James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Nonfiction

  • Does The Ground Feel Shaky or is it Me?

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

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

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

    – Adventures in Solitude, The New Pornographers

    Lenses

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

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

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

    Except it’s not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This is how I feel about everything.

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

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

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

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

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

    I’m open to more ideas.

    Human consciousness is a force of nature

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

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

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

    We cannot imagine the mysteries of the universe.

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

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

    We live in a simulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Except they aren’t

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Except it doesn’t

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

    Here is one story we tell:

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

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

    Rules are just the things we’ve agreed about.

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

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

    Money is just a story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Human Body: A User’s Guide

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

    Part 1: A Thought Experiment

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

    The Hazlett Histories

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Puberty. The man

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

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

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

    Why is sex?

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

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

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

    Or so I’ve heard

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

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

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

    This is not easy to write

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

    Imagine suddenly having a body you didn’t have before

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

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

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

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

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

    The Male Gaze

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

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

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

    But perhaps not.

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

    How to Stop Being a Creep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This all started with a bathing suit.

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

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

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

  • What it’s like to have a brain tumor

    HERE HE GOES AGAIN, writing about his brain tumor. Yeah, deal with it.

    When I really get into it, I really get into it. Telling the story, I mean. It’s a worst case scenario. It’s the last thing you want your doctor to say to you. I have not written extensively about my experience, because it was always too raw, too recent. I was also heavily discouraged from dwelling on it by people close to me, and for good reason. There’s not much to be gained by going over it again and again in my mind, and there is a tendency to become known as the Guy Who Had a Brain Tumor. I don’t want to be that guy, but there is something tempting about it.

    I know I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find it, so you’ll have to suffer through it again, but there’s a scene in the X-Files where Mulder and Scully are on an island watching for the appearance of a monster (because of course they are) and Mulder talks about having a peg leg and I’ll give you the option to just watch the scene for yourself and enjoy the wonderful writing and performances. This is the X-Files at its greatest. Anyway, here’s what he says:

    I’m not being flippant, I’ve given this a lot of thought. I mean, if you have a peg leg or hooks for hands then maybe it’s enough to simply keep on living. You know, bravely facing life with your disability. But without these things you’re actually meant to make something of your life, achieve something earn a raise, wear a necktie.

    Once you get cancer, you get to be a Cancer Guy. I beat cancer. Anything else I do is gravy. It’s my peg leg.

    This very idea is abhorrent to some people, but it’s not to me. It’s tempting, as someone who has trouble imagining a future where he lives up to the dreams he had as a kid. I used to fantasize about going on Letterman. I still find myself retreating to those fantasies even now, long after his show is over, and imagining how witty and wonderful I would have been. I will never be Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Neil Gaiman, or Terry Pratchett, but I can be Cancer Guy. That’s easy. I don’t have to live up to anything, I just have to get through Tuesday. What an accomplishment!

    You’re so brave

    I’ve heard that before. I’m not brave. I am, at my best, a coward. I would never intentionally subject myself to violence. I have never picked a fight. I would never defend a woman’s honor with a physical altercation. Before he was rightly exposed as a sex pest, Louis CK had a scene in his TV show where he gets into a verbal argument with some teenagers, and rather than escalate, he retreats. His date admits to finding him less attractive after that, which is a fear that all men have, maybe the most primal fear of all, that a woman is going to make him feel like less than the man he believes he is. No man wants to appear weak in front of a woman he is trying to impress, or, perhaps, any woman. I have no such fear. In the words of many great men, feet don’t fail me now. Good luck.

    My point is this: I wasn’t brave. I was barely conscious. All I ever had to do was lie there. Everybody else did the hard work of fixing my cancer.

    At least it’s benign

    People love to say this to people who get tumors. I’m sure I’ve said it, too. It’s a comforting thought, that cancer comes in two flavors and one of them is really bad and the other one is fine, like a hangnail. I think it lets people come to terms with the inevitability of cancer in their own lives, and how a benign tumor is the preferable diagnosis.

    I mean, yes. For sure. If you’re going to get a cancer, get the benign one.

    Cancer isn’t binary. We’ve lulled ourselves into a weird kind of thinking where it is, but it isn’t. Tumors can turn bad. They can go away and come back. But a benign tumor in the wrong place can still kill you. If my tumor had appeared in a different part of my brain, it would have been inoperable. It wouldn’t have mattered at all if it had been benign, it would kill me just as dead as a malignant one, except it would probably take longer, and it would be excruciating.

    People close to me, and people I talked to about my experience, like to remind me that I didn’t really have cancer, I guess because I didn’t die from it and it didn’t spread. But the thundering reality is that I did have cancer, it could come back, and when cancer comes back it’s always worse than the first time. I think maybe they like to say I didn’t really have cancer because they think I’m just being dramatic (fair, I have a tendency), but also I think they could be saying it to reassure themselves. I didn’t really have cancer. I’m not going to die yet. They can stop worrying.

    I’ve spent a lot of time here writing about what it’s like to have a brain tumor without actually writing about what it’s like to have a brain tumor. I’m going to write a book (actual questions I’ve been asked are “why would you write a book about that? Who wants to read that?” which are questions you could ask about any book ever written). Others have told me that it could be useful for other people going through similar experiences to read about what it’s like. It’s not that bad, honestly. I would love to offer words of comfort to someone going through what I did.

    I’m saving most of what I have to say about the experience for the book. I feel like it belongs in a bigger story, with the chapters of context around it. My maternal grandmother died of a brain tumor, though neither of ours are hereditary (we’re just lucky like that). I thought about telling her story and telling mine alongside it. I want to do this out of a respect and admiration for my mother, who clung close to both of us as we went through our tumor experiences. I can’t imagine the suffering my mother went through when I was going through my tumor experience. I owe her everything already, but now I owe her everything again on top of that. I never saw her waver, or doubt that I would get better, though I know she felt those things.

    I’m going to write about my tumor experience.

    What you won’t see me do is call it a battle. If I have one annoying habit that comes out of my experience, it’s zero tolerance for battle imagery when you talk about illnesses. You don’t battle an illness. A battle implies a win scenario, but there’s no winning against cancer or lupus or anything else. We get sick and we get better, or we live with it, or it kills us. Strong people die of cancer every day. You can say it, but forgive me if I roll my eyes.

    I just don’t think I’m going to write about it right now.

    It’s on my mind again because things are going great right now in my life, and just today I got headaches that remind me a lot of my hydrocephalic headaches. When I was getting diagnosed, I thought it was my sinuses. That’s what it felt like, and that’s what these feel like. Funnily enough, my allergies are wreaking havoc on my mucous membranes, so it’s likely just that.

    But these headaches make me scared, because of their familiarity. I know these headaches. The last time I had them, it turns out I had cancer. But my sinuses are also really bad right now, so it is probably just that. My tumor is unlikely to grow back.

    But maybe it did.

    I was going to leave it there, but that’s not fair. I am not scared that I might have cancer again, I don’t even know if I’m scared of dying from it, but I am reluctant to spend too much time on it in this space because it’s a bummer. It bums people out to think of me as a cancer patient. I don’t have cancer anymore. The neurosurgeon fixed me up, and the radiation oncologist finished the job. The overwhelming likelihood is that I just have allergic rhinitis and my yearly scan on June 30th will be as clear as all of my post-surgery scans have been.

    But, perhaps unfairly, I have relied on this outlet as a way to talk about things, to examine things, to clear out some of the cobwebs.

    I had cancer, I don’t anymore, and I’m highly unlikely to get it again. I’m unfathomably lucky.

    If reading a book about my experience appeals to you, or you could imagine it appealing to someone, please let me know. I value your opinions.

  • Boltcutters, Love, Relationships, Me

    Author’s note: what you are about to read is heavily redacted from the version originally written. Sober but drunk on the exposure to a creative genius, I unspooled like a ball of yarn and wrote everything down. I have those thoughts, still, and it accounts for at least double what follows, but removed and put into my journal, where it belongs. I don’t say that to taunt but to confess. I had more to say that was far more personal than I am willing to share, even with the people who read this newsletter, most of whom I know. It’s not embarrassing or confessional, but it was raw, and I prefer my ideas to be, at least, a bit seared.

    I just listened to Fiona Apple’s new album, Fetch the Boltcutters. Anyone who knows me or has read these newsletters is probably surprised that it took this long, because that album is extremely in my emotional wheelhouse, not just in general but for this particular moment. It is also an album that is of the moment, the quarantine, the COVID nightmare (and it it less about the other monumental moment occurring right now, though one could still probably draw some parallels — that is not for me to say).

    Sorry. Back to what I was talking about: being middle aged, being single, having no children, and feeling lots of big feelings. This is Fiona Apple’s burden as well as my own. I love pulling my feelings out of my body and holding them up and looking at them from every angle, and sometimes I do it in the presence of someone else and they’re not comfortable with it at all and they don’t want to be around me anymore. I’m like the kid who picked his nose on the playground. Everybody’s watching you, dude. Can you not?

    You’re making us all uncomfortable.

    I’m doing it right now. I’m examining myself in real time. There are no earth-shattering revelations to be had here, no moments of revelation.

    I’m going to throw a quote at you.

    My friend Andrea, who has examined some of my feelings with me, showed me this link, which is Fiona Apple explaining her songs. There’s no opaque “I prefer my audience to figure it out what it means for themselves” dissembling from Apple. These songs are about her life, about the women and the men who have joined her orbit, and even the dogs they bring along with them, and while she is kind enough to the subjects of those songs not to share with us, the motley public, who she’s singing about, she thinks the people she’s singing about sometimes don’t even know that they’re who she’s singing about.

    It’s refreshing to know that even somebody as rich, famous, and talented as Apple still has to contend with narcissists and petty men, and that even the great among us still have to suffer to be among us, and themselves, and each other.

    We’re all in this together and none of us is getting out alive.

    I know for a fact that I have made people uncomfortable by simply being me. I constantly walk on the knife’s edge of losing all of my friendships because I will do that one unconscionable thing that they cannot forgive, and I will have stumbled into it blindly and with good intentions, which only makes it worse because that means I won’t learn any lessons from it, and I will be back to being myself, except by myself this time. That’s the fear, anyway. Like most fears there’s a bit of truth to it, but hiding under that truth is a vast iceberg of doubt and self-recriminations.

    As we get older, we sift our friendships.

    The easy ones pass through the sieve like sand, while the harder ones, the big rocks or cigarette butts or chunks of concrete bounce around on the top until you get sick of trying to get them to fit into your life and it’s not worth the struggle anymore.

    Good luck finding someone who thinks you deserved a second chance. You got that chance. We’re on seventh and eighth chances now. If you’re not going to pass into our lives easily, then you’d better be worth it.

    Oh, right. The quote.

    “It’s almost a matter of luck, if your chemistry happens to bump into the chemistry of somebody else, then it might just work, because you react to each other in different ways. I did have hope when I was writing that song, and honestly, there’s absolutely hope that I could find a relationship. But I don’t really want to. I really just don’t want to. I like my life how it is, and I don’t feel very romantic these days.”

    She’s talking about her song Cosmonauts, which is one way to look at a relationship: two people trapped together, in space, getting sick of each other. Maybe the bitter aftertaste of a failed relationship is the wrong time to be thinking about these things but it’s at the top of mind because while everything else is happening in the world right now, we’re still in the middle of #MeToo. I don’t want to reduce someone else’s experiences into a hashtag, but it resonates with me because it is absolutely true. Just as white people are due to come to grips with the pain they’ve caused, even unknowingly, men have had to reevaluate themselves, also.

    Any man who says he has never made a woman uncomfortable is either lying, joking, or is hopelessly lacking in self awareness. I mean heterosexual men, those of us who have had the privilege of our patriarchy and the sexual proclivities to treat women differently from others. Again, to dismiss this as woke virtue signaling is to avoid the question, because the answers are uncomfortable.

    Yeah, you made that girl feel weird to be around you once.

    You did it. It happened. You probably realized it much too late, long after you did it, long after anybody remembers it, but she probably does remember it and now you suddenly do, and you want to reach out and apologize but you’re a better person now than you were then and you know that to readdress that awfulness is in service only of your agenda, not hers. You want her to tell you that it’s okay, you didn’t know any better, and she will say that because she has been forced to treat men like babies with soft feelings that are vulnerable and need to be protected. So you keep your mouth shut, because you did enough damage already. Leave it. Just try to be better next time.

    When I say you, I mean me. I mean I. I did those things. But so did you. Maybe the men who come after us will be better.

    “It was a challenge, because he wanted me to write a song about two people who were going to be together forever, and that’s not really a song I’m equipped to write because I don’t know if I want to be together with anybody forever.”

    That’s another quote about the same song. I’m feeling this album very hard. I have to set it aside and glance over at it and not listen to it for a few days, because the truths in it are too true. They’re like staring into the sun, or, worse, looking into yourself. Myself. This is about me.

    I, also, have made women feel weird, but not in a long time. I’m better at it. I’m better at knowing boundaries. It’s easy to be better and it doesn’t take much.

    How to be a better man, in three easy steps.

    1. Treat women like they don’t have gender. Don’t treat the women in your life differently. You probably don’t talk to your sister differently from how you talk to your brother — same idea. This approach will never steer you wrong, because you’re treating everyone the same. At work, on the bus, everybody is an independent human being with goals, desires, and opinions. Their bodies are none of your business. Their activities are none of your business. You are ships passing in the night. Smile at the men and smile at the women. You are a cloud moving through the sky, among other clouds.

    2. This doesn’t apply to some very small selection of specific circumstances when the gender difference is, intentionally, at play, when you and the object of your affection are alone or at least alone together. These times of closeness are sacred. A woman allowing you to join her in close proximity is a person who is trusting you to be safe, to not demand anything she is not offering, to respect the boundaries she creates. You have to assume those boundaries are there, and ask permission to cross them. You’re not ruining the mood. You’re being a better man.

    3. Don’t assume anything. If you’re not sure, ask. Take no for an answer. Dear lord, if you don’t take No for answer, delete yourself from my life.

    These are lessons I learned and lessons I figured out. There are general guides to life embedded in the above, and in my worldview, and they all kind of mesh together. All life deserves respect. All humans deserve perfect happiness. Trust first, and decide later.

    I don’t know if I want to be with anybody forever. I don’t know if I want to be with anyone, period. I don’t feel badly about it. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I feel like I’ve given chances, and chances have been given to me, and the dice of the universe have been cast, and I will continue being me. If my future is one of asceticism, it is willing.

    “I like my life how it is, and I don’t feel very romantic these days.”

    I’m in good company.

  • Facts

    What this newsletter will not include is a discussion of Black Lives Matter or the protests currently happening across the world. I spent the week shutting up and listening, and increasing my understanding. I absolutely believe that Black Lives Matter, and all that statement implies. It is not my place to talk about the Black experience in America, but I can talk about science.

    The Origin of Species

    When western science was just getting going, mankind, like Adam, started naming the animals. The person we credit with giving us a lexicon of what shape these names should take is Carl Linnaeus, who you probably remember reading about in biology class. He suggested the system we still use, taking a sloppy and disorganized field of biological classification and streamlining it into simple, easy “binomial” categorization (which is why species names are in Latin and Greek and italicized and the first word is capitalized and the second one isn’t — thank Linnaeus).

    The only way people had to define what was in what species was by observing and examining the characteristics of each plant or animal. Perhaps then it was easier to believe that humans with massive differences in appearance would be different from each other in other ways, too. There were entire continents of people with different colored skin! Surely, the differences between a white man and a black man had to be more than skin deep.

    The discovery of genetics, and the encoding of the human genome, blew that completely apart.

    Data has no bias. The purpose of science is partly to strip away bias from data, and to reveal the essential nature of the universe.

    Science does not tell us what we want to hear.

    Biological essentialism, the idea that there are significant genetic differences among the races, is an idea without merit.

    Let me be absolutely clear: human beings are one species, and the differences between humans are vanishingly small. The differences we define as race are, in fact, only skin deep.

    White supremacy is a deadly, stupid, senseless lie.

    This is not idle opinion or woke liberal thinking. This is fact, readily available to anyone curious enough to investigate it, which white supremacists tend not to be (or they wouldn’t be white supremacists).

    We uncovered some really cool things about ourselves when we started decoding our genes.

    Our DNA doesn’t just have instructions on how to make a creature (you, or me, or a slime mold, as it were). It carries the history of every species that survived long enough to pass its genes on to us, the animals who came before us, stretching all the way back to the very first life on earth. It is what Carl Sagan called an “unbroken thread” and it goes back billions of years, all the way to the very first cells.

    This gives us unprecedented insight into our own origins, and yet tells us absolutely nothing. There’s no instruction manual. It is data, that’s all. It is up to us to figure out the stories we tell. For many years, the story was that certain kinds of humans were lesser than others. They were less intelligent, or less athletic, or less capable. This is all demonstrably false, and each of us carries the evidence in every nucleus in our bodies.

    By looking at the genes of humans in different areas, and measuring the differences in those genes, we come up with a pretty good idea for how old our species is. The answer is: we’re really young. Like, stupidly young. We’ve only been around for about 200,000 years, which is barely a blink geologically, and hardly a sneeze biologically speaking.

    Here’s Where it Gets Really Crazy

    You thought the other stuff was wild, hang on to your hats because I’m going to tell you about genetic diversity between individuals. This is where the DNA rubber meets the racial essentialism road. This is what drives white supremacists crazy, and it’s 100% provable.

    Until very recently, humans had a tenuous grasp on survival. We suffered numerous bottlenecks, maybe as recently as a few thousand years ago. A bottleneck happens when the population is drastically reduced, by disease or climate change, or asteroid impact, or whatever. We went through a bunch of those. We kept almost dying and then breeding like crazy and then almost dying off again. Like bad pennies, humans keep coming back. How do we know that? It’s not like humans were reduced to a few thousand individuals and wrote books about it. No, the answer is in our genes, the unbroken thread.

    Humans have about .1% difference, between individuals, no matter how distant their populations are from each other. A human from America and a human from Asia have roughly the same differences between them that two humans from Asia have. The differences get really blurry, and almost inconsequential. Genetically speaking, we’re so young and so plucky and so inbred (ew) that we literally cannot be very different from each other. It would be impossible. It seems otherwise because the human lifespan is so short. We started out in Africa and spread out from there at a furiously fast clip. Biologically speaking, it was yesterday.

    Okay Jim, but how do we know that? Because we didn’t just decode our own genes, we decoded other species, too! We looked at chimpanzees, which share a lot of the same characteristics that we have. We’re not very different from chimps, but that difference accounts for a lot.

    The genetic differences between chimpanzees that live across a river from each other is something like 1% or so. That’s enormous! That’s humungous! Compared to us, that is.

    Not only does this realization contextualize the origins of chimps (big deal, who cares) but it shows us how closely related we really are, and it makes our recent history even more depressing and/or enraging.

    I won’t even reach too far back for this one: just until a few decades ago, white people were segregating entire populations of people whose only difference amounted to the genetic equivalent of a rounding error. We put our brothers in chains and told them they deserved it because they dared to have slightly (and it really is slight) more melanin in their skin.

    Racism is embarrassing and senseless and disgusting.

    You are more likely to have more in common with a Nigerian bus driver than you are with a President with the same color skin as you. You have more in common with people you’ve never met than you do with the other guys in your genealogy club. We celebrate what country our relatives came from a few hundred years ago, ignorant and dismissive of the vast similarities we share with our African and Asian brothers and sisters.

    While we can’t do anything about history, we do have control over our futures. We’ve accrued a lot of differences since that first migration out of the womb of Africa, but nearly all of them are in our minds, not in our genes. As my ancestors survived Ice Ages and settled into colder climates with less sunlight, our bodies changed a little. The change is so small and so recent that it takes very few generations to make everybody look alike again, and we won’t be any less diverse than we were when we started moving back together.

    It’s one of the greatest crimes ever committed, and repeated, as whites used their slight technological advantage and the blind destruction of disease to steal from their victims, and then continue victimizing them so thoroughly that their children, us, are almost entirely ignorant of the damage caused. I am keeping my promise of never getting political in this newsletter because it is not a matter of opinion or point of view, but a sequence of hard truths we are morally obligated to examine and, if we can, prevent from ever happening again. This is the minimum we can do, and I worry even that is too much. It’s hard to convince the powerful to give up their power, because they’re terrified that those they subjugated will treat them way they were treated.

    Let’s hope our family forgives us.

    SOME NOTES AT THE END

    • Some people think we still have a tenuous grasp on survival, and I’m inclined to agree. Until we’re sufficiently distributed around the solar system, all of our eggs are still in one fragile, blue basket, and we haven’t been very good about taking care of it.

    • There probably were other species of human beings, but they’re not around anymore. They didn’t make it. Did humans wipe them out? Possibly. I like to think that we just adopted them into our families and the species that emerged is us. Luckily for me, the data supports this bias, as we keep discovering the DNA of other hominid species hanging out in the corners of our own genes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans

  • The Loneliest Man in the World

    No, it’s not me! Don’t be so dramatic.

    Who is the loneliest person? I can identify two answers to this question. It’s been asked in songs and poems, and there is a lovely, whimsical kind of children’s book quality to the earnest hyperbole of the statement. Kids are never hungry, they’re starving. Their room at night isn’t just scary, it’s the scariest place in the world. A child’s universe is such a small place, but it extends out into their imaginations. As we get older, we tear down those imaginary places and replace them with their real world versions. We lose the whimsy we had. I think that’s why escapism is popular, and often derided, but I think we miss the simplicity of a smaller orbit, where things make sense, and evil stepmothers get what’s coming to them, and the bad guy loses.

    “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” — Neil Gaiman, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton

    Lest we get lost in a diversion, let’s go back to the thesis: who is the loneliest man in the world? Well, there’s a good candidate, but there’s nothing whimsical about his existence. He’s also called the Man of the Hole, named such for the dwellings he finds or creates for himself in the Brazilian rainforest. He was discovered in 1996, but also perhaps created then, as a member of one of Brazil’s dwindling indigenous tribes with no outside contact. He is the last remaining member of an extinct tribe, and leads a solitary existence in a 42 square mile section of protected land. The leading theory goes that the rest of his tribe was murdered by gunmen around the time of his discovery. He is not a whimsical last survivor, he is a victim of genocide, an echo of a people who were trampled by brutes. We don’t know what language he speaks, or what his name is. He shows no desire to end his solitude. Indeed, can he even conceive of ending it? I don’t think I could.

    We have an answer to the question of who is the loneliest human in history, and it’s much more fun to think about, because he wasn’t alone for very long and he got to go to space. Michael Collins was the man in the capsule orbiting the moon while Buzz and Neil tromped around the dusty surface. Not only did he spend all that time by himself, but for 45 minutes each orbit, he was out of communication with earth. Nobody has ever been more distant from contact with other humans than Michael Collins was in 1969.

    Well, not the way he tells it. With the plucky grit we associate with astronauts, he talks about feeling relief in not having mission control “yakking” at him for a while. Maybe it was the relative certainty that his isolation was temporary, and historic, and extremely prepared-for, but it didn’t have the same thundering tragedy that my whimsical imagination can create, and the image of a solitary man in a thin-walled metal box, gently tracing a slow curve around a distant moon.

    It’s a very of-the-moment feeling to be lonely in our isolation, so much so that I’m reluctant to write about it. I am lonely, and alone, despite the companionship of an affectionate cat and family and friends who are ever willing to entertain my texted non sequiturs and despairing moments. There’s a sense of camaraderie in this spate of loneliness, a universality. We’re all feeling alone. We’re all lonely. We’re all isolated. We’re doing that by choice, but also out of necessity. We’re not the Man of the Hole, moving from one 6 foot deep hole to the next, surviving and subsisting. Our families weren’t torn away from us for long. They’ll still be there when the orbit swings us back into our old lives, even if we’re wearing masks and staying six feet away. Unless they are among the 100,000, that is, a crushing number, a terrible burden, a tragedy we all saw coming and braced ourselves for. We knew we would lose people, but every loss still stings.

    Though it may be selfish, I will confess to feeling lonesome. I like that word the most to describe the feeling I feel, because it has a cowboy-on-the-range whimsy to it, a man on a slow horse, idly strumming a guitar, singing sad songs into empty canyons. In the past when I’ve felt this way, I can cure it rather easily, by going to a place crowded with people, and set up a little basecamp with my computer and a cup of coffee and write something like this. But those places are all closed.

    This is exacerbated by the normal, natural loneliness I feel after the end of a relationship. There was a person I saw every day who occupied a lot of my thoughts and feelings and suddenly they’re not there anymore. It’s not as cruel as death, but it has a similar shape. The feeling you get after the end of a relationship is mourning. Even the most toxic relationships offer a kind of reliability that, when it’s gone, makes us acutely aware of its absence. The space that a romantic partner leaves in your life is a massive cavern, and you miss the warmth of their presence. My relationship was far from toxic, and our separation was amicable, and I learned so much about myself and being a better communicator. I treasure the memories. But that’s what they are. They’re over. I’m just myself again.

    I know that my last relationship will not be my last relationship, despite the lies my insecurities like to tell me. These are difficult times to feel lonesome, and it doesn’t feel very whimsical at all.

    One way I like to deal with it is to really bury myself in the bad feelings for a while, just a little while, like taking a cold shower on purpose, or making a mistake you know will have repercussions but is too exciting to ignore. You have two choices when you feel lonely: make yourself feel better or just live in your loneliness for a while. I’m going to dwell here in my hole for a while longer, but I’ll be okay. Don’t worry. It’s part of my process.

    Here are my favorite songs to listen to while I’m lonely:

    The Raincoat Song by the Decemberists. I hate that I love this song, which is classic Decemberists, a guided missile directed straight at my whimsy. It’s a small song about how maybe wearing a raincoat makes it rain a little harder.

    In Ear Park by Department of Eagles. This song hits me right in the heart. It’s about mourning and loss and trying to move on when you’re surrounded by the absence of another. I’m also linking to this live version, because it’s great.

    Needing/Getting by Ok Go. This song is about somebody waiting for someone to come around but admitting the futility of it. The line “There ain’t much that’s dumber than pinning your hopes on a change in another” resonates so much with me that it hits like a hammer. It describes so much of my adolescent emotional landscape that the best rock and roll does. The video I linked to, above, is classic Ok Go, a stunt video that pleases the eye and the ear, but perhaps is a bit distracting from the message that it’s meant to invoke.

    Capsized by Andrew Bird. One of the great pleasures of following a musician like Bird is that he evolves his songs in stages. This song began as one of my favorite instrumentals, called You Woke Me Up, and was gradually hammered and shaped into a story about suddenly being alone. The image “spoon dirty laundry” is a powerful one, and delightfully specific.

    No Lie by Middle Class Fashion. It’s a song about breaking up, but also it’s about being alright, and that’s okay.

    I leave you now, a bit more lonesome than I was last week, a lonely cowboy on a slow horse, singing his sad songs into the canyons. It’s funny, to me, that my entreaties to you, my readers, to spread the good word of my good words were met with thundering silence. I gained zero new readers. This clearly does not make me any less likely to write these newsletters, or to write shorter ones, or to give up on this. In fact, it makes my little audience even more precious than it ever was. After all, nobody unsubscribed, either.

    Reach out, friends, I love hearing from each of you.

  • Don’t Trust Your Hunches: Three Ways to Succeed as a Writer

    The title is meant to make you want to read this, but I don’t get into the three ways to succeed as a writer until further down the page, so scroll away if you want to skip the other parts. I don’t blame you. Frankly, I’m just happy you’re here.

    If I told you how many newsletters have begun as conversations with my therapist, you might be surprised, but probably not. The topic of this week was hunches, and how we shouldn’t trust them. Well, that’s not the whole story.

    It’s more accurate to say: don’t JUST trust your hunches. It’s fine to have them. As conscious human beings, our minds are stratified in a way that favors survival, and one way to survive is to notice patterns. Your brain are constantly scanning its environment for patterns, and humans are extremely good at finding patterns. We’re so good that the instinct can overtake us and we get things like ghost sightings and obsessive compulsive disorder. I bet you didn’t expect that pivot! I broke my pattern. You probably thought I was going to write more about how ghosts aren’t real or how aliens aren’t visiting earth, but I didn’t! I pivoted to mental health, which is a different pattern for me altogether.

    Here he goes again, writing about mental illness. And human evolution. I’m hitting all the greatest hits.

    Constellations

    Our brains are so tuned to pattern-seeking that it will see them where there aren’t any. That’s where constellations came from. My favorite is Orion, which is a bit like saying your favorite Led Zeppelin song is Stairway to Heaven, but I don’t care. I embrace my basic-ness. Basicosity. Whatever. I’m very basic, and that’s okay, because the things we’re basic about free us to be not-basic (complex?) about other things.

    I love Orion because it comes out in autumn, my favorite season, it’s easy to find, and the best star name in the galaxy, Betelgeuse, is part of it. There was a whole movie about how to pronounce that word, but that’s also a movie about ghosts and haunting and features the best song ever recorded:

    The wikipedia entry for constellations is a good read, if you like such things, because you can see a pattern develop among human beings the world over. There’s something about our brains, that pattern-seeking tendency, that means the constellation I know as Orion is known by so many other names in different cultures. The Greeks saw a guy holding a club, but the nature of patterns is such that while two people might see the same pattern they can make different conclusions about what they mean.

    A different kind of pattern: there is a weird tendency for disparate cultures all over the world to associate Orion with hunting. It does look like a man holding a weapon, which would have been the traditional and baseline interpretation of a man holding a weapon. The Seri people of Mexico call the three stars Hapj, meaning hunter. In ancient India, those stars in Orion are known as the hunting dogs. Why is this?

    All of those are Northern Hemisphere cultures, which means they experience seasons the same. Orion appears in November, and continues to be visible until the end of winter, and autumn and winter are times of culling and using the stores we’ve accumulated in more fruitful months.

    Cause there’s nothin’ strange about an axe with bloodstains in the barn
    There’s always some killin’ you got to do around the farm — Tom Waits, Murder in the Red Barn


    I’m just speculating. It might just be the fact that Orion kind of looks like a guy holding a weapon, like I said before.

    Trust But Confirm

    If the golden rule had a corollary, it would be the above. I believe that we should trust first, and then revise that trust as a person moves in and out of our lives. Every relationship comes with these wobbly orbits — a person can be your best friend for years and then move to a different neighborhood and you don’t hear from them for another few years, and then you move closer to them and suddenly they’re back in your life again, like nothing happened. They bring up something that happened during their time in the wilderness, when they weren’t thinking about you much (nor you them), and you question your own memory. Then you remember, oh, that’s when we weren’t really talking much, and then it becomes part of the sheaf of background info we carry in our mind for that person.

    Hunches are good, and we should always heed them. When someone comes running up to us and says “run!” it’s probably a good idea to run, but look over your shoulder once in a while to make sure there’s something worth running from. Trust but confirm.

    I can innumerate specific moments in my life when I made a hunch, didn’t question it, and made a mistake. Sometimes that hunch can be tiny, a trusted macro of mini-behaviors that I often link together that has one misstep and the wrong text goes to the wrong person, the absolutely wrong person, and I have to re-learn two more lessons: don’t trust your hunches and don’t talk about other people behind their backs. Neither one is productive, and you might screw up and send that bitchy text to the very person you were bitching about and suddenly one moment of weakness that likely had nothing whatsoever to do with the object of your brief scorn ends a relationship.

    This specific scenario has not happened to me, despite my clear familiarity with its bits and bites, but I have done enough similar things that I can define the shape if it to illustrate my point: don’t talk about people behind their backs. If you really don’t like someone, just avoid them, and stop the obsessive thoughts about how much you don’t like them. You know which person I mean. Everybody has one. Other people might agree with you about that person, but there’s enough negativity in the air these days, and you gain nothing by tearing someone down. Besides, the person you don’t like might compliment you out of the blue tomorrow and you might say “oh well they’re not all bad” and their ledger in your brain is revised again.

    I’m Going to Write About Writing Again

    I spend all day writing, for money. They aren’t always subjects I would choose to write about, but that’s what a job is, and I’m happy to do my very best to write the very best words I can about whatever subject I’m being paid to write about. I don’t just do this to maintain my employment, I do it because I take pride in my work, and the people who pay me to write do so because they expect that what I’m going to write is going to be good. It is not enough to simply be good, I have to be exceptional. I also do better than my best work because I care about the people who pay me, and I want their overall business to be successful.

    One of the things that people like me worry about is whether or not writing so much during the week will make me want to write less when it comes to the things I enjoy writing, like this newsletter. As I creep up in word count, the answer is self-evident, but I like stating self-evident things with plain language: I still love writing! I love putting words after another in new, pleasing ways. I mentioned this in the previous newsletter, but it’s something that occupies my mind continuously.

    Creativity is not a battery

    Our modern age makes us examine ourselves in context that are familiar in other areas of our lives, and there is a tendency toward metaphors when we try to understand the more obfuscated portions. This is especially true in the motions of our minds — the microscope cannot examine itself, only other things.

    We don’t know exactly how many of our brain’s functions work, but we can look at our behaviors and make some conclusions. How closely linked are thoughts and behaviors? The debate continues and I won’t try to enter it here, because my sister is a behaviorist and I don’t want her to read this and feel embarrassment that one of her siblings so fundamentally misunderstands the very subject she’s spent her adult life studying.

    Anyway, my point: the metaphor for creativity is not the gas tank, battery, or other source of a finite resource. Creativity is not a cistern, it is a river.

    We might get tired of creating, and our overall energy level might decrease, and after a long day of bending your mind into pretzel shapes, you would rather absorb a tv show than try to bend it even more for the novel you’re working on, but you have to do it anyway. I broke another pattern: I bet you thought I was going to say it’s okay to not do what you love, but it’s not. You gotta do the work. I don’t always do it, and I won’t beat myself up over it, but I will use it to shape the next day, after work, when I don’t want to write. Okay, today, I didn’t work on my novel, but tomorrow I need to.

    There are three vital behaviors, and accompanying thoughts, to my philosophy. I am 43 years old, and I have been doing this long enough to know what works for me, and I suspect that it will work for others. I didn’t invent a lot of this, but gathered it from the advice of other creative people, and added my own twists.

    How to write a novel

    The glib version is this: write it. You have to write. If you aren’t writing, you’re not writing. It’s that simple. Everybody has a billion ideas, but the difference between telling a story and thinking of a story is, well, telling it.

    Here are those three steps to being a successful novel writer that I promised, above. Note that I don’t define success as anything but having written a novel, which is a laudable goal.

    1. Write every day, even if it’s just a little

    2. Write at the same time every day, even if it’s just a little

    3. Leave off in the middle of a sentence, so you don’t struggle for where to start the next time

    I have written a novel to completion, and I have chosen writing novels as my primary method of expressing my creativity, but I have published zero novels and the number of people who have read it is very small. I have tried to get it published, but querying a novel (the verb, if unfamiliar to you, is “to query,” which means “to bleed into an email that will be scanned, not read, by somebody who sees a thousand bloody emails a day and is not impressed by how much you bled into yours”), is a daunting experience that is not nearly as fun as writing. I confess to spending more time doing the fun bits, and writing instead of querying, but it’s not a race, and I’m not chasing a dream of being rich from my writing. My dream is only to write, and that dream comes true every day. If my novels are mandalas made of sand that are swept away the moment I finish them, never to be seen again, then it doesn’t really matter. My writing is about me, and for me, and I want you to read it. But I won’t consider myself a failure for not being J.K. Rowling, or Nicholson Baker. If writing a novel weren’t fun, nobody would do it.

    It’s a cracking good time to write a novel. I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s very difficult, too, but rewarding. And when you’re done you have a novel, and you can say you wrote a novel. There’s nothing to stop you from saying you wrote a novel when you haven’t written a novel, but at least if you have written the novel, when someone says “prove it” you don’t have to make excuses for not having a finished novel to show them.

    That’s the tricky bit, the last thing I mentioned. Also, you might have noticed I snuck it into the paragraph above: “I want you to read it.” Aye, there’s the rub.

    I daydream and come up with plots and ideas all the time, and sometimes I write them down and they become something more, as I build on it by writing more words. I write a lot that nobody will ever read, by design, because writing something down has value in itself, but the choice to write my ideas and form them into coherent stories is brimming with the hope that somebody might want to read it. They don’t even have to read it, but I want them to want to read it. After all, how many brilliant novels sit on shelves and gather dust because the owner “will get to it eventually?” You don’t have to read my novel, but saying you want to read it is part of the deal I’ve made with myself in writing it.

    And it’s also the hardest part. And the part I don’t want to think about. And the part that, when my confidence flags, I question the most. Nobody reads this, so what’s the point?

    Thousands of people have likely read my work, though I don’t know for sure. I’ve never seen the numbers on the things I’ve published online and in print that have found purchase in the zeitgeist or however I choose to frame it, but it’s not small. Through McSweeney’s and Machine of Death, I have succeeded. My writing has been read, and continues to be read, by many people. They don’t necessarily remember my name, but they probably remember the ideas I tried to communicate. Maybe they resonate with them and bounce around in their heads, just like they bounced around in mine. A good story is like herpes. I’m sure there are other metaphors but that’s the gross one I choose.

    I used to say “nobody’s reading this, so what’s the point?” You can find me saying it in previous newsletters. I will likely have the same struggle again, many times. It is easy to see someone’s creative endeavors that nobody ever reads and say “why bother?” There are millions of unread words, millions of unseen photos, unheard songs. All artists are burdened by the weight of obscurity. That is, until they’re burdened by the weight of notoriety, which brings its own problems. There is a nice middle ground, one that I aspire to, which feels attainable: I want a small but loyal group of people who enjoy my work and want to see more of it. Again, this is something I’ve earned, and already have, to a point. There are a few dozen people who seem invested in what I create, and I think of them when I write. I am doing this for me, but I’m also doing it for them.

    I’m doing this for you.

    But I’m mostly doing it for me.

    Having said that, I would love it if you told people how much you like what I have to say, because that is all I can do to make my work more known: encourage people who enjoy it to spread that enjoyment to others. It’s a cruel fact for someone like me that no amount of hard work can make you more widely-read. In my example, above, I said I didn’t expect to be J.K. Rowling or Nicholson Baker.

    I didn’t choose those two names at random. J.K. Rowling is an outlier. She is so popular and well known for writing something popular that when she tried to write something that was not in the same genre, she did so under a different name. Everybody found out it was her, anyway, and it is an open question whether or not it would have been published if she weren’t the author of Harry Potter.

    But if good writing was rewarded with money and fame, you would know who Nicholson Baker is. He wrote one of my favorite novels, the second of my recommendations, below. He is known well enough to have feuded with Stephen King (King derisively called one of Baker’s books a nail clipping, and Baker’s response was an essay about nail clippers in The New Yorker) , and have books written about understanding his work, but he is not nearly at the level of Rowling. There are thousands of writers who are in this category.

    I don’t need everyone to read what I write, I just want somebody to, maybe a few somebodies.

    But it doesn’t matter if my circle of loyal readers never expands. I don’t write for them. I write for me. Creation is its own end. The act of having made something is vital to my survival. I can’t not do it.

    Recommendations

    1. Other newsletters I read end with recommendations, and occasionally mine does, too. This recommendation is for four newsletters I enjoy reading.

      1. I will cite my pal Dane’s newsletter not only for its content but for her recommendations — she mentioned something in her recommendations and I clicked the link and bought one. Her newsletter is called My City Anthem, and you can read it at this link: https://mailchi.mp/92203ad024a6/my-city-anthem-issue-5910136. Her point of view is interesting, and the things she chooses to write about are not things I would ever think about, which is an endorsement.

      2. Another newsletter is one I’ve mentioned before, my friend Andrea’s, who writes You Know What I Mean https://andrealaurion.com/newsletter1, and whose work consistently delights me.

      3. Speaking of being delighted, Ginny has been delighting the entire city of Pittsburgh with her words and hardly needs the bump from me, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her newsletter, Breathing Space https://breathingspace.substack.com

      4. My brother Rob demolished my preconceptions about newsletters with his, called The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown, at http://tinyletter.com/RobertLong4man — Rob is my favorite writer, not just because our work probably contains some similar DNA, but because his work is constantly refreshing, and surprising, and the way he uses language is enviable (I envy it!). You can also buy his book, which you should do to a) support small press b) support my brother and c) read something you will definitely enjoy: https://squareup.com/store/sundress-publications/item/i-am-here-to-make-friends-by-robert-long-foreman?square_lead=item_embed

    2. My brother Rob once compared my writing to Nicholson Baker’s while simultaneously gifting me a book he wrote, and I have never been more honored by any other comparison. The book is The Fermata, which I won’t try to describe to you except to say that it’s highly sexual and the protagonist stretches the bounds of likability, but now that I’m writing this I think I’ve recommended it before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fermata

    3. My pal Matt and I vibrate on the same creative wavelength and while we rarely agree about movies, his kickstarter is for a book and I would very much like to read it, and if you like my work you’ll probably like his: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matthewbuchholz/flee-america-fifty-states-of-alternate-histories?ref=discovery&term=alternate%20histories

    4. My own newsletter, this one you’re reading! Yes! I’m recommending something you’re already reading! That’s marketing, baby. You can share it with other people by sending them this link: https://www.tinyletter.com/jamesforeman

    Good evening, my lovelies.

    <3

  • "To Write" is a transitive verb

    Almost exactly a year ago, my job ended. It was a good job. I discovered a great deal about myself during my years there. I learned about my field and how to be a good contributor to a team that does what I do.

    I just finished my first week in a new job. The work is similar to the old job, but new in interesting and exciting ways, which I think is exactly what one wants when one moves from one employment to the next. I find all of my new coworkers capable and supportive, a testament to the people who hired me. That is a vote of confidence for me. If I am surrounded by people who are good at their jobs and are also kind and helpful on top of that, then the people who hired me obviously saw those traits in me. This is a delightful revelation. It makes me want to live up to the high expectations, and also gives me the confidence in my own abilities that I can meet, or even exceed, those expectations. I am experiencing good leadership.

    I lamented often during the last year that I was due a good turn, and it has happened. I was hired by good people at a good place to do good work. All this, I admit, is wildly fortunate. While I like to think I earned some measure of credit for what I accomplished, I accept that this good turn was helped along by what I am rather than what I did. I won’t enumerate every single point of privilege. They are obvious and I am deeply thankful for them. I know how lucky I am.

    Because being happy about something good is a new experience for me, I approach it as a primitive man would approach a television set. I’m waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop, even though there is no evidence that there are any shoes up there at all. Writing this has been difficult for me. I started it twice and put it away both times. Why?

    Partly, I am reluctant to talk too much about work online. This is a habit I adopted early in my life, and I think it’s generally a good idea to keep parts of your life siloed off from each other. This makes me better at everything I do, because I respond well to processes.

    I am also reluctant to write about writing, because I have always thought that if one has time to write about writing, then one should be writing something. It’s a bit like buying eggs when you have a chicken at home. It’s my own little version of “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean,” a refrain heard in fast food restaurants.

    I have finally accomplished my goal of writing this post, which is not important. The audience of my newsletter is small. This isn’t about you, it’s about me.

    After a week of time at a job spent writing a lot, I find that my desire to write is not lessened at all. Without exception, the times I wrote the least are the times in which I have been unemployed. It was observed to me that I simply do better, overall, when I have a job. I think this is true. I have the window open to write this newsletter update and another window open to my second novel, which is tantalizingly close to a first draft.

    These days are awful, but there are good things among the bad. I hope this is as true for you as it has been for me.

  • Introvert Olympics

    I have more to say about introverts and extroverts, below, but I wanted to start this newsletter on a high note rather than a skeptical one. Here’s the high note: I’m still here! Here’s an actual image of me trying to write this. My new apartment is a basement and it’s always chilly, even when it’s 70 degrees outside, and Emmitt is a cat. You can do the math.

    There are a bunch of new terms that we use now that weren’t lexiconically noteworthy until this year: social distancing, abundance of caution, COVID-19, novel virus. I am doing my part by staying inside, which is easy for me because I like being indoors and I like solitude. I also have an unfortunate tendency to masticate, and this indoor solitude makes it much easier.

    Masticate is verb that means “to chew” and I prefer it to the other metaphor for the activity, woolgathering, which sounds whimsical and harmless. Mastication is neither of those things. The activity is also more commonly known as “worrying” which is a word that also means “to chew.” It has teeth. When you do it right, it feels like gnawing on gristle, and it has about the same utility, which is to say, it’s pointless.

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

    After years of practice, I’ve gotten very good at it. For instance, I can focus my worries, laser-like, on an extremely specific subject that actually has some small chance of coming true. I tend to materialism (as in the philosophy), and I only worry about things have some possibility to occur. My worries are based on facts.

    One great aspect of fact-based worrying is that it is also vulnerable to the application of data. If worry is a balloon blown up by thoughts of what might happen, facts are the needle that pops it. Facts don’t supply the air, they simply get the process started. A pile of worrisome facts is a crisis, and worries are often based on the fear of a crisis. The difference between a worry and a crisis is that a crisis can be managed. A crisis can be overcome, dealt with, surpassed. If I scatter a deck of cards all over the floor, I’ve created a crisis. All I have to do is pick them up, and I’ve solved that crisis. A worry can’t be managed. It slips between your fingers when you think you’ve got a handle on it. A worry is what happens when you think about how terrible it would be if someone threw a deck of cards on the floor, and somebody slipped on it and hurt themselves. That would be terrible! But it’s not real. It didn’t happen. The cards are fine. If they scatter all over the place, I can just pick them up before anybody slips on them. Even better, I can put the cards away in a drawer, which makes it even more unlikely to happen. Even if someone else comes along, opens the drawer, and throws the cards on the ground, and somebody slips on it and hurts themselves before I can get around to picking them up, that is a crisis we can deal with. But none of that happened! It’s a worry. It’s something to chew on, pointlessly.

    The universe has been kind enough to offer me plenty to worry about, little facts that get the balloon inflating. You know the one I mean. It’s very easy to worry about a virus, because it’s invisible and deadly and lurking around everywhere. Anybody could have it! It might even be living on things that I touch. I can take precautions and mitigate my risk, putting the cards away in a drawer, and that will probably be enough. I have slightly high blood pressure (it’s high normal, but I take medicine for it because I’d prefer it to be normal normal, which is another way for me to put the cards away), but I’m not statistically more likely to die from it if I get it.

    No, I have something even better to worry about, and I’m writing about it because I’ve learned that writing about my worries crystalizes them and gives them form, and once formed can be examined. I usually do this privately, in a notebook that nobody sees, because I don’t think anybody would care, and it can sometimes be embarrassing. Yes, believe it or not, I have worried about some things that, when analyzed, shows itself to be as ridiculous as a spider with roller skates on.

    I’m writing this and sharing it with you, my readers, because it’s What I’m Going Through at the moment, and you might find solace in watching someone crystallize a worry and then smash it. Anyway, here goes:

    A lot of bad things have happened to me this year, and while I still have the things that matter most, and my blessings are many, there was a lot of bad stuff! I won’t make a list for you, but I’m single and living alone during a pandemic now. That sucked! So what would be an additional thing that could suck really bad? I could get COVID! Yes, I could. But I put those cards away, so it’s not likely. But, and here’s the worry, what if my tumor grew back.

    I have an MRI every year, in June, to make sure that hasn’t happened. The internet says that tumors like mine grow back, but experts I’ve talked to say it’s actually unlikely. Me getting the kind of tumor I had was incredibly unlikely, and they did a great job getting rid of it, so it’s highly unlikely for it to grow back. Those cards have been put away. When oncologists are really worried about tumors growing back, they do scans more often than yearly, so that should be a pretty good indication of what my medical team is worried about.

    But even if it has grown back, that becomes a crisis, and a crisis can be managed. It’s already happened once, and it was an awful experience, but I’ve done it before. Brain surgery sucks, but I already did it twice. What’s once more?

    I always start to spin up my cancer worries around now, because the day of my yearly MRI approaches, but my run of bad luck lately has me worried about this MRI, as if it will be different from the last two. But this is something I don’t remind myself of often enough: the tumor crisis happened in the middle of a great run of luck — I was in a relationship I liked, I had a job I loved, and everything was going great. Therefore, how lucky I currently feel I am has nothing to do with whether I will get a brain tumor.

    There is data on both sides of a worry. As I said before, the worry wouldn’t exist without some facts to get it started, but the two items on the Pro side are thus: I had a tumor once and it sometimes grows back, and I’ve had a run of bad luck lately.

    The evidence on the other side is piled so high that it casts a shadow on the two points of data on the Pro side. One of them is a neurologist saying “your tumor won’t grow back.” Another one is a total lack of any symptoms. It reminds me of when I was afraid I had diabetes and a friend of mine who has diabetes said “what are your symptoms” and I said “I don’t have any” and that was the end of that. Also, luck isn’t a thing. Luck is a series of patterns taken personally, and it’s never a good idea to take things personally.

    And with that, my worries are allayed. In fact, I’m so embarrassed by my worrying that I am rethinking sending this newsletter out! Here goes Jim again, talking about his brain tumor. “We get it, you had a tumor.” Yeah, well that one thing you do that’s annoying is annoying, too, so stop doing it!

    I promised some words about introverts and extroverts so I’ll finish this up with that. I don’t believe that people are only one or the other. I know people who read a lot and don’t go out very often that turn into social butterflies in specific circumstances (like when they’re talking about something that interests them). I know self-described extroverts who read and write a lot and spend a lot of time alone! As with most things in the human experience, I think it’s more of a spectrum. Some people are very solidly on one side of the spectrum than the other, but it’s reductive and unrealistic to limit oneself to just one side.

    The debate is particularly active currently, as the title of this newsletter alludes to — many people are talking about how great this pandemic is for introverts. I, myself, said that I probably wouldn’t mind being quarantined. I was right, I didn’t mind it, for about a day. Now, more than a few days into the lockdown, I am ready for it to be over. I miss drinking a beer at a bar with my favorite DJ. I miss going to movies. I’d love to go to NYC and see David Byrne’s show. I miss people watching and buying furniture at IKEA, especially now that I have some space to fill up. I’m glad that fewer people are dying than we anticipated, and I’m happy that my putting the cards away has probably kept a few people safe. That’s good. But I’ll be happy when we can hug our friends again.

    Now I’m going to recommend some things!

    I mentioned Simon Stålenhag in the last newsletter, and I had no idea that a tv show based on his paintings was imminent! It was and now it’s out and I love it. I’m biased toward liking it, of course, but I can also justify my liking it.

    Every episode was written by the artist, and there is a definite choice to make the show resemble the emotional space of the paintings. There are long stretches of quiet contemplation. Every episode is about an hour long, but there’s a lot of empty space in them — lingering shots of landscapes, diversions that don’t really need to be explored. It takes a while for things to happen in each episode. The show is more interested in creating a mood than it is in telling a story, but I never found the stories lacking. Things happen and are never explained, but that appears to be the thesis of the show: life is defined by the choices we make in a random universe, but human beings, and our relationships, are what keep us moving forward. The show isn’t as interested in solving riddles as it is in watching people try to deal with them. That’s life! I can see that frustrating somebody who wants more plot than atmosphere, and usually that person is me! At one point, the last character you expect to cry goes on for a jag of weeping for an uncomfortable amount of time, and we have to watch him do so, and then collect himself and go inside the house. It’s powerful and hard to imagine in a different show.

    Also, the visual choices of the show are very reminiscent of the illustrations, which are based on a premise of a more technologically advanced 1980s but without the strangling weight of nostalgia that chokes shows like Stranger Things. The show does not take place in Sweden but in Ohio, which is perfect — it looks exactly like the suburbs I grew up in, and the small town I pedaled my bike through. This is probably another reason why I like it. I’ve only watched half of the episodes, so maybe it takes a turn for the worse! I like to space these things out, because I also enjoy delayed gratification. That’s a matter for a different newsletter.

    Anyway, the show is called Tales from the Loop and it’s on Amazon Prime.

    My other recommendation is a podcast! I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, but I used to. If I ever have a commute again, I expect I’ll listen to more. But one podcast that is particularly Of the Moment is called Stay F. Homekins, and it’s just Paul F. Tompkins and his wife, Janie Haddad Tompkins, talking to each other for 45 minutes. They’re both hilarious, and they make each other laugh a lot, and their conversations are fun. It’s low-stakes and low impact, just two people stuck in the house together, like the rest of us. Janie also happens to be from West Virginia, and I automatically like anything involving someone from West Virginia.

    Stay distant, friends, and I’ll see you soon!

  • An Open Letter to the Guy Who Broke Into My House During a Pandemic

    So, that was awkward!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So, thanks for that.