak it. Metaphors are fraught and all too common. If I were to tell a person who’s just learning english that I wasn’t feeling well and I had “the hot snakes,” they would probably be extremely confused. That’s a bad example, because it confuses lifelong english speakers, too, as in this memorable outtake from Parks & Recreation, which you’ll have to watch if you want to know what hot snakes mean (if you haven’t figured it out on your own already).

    生肖

    Speaking of hot snakes, I was born in the year of the snake, according to the Chinese zodiac. Specifically, the year of the fire snake. According to one website, this is what being a snake-person means:

    In Chinese culture, the Snake is the most enigmatic animal among the twelve zodiac animals. People born in a year of the Snake are supposed to be the most intuitive.

    Snakes tend to act according to their own judgments, even while remaining the most private and reticent. They are determined to accomplish their goals and hate to fail.

    Snakes represent the symbol of wisdom. They are intelligent and wise. They are good at communication but say little. Snakes are usually regarded as great thinkers.

    Snakes are materialistic and love keeping up with the Joneses. They love to posses the best of everything, but they have no patience for shopping.

    Snake people prefer to work alone, therefore they are easily stressed. If they seem unusually stressed, it is best to allow them their own space and time to return to normal.

    In other words, it’s nonsense. The above could describe anybody. Having spent many years in school with people who were born in the same year as me, which is how the Chinese zodiac is determined, I can confidently say that lots of people don’t have all of those characteristics.

    As somebody who knows about these things will surely want me to know, the Chinese restaurant menu version of the Chinese zodiac that I’ve cited is merely scratching the surface. The true Chinese zodiac goes much deeper, going from months, to days, to hours (which are called your “secret animals,” which is awesome). It’s still meaningless.

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    James Randi on Nova

    Early Jim lived in the dark ages before the internet (people often forget that on-demand video is an extremely new phenomenon), so he derived entertainment from shows like Nova. The best episode of that show probably ever concerned The Amazing Randi, a magician turned professional skeptic. It was because of that, and Carl Sagan’s books, that I am so annoyingly skeptical. This segment, specifically, inspired the person who wrote that stuff about the Chinese zodiac you just read.


    Snowmelt by Zoë Keating

    I wrote this on Facebook so I’m just going to repost it here: Zoë Keating, whose husband died of cancer that began in his brain, released this EP recently. They were together for 16 years. She calls it “four songs from the end of a long winter.” It’s such a gift to be able to follow an artist through these emotional tribulations. The song Possible, for example, has a note of hopefulness enveloped in melancholy and I can’t stop listening to it.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    jim v3.0 is still compiling

  • Pamphlet 7: "Coffee"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: COFFEE

    The most important beverage in my life is one that I am also very addicted to. I get cranky headaches if I don’t have it. I’m grumpy before I drink it. I’m drinking it right now (I just took a sip). It’s a cultural artifact of American life that we can’t live without: coffee.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas Africa: Cradle of Civilization

    We can trace coffee’s origins go back to Ethiopia, where the legend of the goats-eating-berries was born. The crux of that legend is that a Christian monk got the idea to make a drink for humans out of the berries that made a bunch of goats jump around like lunatics. The drink propagated throughout Africa and the Middle East and it became a staple of the Arab diet long before it got to Europe. Coffee: invented by Christians, perfected by Arabs. In all the controversy and dispute between the west and the Middle East, it’s good to remind ourselves of the times we worked together to make the world a beautiful place, and there are fewer things more beautiful than a steaming mug of black coffee.



    Aristocratic Performance Rituals

    Coffee was the dominant hot-and-stimulating drink of England, until tea came along in the 17th century and wealthy aristocrats made it a more desirable beverage to the lower classes who wanted to be fancy, too. A common trend in European history is this: fancy aristocrats invent elaborate social performances and then measure each other based on how fancy their peers’ performances are. The finicky and elaborate nature of making a good pot of tea provided the perfect opportunity to create one of those rituals. The poor wanted to be fancy, too. Thanks to the evergreen laws of supply and demand, higher demand led to higher supply, which led to lower prices. Suddenly, poor people could drink tea, too. I used the word “fancy” four times in the above paragraph, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

    The aristos weren’t happy about that, but at least they had their fancy and extraordinarily expensive vessels! You can’t just grow more teapots — those had to be made, by hand, and the best stuff cost around $600 for just one tea cup. Good luck affording a so-white-it’s-translucent ceramic tea cup from China, plebs!

    English “china”

    Proper English tea has milk in it. Adding milk after you’ve poured the tea is the English way, at least for high-nosed toffs. Working class people put the milk in first. The reason for this, so the story goes, is because the clunky, cheap porcelain made in England would shatter at contact with boiling water. Chinese porcelain didn’t do that. It was the good stuff. It was strong, lightweight, translucent and durable. The European knock-offs weren’t.


    Chinese porcelain was so expensive that the introduction of tea sparked a porcelain arms race all over Europe. Alchemists, potters, sculptors, and artisans worked together from France to Germany to England in little skunkworks to crack the Chinese recipe. They churned out a lot of almost-theres with varying levels of success.

    This allegedly changed when a man with the extremely working-class British name Ben Lund added “Cornish soapstone” to the mixture. The humble powder of talc was all it took to keep his recipe for porcelain from shattering. His factory was bought by what is now Royal Worcester, the oldest (or maybe second-oldest) operating porcelain manufacturer in England.

    Eventually, the cost of Chinese porcelain came down, too (supply and demand, baby), but not before England had flooded the market with bad copies and had the audacity to call the stuff “china.”

    “Coffee – the favorite drink of the civilized world.” – Thomas Jefferson


    Tea

    Tea is the most versatile word in the English language (except, maybe, that word). It can refer to

    ⁃ a plant, Camellia sinensis
    ⁃ a small meal between lunch and supper
    ⁃ a drink, drunk at tea time, but not necessarily made of the plant called tea
    ⁃ gossip, as in “the tea,” the telling of which is called “spilling”
    ⁃ a river in Brazil

    Revolution

    Americans don’t drink tea the same way our English friends do because, well, they’re English. We’re Americans. We share a lot of cultural DNA with our English founders, but the big divergence put an end to that (the American Revolution, you might have heard of it). We rejected tea as our National Hot Drink and embraced the hardscrabble, hard-hitting, tar-black working man’s drink. We didn’t have to go without the meal called tea, though, because it didn’t exist yet — that didn’t come about until, you guessed it, a rich English Duchess invented it in 1850, because English aristocratic women had two jobs: socialize with other aristocrats and, most importantly, make male babies. If you’re like me, you can’t even mention making male babies without thinking of the most famous Male Baby Wanter in history, the irascible Henry Tudor.

    Anne Boleyn

    The only wife Henry truly loved was Jane Seymour, because she gave him a son. There’s no reason to doubt that his love was real, because he was a petulant bully who only really cared about himself and his legacy, and the Queen who eventually gave him a male heir was a dream come true. In case you doubt his true love for her, he had himself buried next to her at Windsor, which is the highest honor any dead king can give to a dead queen. Henry Tudor is known for executing his wives, but he didn’t have time to get bored with and subsequently get rid of Jane — she died two weeks after giving birth to Edward, an unremarkable monarch whose only laudable act was to die young and hasten the ascension of his half sister, Queen Elizabeth I.

    The Queen right before Jane was the most famous of Henry’s wives, Anne Boleyn, who was executed on largely fictional charges of treason and incest. The method of her execution is just as noteworthy as the rest of her life — the executioner used a sword to do it (most people got the axe, as it were). This is often cited as a sudden and uncharacteristic honor on behalf of Anne’s royal mien and upbringing in France (where all executed monarchs get a sword).

    But count me among the Anne Apologists, because I say that Henry decided to have a sword swing end her life because of his obsession with the British monarchy that he was so desperately trying to continue in his own image. More specifically, he was really, really into the Arthurian legends and chivalry and all that (French is the language of chivalry, and he wrote some embarrassing love letters to Anne in that language). He even had a big replica of the Round Table with himself in Arthur’s seat. The prime symbol of Arthuriana is the sword, and a monarch executing a traitorous queen with a sword was the ultimate act of Proper English Retribution. Like everything else in Henry’s life, Anne’s execution was about Henry.



    While on the subject of Anne, she’s just about as close as we can get to a feminist icon in Tudor England. She knew what she wanted, and maneuvered herself and the people around her to get it. She was also an intellectual who argued with Henry and won. She refused to have sex with Henry until he made her Queen, which Horny Henry respected. She’s almost certainly innocent of the crimes she was executed for, not only because Henry wanted her out of his life and was capable of doing anything in order to make that happen, but because of what she did while waiting for her death in the Tower — she summoned the Archbishop of Canterbury to her cell and confessed everything to him.

    Confession

    During this confessional with the Archbishop, Anne Boleyn doubled-down on her innocence. For an observant Catholic, this is the Ultimate Truth Zone. If you lie during a confession, you’re heading straight to Hell when you die. You gotta hand it to Catholicism — there is no better way to keep tabs on a the politics of a parish than by a) forcing everybody to tell you every bad thing they did and b) damning them to hell if they don’t. This not only gave a priest leverage and protection (even if the implied, icky bad juju of doing social or physical harm to clergy weren’t enough), it put a lot of power in the hands of a powerful, educated minority. If you’re suspicious of large, pervasive organizations having too much power, maybe you would have been one of those guys throwing tea into Boston Harbor, too.


    Recommendatae

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    How To Make a Proper Cup of Tea

    Boil water. Put a tea bag in a cup. Pour the boiling water into the cup. Let it steep for as long as you like. Remove the bag, add whatever you like to it (milk, honey, lemon, whiskey). There are a lot of fussy rules, if you want to be fussy (Americans are notoriously non-fussy). I suggest you look elsewhere for those. Like here, for example: http://www.vogue.com/article/english-teatime-etiquette-how-to

    The Hot Jimmy

    One of my favorite fall/winter drinks is a variation of a hot toddy that I’m calling the Hot Jimmy. (I didn’t know what a hot toddy was until after I had invented my version – thanks, Lisa!). I make a cup of herbal tea (which has no tea in it) — lemon ginger is my favorite — add a bit of honey and throw in a shot of Wigle hopped whiskey (which you can’t buy right now). It’s perfect for a damp, dark autumn evening.

    ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS


    Catherine of Aragon

    I said Anne Boleyn was a feminist icon, but I don’t want to ignore her predecessor, Catherine. She was probably Henry’s true love, despite the way he treated her (annulment, banishment, forced estrangement from her daughter). He left her in charge while he went to fight the French, during which time she fought off an attempted invasion by the King of Scotland. She rallied her troops while in full armor and extremely pregnant, and got super pissed when the English military, fearing for her delicate nature, brought his clothes as proof of King James’s death rather than his actual dead body.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    keep the coffee comin’

  • Pamphlet 6: Food

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: FOOD

    This is the first issue of the new year, the sixth issue total and the first in a new series. I’m going to be trying some new things (see the COLOPHON, below, for details). But enough of all that, let’s get into the object of our acts of culinary consumption: FOOD.


    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal editorial; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    Mayflies

    Here’s a workable definition of life: Life is the acquisition of adequate calories before reproduction. I offer you the mayfly as an example. It hatches underwater as a nymph, with a big digestive system and little else. The nymph eats as much as possible, sometimes for years, only to ascend into the air as a winged imago, its final form. The imago has a mouth, but it’s nonfunctional. It can’t eat. It doesn’t want to eat. It wants to get hella laid. The mayfly lives a day or two. It mates, lays its eggs, and drops dead. The eggs settle on the bottom of a pond and the cycle continues. The eggs hatch, and the hungry nymph starts collecting calories.

    Calories

    I often wonder what humans of the past would think of humans of the now. Drop one of our early human ancestors into our lives and he would be stunned by a whole bunch of things we take for granted. We live in the safest age of human history. We run for fun, not to save ourselves from marauding enemy tribes or hungry megafauna. We have so much food to eat for such little cost that the leading causes of death in humans arise directly from our diets. Losing weight is actually easy, mathematically speaking, for the baseline human (with “normal” bodies not beset by disease, hereditary flaw or misadventure): consume fewer calories than you use.


    Our bodies are made to prefer high calorie foods. This instinctual drive to eat the lowest possible volume with the highest possible calorie content made Americans the fattest people in the world, but it also made us come up with some pretty amazing innovations.

    “My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.” – Orson Welles


    Preparation

    The human life cycle is slightly different, with the same pieces rearranged. We get our calories from food we pick up and put in our mouths. This is true for most animals, but humans developed a unique twist that probably made us who we are today: we prepared it before putting it our mouths.

    You thought I was going to say “we cooked it!” We did! But that came later. We evolved smaller teeth, smaller guts (see below) and smaller faces long before we ever cooked anything. Our ancestors used stone tools to tenderize meat and cut it up into smaller pieces. That’s some pre-human ingenuity!

    The beauty of meat as a food source is that it lets some other poor animal collect the calories for us. Cows spend their lives eating and digesting because they have to. They eat plants, and plants have such a small calorie count for their volume that cows need a four-segmented stomach to get the most nutrition they can out. A cow converts those calories into big muscles that it needs in order to carry around all those big stomachs full of digesting grass, and then a human comes along and skips the boring part and eats the high-calorie muscles.

    This all begins with the most efficient energy-creating system in the natural world, photosynthesis, which lets that crunchy grass grow into tasty food for a cow just by being in the right place at the right time to absorb the energy and carbon created when sunlight snaps ambient carbon dioxide molecules in half.

    The grass uses the sunlight to make itself food for the cow, which uses the grass to make itself food for a human. Every animal takes the work of another to make itself.

    After our pre-human ancestors discovered fire, they figured out how to use it to make their food better. Because meat is the easiest solution to the maximum calories for minimal effort problem, cooking meat was probably what catapulted those proto-humans into the big-brained dummies we are today.

    By cooking meat, you make it easier to chew. You can eat more of it in less time. That little innovation made us who we are.

    Vegetarianism

    We eat meat because we always did. From fish to bison, meat was the high-calorie rocket fuel in our cognitive development. But that was a few thousand years ago.

    As my morality and my politics begin to coalesce and align into a Do No Harm kind of lazy pacifism, I find the act of eating a dead animal less and less justifiable.

    You might have noticed my interest in human evolution (this is the last issue to dwell on the subject). There’s no question that vegetarianism (or, dear god, veganism) in protohumans would have been disastrous. Eating cooked meat was a key to human survival over the last few bottlenecks, migrations and ice ages. But just because it was important then doesn’t make it important now.

    Most of us don’t have to eat meat to survive (note: iron deficiencies and other medical issues still require many people to eat meat, bless them). My sessile, first world life makes me need fewer calories than my ancestors, and I have access to so many high-calorie, low-effort food sources that I probably wouldn’t even lose a single pound if I stopped eating meat (let alone starve).

    I eat meat because I’m lazy and unsophisticated. I like hamburgers. I like hot dogs.

    I believe that our species will one day look upon eating meat as a necessary evil that they will also have grown out of.

    “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – J.R.R. Tolkien


    Broccoli

    When I was in grade school and was asked what my favorite food was, I said “broccoli.” I will defend this choice to the grave. It’s still my favorite. I prefer it raw, but I’ll eat it any way I can get it. I don’t put salt on it. I don’t put cheese on it. I just eat it. I would not pass up a pizza for a bowl of brocc, but that doesn’t mean pizza is my favorite food. They are not contrary ideas.


    Broccoli was created by the ancient Romans, proving that people who are against genetically-modified foods can’t even be consistent in the foods they purposelessly fear. Broccoli didn’t become popular in the US until the 1920s. It only took broccoli 2500 years to go from a cultivated offshoot of cabbage in northern Italy to a staple food in America, though, be fair, America didn’t exist for most of that time.

    Fractals

    There’s a type of broccoli less popular than the kind you find in most stores here. It’s called “Romanesco,” also called “roman broccoli” (image above). It differs from the other varieties of broccoli in a few significant ways (it has a nutty flavor), but it is best known for its geometric fractal growth pattern.

    You’ve probably heard the term “fractal” but maybe not know what it is. The geometric fractals are easiest to understand, so I’ll make it simple: a little piece of a fractal form looks just like the biggest piece. A fractal triangle would be a triangle made out of smaller triangles, where are also made out of triangles, etc. There’a also a lot of math involved in fractals, which you can see at the link at the bottom of this pamphlet, if you’re into that sort of thing.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    • A lot of kids know the word “fractal” because it’s a word in the song from Frozen, “Let it Go.” Elsa refers to her powers as creating “frozen fractals” and snowflakes kind of look like fractal patterns. Also, it’s a great song with a great message, but saying the message would just be restating the title.


    COLOPHON

    Composed entirely by James Foreman on a notebook computer with additional edits via telephone.

    I wrote five issues last year, so I think that’s how I’m going to continue doing it. Volume 1 was five issues, and Vol. 2 will also be five. I don’t know how much time will be between Volumes, but hopefully not as long as last time. I’ve toyed with the idea of formatting the previous issues for print, maybe with little illustrations instead of photos scrounged from the internet.

    LINKS

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/

    http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/

  • BROADSIDE: "An Anniversary of Being Born"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    BROADSIDE: AN ANNIVERSARY OF BEING BORN


    The term “broadside,” in the context of printing, comes from the pre-newspaper method of delivering information to the public. News was printed on a single side of a thin piece of paper. A common use for them was to attack rivals or to make the case for a political point, which is why the word is often used to describe the same tactic in modern times. This is a BROADSIDE because its only concern is a single topic, and not because its content is inflammatory or political (because it isn’t).


    This weekend — the first weekend after Martin Luther King Jr. Day — is a momentous one. It’s when I discarded an old life for a new one. Eleven years ago, my marriage ended. I can’t believe it’s been that long, until I look in a mirror. I don’t mind getting older, but it’s not easy to watch it happen.

    When I learned to embrace the things I can’t change, my life got a lot better. I’m a pathetic sucker for inspirational quotes, and my favorite inspirational quotes are about how we can’t change things:
    We cannot control the wind, but we can adjust our sails. – anonymous
    Weather, wind, time, gravity — there are so many things in this wild universe that can’t be altered by our actions, though sometimes we can nudge them around. We can’t avoid death, but we can hasten it. We can’t make time slow down, but we can enjoy the moment. We can make somebody hate us, but we sure can’t make them love us.

    Divorce is probably as painful as death. – William Shatner


    Yesterday: I knew when my marriage had ended, but not the year. I’ve used the same email address for years. When my memory stumbles, gmail is there to catch it. A quick search revealed that, shortly after the events that led up to the end of the marriage, I wrote a narrative of those events. It’s not easy to read. I won’t let you read it because it’s full of names, and I don’t name names. My memories of some of the events still make me wince, even if the wounds have healed.

    My marriage only lasted for 6 months. The relationship before it was only 3.5 years. When viewed objectively, my pain should not be as great as a person who was married for longer or had more to lose. Nobody has ever made me feel that way by comparing their divorce to mine — it’s shame, self-imposed, felt only by me.

    Allow me to contextualize:

    • She was my first love

    That’s all. That’s enough.
    Cameron has never been in love – at least, nobody’s ever been in love with him. If things don’t change for him, he’s gonna marry the first girl he lays, and she’s gonna treat him like shit, because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won’t respect him, ’cause you can’t respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work. – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off


    It is recommended that you make every effort not to accept animals that are in an injured or disabled condition. – Guide to Animal Handling


    Animals in pain will bite people trying to help them. Some people know that and touch them anyway. They know the danger. They see a creature in pain and they have to help. Some of those people reached out to me, and they stayed even after I bit them. The very least I can do is reach out to some wounded dogs. I can pass along that generosity of heart by helping people who need it, too. I’ve done that, and I’ve been bitten. It was always worth it.

    A wounded deer leaps the highest – Emily Dickinson


    Taken out of its context, the above quote appears inspirational: wounded people are better for having been wounded. But that wasn’t her point. The high leap of a wounded deer is a cover, a fake. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Sorry if I bleed on you. It’s nothing.” After my marriage was over, I jumped into dating again, and I jumped high. I wasn’t ready. A relationship can only succeed when the pieces match, if the positive parts of one person can fit into the negative spaces in the other. I had a big empty space that drank every ounce of emotional support poured into it, but I couldn’t give any of it back.

    In the same poem, Emily Dickinson wrote “Mirth is the mail of anguish.” I was extremely mirthful. I was brimming with mirth. I didn’t know I was setting a trap. That’s when I did most of my wounding.

    It’s called “wounded,” Peanut. “Injured” is when you fall out of a tree or something. – Band of Brothers


    A wound is inflicted, an injury is suffered. You can read a lot between the lines when I make an effort to use the words I choose. Let me be clear: the time for blame is long past and ridiculous anyway. The person who wounded me isn’t the same person she was when it happened. Like the enemy soldier who becomes a friend later in life, after the war and its reasons are long resolved, the historical facts are immutable. I healed a long time ago, but I can still contemplate the scars.

    My sun sets to rise again. – Robert Browning


    The slow upswing isn’t as interesting as the sudden drop. A shattered glass is more interesting than an intact one, which isn’t as interesting as watching it break. Would you rather watch a building implode or watch them build the new one? That’s why this section isn’t as long.

    I got better! I was reborn. The wounds made me stronger, better, faster. I had my heart broken and it took a while, but it healed up nicely, thanks to a lot of patience and work and therapy and help. I’m more consistently happy now than I was then. The memories that have lasted are the happy ones. We had a lot of fun and I learned a lot from her. My sun rose and it’s still rising. But there’s still work to be done.

    My thirties were a time of great abundance, but nothing stuck. I shouldn’t say nothing, because they were people, but, in the words of Taylor Swift, I couldn’t make ’em stay. Actually, it was more like I couldn’t make myself stay. In the eleven years since my first relationship ended, no relationship of mine has lasted more than a year. I’ve done most of the dumping, rather than having been dumped. Why? Did I run away when things got tough? Did I get bored when things got safe? Did I pick the wrong relationships?

    We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all. – Eleanor Roosevelt


    Confession: in times like now, January of 2017, I’m not very hopeful for the future. Messages on dating websites go unanswered. My photos on dating apps go swiped in the wrong direction. Efforts to move acquaintances into dates bear no fruit. The signs we look for when somebody is interested in us are absent from every encounter. There’s nobody on my mind. I have no crushes, and there are no crushes on me. Is it a dry spell or a desert?

    My confidence is like a soldier without a war, and it starts fighting itself. Am I unlovable? Am I unbearable? Am I unattractive, unlikable? I’m too fat for anybody to be interested. I’m too ugly to catch a second look.

    The negative thoughts don’t stay forever, but they never really go away.

    The last wounds to heal are the ones I’ve inflicted on myself. I don’t think I’ll be completely better until I let those wounds heal, too.

  • Pamphlet 5: "Fire"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER FIVE: FIRE

    Burn a log in a fireplace. The light and heat is a mirror of the activity on the surface of the sun. Energized oxygen locks into place with the dormant carbon atoms in the wood and the sunlight used to separate oxygen from carbon during photosynthesis comes bursting back out. That’s what a fire is, but it’s not everything a fire can be.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    The Sun

    The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
    Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

    That’s an old children’s song made famous by They Might Be Giants [youtube.com] and it’s all around exactly right. Without a giant, heavy, dense, ball of gas in the middle of our solar system for earth to orbit, we most definitely would never have evolved.

    The sun is also a star, and stars are the source of all matter in the universe. A star is dense and that density increases as it ages, crunching atoms closer and closer together and pushing the resulting elements into its core, piling them on as it burns. When that star one day explodes, as they often do, it sends all those complex elements into space. When enough of that stuff gets in one spot and cools down, those elements clump together and spin around and, eventually, you get planets.

    It’s such a weird, beautiful concept that I want to state it in the plainest terms: we’re made out of stars. The Big Bang threw all that radiation into space, where it cooled off and came together and got close enough to start slamming hydrogen atoms together, which made helium, etc. That’s the source of every single atom, even the ones in your body.

    It’s tempting to get really deep into the science here, because it’s really, really awesome. For instance, the “necessities” of life seem less and less necessary as we learn more about our universe. We know that sunlight isn’t necessary for life (just look up a little thing called chemosynthesis [wikipedia.org]). Now we’re not even sure a stable orbit around a star is necessary. There is ample theoretical basis for an internally-heatedplanet (by decaying uranium, for instance) that could conceivably sustain an ecology of creatures that have never seen any kind of light at all, on planets drifting silently between stars. But as Richard Feynman says, I have to stop somewhere.

    When you die, you can get cremated, and superheated oxygen collides with the carbon in your body, and the beautiful, glimmering sunlight that triggered the photosynthesis in the plants eaten by you and the animals you ate and then encorporated into the cells of your body splits open in a blaze of subatomic particles and rejoins the thermodynamia of the universe.

    Or you can be buried, and then slowly consumed by tiny organisms that eat the carbon in your body and feed larger organisms that are eaten by even larger organisms that themselves die and on and on until the matter that made you makes a whole lot of things that aren’t you.

    If you’re lucky, all this happens after the miraculous collection of carbon and atomic forces that came together to make you had a grand old time and the people left over on earth can console each other by saying “well, that’s was a good long life.”

    Long Lives

    World records are premised on the ability to document the achievement. The fastest living man could be Usain Bolt, but there’s no way to know without measuring the running speed of every human on earth, which is impossible. Just so, there’s no way to know how old the oldest living person is without a precise measurement of every human life, so we have to trust birth records in foreign countries to tell us who the oldest (verified) person is.

    The oldest (verified) living human being is Emma Morana, an Italian woman who just turned a 117 years old in November. As far as ancient humans go, she doesn’t look quite as corpse-like as some of her fellow Oldest People:

    The oldest (verified) person ever is Jeane Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. She had one daughter who died at age 36 of pneumonia, who had one son who also died at the age of 36, in a car accident. Jeane lived in the same small town in France for the entirety of those 122 years.
    Don’t let the cigarette picture fool you — she smoked only one or two of them a day, showing a moderation that defined her lifestyle of consistent exercise and clean living. She claimed to have never been sick, and she almost burned her apartment down at the age of 110 because of poor eyesight.

    The list of Most Long-Lived (Verified) Humans shows that death has a clear preference for men: an overwhelming 94 of the 100 oldest (verified) people are women. There’s no consensus as to why women tend to live longer than men or why there are so few ancient men compared to ancient women (85% of centenarians are women).

    One leading explanation puts the blame squarely on the lack of menstruation in men. Women have less iron in their bodies than men because blood and other iron-heavy stuff (I’m not a doctor) is lost at a reliable rate of once per month. More iron means a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, which is one reason why red meat isn’t very good for you and why vegetarians tend to be healthier than the omnivorous among us. Male and female iron levels eventually equal out, later in life, but women have those 50 years or so of a head start.

    If you had to live in the same town and, for most of it, the same apartment for the entire duration, would you want to live to be 122? For some people, a long lifespan spent in one place is no life at all. It’s not how much time you spend on earth, it’s how you spend it. Besides, there’s really no such thing as linear time.

    Nonlinear Time

    Everything that ever happened has already happened, from the beginning of the universe to its end. We experience time at a rate of 60 seconds per minute. Life is a series of now moments strung together — those that haven’t happened yet are purely theoretical and we call them “the future” while nows that have passed are called “the past.” We can only perceive one now at a time.

    I say the future is theoretical because there’s no way to know it will happen. We expect it to happen because of all the nows that preceded it. We’re all natural scientists, hypothesizing that the nows to come will resemble all the nows that came before, because those nows fit a certain pattern. Finding and anticipating patterns is also called “learning” and we immediately start doing it when we’re born. A baby who drops his toy on the floor over and over again is testing his environment (and his parents) and learning about gravity.

    It’s not an easy concept to internalize until you use the flatland thought experiment. Since time is the fourth dimension, we can use the other three dimensions in the illustration.

    Imagine a species of 2-dimensional creatures. They have no height, only length and width. They’re squares or circles or triangles but they’re all living side-by-side. The concept of “above” might exist in the minds of their scientists, but they’re incapable of perceiving it.
    But not us. We’re 3D. We can look down on those poor 2D creatures and see their entire world spread out before us. We can even see inside their 2D bodies and their 2D buildings. No walls they made could keep us out — we could, at a whim, pick any one of them up at any time and take it on the ride of its life.

    Now, add a dimension on top of that one. We’re the flatlanders, now, and some mysterious 4D creatures look at our poor, feeble 3D lives and pity us. We can’t perceive time but it effects us, just as the 3rd dimension effect the flatlanders. Those 4D beings perceive time just as we perceive the third dimension. They see time not as a linear progression of nows but as a set string of nows that they can see all at once.

    It might feel like predestination, but it really isn’t. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, then how can you say what was supposed to happen? It’s not a curse, but a blessing, to not know how things are going to turn out.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    Many of you already know me and already know that my nephew, Miles, died in the summer of 2014. He should be turning 20 next week, but he isn’t. His work lives on, frozen in time, and we can all still enjoy it. In honor of his birthday, I recommend you spend some time with him.

    My other suggestion is to watch this video of Richard Feynman describing the chemical process of fire. He was a genius and a fantastic storyteller and a great bongo player.

    THE ANECDOTUS

    a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

    I have never liked the sun. I’ve won every Who’s More Pale contest I’ve ever entered, by clear margins. I burn easily. I’ve never had a tan. The sun stings my skin and hurts my eyes and heats everything up (the only thing I hate more than direct sunlight is too much heat). This is not revisionism based on present biases, and I offer photographic proof:
    Yep, that’s me, hating the sun.


    You light up my life, my sweet reader.

  • Pamphlet 4: "Love"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER FOUR: “LOVE”

    The word “love” can mean a lot of things, but there’s not enough room in this little letter to cover more than a few, or even more than one: the feeling of great affection between two individuals. That’s my definition, not a dictionary’s.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    Romantic love

    Love is a material event. It is the collusion of chemicals, neurons and glands. Its purpose is to drop a person’s emotional defenses and push that person toward a different person. Ideally, this target of affection experiences a concurrent material event in their bodies, and this shared experience makes them want to do things like rub their excretory organs together.

    If you can keep your hormones out of it, then you can imagine how objectively disgusting the act of sexual intercourse is. Just take a moment and imagine yourself as an alien observing humans having sex. It’s gross. It’s messy. In our western culture, where even the sight of a female nipple is off-putting, we are willing to take huge personal risks (social, cultural, physical) to toss all of that social conditioning aside and throw our naked bodies at each other.

    The many risks in allowing ourselves to be so vulnerable to another person are mitigated somewhat by a vetting process called “dating,” and it is terrible. Every human who has reached his 39th year, like your humble author, without a permanent partner has contemplated arranged marriages with the whimsy that people in arranged marriages probably have for the freedom to date anybody they like.

    First, you have to find somebody and then you have to impress them and then you have to keep impressing them until your neurotransmitters velcro together and it hurts more to lose each other than it does to keep the other around. If that reads as cynical to you, you’ve never dated in your late 30s, on the internet.

    Internet dating

    Back when I started internet dating, there weren’t many options. The big name was Match.com, but that’s where all the old people went. Savvy people like me had The Onion personal ads [archive.org], which didn’t have anything to do with the satirical news site but was part of a larger personal ad network with footprints on edgier websites like nerve.com. People my age who have been married and missed out on the joys of internet dating might not even be aware of the subtle rules and mores that have emerged from that ecosystem, so here are a couple:

    • Cultural norms are alive and well. Although there are many exceptions, the general rules of in-person dating are the same. One might imagine that the internet is the great equalizer, with men and women connecting in equal measure. This is not the case. Men cast wide nets and send messages to many women at once, and women have to pick through the morass and choose the men they’ll write back to. The onus is still on the man to make first moves. The result of this is the title of my future book on internet dating, You’re Not the One He Picked, You’re the One Who Said Yes. A real world equivalent would be a man going to every woman in a crowded bar and asking for her number until one of them says yes. Maybe he’ll get lucky and his first choice will express interest. This is very unlikely. He will then go down his list of most desirable women in the bar and ask for their numbers until one of them says yes. She wasn’t his first choice, she was the one who said yes.

    • One photo is all that matters. You can write a bunch of paragraphs about how great you are, but nobody will read them. Okay, somebody might read them, but not until they’ve looked at your photo and decided that you’re attractive enough to investigate more. You’ve probably heard of Tinder — it’s the mainstay of modern internet dating. It only gives you one photograph of a person, a name, an age, and a snippet of information. Rejecting or accepting a person is as easy as swiping their photographs in one direction or the other (left for no, right for yes). Imagine swiping right on every person you see and having no matches. That means nobody swiped right on you. For an already fragile self-image, Tinder is an unforgiving wasteland.

    There are innumerable factors that go into whether people are attracted to each other. With higher cognition comes higher awareness comes higher standards. Women are fully aware of the risks of allowing a man into their intimate areas (both emotional and physical), so they have to be picky. One species that doesn’t have to worry about so many variables in their desirability has a different romantic burden: they have to be good artists.

    Bowerbirds

    Birds are weird, man. Science fiction has speculated (it must have been a person making those speculations, but I can’t remember his or her name) that birds could develop human-like intelligence if given free evolutionary reign and a dozen or so more million more years. They’re constantly surprising us with their intelligence and guile, two traits that would likely increase as the pressures of natural selection winnowed the dumb from the less-dumb. The ascendence of humans are evidence enough of this evolutionary preference. See, also: birds are bipedal, dextrous, and already show a penchant for tool use. Evolution has made stranger things than smart birds, it also made birds that do this:

    That’s a male bowerbird’s bower, constructed for only one purpose: to attract females. Everything you see there was picked by the bird who built it and not one of those choices was random. Lest you think every bower looks the same, look at this diversity:

    Each item is placed with intent and precision and every single bower is unique. Different species of bowerbird make different kinds of bowers. The dome-type, above, and the “avenue” type, below:

    Each species prefers different kinds and colors of objects, but some have been observed tailoring their bowers to the preferences of the females they’re trying to attract.

    This isn’t just a mating ritual, this is art.

    There is no concrete consensus about why bowerbirds do this, but some speculate that it’s an externalization of display plumage. While peacocks, for instance, use their massive, colorful feathers to attract mates, bowerbirds evolved the same predilection to attract females using colorful displays but build them instead of grow them.

    Not all art has a purpose. Some definitions of art include its inherent lack of functional usefulness, but maybe we can learn something from the bowerbirds. Some artists are in it for the sex (this is especially true if we include musicians), but self-expression is a way of displaying plumage we make rather than plumage we grow. There’s no point to making art that nobody sees. We make art to announce ourselves, to plant our flag into the ground and claim this space, this time, for us. I made this, now look at it.

    Bowerbirds don’t just make bowers to attract females. Some species just use the bower as an enticement for the real act: a dance [youtube.com]. Dancing is something humans do, too, and it sucks.

    THE ANECDOTUS

    I don’t dance but I still go to a dancing-based party every month called In Bed By Ten [facebook.com], which is run by my friends Matt and Kelly. It’s a great time, even though I don’t dance. I get to hang out with other people who aren’t dancing, and lots of my friends go. It’s a chance to see them and socialize. I also can’t go without getting flak about my not dancing. People try to get me to dance, and have been trying to get me to dance for my entire life, but it just isn’t going to happen. It’s not some game I play to get attention (which is a fair accusation). It’s not really even a choice. I don’t dance because I’m terrified of looking ridiculous and let’s face it, everybody looks ridiculous when they’re dancing (except maybe the professionals).

    This fear of looking ridiculous has manifested itself my whole life in lots of unpleasant ways. Social anxiety is, ultimately, a fear of ridicule, and I’ve struggled with that since I was very young. I’m happy that I’ve been able to conquer most of my social anxiety, but the dancing thing remains. I just can’t let go of myself enough to dance.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    I don’t know what to recommend with this issue, so instead I’ll give you a link to my internet dating profile, which you can read at your own risk. Warning: sincerity.

    Thank you for reading, my loves.

  • Pamphlet 3: "Human"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER THREE: “HUMAN”

    A human being is one of a large group of known animals (and a much larger group of unknown animals) of the genus Homo. All human species are extinct except one: Homo sapiens. Everybody reading this pamphlet is presumed to be a member of this species at the time of writing.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    Homo Sapiens

    I just finished reading a book called Sapiens, which chronicles the history of our species of human. We are not the only humans to have walked on the earth — here’s a list of seven of others, a mere sampling of the probable dozens of our cousins who died before we got to know them. We are unique among them simply because we survived.

    Why we survived is a puzzle of history, but there are tons of theories, most of which agree on the how, if not the why. About 40,000 years ago, humans experienced a cognitive revolution, a fancy term for a simple idea: ideas. You can read more about that at the link, but the basic explanation for human domination of the globe can be illustrated with a line.

    Most species on the earth follow a straight line. They occupy their ecosystems and fall into a temporary equilibrium with the world around them until some external force knocks the ecosystem around and they survive or die off. It’s a predictable trajectory. It’s how life happened and keeps happening.

    Homo sapiens were like that, too, for a hundred thousand years, until the cognitive revolution. Our straight line started zigging and zagging. We developed complex ideas and languages to communicate them. We developed cultures and religions and ideas like trade and currency. We started cooperating in larger numbers. Rather than adapt to our environment, we changed it.


    Neanderthals, as a contrast, occupied Europe for at least a hundred thousand years and had no such zigging or zagging. They showed signs of rudimentary ritual practices and had access to fire, were much more suited to their environment than human beings, yet they became extinct while human beings thrived. For many years (and, in some cases, still today), scientific consensus was that humans had killed them off. This is consistent with human behavior.

    Humans didn’t kill off everything, but most things didn’t survive us. If it was big and meaty, we killed it and ate it. If it was big and dangerous, we killed it and probably tried to eat it, too. Human migration around the world can be traced by mass extinctions of megafauna (a fancy term for big animals). Where people went, the giant sloths and woolly mammoths died.

    But humans shared Europe with neanderthals for five thousand years, and there were a lot fewer of them than there were of us. If we had wanted to kill them, the neanderthals would have been dead. The prevailing theory now is that we probably made love to them, instead.

    I find it comforting and inspiring that our ancestors didn’t slaughter every other human species. In all probability, we worked together, lived together. We only know this happened with neanderthals because we decoded their genome, and we can see their genes buried in our own DNA. Who knows how many other species of human we shared and cooperated with? We didn’t kill them, we carried them with us into the future.

    My Genes

    I have 268 neanderthal variants in my genes. Here’s what my chromosomes look like, with the Neanderthal variants are in blue:

    Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had a common ancestor, and then came back together in Europe for a few thousand years. Modern Homo sapiens with a 100% European lineage, like me, all have Neanderthal DNA in them, but I have relatively little (I’m in the 30th percentile or so). How do I know that I’m 100% European?

    I filled a little vial with my spit and mailed it to 23andMe and in a few months I found out that nobody on earth is more white than me:

    These results are only accurate to about 500 years ago, and confirms what we Foremans already knew about ourselves (though it’s mostly my mother’s side — the Hazletts — that we know about, thanks to extensive genealogical research by my more recent ancestors). These results have no affect on my life at all, since I already knew what I was and where my people came from. There were no surprises in my genome, no secret dalliances with Persian princes (or Greek peasants, for that matter). I’m a little disappointed that my family history is an arrow-straight line from one corner of one continent to me, but that’s preferable to not having a line at all.

    End of Line

    I want this newsletter to be 75% informational and 25% personal, so indulge me: I don’t know if my line ends with me, and I’m not sure I mind either way.

    My parents had six children, so it’s not as if the venerable Foreman line will end with our generation. My brothers and sister are breeding and they’re doing a great job with it. I have no illusions about the feeling of immortality often cited in making decedents. There’s no immortality to be had for us, and that’s okay.

    Indulge me this, too: what was the first name of your great-grandfather? Do you know your grandmother’s middle name? These are things that can be found in public records, so no bonus points for finding out later. More to my point, do you know what your grandmother’s friends called her when she was little? Do you know what her favorite color was? What was her first crush like? How did your grandfather feel when he got his first job? These things are accessible, if they’re still alive or anybody currently alive ever asked them, but good luck answering those questions for your great-grandparents and don’t even bother with the great-greats. Even if that data was accessible, would you read it? Would you read all of the autobiographies of all of your great-great grandfathers? Be honest.

    Unless you happen to be particularly noteworthy, you won’t be remembered for very long past your death. Did you write a book? It’ll go out of print. It’ll join a vast store of digital copies of books written by hundreds of thousands of people, likely so similar to others of its kind that nobody will read it. Did you paint a famous painting? If it’s in a national gallery or famous collection, maybe somebody will see it again. Were you ever such a famous movie star that you dominated an entire genre for decades and everybody in the country knew you by name, like William Hart? Good luck finding someone who knows him now. Another fun game is to ask a teenager to name more than one Beatle.

    Imagine the burden of our information on our descendants. The autobiographies of their ancestors won’t be theoretical, they will be key-word searchable and accessible from anywhere on earth. And they’ll be exhaustively complete. We wonder what our great-great grandparents did for a living? Our great-great grandchildren will know who our friends were (Facebook), who we dated (Match, Okcupid), where we went (4square, Yelp) and have insight into our most intimate thoughts (email, blogs). More information is better, but when is it too much?

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    Thinking about my descendants is a bit theoretical at this point in my life, as I sit alone in a coffee shop, single and loving the voluntary seclusion of living alone, kids aren’t near the top of my priorities list. Love and marriage are the standard western human precursors to kids, and my favorite love songs are not about the fire of lust but the warmth of comfortable domesticity. The gold standard of that kind of love song is This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads. If you know me and you know the same kind of music, then you already know about that, so what’s the point in a recommendation? Instead, I’ll recommend this video for a live version of another favorite Talking Heads song, Houses in Motion — this one has bonus choreography and Canadians wearing wigs:

    THE ANECDOTUS

    I first fully became aware of my species during early adolescence, but not for the reasons that implies. I grew up in the homogenous neighborhoods of suburban West Virginia. From kindergarten to high school, there was one black student in my class (though not the same one throughout). I did three things in that period of my life: 1) watched tv 2) stayed up late 3) wrote stories. Every Saturday night, after SNL, WTOV played Star Trek episodes.

    Star Trek informed my idea of what it meant to be human, contrasting our species with others. To me, different races were Klingons and Romulans, not dark-skinned humans. There was no racism in our household. The topic was rarely even discussed. There’s some kind of privilege in that, but I think it helped me rather than hurt.

    ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS

    We’re still finding little secrets in our genes, and I’m happy to report evidence that supports my thesis that humans cooperated with, and loved, strangers they encountered: a new non-sapiens human relative found in our genes.

    thank you for reading, fellow human

  • Pamphlet 2: "Light"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER TWO: “LIGHT”

    Light is one of those subjects that you can’t stop thinking about, once you let it in your head. Einstein couldn’t stop thinking about it, and thank goodness for that. Another person couldn’t stop thinking about it, either, a person who led a far more interesting life than his mathematical descendent (sorry, Al).

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    Isaac Newton

    Isaac Newton invented an entirely new branch of mathematics before he was 30 (though Leibniz begged to differ). He came up with those laws of thermodynamic laws we all know and love, too, and a whole bunch of other things that are beyond the scope of this newsletter. Concordant with the theme of Pamphlet 2, Newton was also obsessed with the properties of light.

    Newton walked the halls of Trinity College and littered the ground behind him with his optical discoveries: how prisms work, the intrinsic nature of colors, designs for new kinds of telescopes, how to grind better mirrors. Curious about the behavior of light against the human eye, he stuck a large needle between his ocular bone and his eyeball to see if how his vision changed when he squeezed it. No joke. He even diagrammed it:
    Oh, and he was 24.

    Isaac Newton was also a grade-a jerk with a thin skin. Another scientific luminary in a time when one could throw a stick in a random, filthy, street and hit three luminaries was Robert Hooke (he discovered the cell structure of living creatures and named them such), who made some mild criticisms of some of Newton’s discoveries. Newton’s reaction was to take his ball and go home, withdrawing from public discourse altogether.

    Newton didn’t stay away from the public eye forever, and eventually, in his old(er) age, found himself in charge of the Royal Mint, which was plagued by the circulation of false coinage. He is credited with successfully prosecuting dozens of forgers by disguising himself and hanging out in pubs, gathering evidence and conquering counterfeiters like a 17th century Sherlock Holmes. How has this footnote of history never made it to a quirky BBC detective show? Speaking of whom…

    Bartitsu

    Sherlock Holmes was no mere fighter — he was a practitioner of an obscure “gentleman’s martial art” of the 1800s, a style of combat that utilized the gentleman’s walking stick and was always depicted in practice by a gentleman with a gentleman’s hat, tails and gentleman’s mustache.


    Bartitsu (or, as Doyle miswrote it, baritsu) was invented by the extremely English-sounding E.W. Barton-Wright. The name Bartitsu was a combination of his name and “jujitsu” which was, among a large number of extant martial arts, a major source of inspiration. In fact, Barton-Wright is credited with being one of the first westerners to teach Japanese-style combat, a manifestation of the era’s obsession with orientalism.

    Barton-Wright did not just make up a martial art using a modern version of a club, he founded a capital-C Club called the Bartitsu Academy of Arms and Physical Culture. He encouraged a well-rounded martial arts education, believing that one should master many forms of combat. Pursuant to this, he imported martial arts masters from all over the world and even hosted a group of historians experimenting with ancient fencing techniques. As if all that weren’t Elizabethan enough, he also employed (and in some cases, invented) a slew of therapies involving electricity, heat and radiation.

    Bartitsu was essentially forgotten, but has seen a resurgence in the 21st century as another generation discovers its own incarnation of Holmes.

    Jackie Chan

    Speaking of bridges between asian and western cultures, Jackie’s nickname as a child was 炮炮, which means “cannonball.” It’s a pretty accurate description of Jackie Chan as an adult, too.

    Contrary to popular belief, he never did all of his own stunts. He has the world record for having personally performed the most stunts on film, but he had a team of extremely talented stunt performers who worked on every Jackie Chan movie for most of the 80s, when his most dangerous stunts took place, like the stunt in Armour of God (Jackie fell from a tree and fractured his skull).

    Some of Jackie’s greatest assets are his humor — kung fu comedy is a genre he is credited with inventing — and his willingness to embarrass himself, something that his late co-star Bruce Lee didn’t do. Jackie’s producers want him to be more like Bruce (so he could be the next Bruce Lee), but Jackie didn’t find real success until he purposefully went the opposite direction. Where Lee was a stalwart paladin, Jackie was flawed and bumbling.

    During my research, I found a video by the folks at Every Frame a Painting that perfectly sums up everything I just wrote, so you should just watch that instead.

    This is my earliest recollection of ever even hearing about Jackie Chan, when he won a lifetime achievement award from the MTV movie awards (which they discontinued because the last winner, Clint Howard, seemed to be so legitimately touched by what nobody else took seriously). This award was given to him when he was finally breaking through in Hollywood and preceded his most famous American movies.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    It’s finally feeling like autumn around here, a season that makes me want to listen to music like The Handsome Family, whose song, My Sister’s Tiny Hands, I heard Andrew Bird cover at his most recent Pittsburgh show. I had no idea it was a Handsome Family song, but reading the lyrics (sample: “The sunlight spread like honey/ Through my sister’s tiny hands”), it makes perfect sense. The descriptions of light, shadow and darkness are some great writing.


    Not every recommendation in this newsletter will be a music video, which is good because I have another one:

    I used IKEA’s “Dioder” LED light strips to make my grandfather’s > aunt’s sword into a lamp. They’re bright and warm and don’t have that weird, bluish LED flicker and you can use command strips to temporarily attach them to something that you treasure. I probably don’t have to worry about this sword’s preservation, considering it lived much of its life as a stake for tomato plants in one of my grandfather’s patient’s gardens.

    QUOTUM INTERRUPTE

    “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” – Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

    THE ANECDOTUS

    a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

    Despite being a modern, medicated American, I still have the occasional bout of depression. It’s not capital-D Depression, which I do have, which is managed by the medication. Its symptoms include an unwillingness to leave one’s safe little spaces, an avoidance of social situations, a sinking sense of malaise. It’s Depression Junior, a sad feeling for a little while. But there are things you can do. In order of importance:

    • drink at least one glass of water, and more than one is better

    • eat a little something with lots of protein in it

    • pick one small task (take the garbage out, wash a few dishes, etc.) and do it

    • call somebody who loves you and talk for a bit

    • turn all the lights on

    Light therapy is useful in cases of seasonal affective disorder, but lots of light is just good for you. It chases shadows away, and when you’re sad, you don’t need any damn shadows around.



    Thank you for reading, dear reader.