James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Nonfiction

  • Do Not Listen to Dan

    in memory of Daniel Wolf Roemele (1977-2026)

    “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.

    Pierce: Something like a memorial.

    Abby: This isn’t enough , but it’s what I have right now.

    Shaun Scott: We All Surrender to Tock

    1

    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 the Big Feelings Get Too Big

    Who let them in here anyway?

    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

    Share

    If you liked reading this, consider a subscription, won’t you? It’s free!

  • An Impractical Guide to False Starts

    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.

    —

    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.

    —

    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.

    —

    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 story still 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!

    Share

  • The State of the Union

    This has some bad words in it 😬

    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

    Share

    What the Fuck Are We Doing Here?

    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.

    Here’s the vice president refusing to admit it.
    Here’s the Attorney General refusing to admit it.
    Here’s the Secretary of Defense refusing to admit it.

    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!

    You know what he does to his enemies? Ask Mike Pence or his security detail.

    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.

    1

    “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

    2

    to be clear, if you voted for Trump, please don’t tell me

    3

    That’s not entirely true — she has nothing good to say about the bad drivers of West Virginia

  • Dear Miles,

    Ten years ago this very day, you left us forever.

    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.

    Okay well I’m going now

    Jimmy

  • The Atheist to Agnostic Pipeline

    Plus a Week in Review

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

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

    Rowlf the Dog, The Muppet Movie

    How I Used to Be

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

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

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

    I read Carl Sagan and watched Bullshit and James Randi.

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

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

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

    • Bigfoot? Don’t make me laugh.

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

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

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

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

    The Bone Prison

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

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

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

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

    However this started
    It ends up just the same

    –Psapp, Orekche

    A Brief History of Seeing

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

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

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

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

    I wrote all of that to write this:

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

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

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

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

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

    The Last Blind Ancestor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Here’s Where it All Comes Together

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

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

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

    But Maybe It Wasn’t the Realizations

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

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

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

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

    The Parable of the Forest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Week in Review

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

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

    This Week’s Obtrusive Thought

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

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

    Things I Read This Week That I Loved

    Space Crone, by Meghna Rao

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

    Sobbing on the Subway, by Leah Reich

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

    This Week’s Passport Photo

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

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

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

    This Week’s Song

    1

    Well, maybe not. There’s some debate.

    2

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

  • Love and Death, But Mostly Death

    This could be the title of my whole newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He would have loved that joke, by the way.

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

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

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

    ― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    – Paul Simon, Graceland

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Chase the things that scare you

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

    I got out of bad reluctantly this morning.

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

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

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

    Here’s a flow chart:

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

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

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

    4. put my phone down and write my morning pages

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

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

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

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

    Here’s Where I Tie It Back to My Brother

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

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

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

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

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

    Do You Suffer From Decision Paralysis?

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

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

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

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

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

    Writers Write

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

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

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

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

    Don’t Focus on the Deliverables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Luck is probability taken personally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1

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

    2

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

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

    3

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

  • Who Are You Supposed to Be?

    Happy new year, too, I guess

    I asked you a question.

    Who are you? Do you really know?

    Beginning, more like no kidding – LA Priest, Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

    Who was that guy who used my body?

    Who am I?

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

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

    Let’s Think About Thoughts

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

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

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

    The Pandemic Destroyed Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This Is All Leading to a Year in Review Section

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

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

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

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

    Writers Have to Write

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I’m a Master of Complicating Simple Things

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

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

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

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

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

    A Year In Review By Way of Two Books

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

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

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

    – Three Days in April by Edward Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

    I see you know who I am.

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

    – The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

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

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

    In Conclusion

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

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

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

    take these steps and never wonder again

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

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

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

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

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

    1. Take a walk.

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

    2. Drink a glass of water.

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

    3. Have a snack.

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

    4. Take an ibuprofen.

      1. Tylenol or aspirin will do.

    5. Take a nap.

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

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

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

    COMMENCING PERSONAL ANECDOTE

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

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

    His response: “Yeah.”

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

    “Yeah. Sorry.”

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