James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Nonfiction

  • Everything Ends

    So the new things can begin

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

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

    – Yesterday is Here, by Tom Waits

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

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

    Anyway, on to the newslettering:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Memories are Comets

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

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

    Something New Is Always Starting

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

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

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

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

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

    You don’t even have to do anything.

    But then you could say that everybody is a miracle.

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

    Carl Sagan got it, too.

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

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

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

    The white winter peals away to green spring.

    Hold on.

    Everything is Ending

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

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

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

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

    The Long, Slow Goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    – Achilles, Come Down by Gang of Youths

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

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

    A Tiny Tincture of Tolkien

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That’s how these things go.

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

    May your endurance be easy.

    Thank you for reading.

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

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

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

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

    Lots of cat pictures in this one

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

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

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

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

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

    Enter Eli

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

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

    Suddenly, Cats Everywhere

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

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

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

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

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    Emmitt Is Very Small

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

    You Will Never Meet Emmitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It Takes Time and Patience

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

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

    Look closely. (photo by Will1)

    Oh My God, There He Is!

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

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

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

    There Have Been Two Exceptions

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

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

    With me.

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

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

    This is the first time we met:

    So Now I’m a Cat Person

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

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

    We make a good team.

    1

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

    2

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

  • 🩳 Jim Shorts || The Store Timer

    I’m not decided on the title

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

    I also made this logo.

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

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

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

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

    Tick Tock Tick

    These are primary variables

    • which store?

    • time of day

    • my mood when I went in

    • how busy the store is

    • who’s with me

    • am I hungry?

    • ambient temperature

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

    The Weighty Variables

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

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

    My mathematical mind

    can see the breaks

    So I’m gonna stop

    riding the brakes

    – My Mathematical Mind by Spoon

    What Does This Mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • It's Summer, Baby

    Let’s try to have some fun

    When you swing in the tire swing

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

    the feeling of feet brushing the tops of sunflowers

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

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

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

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

    Summer: Great for Thee, Sucks For Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    My Father Died

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

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

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

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

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

    Here’s That Story

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

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

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

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

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

    The Long Staircase

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Summer Scaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This Was All 35 Years Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Andrew Bird – Near Death Experience Experience

    Things I’ve Historically Blamed For My Summer Hibernation

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

    – the weather (hot, humid)

    – bugs

    – sunlight

    – longer days

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

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

    Autumn Brings My Favorite Things

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

    – the weather (cold, crisp)

    – smells (cruncy leaves, campfires)

    – Halloween (spooky and dark and candy)

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

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

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

    – Sarah Williams4

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

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

    I Had a Dream

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

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

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

    The words came out. I wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Jim Shorts

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

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

    1

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

    2

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

    3

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

    4

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

    5

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

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

    Read to the end for a great TikTok

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

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

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

    The Enemy is Resistance, and It Comes From Within

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

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

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

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

    Poetry Break

    the past is so horribly fast.

    —from I Have a Time Machine, by Brenda Shaughnessy

    How Do You Picture a Year?

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