“And the mountains they tried to fall on old Peachy, but he was quite safe because Daniel walked before him. And Daniel never let go of Peachy’s hand and Peachy never let go of Daniel’s head.” – The Man Who Would Be King1
Dan Roemele was my friend. As I discovered in the days since his death, he had lots of friends, more than I knew.
Dan was loud, large, opinionated, and kind, generous, selfless, hard to deal with and easy to talk to. His laugh was large and loud, too, and it came naturally. He laughed a lot and people around him laughed, too.
Dan was extremely private, so private that nobody really knows what his last days were like. From what we have learned, he died peacefully in his sleep. One of us in closer contact with him recalls a series of ailments and small calamities that preceded the terrible quiet that too many of us can recognize, a 21st century silence of unanswered calls and unread texts. Is he busy? In a bad mood? Mad at me? The worst case scenario is unthinkable except in hindsight. Now it feels inevitable.
I Remember the Day I Met Dan
I had just started dating Becky. She was the first girl I ever dated. I moved in with her and she pulled me into her life and I went along happily. She said that her friend was starting a role playing campaign and there was space for us in it.
I have been a TTRPG gamer for most of my life. I specifically loved a system called GURPS and played it a lot with my friends in college. I had tons of sourcebooks and many many hours of game mastering and creating scenarios and worlds for my friends to play characters in. I was almost always the GM of those games and I was excited to find out how other people game mastered.
Dan was living with roommates in a house on Mount Washington. The back of the house was wide open with huge windows overlooking the city below. That house always felt precarious, like it was about to fall into the valley. It creaked and shuddered in the stiff, constant wind.
Dan was tall. He could loom better than anybody I know. He had long hair for the entire time I knew him, but the giant beard came later. He spoke gently and delicately, with a surprising softness. But when it was time for the game, he was on mission and in the lead, confidently at the head of the table with a head full of ideas.
I told him I had a lot of experience playing GURPS and he said “Ugh, I hate GURPS.” I never found out why. He actually played it with me a few times over the years, because he would overlook grudges with a game system if it meant a good time around the table. With Dan, it almost always was that: a good time.
Those first few games were difficult for me! Dan had an adversarial approach to leading a game. While my games tend to be set ups for the players to show off and spend time in the spotlight, Dan was a big believer in consequences. There were no easy answers and no simple solutions.
Dan’s campaigns were like life — if you and your reprobate friends robbed a gangster, then you’d better be ready to spend the rest of the campaign running from him. Our characters never really succeeded at much, but we could take a breather once in a while between calamities that we caused.
The first game I played with Dan was the Wheel of Time RPG — similar to Dungeons and Dragons but set in Robert Jordan’s enormous book series. I hadn’t read the books so the setting was alien to me, but fantasy is fantasy — you can always make a big guy with a big club (or “crub” as Dan would say).
It didn’t matter what character you made, not really — Dan would find a way to stymie their plans, throw mud in their eyes, and make their lives miserable. Most of the time, we made everything worse despite our best attempts. Dan loved giving his players impossible choices and slowly unveiling the next disaster to come out of them.
Star Wars Without Stormtroopers
We played many games with Dan — board games, role playing games, video games — but the games I will most fondly remember are his Star Wars games. The heading of this section will always be my shorthand description of Dan’s Star Wars campaigns.
He set his campaigns in a familiar universe but dropped the characters we made into blisteringly original scenarios that nobody had ever considered for Star Wars, like a space station run by competing groups of criminals, haunted by a medical droid obsessed with experimenting on humans.
Over many years of playing Star Wars campaigns with Dan, I don’t remember our characters ever encountering a stormtrooper. The Empire was an implacable, fascist meatgrinder, not a bunch of bumbling, mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplashes. Our characters never encountered stormtroopers because Dan’s stormtroopers were elite soldiers reserved for important and difficult threats. Our characters were never a threat. They were the smallest of the small timers, barely making a dent and barely surviving.
Dan’s Star Wars games were not about larger-than-life heroes blowing up death stars and fighting with lightsabers. If you ever found a lightsaber, your character wouldn’t know what to do with it and would probably lose a limb. I remember a near total party wipe on a slippery ladder. It was maddening! But it was also so idiosyncratically Dan-specific that it’s impossible not to love it.
When faced with a dilemma or fork in the road during a game, Dan would offer what seemed like sound options. From a different GM, you would think “oh this is what he wants me to do.” Sometimes that was true and it is exactly what Dan wants you do to, but under no circumstances should you do it. We started holding up this sign for the other players when Dan’s suggestions seemed reasonable and one of us seemed about to make a terrible decision.
Dan had a little tic that I will always think about when I think about him. Whenever he was game mastering, and he was about to narrate the next scene of the game, he would pause for a moment to consider what to say, and then make a little throat-clearing noise before unleashing the booming, authoritative declaratives of a dungeon master. I will miss that.
A man of contradictions, he was quiet and reserved in social functions. He hovered at the edges, swaying back and forth on his feet, as far away as possible from the hubbub of a party. He left early if he decided to come at all. At the little celebration of his life last night, we all agreed that he would never have come to it.
He was in his element when he game mastered, like we were seeing the true him. I have only recently learned that I probably wasn’t seeing the true him even then.
The Parable of the Elephant
I’m sure you’ve heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the lesson being: you can’t understand something properly if you only ever consider it from a single perspective.
At the celebration of his life, we assembled a picture of our friend Dan from a dozen different perspectives like the blind men in the parable. He revealed one part of himself to some, and another part of himself to others. Maybe everybody is like this, but as we talked and caught up with each other last night, I don’t think any of us really knew Dan. What was the “real Dan?” Only he will ever know, I suppose.
I don’t know if I knew the real Dan, but I know I knew my Dan, and I loved him. He was hard to love sometimes, and stubborn and certain about everything. He was a singular being. He was a bright, blazing light, full of love and overflowing with kindness. Abrasive, yes, but soft. He was always the first to help you move and the last helper to leave.
Sometime in the last few years I had to leave a game early because of some emergency or other, and Dan said “We game tonight in the missing man formation.” It sounds ridiculous and cringe but Dan didn’t care and probably didn’t even notice. It was just the way he talked.
I miss that voice. The world is a colder place without Dan’s warmth in it.
I am sorry that you never got to meet him.
I’m not the only one who shared his memories of Dan Roemele. I’m going to link to them here as I learn about them. I don’t think Dan had an official obituary so these tributes from his found family shall suffice.
Dan had a poster of the cover of this movie on his wall when I first met him. I was astonished that anybody even knew about that movie, one that I had loved since I was a kid. It was the first sign to me that Dan was somebody I was going to like.
When my psychiatrist asks me if I’m having “death thoughts” my answer is always the same: “not in the way you are asking, but yes.”
I’m not suicidal, but death is a constant preoccupation. The intensity increases and decreases as I cycle through the usual peaks and valleys of depression and anxiety. In other words, I’m pretty much always thinking about death (my death, the deaths of my loved ones, the deaths of strangers, the concept of death, life after death, etc.).
Naturally, I’m drawn to art about death and dying.
My sister recommended Hamnet to me, so I read it, and I want to write about it because it affected me greatly in all the best ways that great art does.
Hamnet, a Love Story About Grief
Grief is a kind of universal element that lives in all of us, like the carbon atoms in our bodies. Every human on earth has (or will have) a personal experience with death. New people join our own universes all the time and they all leave eventually, too. They always seem to leave before we’re ready. Nobody in Hamnet’s life was ready for him to go.
We know from the very beginning of this novel that Hamnet will die, so it’s not a spoiler. When it happens, we’re still shocked. The magic trick of this book, and maybe all great historical fiction, is how O’Farrell hides the historicals behind the fictionals.
Hamnet is a Boy and Agnes is his Mother
I can approach Hamnet thematically and say it’s about grief, but that’s not quite accurate. It’s really a book about a person, Agnes, who is a witchy sort of woman living in the middle ages in Stratford, England. Her husband happens to be a playwright we all know but he’s never named and we mostly learn about him as he comes in and out of Agnes’s story.
Agnes is a kind of village shaman, using herbs and other natural things to heal people. The writing borders right on the edge of magical realism, because sometimes it seems like Agnes really can learn about people just by touching their hands in a specific place, and sometimes it seems like her folk remedies actually can rid someone of the plague or fix whatever else is wrong with them.
In the world of the book, she can and she does.
She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange.
A Note About Craft
I am a big fan of O’Farrell’s writing. Here’s one of my favorite passages:
WHEN THE TWINS WERE VERY SMALL, PERHAPS AROUND THEIR first birthday, he had turned to his wife and said, Watch, Agnes had lifted her head from her workbench.
He pushed two slivers of apple across the table to them. At exactly the same moment, Hamnet reached out with his right hand and gripped the apple and Judith reached out with her left.
In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left.
They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right. lis like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle.
Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.
I have read other reviews that mention how affected the prose is and that makes me wonder if I’m missing something or if they’re seeing something I’m not. However you want to describe Maggie O’Farrell’s writing, I think it’s great and I want to read more of it.1
A Mother’s Grief
You never get over grief. It’s not like a virus or infection that runs its course and goes away. We have to live with it always. It comes and goes.
Hamnet shows us the architecture of the grief in Agnes’s heart after her son dies. One measure of a great story is that it reflects back at you what you can recognize but in ways you never thought of before, or illustrates them in ways you would never have considered. I see myself in Agnes and her anguish.
This passage puts to words an experience we can all relate to: when we think of someone and, for a moment, forget that they’re gone.
She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see.
It’s not just a book about how Agnes and her family roil and boil in their grief over Hamnet’s death. A good story also has a trajectory, a movement from the state of things in the beginning through some transformational event. That transformation is the heart of drama.
It’s part of the human story, too. We begin a life, even a single day, as one person and events happen that change us forever. Agnes suffers the death of her son and grieves and, in the last chapter, is permanently transformed. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Station Eleven (the series)
I haven’t read the book Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. I was so powerfully affected by the series that I don’t want to alter it in my mind by reading the book. I don’t know if that makes any sense. I don’t even like recommending Station Eleven to people because I’m afraid they won’t like it as much as I did, or, perhaps worse, won’t be as affected by it as I was.
The tv show was a profoundly moving experience. I watched it as the last few episodes aired. It was a show that was being made before and during the pandemic and it aired those last episodes just as the lockdowns were ending.
The series is about Kirsten, in both the present day and 20 years after the pandemic that killed most of the world’s population. She is an actor in the Traveling Symphony, which performs music and plays to the communities that have sprung up in the bones of the old world.
It’s post apocalyptic but not in the way you might be used to. One of the things I loved about Station Eleven is how it depicts the end of the world as the beginning of a new one. Most post-apocalypse stories are about how society breaks down and sets people against each other. This does not ring true for me and what I know about people.
What do you see on the news when disasters happen? What do you see when tragedy happens in your own life or in your own community? People don’t scatter and huddle in their basements with guns aimed at the door — they spring into action to help. Look at the aftermath of any disaster, anywhere in the world. The pile of rubble that used to be a hospital is crowded with people digging others out, tending to the injured, comforting their neighbors. If the end of the world happened, I don’t think everybody would immediately leap at the throats of their neighbors.
There are violent people in the post-pan(demic) world of Station Eleven, but they’re fringe crazies, aberrant exceptions. They barely appear in the story at all.
By the end, Station Eleven brings all of the characters we’ve met over the course of 10 episodes and puts them in a post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic production of Hamlet. In acting out the play, our characters reach a kind of mutual understanding of each other and allows them to set aside the traumatic happenstances that led them to fighting and scheming against each other.
Hamnet is Also Hamlet
Factually, William Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died of the plague at the age of 11, and a few years later he wrote a play called Hamlet. We also know that Shakespeare made a lot of money and sent most of it back to his family in Stratford. He retired there, too.
In the book, we see a Shakespeare who can’t sit still. He needs to be in the city, performing, creating. Even after the death of his son, he can’t stay with the family. He can’t explain it to Agnes, who is perplexed by his callousness and selfishness. She watches him leave after their son’s death and she understands him even less than she did before.
In the book, Agnes hears that her husband has written a play with the same name as their dead son, and she’s enraged by it. How dare he! She and her brother travel to London expecting to be disgusted.
But that’s not what happens.
She watches the character of Hamlet, who looks and acts just like her son, who has been coached and trained by her husband exactly how the boy stood, or smirked, or walked, or spoke. Her husband plays Hamlet’s father, a ghost.
“Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death.
He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”
Agnes experiences her husband’s production as a catharsis, a revelation. Through this performance, she can process the death of their son and see, finally, and in stark relief, the context and shape of her husband’s grief, too. Agnes can move on to the rest of her life with a new understanding of her husband where before she had always struggled to comprehend him. Art transforms.
Shakespeare, Agnes, Kirsten and Jeevan all use performance, as witnesses and as participators, to talk and listen to each other.
The stage allows us to be vulnerable and exposed while also hiding our true selves behind masks and costumes. Words written for us, spoken by characters who bear no relation to ourselves except in our mutual humanity, resonate through time and distance and unite us together and help us, too, to understand each other. This is not just performance but all art. Great art shows us ourselves while it shows us things we’ve never seen.
I gave you a piece of Hamnet to read, so naturally I want to give you a piece of Station Eleven to watch.
This has small spoilers, but it’s from the second episode so you’re not missing much context. Jeevan, the man taping up the vent, is introduced to us as a guy watching a production of King Lear who sees a famous actor on stage have a medical event and instinctively runs on stage to help him. Kirsten is a child actor in the same production who gets lost in the chaos after this event and the simultaneous outbreak of a world-ending flu pandemic. They take refuge in Jeevan’s brother’s apartment.
Kirsten is also the adult woman in a production of Hamlet that does not fully unfold fully until the end of the show (but you can see it hopscotches through time).
Great Art Transforms Us
As we watch a play or performance, we experience the text of the songs being played or the lines of dialogue being spoken and they allow us to reflect on our own lives and feelings.
We see a wrathful Iago scheme and plot against his commander and remember the times where we, too, were passed over for a promotion. That other guy didn’t deserve it, but we do! When we see Othello, twisted and contorted into seeing an unfaithful wife, we can think of the times we lost our faith in our own friends or lovers. When Othello snaps and strangles his dearest love, we can all remember the times we treated someone badly because of our own anger or resentment.
Hamnet and Lincoln in the Bardo
The obvious accompaniment to this book, or maybe another book in a reading list, would be Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It’s a different kind of book in lots of ways — it takes place in the Bardo, or the space between life and the afterlife, and our characters are all unquiet ghosts in a cemetery. Stylistically they couldn’t be more different, as it’s all told in a shifting, choral sort of epistolatory first person. These ghosts witness Abraham Lincoln come to visit the temporary tomb of his son who has, like Hamnet, died young from a disease.
Lincoln’s grief is legendary and known to us. He is said to have held his boy’s body in this temporary resting place.
All three of these pieces — Hamnet, Station Eleven, and Lincoln in the Bardo, are in conversation with each other, at least in my mind. They are certainly in conversation with each other to me. Interestingly, Hamnet and Station Eleven kind of came out around the same time, so they weren’t in clear communication with each other.
You don’t have to squint to see it is also in conversation with The Pitt, which also hops back in time to the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It, too, is kind of about grief and moving on when everybody seems to be dying around you.
We’re so powerless against death. We are always fighting it, writing about it, making shows and art about it, trying to understand it.
My pitch for a thrilling Star Wars show after Andor
The rebels won, but the dirty work isn’t done.
Added 9/13/25: I’m revisiting this for the algorithms because the conversation about Andor has not stopped. This is my vision for a series that would take place after Andor, but you can also see this as Andor Season 3. This article goes over some of it — Tony Gilroy gave an interview where they asked him about a fan’s idea for Andor Season 3. That idea is similar to mine, but it frees Daedra from prison and makes her a Hannibal Lecter type of character as she gets revenge. I don’t like that because I think it’s much more interesting to put her where I have (as a double agent against both the Empire and the Republic).
This is a long post of very niche, nerdy fan fiction. I’ll include a little overview of my relationship to fan fiction and related topics at the bottom. Until then, enjoy my pitch.
Some art feels like it was made specifically for us and sometimes that very art stirs us to make our own. I have had this idea rattling around in me for quite a while, probably some time after Rogue One came out. I want more stories like the ones Andor gave us, so I wrote them.
Anyway, I’ll start with the pitch:
Title: Star Wars:Rogue Company
Logline: A year after the fall of the Empire, A team of rebels hunt down the worst Imperial war criminals against the backdrop of a burgeoning New Republic.
Tone: Andor meets the movie Munich
Synopsis: The long galactic nightmare is over. The Emperor is dead, the Imperial Remnant has been defeated and scattered to the Outer Rim. The New Republic is building what it can from the wreckage of what came before. While the leaders of the Rebellion pick up the pieces of what’s left of the Imperial government, a small team of operators, spies, soldiers and scoundrels work in the shadows of the new dawn to hunt down the worst of the Empire. From the disgraced Senators who collaborated with the evil Empire to the generals at the tip of the Imperial spear, Rogue Company brings them to justice.
Main Characters:
Kleya Marki. The main protagonist. She worked for many years with Luthen Rael to chip away at the Empire and, ultimately, create the circumstances that allowed the Rebel Alliance to exist. In the days of the Empire, bombings and assassinations were the norm, but the new bosses want her to stay on the straight and narrow.
Arin Mosch. The other main protagonist. He’s a true believer in the New Republic and its lofty ideals. He’s the moral counterpoint to Kleya’s ends-justify-the-means methods. He is the scion who went to war while his siblings managed the family business. He frequently clashes with Kleya.
General Alexsandr Kallus. A former ISB agent who secretly fed information to the Rebels under the name Fulcrum and defected to the Rebellion. He is tasked with developing a New Republic espionage and counter-espionage division while also staying true to its ideals. He is Rogue Company’s commandant, the guy who gives the orders and sets up missions.
Dedra Mera. Imperial triple agent. Dedra survived the fall of the Empire only to find herself among a small Imperial Remnant after a prison break staged by Rebellion operatives. The Rebels believe that she is their secret but she is actually feeding them false information. She works against both the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic in service of her mysterious new master. She walks the knife’s edge at all times and even she doesn’t know where her true loyalties lie anymore.
Mon Mothma. The leader of the New Republic. In addition to the constant challenges of creating a new government, she has to deal with the old, unsettled scores of her life as a Senator, appease the many factions fighting for favor, and prevent the Imperial Remnant from filling the vacuums that the New Republic can’t fill themselves. On top of that, there’s the matter of all the promises, compromises and favors she made in the service of the greater good and what happens when those porgs come home to roost.
Senator Tamril Yoost. Senator from Kuat. Yoost is the main antagonist to Mon Mothma, representing the planet most sympathetic to the Imperial Remnant. Yoost is outwardly supportive of the New Republic as it takes shape but unabashedly critical of the Rebel Alliance’s methods during the war. Maintains the lie that the Jedi are dangerous and blames Darth Vader for the Emperor’s radicalization.
Chief Advocate Marl Fetter. A harried and experienced attorney in the Coruscant justice system, Fetter defended Rebel criminals against Imperial crackdowns, constant authoritarian overreach, mercurial shifts in enforcement, and capricious, inscrutable corruption, all while deftly avoiding reprisal. He was a natural choice to head the new government’s criminal justice reforms and the prosecution of the Imperials, but he’s used to being on the other side of the courtroom.
Neska Pujar. Ambitious young journalist with something to prove and new hire at the Coruscant News Network. Neska has only ever known the Empire and lived a hard life in the lower floors of Coruscant. She has fought hard to get to where she is, and was just assigned to the Reclamation Desk where she does little more than rewrite official reports from the garbage and sanitation departments. She stumbles upon information that suggests things are not what they seem in the new government.
Supporting Characters
Moff Kobb Sobelle. Sobelle was the Moff in charge of the Kuat sector during the Empire. He is most definitely still in charge of Kuat, albeit unofficially, and maintains his luxurious lifestyle. He keeps a reprogrammed Operation Cinder messenger droid as a toy. His hedonistic lifestyle hides his true ambition: rebuild the Empire with himself as the Emperor.
Hosan Maye. A low level Imperial manager who only knew the Empire as his employer, blissfully unaware of the crimes and atrocities and nearly every aspect of the Galactic Civil War. The New Republic is just the new boss to him, and he dutifully continues his work overseeing Sector 7345 in the Coruscant Sanitation Department.
Episode 1: Long Live the Empire
An angry Kallus storms out of a meeting with the New Republic military. Kallus has presented irrefutable evidence that Kuat is harboring an Imperial Moff who oversaw and facilitated multiple war crimes. The military council refuses to act, preferring a diplomatic solution that has so far gone nowhere.
Kallus finds Kleya Marki who has been quietly supporting rebellion elements in Imperial Remnant sectors. He convinces her to come back into the field and undertake a secret, unofficial mission to bring Moff Sobelle to justice.
Mon Mothma presides over her own contentious meeting, though hers is with representatives of the Rebel Alliance and members of the Coruscant delegation. They argue about how much power former Imperials should have and what concessions are necessary in order to keep the capital planet operating smoothly. One of those is the head of Coruscant Reclamations, who returns to his own department with a chip on his shoulder.
He is forced to demote one of his best administrators, a mid level Manager named Hosan Maye, a former Imperial who oversaw multiple departments of garbage sorters, including a family of Ugnaughts. They’re fired by their uncaring, ambitious new manager. One of those Ugnaughts kept an old holo diary of a Clone Wars commander turned Imperial who suspected, and gathered evidence, that Darth Vader was actually Republic hero Anakin Skywalker. This Ugnaught quietly gives Maye this recording as a parting gift.
This is a pretty great pitch, right? Maybe one of your Hollywood friends would like to read it haha lol jk or unless…?
I stopped at one episode because you get the idea.
The plot of the show is structured similarly to Andor. The main story centers on Rogue Company and their secret missions to bring war criminals to justice. That sets the scaffold on which the whole show is built and gives us our two leads, Kleya and Arin.
Their first mission, likely over the course of a few episodes (following Andor’s 3-episode arc structure), would be to extract Sobelle. Further adventures, quests, or missions could include more extractions (and a few lively debates about assassinations), heists, and general shenanigans against the Imperial Remnant. We could even venture into the dark underbelly of the galaxy — we don’t see it much in Andor, but the Hutts and the Pykes are two among many criminal organizations still active and still very much a threat to peace.
The possibilities for continuing adventures are endless, but here are a few of my ownarc ideas:
Life During Wartime. A deep cover specialist with cyber mods that allow them to change identities goes silent. Their final message warned of an impending disaster and hinted at another secret super weapon. Is this a paranoid break with reality or something much worse?
Uneasy Ghosts. Tay Kolma was a loose end to Luthen and Kleya but he wasn’t just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time: he was a connected and influential member of the Coruscant elite. Tay’s widow, penniless and destitute, comes to the Coruscant NewsNet with a wild accusation: her husband was murdered on orders from Mon Mothma herself.
Too Many Masters. The hits keep coming for Dedra — her Republic controller demands something they can use or they’ll cut her loose. Her leads on Republic secrets have dried up and her Imperial commanders are losing patience. One night, a stranger visits her in the dead of night with an offer: for the low, low price of an undefined favor some time in the future, they will give her exactly what she needs to satisfy both. What could possibly go wrong?
Sympathy for the Devil. The return of the Republic means the return of the rule of law and the pursuit of justice. Marl Fetter has become a steady hand in the chaos, balancing a need for justice against cries for revenge from the many victims of Imperial rule. His dedication to truth and justice is tested when Rogue Company brings in a famous war criminal who might not be who he claims to be. The victims want blood, and there are lots of people in the New Republic who don’t care that he might not be the man responsible — they need a win. Can Fetter knowingly sacrifice an innocent man on the altar of freedom if it’s for the greater good?
This central conceit and set point of view on Rogue Company could be easily modified a little bit to make it a procedural, with a Villain of the Week structure. I don’t think that’s as interesting as my version, which builds on Andor’s depth and scale.
Character Dynamics
Just like Andor, Rogue Company lives and dies by its characters. A proper Season 3 of Andor should pull some characters over — Kleya feels like a natural co-lead. The character of Arin is meant to be a foil to her. He’s a true believer in the values of the New Republic. He’s been submerged in the rhetoric for so long that the whole struggle must seem pretty black and white. Kleya long ago gave herself up to the gray. Throughout the course of the show, they will bring each other a little closer to their side and maybe meet somewhere in the middle (at least in some cases). While Arin is due for a rude awakening, Kleya could use a little light in her darkness.
Again, like Andor, we also follow other stories. Mon Mothma has an unenviable job in front of her. She has to help make a new government that’s better than the old one, rebuild the Senate, deal with the last 20 years of Imperial authority, rebuild the bridges she burned when she joined the Rebels, and try to pay all the debts she accrued and return the favors she promised while she led the Rebel Alliance to victory. A lot — and I mean a LOT — of people are going to want to take credit for what the Rebels accomplished. She’s their main target.
Senator Yoost is a villain with a lot of juicy possibilities. He’s been around a long time and has too high a profile to be removed. In private, he changes his mask depending on who he’s talking to — in his meetings with Mon Mothma and other rebels, he’s a sympathetic fellow traveler who misses the easy choices of the Old Republic but grudgingly must do what his constituents demand. To the former Imperials still floating around Coruscant, he’s just playing nice with the New Republic while helping funnel aid to the Imperial Remnant. The New Republic has “may the force be with you.” The Imperial Remnant has “Long live the Emperor.” To the public, he’s a fiery critic of the new government and is quick to remind everyone of how great things were when the Emperor was in charge.
We’ve never seen criminal justice in Star Wars. The arrest of Andor and his subsequent imprisonment are the closest we’ve seen. There are some in the deep, pre-Disney lore, but I bring it to the forefront. If you’re bringing war criminals in for justice, what does that justice look like? My pitch for Andor Season 3 introduces the tantalizing possibilities for Star Wars courtroom drama and lets us explore what this victory really means for the good guys. How good are they, really? Let’s find out!
More on the Supporting Characters
I didn’t fill out more of the Company itself, which could include a bunch of really interesting side characters pulled from the Star Wars galaxy — maybe a refugee from Ghorman (like Magva Yarro), a fan favorite like Migs Mayfield, a spunky droid like C1-10P (Chopper), etc. I’d love to see some diversity, of course, both in the human contingent (lest we forget that Rogue One had zero white guys in the main cast) and the nonhuman one.
The Big Secret
The Death Star looms over Andor and Rogue One. That secret is the engine behind a lot of what we see eventually play out, especially in the second season. I propose a similar secret behind the action of Rogue Company: the true identity of Darth Vader.
Behind the immense struggle between an authoritarian Empire and the ragtag Rebels is a religious dispute: Emperor Palpatine is a practitioner of an ancient religion who wiped out his generational enemies, the Jedi, as part of his rise to power. To this end, Palpatine pumped the galaxy full of anti-Jedi propaganda for decades.
Anybody who is remotely pro-Empire is going to lean into that propaganda to sow discord against the New Republic, which has an actual Jedi at the center of its two greatest victories: the destruction of the Death Star and the death of the Emperor.
I can easily see the Imperial survivors blaming Darth Vader for all the bad things that happened, including the evils of the Empire itself. All the galaxy knows is that Palpatine started the Empire after the Jedi tried to assassinate him. Simultaneous to this was the appearance of Darth Vader, in his spooky black armor, at the Emperor’s side. Nobody knew who he was or where he came from. The obvious move for the Imperial sympathizers is to blame Vader for everything, including Palpatine’s sudden turn to authoritarianism. Palpatine would approve.
Imagine all that discord circulating in the galaxy and then it comes out that evil, manipulative Darth Vader was all along Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi hero. Palpatine was right: the Jedi are evil schemers and their deaths were all faked by the Jedi themselves. They have secretly been in power this whole time, using their mind powers to twist the Emperor into their servant. That’s bad news for the New Republic! Especially since their big hero was Anakin Skywalker’s son. Imagine if these same people found out who Darth Vader’s daughter was.
Nobody really knows what happened in that throne room during the Battle of Endor. All anybody knows is that Luke Skywalker, a known Jedi, went in with Darth Vader and the Emperor and only Luke came back out. Those Imperial sympathizers would be absolutely frothing to use that against their political enemies. If they knew that beloved Rebel hero and survivor of the Alderaanian genocide, Leia Organa, was Darth Vader’s actual daughter in addition to Luke Skywalker’s sister, and that Darth Vader was also the Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker, I imagine the outcry would be immense. Or, at the very least, the pro-Empire Senators and other leaders could use that to destroy the reputations of the people the galaxy is supposed to trust with the new government.
If all that is true, what other secrets are the Rebels covering up? How can the galaxy trust them at all?
This naturally leads to the third storyline: the reporter.
Journalism in Star Wars
Just like criminal justice, we’ve never really seen what journalism looks like in Star Wars. I’d love to see a hungry, young reporter find out who Darth Vader really was and what lengths the New Republic would go to keep that news from leaking out. We could trace her investigation of his real identity and, through that, explore parts of the galaxy we’ve never seen before.
I imagine Neska, listless and annoyed by the reality of working in the big city, absent-mindedly flicks on the holorecording given to her by the harried, now unemployed former sanitation worker. In this recording, a low-level Imperial officer recounts his theory that evil Imperial scapegoat Darth Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker, the hero of the Clone Wars. She watches this recording, realizing that it might be true, while on the screen behind her, Senator Yoost blames Darth Vader for the latest atrocity to come to light. In this moment, at the end of Episode 1, we set the stakes.
The Canon Question
According to the internet, the true identity of Darth Vader was not revealed to the galaxy until shortly before the sequel era, in a book called Star Wars Bloodline. That would be decades after Rogue Company, so my idea clears the canon issue (I find most questions of canon to be tedious and irrelevant to good storytelling, which should always be the primary aim, but I concede it here).
What Happened to Dedra?
I couldn’t let Dedra die in prison so I would put her back in action for this story, too. She’s on the run and in more peril now. I have her working for the Imperial Remnant but owing her life to the Rebels and serving an additional third master. It seems obvious that this master would be Snoke or a First Order predecessor of some kind, but I left it ambiguous. Dedra is fascinating and I love Denise Gough’s performance. But I also don’t want to make her a hero — she’s a very banal monster but a monster nonetheless.
Her life is an unrelenting nightmare of imminent discovery. The model for this storyline for me is Baltar in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica. I want to see what lengths Dedra would go to in order to protect herself.
The Ghosts of the Future
Looming over any story after the Return of the Jedi is the unavoidable certainty of things like the return of the Empire as the First Order and the return of the Emperor as, well, the Emperor. It gives me some cover for this story, though, because I don’t have to pretend that the New Republic is going to be a return to the thousands of years of peace that preceded the Clone Wars — they’re going to fail, at least for a little while.
Continuing Qualities of Andor
Some aspects of Andor that I want to continue and are important ingredients to what I would call Andor-Like Star Wars storytelling.
no big characters. I don’t want to see any of the famous faces we all know and love. They’re superstars in the Star Wars universe, too. Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Lando Calrissian — they are too big for this story.
no Jedi. The force is mysterious and misunderstood, at best.
no easy answers.
Threading the Needle
I don’t want the thesis of Rogue Company to be: “you have to kill all the Imperials just to be sure they don’t come back” nor do I want it to be “you have to be merciful in victory and treat your enemies better than they treat you” despite my own complicated feelings on these issues. I see this show as a way to tell some really juicy, complicated stories in the giant universe of Star Wars and Andor is a beautiful door into those stories. As all fan fiction, I’m just building on what came before me.
Star Wars is about good guys doing good things and bad guys doing evil things and Andor, and Rogue Company, let us look at the shadows between light and dark. Even so, I would want to make sure that light stays bright. It’s important that even as we have fun on the margins of the story, we acknowledge that the story of Star Wars is a victory of good vs. evil. Let’s not lose sight of that.
Final Notes
Like I said, this is fan fiction. I don’t expect an actual sequel to Andor, nor do I envision this as an actual Andor season 3. Getting this whole thing out of my head and into the universe is my only aim. I also welcome any comments or (nice) criticisms.
I posted this to the Andor subreddit but without this last bit because nobody there wants to read about my history with fan fiction.
Anyway, a lot of talk around writerly folks (or maybe creative folks in general) floats around the idea of a “flow state” or the trance-like act of work/creation that we are all trying to access or engender in ourselves.
For a creative writer in the flow state, the words come out as if some greater power is dictating them. Accessing the flow state means tuning our radios to that frequency and transcribing what we hear. It’s the closest I have managed to get, personally, to what I would call a spiritual experience, or a feeling that powers bigger than me are using my brain and my fingers in service of something else.1
The exact nature of this flow state is one of great interest to me and I’ve been collecting data since I read The Artist’s Way (this data mostly amounts to things written and said by famous creatives like Tom Waits and Bob Dylan). The nature or origin of the flow state is probably just some combination of body and brain chemistry that strikes like flint to steel, but it sure feels like, well, the hand of god. Or maybe the hand of “a” god. It’s fun to think about anyway.
I mention the flow state because my longest encounter with it was many years ago, in the back yard of my future in-laws house, where I sat at a picnic table and smoked dozens of cigarettes while hand-writing a script for the first (pilot) episode of a Star Trek show. My show took place a hundred years or so after Picard and company and would form the basis of my first (and only finished) novel (that has nothing whatsoever to do with Star Trek or Star Wars). I couldn’t stop writing that fan script until it was finished, and it came out of me so forcefully.
I had a similar, but smaller-scale, experience with this. I suspect the restrictions of an established story with its own rules is empowering to me, like when you pinch a garden hose. I have spent a lot of idle hours in my life imagining what my own Star Wars stories would be and what I think are interesting directions to take the stories we’ve seen.
Fan Fiction is Great
This would have been impossible to convince me of 20 years ago2, but I am completely in favor of fan fiction as a viable and worthy way to spend our creative energies. I find the ability to create so tenuous and the motivation so often elusive that creation itself, and creative writing specifically, is a sacred and beautiful act, even when (or maybe even especially when) it’s created by a new writer. It’s true that writing fan fiction leads writers to explore their own creations, but that’s just a nice bonus feature. Fan fiction itself is full of wonderful stories and I encourage you to head over to AO3 to find something that rings your bell. I didn’t post this there because it’s not my community and I don’t want to parachute into someone else’s fun corner of the internet for my own gratification.
Gratification is an interesting word. Is that why we write? I would argue that we only write what we want somebody to read, but that’s not always true. Writing something is its own end and requires no purpose.
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note that this does not mean I think my Star Wars fan fiction is dictated from God in order to fulfill some purpose, merely that the act of creation is good and pure and primordial irrespective of its point
Every generation gets their own prestige medical drama. I end up watching a lot of them despite my squeamishness. I’m not ashamed to admit that I close my eyes when Dr. Bangs on The Pitt takes a scalpel to a teenager’s eye socket.
I had a couple of brain surgeries a few years ago. The first surgery was just to put a shunt in my head. The second surgery was the Big One. They popped open the back of my skull, plucked out a little tumor, and stitched me back up.
After the surgery was complete, the surgeon told my family about a moment that happened during the operation. As I sat, insensate, in a supine position with the back of my head pealed open, he touched the surface of my brain with his scalpel. My heart stopped. When he removed the scalpel, my heart resumed beating. He did it again, for some reason, and my heart stopped again.
This was, apparently, hilarious.
The Pitt is a Pit But it’s Also a Pitt
The Pitt is a great name for this show. The title refers to the cute nickname the people of Pittsburgh Regional Hospital have for the emergency department. This is because it’s kind of pit-like but also because it takes place in Pittsburgh (which is why they spell it with two Ts).
There are references to Pittsburgh peppered throughout the show and there were only a few little moments that hit my ear wrong (as a 20+ year Pittsburgh resident). For instance, they eat Primanti Bros, but without the requisite “I hate Primate Bros” comment from an aggrieved foodie. My brother Rob observed in the family Discord that they call Pittsburgh’s light rail “the subway” which is a sweeping and grandiose word for what we actually have (we call it “the T” and most people who live here have never ridden it). They drink Iron City and there’s a derisive reference to Philadelphia, so that’s pretty good.
While they don’t always get all the little facts right, they do get one thing right: what it feels like.
The show takes place in the late summer, around the time of a fictional music festival. I read this interview with the producer, John Wells, who went to CMU.
“We shot in early September and there’s that wonderful, muggy, warm, late-summer, early-fall feeling that we wanted to get in,” Wells said. “The way the air feels and the way in which we shot it, we worked hard to get that into those scenes when we were outside, to get that feeling that there’s a heaviness of the air.”
Wells said the crew spent time discussing how to capture the feeling with a camera “and how we were going to move at a certain pace in a way to try and get across that feeling. It’s hard to describe in any kind of specifics. It’s just the way the city feels.” – PPG
He’s so right! The city does feel like that and they captured it so well that I can forgive the tiny little bits that didn’t hit right. Notes for next season: gimme at least 1 yinzer. It’s not Pittsburgh without one! I wonder if Jon Daly is available.
Each episode of The Pitt is an hour of a single day shift in the Emergency Department. There is a palpable dedication to realism1. There are no cartoonish villains or perfect heroes or outrageous scenarios. I really enjoy the tightness of the writing and the economy of story.2
This show also made me miss being in the hospital. I know, I know, but hear me out. When I was in the hospital for those surgeries I didn’t have to worry about anything. The hospital is a building full of people who want to heal you and send you home. They bring you food three times a day. They don’t want anything bad to happen to you. If something really bad happens to your body they will try to fix it.
Out here in the world, anything could happen and I have to find my own meals. Terrible!
The Pitt is a medical drama, but there’s another genre it belongs to: the unfortunately-named “competence porn.”3
I like watching really smart people do smart things. I like to see problems solved and lives saved by skilled professionals.
As I thought about the thrill of watching competent people I started to realize that this is something a lot of my favorites movies and stories have in common. I also suspect this is one of the reasons why people love sports? Maybe!
Great Examples of Competency as a Genre
The movie Sneakers is about a misfit red team who stumbles onto a device that can break any cryptographic code. They use it better than the guy who invented it, because they’re more competent than everybody else.
The book/movie The Hunt for Red October is about a lowly CIA analyst who figures out how a disgruntled submarine captain is going to arrange his own defection while also delivering a secret prototype into American hands.
The show Slow Horses is about competent (and occasionally incompetent) spies manage to figure things out before anybody else. More competent spies can be found on The Agency and Counterpart.
I love it when smart, capable, people solve problems because they’re smart and capable. It’s thrilling! That probably explains why it’s so common in the thriller genre lol
Entering Into the Chaos of Another
The competency is nice, but I don’t think I would enjoy a show about auto mechanics. The urgency and enormous stakes of medicine make it fertile ground for drama (which is why we get so many medical dramas).
I worked for Carlow University for a few years. Carlow was founded by the Sisters of Mercy, Catholic nuns whose devotion to helping people is summed up nicely by this quote by John Keenan:
“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.”
People who work in emergency rooms leap into the chaos of the acutely sick and suffering. They heal and fix and work to save people and join them on the worst days of their lives. The Pitt is fiction but it vibrates with emotional truth. I can’t tell you if it’s factually accurate, but it understands big feelings pretty well. I know a lot about those.
Grief > Joy > Grief; Repeat
In the first episode of the show, elder attending physician Dr Robby gives a med student some advice about how to deal with the constant seesaw of joy into grief and then joy again in emergency medicine.
During a chaotic crisis, Dr Robby, who has shouldered the burdens of these feelings both in himself and in his staff and patients, and the weight of the billion little decisions they make that can unravel into terrible consequences or bloom into ecstatic relief, breaks down, finally, huddled in the pediatric care room. For him, and for us, the suffering is just too great, as his past and his present collide and collapse, a staggering overload that drops him to the floor. We can’t take anymore and neither can he.
The med student he advised finds him and, not knowing what else to do, joins him. Robby tells him to get up and get moving. But he’s saying this as he, himself, can’t.
There’s no monologue at the right moment that breaks the spell. They just get up and keep going. They’re not cured or refreshed, they just continue. All they can do is continue. They open the door and go back into the chaos of the dead and dying.4
They continue on, and the crisis winds down as the day ends. We follow the doctors out of the building, through the waiting room that’s already full again.
But before that, the student and Dr Robby reconnect for a minute. The med student repeats back the advice Robby gave him earlier, and tells him he knows the prayer that Robby had been repeating, in biblical english rather than Robby’s talmudic Hebrew.
The tension from the crisis has abated but not with a narratively easy or convenient explosive release. We do get our release, but this is it: a quiet moment between mentor and student. The story closes its long loop from beginning to end, the wise elder has imparted his wisdom and the young student has metabolized the advice into something greater for both of them.
Robby’s advice is the thesis of the show: you can’t help people on the worst days of their lives and not feel the joy and the grief as if it’s your own — the best you can do is find a balance. The only way out is through, unfortunately.
These Are Spoilers
The last few episodes of the show take place during a mass casualty event. There’s a shooting at the music festival and the Pitt is the closest hospital to the disaster, so they get the worst of it.
When the news hits, the whole hospital mobilizes to deal with the crisis, citing their own “mass shooting training.” They wheel in giant bins of emergency medical supplies. One of the doctors has military experience (we learn along the way), so he has tricks he learned by treating victims of warfare.
The ease with which the hospital moves into mass casualty mass gunshot mode is depressing and scary and sad and infuriating. I hope this is not the world we will live in forever but it’s the world we live in now. Like a lot happening lately, I wish it weren’t.
no tv show can be completely realistic, of course. Drama requires the laws of reality to bend to fit the demands of the story. There are good discussions on the subreddit for the Pitt if you’re curious.
it’s a nice counterbalance to the over-written tragedy of shows like The Boys or The Last of Us, which never have relationships or subtexts that they don’t love announcing in direct dialogue between characters who already know about them
People on the internet like to apply the blank porn appellation to lots of things and I dislike every one of them. Porn is famously hard to define but anything called porn is very specifically intended to serve a function beyond simply entertaining or telling a story. The Pitt is good drama about competent people doing their jobs well.
you can watch this scene yourself for as long as the video stays up (I expect it to be taken down because these clips always are). I recommend watching everything that leads up to it first, though. I will say I also forgot the little detail of Robby pushing Whitaker away after he helps him up. The little touches like that are a different kind of competence — the thrill of watching great storytellers, filmmakers, actors, writers, etc.
I have all these feelings. They are big. If I were an illustrator I would draw myself with a giant sack of wet laundry on my back with the word “feelings” on it. My head is bent low in effort, but if you could see my face, the expression would be anguish.
They’ve been bad lately, and bigger than I’m used to. They’re so big and mean and nasty that all I can do is keep going and hope they’ll pass eventually. They always do.
But where do they come from? Well, that’s a little harder to pin down. Some of it is self-inflicted. In sports terms, it’s an unforced error. In the parlance of the internet, it’s called a self-own. Nobody said anything or did anything with the intention of hurting my feelings — I did it all to myself.
I feel like a cat with a long tail in a room full of rocking chairs. The cat could just leave the room. The door is open, cat! Just walk through it! Why are you doing this to yourself?
But the pain of that rocking chair coming down on its tail is weirdly comforting. Or, if it’s not comforting, it’s familiar.
Sure, the cat could leave the room, but what’s in the hall? What’s in the next room? What if that’s even worse?
And then there’s the little part of that cat that needs the attention it gets when it yowls. That’s the hardest part of this to reckon with. Is that why I let these things get to me?
Or am I just being hard on myself about that, too?
I’ll return to this in a moment, but for now, let’s look at why I think this is useful to write about.
Don’t Be Sad I Know You Will
I was going to stop writing about my feelings so much. I write about my interior life more than anything else and I never wanted that. I was ashamed. I kept thinking — this is what I’m doing now instead of writing my novels or my stories? Every time I would start writing one of these I would jump in front of myself and tell me I was wasting my time. Who cares about any of this?
But then I looked at the stuff I enjoyed reading the most and it was all stuff like this. This, the newsletter you’re reading, but also this:
“I rarely look in the mirror anymore, not for an extended period, lest I set myself up for a full day of isolation on my phone, pondering the steps I can take to not despair over my appearance: Nose job? Jaw enhancements? Hair plugs? Teeth whitening? Intermittent fasting? That barbaric surgery where they stretch out your leg bones to gain three more inches of height?
And then I start calculating if any of those alterations are worth it. How many “good years” do I have left to not feel like an ogre anyway?”
I still wonder most days what it’s like to have a body that’s not awful. Body image was a topic in IOP (that’s “Intensive Outpatient Program” for you fuzzy ducks who haven’t gone to rehab), and I took the floor. I described how much I hated the sight of myself, how I defaulted to believing myself utterly loathsome, physically, and how I relied on attention to feel less so, if only for a moment. How I’d spent 24 years in long-term relationships in part to keep that ongoing drip of knowing someone out there wasn’t revolted by me. There was a long silence. I’d gone deep. One woman said, “It’s okay to cry.”
These are middle-aged men writing about their experiences and they resonate so much with me that I feel like I did when I was reading science fiction books and watching action adventure movies when I was a kid. I love how they make me feel and I want to make something that makes people feel that way, too.
I want to make somebody else feel the comaraderie and fellowship I feel when I read about other people like me. How do I feel when I read about A.J. and Ben and their own big feelings?
I feel like I’m not alone. I feel like there are other people out there who know what it’s like to feel this stuff. Sometimes they figure out ways to deal with it, but sometimes they don’t.
Do You Want Sympathy or Solutions?
This is a good question to ask somebody when they tell you a bunch of bad stuff that’s happening to them, or when they’re complaining about their jobs, or when they’re telling you about their problems. It’s especially useful to people like me, who struggle sometimes with human interactions.
Sometimes we just want to get the bad stuff out of us and into the world and we need somebody to validate our feelings. We don’t want somebody to tell us how to improve our lives or feel better about things, we just want somebody to hear us and listen. We want a witness.
My therapist’s name is Sandy. Everybody who knows me knows about Sandy. When they see me having a bad time, they don’t ask “have you talked to somebody?” they ask me “have you talked to Sandy?”
Sandy knows me really well because he’s been my therapist for over 20 years. He was my dad’s therapist before he was mine, and since my dad was the origin of so many of my troubles, Sandy’s insight and experience are particularly useful to me.
My dad started getting better after he started seeing Sandy. Sandy helped him connect with his own interiority and deal with the anxiety and depression that made him such a nasty person to his children and his wife.
In addition to his body shape, I inherited these from my dad. I have had terrible anxiety all my life. It got tremendously bad in my adolescence. I had daily panic attacks in college. I had trouble making friends because of it. If I suspected a girl liked me, they might as well have lit a stick of dynamite and dropped it into my limbic system.
All excitement, all arousal, was bad. I didn’t know how to differentiate the good excitement from the bad. I was scared of pretty much everything, but I was especially scared of other people. I didn’t know how to handle their feelings or my feelings about their feelings.
I still struggle with them sometimes! Maybe more than sometimes.
The Day That Sandy Saved My Life
After graduating college, I moved to DC to live with my Aunt Posy and “find a job.” I put it in quotes because I didn’t have a plan and I had no idea how any of it was supposed to go.
I had an english degree and a vague idea that I could start a career. I didn’t know what that career was going to be or where I would find it. It didn’t matter, because I was too anxious to follow through on anything you do to find a job and I spent most of those days in Posy’s basement, smoking cigarettes and writing fiction that nobody read.
At the end of those six months, my mom suggested I come back home and start seeing a therapist. My dad had been seeing Sandy for a little while, and it had helped him. I returned to West Virginia at what was the lowest point of my entire life, and moved back in with my parents. My dad made me an appointment with Sandy and drove me to Pittsburgh from Wheeling.
I had been to therapists before, as a kid. Twice, actually, and neither one lasted very long. Those therapists were supposed to help me get along better with my dad. His work with Sandy, many years later, was proof that he needed the therapy as much as I did.
So I went into Sandy’s office with trepidation and, of course, anxiety. I told him some version of the above, that I was so nervous all the time and didn’t like myself and I was ashamed of what I looked like and who I was and I was resigned to living like that for the rest of my life. I had trouble talking to people I had known my whole life. I was scared of everybody, everything. I had never even held hands with a girl, let alone kiss one. I was never going to live a normal life.
“Jim, you have anxiety,” he said. “I’ve helped many people with these things you’re feeling. You’re not alone, and you’re not cursed, you just need a plan. Here’s what we’re going to do…”
I needed sympathy and solutions, and he gave me both.
I Need You To Witness Me
I don’t even need to know you’re out there. These newsletter are like prayers. That’s something else I’m coming to understand: prayer isn’t about somebody answering, it’s about the praying. A prayer names our suffering and lets us get our arms around it. A prayer asks the universe, the powers greater than us, to hear us, to witness us.
So What About My Big Feelings?
Oh right, I said I’d get back to this. I’m not expecting you, or the the wild, wide universe, to do anything but witness me. The universe doesn’t have a choice but you do. I’m worried that if I write what people don’t want in their inboxes, they’ll stop reading what I write.
Every time I write one of these I think nobody wants to read it and everybody will yell at me about it or, worse, nobody will say anything about it at all. But in the end, right before I hit “Send,” I say “fuck it.”
Because one of my continuing big problems is the approval I look for from other people. I shouldn’t need somebody to tell me I’m handsome or tell me they like my writing. That needs to come from inside me. This is my next challenge. I’ll write about it here, in addition to my writing challenges and all the other challenges that constantly challenge me lol.
That’s a small version of why I decided it was okay to write about my feelings and post it here. It helps me, and maybe somebody will be helped by it, too.
We’re only as old as we’ve been told And I’m not ready for the shelf – Marika Hackman, Ophelia
there might be a middle aged middle child in your life who would like reading this
Everything You Don’t Need to Know About Things You Didn’t Know You Need to Know
This is James Hazlett Foreman’s newsletter. It used to be called The Collected Foremanea but I changed it to Middlebrow because that is a more accurate title for the kinds of things I plan on posting here in 2025 and it was time for a change anyway.
I wrote this here Impractical Guide about a year or so ago because I was thinking I could do these at a regular cadence. It’s been a year and I’ve written exactly 1.4 of these, but I like how this came out and I still might do more. I dunno, we’ll see. That I wrote a guide to false starts intending it to be the first of a series that I didn’t follow through with is so poetically perfect that it would be funny if it were the only one I did but I had a lot of fun writing it so who knows.
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Have you ever started something that you thought would be more than it turned out to be? They differentiate themselves from the regular kind of start by faltering somewhere in the execution. Let’s talk it out.
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Let’s Define Our Terms
A false start is a combination of two ideas, two words. One of those ideas is that things have to begin. It’s the start, the origin, the beginning.
The other idea, the other word, is false, and it negates the idea that anything was started at all. It also has a lot of shame piled up around and behind it and I’ll get to that. But first, let’s get something straight: you can’t let a fear of not finishing stop you from starting.
Thanks for reading Middlebrow! Subscribe if you like this. Don’t tell me if you don’t.
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A False Start is Just a Start That Stopped
We vilify false starts because ours is a culture of continuous, unstoppable, compulsively flogged and endlessly worshipped success. We are ashamed of our false starts because the glory is in finishing. Finish already! it’s done, let’s go, another thing to finish. Next thing to go, let’s start the process again.
But the joy of the thing is not just in the finishing.
Do we point to a spot on the dance floor and plant our foot down there and say “done!” Do you only listen to the last note of a song? Do you fill out the crossword puzzle on the next day when all the answers come out?
The point of life is to experience it, not to finish it. Our art, our lives, are not about what we finish. It’s about what we do. It’s about all those starts.
After all, how many things have ended that never began? How many things began that never ended? In truth, nothing you have ever started is truly unfinished. Not until the end of all things does any one thing end.
A novel you started and didn’t finish may yet be picked up by one of your heirs. The Silmarillion was unfinished but we can be quite happy it was begun. The Great Gatsby brings joy to millions, yet it was also unfinished.
How much poorer would our lives have been if nothing was ever begun out of fear of never finishing it?
I would argue that nothing, truly nothing, is ever finished. Oh sure, it can be finished enough, but don’t act like you would never take brownies out of the oven a little too soon before eating the entire pan by yourself.
The book you read was finished because the author wrote “the end” at the bottom of the last page but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some things that the author wishes they had done instead.
And while most of us can’t go back and change a novel that’s already been written, the story continues. Not even the great Arthur Conan Doyle could kill Sherlock Holmes. That story wasn’t finished even when the creator tried everything he could to finish it.
And then after Doyle himself died, and quite finished writing anything at all, Sherlock’s storystill hasn’t ended.
Your false start isn’t false until the last atom stops moving and by then, nobody will be around to notice that you never finished that story you started.
So go ahead, start that project. Write those first few words. Scribble that first line on the back of the papers you’re grading. It might not go anywhere. You might decide to pick it back up in a year or five. It doesn’t matter what you finish, it matters what you start.
The ledger of heaven increases not because of what we finish but because of what we try. We make the beginnings. Let the universe sort out the endings.
—
A Personal Sidebar
I have started a lot of things. I have finished far fewer. I have started writing in many notebooks, used a new pen only a few times, taken a first bite of a burger, first dates that led to no second dates, second dates that never led to a third, a million half-hearted and full-hearted beginnings.
I am tempted to be ashamed of them, because shame is a constant companion. I will also never stop feeling ashamed of things that don’t warrant it, but I can always try to feel less of it. After all, there is no ledger for shame. The Great Accountant is not going to judge me for not feeling adequate shame about the notebook with only a few pages written in it.
But this is not an Impractical Guide to Shame, it’s a guide to False Starts, and the feelings they cause when we’re all by ourselves in the dark days of a rainy winter and we’re beating ourselves up for something that doesn’t matter. Let’s grow a little together and not do that anymore.
—
False Starts in Sports Can Stop You Cold
The above advice does not apply to sports contests, only creative endeavors. If you are competing in a sport, especially one of the racing sports, then rushing to the finish line is extremely important and I would argue the entire point. In these cases, you do not want to start falsely, you should focus on starting when everybody else starts, because that’s the only way to fairly find out who the fastest person is.
Some famous false starts in sports include a tantalizing example in the Wikipedia page for false starts, which includes this gem in the speed skating section: “…a false start occurs when one of more competitors are intentionally slow at taking their starting positions…” which boggles my mind and is an excellent example of what is so great about sports: not the actual rules themselves, but the small ways that competitors eke out a tiny sliver of an advantage by complying with rules in aggressively sloppy ways.
This is a great example. A speed skater can gain a significant advantage simply by futzing around as they take their ready position, as the time between the B of the bang and the G of the bang can be the difference between victory and second place.
—
You’re In Good Company – A Famous False Starter
Leonardo DaVinci arguably had more false starts than the other kind. Mona Lisa? False start. The Last Supper? False start. Neither of these were ever finished.
The Mona Lisa is “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world” and it wasn’t finished! He started working on it in 1503 and never actually gave it to the person it had been commissioned for. There’s even some evidence that he was still noodling around on it 14 years later.
DaVinci was so bad at finishing things in a timely manner that he invented a new way of painting using a combination of tempura and fresco techniques that would let him allegedly get better and brighter colors, but also enabled his inconsistent and capricious work style.
This technique was great in the moment but it meant the whole thing started falling apart practically as soon as he was done. DaVinci’s contemporaries who saw his famous Last Supper in its “finished” state as children and then again as adults found it so deteriorated to be unrecognizable.
—
How to Finish; False Starts That Lead to Real Things
Even though I have adequately disabused you of the notion that your false starts are something to feel bad about, I don’t want the simple sweet joy of finishing something to slip by. After all, finishing is a virtue all of its own and worth celebrating.
In the interests of finishing something, or how to turn a false start into a true start, here are some tips that have worked for me:
Start Small. Don’t do too much. Do a little bit today, and then a little bit tomorrow.
Have Faith. Don’t be afraid to set something aside. Some ideas were never meant to become more than little starts. Combine enough of the little starts and you might end up with something big enough to be done.
Good Enough is Better Than Perfect. You can’t make anything perfect anyway. And you’re always going to want to make changes. If you don’t know if something is done, get somebody else’s opinion.
Lean on Your Mentors. A mentor isn’t necessarily somebody who helps you with their actual time and attention, they can be found in every library and book store. Some of them even wrote books that can help.
Thanks for reading! If you liked it a whole bunch, share it with somebody else!
Politics are like gravity: it’s either vague and distant or crushingly immediate.
We don’t think much about how the planets stay in their orbits, but it’s hard to think about anything else when your car spins off a bridge and you are plummeting to the bottom of a gorge.
I don’t like to write about politics. I’m not particularly good at it. I don’t know how I feel about most political matters most of the time. I have core values and I try to measure the events of the day against those values. This is probably what most people do!
I’m happy not worrying about how the roads get repaired, how prepared our military is, or how medical research gets paid for. Those are matters for other people, and I vote for the people I think are going to do things that align with my personal values. Again, this feels like what most reasonable people do.
But We Are Beset By Unreasonable People
Donald Trump is way more than just “unreasonable,” and so are the people who voted for him.
I wrote most of the below before that utterly insane meeting between Zelenskyy and our President. What before was a vague unease before the election turned into outright anger after the inauguration which has now become incandescent rage. I am disgusted by what happened there, and what continues to happen. I’ll try to spell it out.
We Call It Bear Baiting
Watch the press conference closely (or don’t, if you value your good mood). Vance immediately goes in on Zelenskyy’s unwillingness to talk about Putin in nice terms:
Vance: The path to peace and the path to prosperity is, maybe, engaging in diplomacy…That’s what President Trump is doing.
This is a direct shot at Zelenskyy’s unwillingness to take a conciliatory tone with Putin, the authoritarian dictator who has been very public about his intention to take back what he thinks belongs to Russia and who has invaded a sovereign country, bombed its cities, and killed its citizens.
While Vance strikes Zelenskyy with one hand, he strokes his boss with the other. He knows what Trump wants: obedience, praise, compliments, and credit. Which is why, when Zelenskyy refutes the notion that he needs to be nice to the guy killing his people and calling him a Nazi, Vance pushes his boss (who is barely paying attention to any of this) by saying:
Vance: And do you think that is respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
This is directly and specifically intended to get Trump mad. That’s the only reason he said that, and that’s the only reason he’s even sitting there.
Power in Washington is given to people who are obsequious enough to the President, who repeats his stupid lies back to him, and who join in his refusal to accept obvious facts.
This whole situation makes me feel like I’m going crazy. How can anybody support this circus?
Send This to Your Trump Supporting Friends because I feel like arguing with a moron
Have you seen what happens when a reporter asks a Republican politician to speak an obvious fact that goes against the wishes of the President?
The President believes, or says he believes, these things:
the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he actually won
Ukraine was not invaded by Russia
the President has absolute power over the entire federal government
Those are just three of the big ones, but there are tons more. The things that he seems to believe are not true. They are not facts. They are lies.
Trump Lost the 2020 Election Because He’s a Loser
But he’ll never admit it in public. He is surrounded by Wormtongues who nod and agree and pump him up and tell him everything he wants to hear. He’s so easily manipulated that the ones who do so skillfully are the ones who reap the benefits of their proximity to power.
If you disagree with Trump then you become his enemy. He makes things bad for his enemies. Sometimes he just fires them, but sometimes he mobilizes a mob of his followers to bust down the doors of their workplace, beat up their guards, shit in their offices, and try to hang them.
Make no mistake: I have zero percent respect for any of the pro-Trump crowd. Let me be specific: if you think Trump is good or you support what he does, please help yourself to a walk through the nearest window. I have no time for you, I think you have low intelligence, and I suspect you might actually have something deeply wrong with you. In other words, get fucked.
Trump represents the politics of grievance. He has no platform that isn’t cobbled together from the manifestos of white supremacists and Christian nationalists who piled into the space left by establishment Republicans who tried to nudge his populist barking into something coherent and were pushed out of the nest by spitting fascists like Steve Bannon.
There is no unifying ideology, no vision for a better country, nothing. The people who support Trump are tired of getting pushed around by other countries, they’re tired of pretending like they have to be nice to people with dark skin, they are sick of hearing people speak Spanish at the grocery store, and they’re scared that some big transgender woman is going to kick their door down and take their guns away. They’re mad! They want someone to demand respect.
Just like Vance was baiting his boss, he was baiting his base, too.
And I’m really fucking sick of it.
Senator, is gravity real? Well, we can’t really say. I definitely feel something when somebody throws a can of soup at my head, though.
I Haven’t Even Gotten to Elon Musk Yet
I’m so tired.
There are very powerful people who cannot even disagree with the president or his cabinet of clowns because the richest man in the world has promised to fund their rivals. If that weren’t enough, they are also afraid of being murdered by Trump’s followers, who have demonstrated their willingness to destroy and tear apart the institutions, buildings and people who get in the way of their leader’s grabs for power, influence and money.
Even the followers who aren’t personally willing to inflict violence on Trump’s behalf widely and loudly support those who do. Regardless of whether or not January 6th was an organized insurrection it was at least a riot created by an aggrieved wannabe-tyrant that got actual people badly hurt and at least one person badly dead.
Members of Congress are afraid to voice their differences because the current monarch-in-chief has loyalty and obsequiousness as his only values. There have been many opportunities to stop all of this from happening, but each one was squandered by Republicans who saw the Trump administration as a means to an end and Democrats who kept tripping over their dicks at every turn.
That end is and has always been power. They wanted power over people, over the country, over the world. They got it. Congratulations, you pigfucks. Enjoy the ashes of whatever it is you think you’re burning down.
I thought we were better than this. I thought we had principles. I thought a lot of things that have turned out not to be true.
They Don’t Have a Plan
There is no guiding principle. There is no grand vision. Trump is mad at people who aren’t loyal to him. Have you seen what happens when reporters ask a Republican to state a simple fact: that Trump lost the 2020 election? It’s nuts. They refuse to say it! Public disagreement with the president makes them his enemy.
Why are they so obsequious? Why don’t they state obvious facts? Why do they pretend that true things aren’t true? Because they want that power, baby! That’s all it is!
The guiding principle of this country has always been based on what I would call core Enlightenment values.1 These values are, roughly: facts are indisputable and laws should be followed. These assholes in power don’t want laws to be followed, and they think the facts are whatever Donald Trump thinks is true.
So What Do We Do?
I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t have a solution for you. I don’t write that kind of stuff. I have my own ways of fighting back against this authoritarian encroachment. I’ll get to that in a second.
Let me be clear: I don’t care about your political party. I don’t even care who you voted for, because voting is only a very small (and of questionable mathematical significance) part of our responsibility as a citizen2.
In years past, I shrugged as Republicrats won and lost their elections, because I believed then (and still do) that they were basically the same party with slightly different talking points.
My core values haven’t changed — I still believe in the essential dignity in all humans, that we are all basically good and do things for good reasons, and that all people are better off the more freedom they have. My values roughly align with what’s considered liberalism and enlightenment-era ideas about expression, religion and commerce. Neither party does super well on those values, though occasionally one of them does. Lately it’s been the Democrats, even though they sure do a great job of making it hard to root for them. I am often encouraged by opposition parties, because they’re the ones who are moving against (or just standing against) the authoritarians.
For a long time, nothing ever really changed for people like me. The people on the margins always suffer the worst excesses of the rulers, but white men usually get the better end of the deal. I have done what I could the best way I knew how, by giving money to charities so they could do good things with it. I still think that’s the best way for me, personally, to offset the damage being done by King Dump and his Dumplings. I won’t tell you which charities you should give your money to because that’s a deeply personal thing and you need to make a decision based on your own values.
This time it feels more urgent than before, and that’s partly because a few people in my immediate orbit have suffered, will suffer, and continue to suffer because of what Trump has been doing.
This Time, It’s Personal
Some people I know are at risk of actually dying and I don’t say that lightly and I don’t mean that they will be forced to hear opinions they don’t like or find new jobs or whatever. I am not even referring to people who will have to find new ways to pay for their medicines or healthcare or the people whose very existence is disputed and degraded, but that’s bad enough and it makes me mad, too.
When I say I know people whose lives are endangered by Trump’s brainless orders, I mean that literally and specifically. The police and military are full of Trump supporters. The people with the guns are on the side of the tyrant, and they’re extremely capable of using those guns against people who look like somebody they’re supposed to hate.
Those future and potential victims are just the most obvious and unavoidable reasons I’m so angry about the state of things in this country, but every day provides more. It’s only been a month since that pile of dirty diapers didn’t put his hand on the bible when he was sworn in, and it’s only going to get worse.
The Bible Thing Was an Omen
I have zero percent christianity in me, so I do not care whatsoever that Trump didn’t put his hand on the bible when he was sworn in. The important part of the bumbling fumble of that swearing-in was his rejection of the little traditions and norms that all make this country what it is.
I like it when Presidents have an understanding of the office and what it means and who sat in that office before them. I don’t demand any huge intellectuality, but I do like it when the President respects the office as a servant of the people, not as its only, towering authority.
You Really Did it This Time, My Mom is Protesting
I can count on a single hand the number of times my mom said something bad about somebody else.3 I don’t remember her ever being particularly political, though she’s always volunteered and helped out in the community. National politics hardly ever entered the family conversations.
Imagine my surprise when this photo appeared in the family group chat:
I asked my mom why she was protesting:
I am protesting because right now, there is really nothing else in my power to do. Dealing with the horrible frustration that many of us feel due to the events of the last month in our nation is overwhelming at times. I am many generations away from the beginning of this grand experiment called The United States, the basic tenets ratified when the states approved the draft of the Constitution have held us together until now. The crisis is tangible. Demonstrating with signs is one way of standing our ground against this administration’s lack of respect for the rule of law. Many honks in appreciation have led me to believe there are others out there with similar fears. The cold right now is an issue when standing in freezing rain and ice but as I recall my great (times 6) Grandfather, who fought and bled with George Washington in freezing cold and sizzling heat in the Revolutionary War, the least I can do is feel a little discomfort.
Family friend Bryn did some protesting, too. Here’s what she had to say about it:
It’s hard to pin down all the things to protest. Mostly the wealth disparity. But that includes lots of other things like healthcare. Protesting the destruction of federal programs that help everyone.
But I think her signs speak even louder:
The planet spins, things are always changing, and just as sure as gravity keeps holding us down, I’ll have something new to be mad about in a couple of days and hopefully things can settle down and get back to some kind of normalcy.
Until then, though, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, JD Vance and everybody who likes them and supports them can eat a big bowl of shit.
Programming Note
Don’t worry. I’ll get back to writing about my feelings and grief and stuff. In fact, I’m changing the name of this newsletter again, so when it comes to you next time it will be called “Middlebrow” because I want to write more about all kinds of stuff that are interesting to me. If you’ve been here a while you remember the last time I sort of tried to do that but now I’m serious! Nothing will change on this end of it except some branding.
Anyway, you have that to look forward to.
Thanks for reading this. If you liked it, subscribe now because I got tons more in me.
“The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were individual liberty, representative government, the rule of law, and religious freedom, in contrast to an absolute monarchy or single party state and the religious persecution of faiths other than those formally established and often controlled outright by the State.” via Wikipedia
I’m just doing some test content to see if this works the way I want it to. If you’re seeing this it means I’m still working on it! I am trying to get the footnotes to work exactly the way I want them to, which is to appear on the right there and look that way. I wonder if this is going to work. But maybe this time it will.
I was in high school. I was in the writer’s club. We read stories occasionally. I read one, which I rarely do. It was very long, but I read the whole thing. Afterward, the teacher said “thanks for the bed time story.”
I was devastated. I thought it was worth the time, but I was alone. My fellow students made no reaction that I can remember but subtleties were lost on me even then (less so now, but I’m still slow on the uptake).
I also remember somebody in high school throwing a very long softball pass to another student who had turned away at the last minute. The ball hit him squarely on the top of the head and bounced so high.
My memories from high school are like that ball, and I never see them coming. They hit me and I fall down. I am concussed.
These colliding memories are never nice memories. I have buried the nice memories deeply, instinctively, like a cat burying its turds. The bad ones all float at the top like watermelons. They take turns on the slingshot.
I don’t know how to rid myself of these. I don’t think I ever will. Maybe they serve a purpose. Maybe some day I’ll put them to use.
This Week’s Worry
I have been obsessed lately with my age, with everybody’s age, with age and getting older. I have to turn the self view off on Zoom calls because I can’t stand seeing the bags under my eyes, or the silver in my hair. My beard gets whiter and whiter. My trademark, the half white mustache, just looks like an old guy’s mustache now.
This is just the top of the worry mountain. There are so many lurking under it–it’s too late to publish any more writing, it’s too late to have a fulfilling romance, it’s too late too late too late.
This Week’s Magic
For a while after my father died, in the quiet moments before bed, I was aware of a presence. It stood just over my right shoulder. You know how you can be in a room with another person and even without looking at them or speaking, you can still feel them there? It was like that except bright and warm and directed straight at me. In my mind’s eye it was a sparkling sun, spilling all over with love.
Unlike dreams and hallucinations, it does not flee when I try to recall it — I remember it fully and completely. It was not either of those things but altogether different. I feel it return even now, as if to answer the shame and worries, or maybe because I’m writing about it. It brings calm and quiet.
Is it something in me that my grief has let loose? Is it the fading of the day’s anxieties and the encroaching night, my favorite time? I don’t know.
Something that I can’t explain is that it feels like attention, and like any other kind of attention, it waxes and wanes. I can feel it leave and then occasionally return. I’ve never felt this before, and I think I’ve felt most things.
I don’t know what the heck is going on there but I’m not going to dismiss it or try to think about it too much. It’s there and it’s beautiful and, to me, it’s a kind of magic.
This Week’s Joy
I wrote the first draft of the first short story I’ve written in many years. It still needs work, but by god I did it and there it is. I even printed it out and got out my red pens for the revision, like the old days.
Also, Emmitt is my steadfast friend.
This Week’s Wisdom
Let’s talk about baby steps. Let me hand it over to Julia Cameron:
“Doing any large creative work is like driving coast to coast, New York to Los Angeles. First you must get into the car. You must begin the trip, or you will never get there. Even a night in New Jersey is a night across the Hudson and on your way. A small beginning is exactly that: a beginning. Rather than focus on large jumps—which may strike us as terrifying and unjumpable—we do better to focus on the first small step, and then the next small step after that. “Oh, dear,” you might be sniffing, “where’s the drama in such baby steps?” Think about that for a minute. When a baby takes its first step, it is very dramatic.” Julia Cameron, Walking in This World
I already knew all that but I needed to remember it again.
This Week’s Reading
I have discovered George Saunders recently. I don’t know how I wasn’t aware of him before. Someone whose writing I enjoy called him a master of short stories, so I bought his most famous book and read it really fast. His writing appeals to me. It’s literate without being stuffy or grandiose. You never get the sense that he’s showing off. I really love Victory Lap, which you can read behind a New Yorker paywall.
I also worry that his popularity is like a Thomas Kinkade kind of popularity, and I’m just a rube with bad taste. That’s okay, too. I’m a sucker for a good story, and Saunders provides them.
I hesitate to hit publish on this and bless (curse?) your inboxes with this. But I have multiple irons in multiple fires and I need to finish something and put it into the world where other eyes can see it and remind the universe that I’m here and I’m still writing and I haven’t given up yet. I’m still here.
My saving grace, my heroic flaw, is that I can’t give up, even when I probably should.
I don’t know what you would think of all this. I didn’t know you as well as I should have.
I’m sorry to make this about me, but you can’t talk anymore. You should be 27.
Here’s what I remember. You were vibrant. You always seemed restful, even when you weren’t. Your hair was incredible and bright blonde, like a violin bow unfurled. I remember that. I remember your braces, too. I remember your smile. I remember your easy agreeability.
I remember when you were a fat little baby, and (I tell this story all the time) you were toddling around my apartment in Morgantown and you picked up a letter that my roommate was going to mail and you ripped it open and I lunged at you and said “no!” and you started crying right there while your dad and I laughed.
I remember that, too.
I still see you in my dreams. Maybe I’ll dream about you tonight.
I have a dumb question. When I dream about you, is that you visiting me? I hope so. I also hope you have better things to do, like explore the universe. Forgive me if I don’t say hi in there. In my dreams you’re supposed to be there so it’s not strange to me that you still look like this, 10 years on:
I don’t just think about you on August 21, but I always think about you on August 21. I tell people. I tell them about the website your dad made for you. Your peers would call me “cringe.”
Wait, no they wouldn’t. You’re a millennial. You’re not Gen Z. I’m sorry, in my mind you’re still 17.
You’re lucky. Wait, hear me out. You don’t have to get old and watch everybody else get old and busted and die around you. You don’t have to have cancer scares. You don’t have to have any more fucked up surgeries. You get to be remembered as a twanged bow string, vibrating forever. You get to stay put while the rest of us have to keep moving on and on and on.
You vibrated so much. You made so much great art —
I mean it, you made really great art — in such a short time that it’s almost as if —
No, I won’t say it.
You didn’t know you were leaving until you were already gone.
I’m going to wrap this up.
I don’t know if you can read this. I think it’s probably silly to think you can, but I don’t care. I don’t pray but this is a kind of prayer anyway.
I remember in Morgantown, shortly after you died, they released paper lanterns into the sky in your memory. That’s kind of like what this letter is. It’s going to go up and out and away.
I hope wherever you are is nice. I hope you can skate or take photographs or maybe just laugh a lot at all the silly shit we do down here. That’s a nice thought.
