James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Memoir

  • My Body, My Burden

    Finding All New Bottoms

    My original title for this was My Fraught Relationship With Pain, because I had a couple of jaunts to the emergency room and they were both pain-related. I’ll elaborate in a minute, but I ditched that title because I realized that nobody has a good relationship with pain. The title I settled on is high-school-writing-class-awful, and I know that. I’m sorry. It fits my mood too well to change it now.

    I Have a Blog Now, Again

    I used to blog. I had that blog for years. Before other internet-based methods of communicating like Twitter, I blogged a lot. It’s gone, now. I have no idea where I put it.

    I shuffled it around from domain to domain, a big shambling mess of personal anecdotes, song lyrics and Star Wars memories. The last place I remember putting it is empty. The Tumblr blog I had for almost as long is still there, for as long as Tumblr is still around. I’m annoyed at myself for not saving it but I’m also arsed if I can figure out what I was ever going to do with it.

    I’ve lost all of my writing before. Before cloud storage put everything that matters in redundant server racks accessible on a dozen devices I don’t even use anymore, we had hard drive crashes, clicks of death, power surges, and botched back-ups. I’ve lost more writing than I’ll ever publish.

    I go back and look at my Tumblr and I don’t remember writing most of those things. Part of me thinks it would be nice to have all that writing, but the larger part of me asks “why?” I don’t have an answer.

    Here’s the Blog

    My blog is at jameshazlettforeman.com which I have finally settled on as my writer name. Yes, I was influenced by my brother Robert Long Foreman, because he had the right idea from an early period in his writing career, which was to use all three of his names. I am only now realizing that this was the correct move, and you can add it to the list (ever growing) of things I have learned from my siblings in general and Rob in specific.

    When I feel more like writing it, I’ll be adding shorter form items to it. This newsletter is the delivery mechanism for longer content that tends to be more personal. The blog will have other content more focused on science fiction and fantasy and writing and things like that, but for now you can read this post about my name.

    I said I would get personal, and I will not let you down.

    There are three body-related things happening to me, or have happened recently. If you have been following my writing, you know why I might be particularly attuned to what my body does.

    This is My First Body Crisis

    Anyway, we were visited recently by the neighborhood outdoor cat, whose name I mention in this video, and whose attention Emmitt is absolutely deranged by. I did not expect Emmitt to do what he did in this video, because he has never so much as scratched me, and only hissed at me a couple of times when I cornered him in order to put him in his cat transporter.

     

    He bit me, I did not take it very seriously, and I was rewarded for this with a trip to the urgent care, where I was given a powerful antibiotic that handily eradicated the infection.

    This is my Second Body Crisis

    Shortly after this event, my shoulder started hurting a lot. Here’s a photo of me showing my brother in law and extremely capable physical therapist where, exactly, it was hurting. He did his best, but when I have a lot of inexplicable pain, I take myself to an emergency room.

    I went to the emergency room despite being pretty sure that the pain was from my very bad posture. I stopped sitting in the chair that was causing my pain and it stopped, which was enough to convince me that Derek was right, that it was, actually, not something to be worried about. A simple change in lifestyle was enough to eliminate the pain entirely. Mischief managed.

    This is my Third Body Crisis

    I used to think my memory problems were because of my brain surgeries, but I’m no longer so certain. I stopped drinking recreationally because I realized I was doing it as a way of marking time, which is one of the many reasons not to drink.

    I occasionally will have a drink or two after work, and I am angry at myself the next day every time, because it interrupts my sleep, which is the number one contributor to me having a more difficult day than I would have had before. Alcohol also contributes to my memory erasure. It can make things fuzzy that weren’t fuzzy before, and I don’t remember having those issues before the pandemic.

    I don’t know what causes it, but I do know that imbibing certain substances, including some of the drugs I’ve been prescribed to help mitigate my anxiety, may have been blurring my memory. When you watch a loved one go through the rigors of dementia (more than once, though they were different people), you develop a different relationship with your memory.

    Of all the unpleasant things to experience during the treatment of brain cancer, an overzealous application of general anesthesia is one of the worst. I don’t remember any of the day preceding the first surgery. My only memory is waking up after it.

    Did that first experience with general anesthesia have a permanent effect on my memory? It’s not unheard of. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that certain chemicals can make my memory worse, and it’s best to avoid those. Also, I am less prone to bouts of Goose-ish behavior:

    I will be blogging more, but I will also be using this newsletter to talk to you, dear reader. Please read both, if that would delight you. If you derive no delight from either this newsletter or my blog, do not read them. I won’t be offended.

    Please be kind, and forgive yourself. Please give yourself permission to be flawed and human and imperfect. You’re a thermodynamic miracle. Treat yourself like one.

    But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come…dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.

  • A Note About Names

    My name is James Hazlett Foreman. That’s the name I was given by my parents, though I suspect my mother had more to do with it than my father. I say this not because of a lack of fatherly interest in child-rearing but because of a great deal of interest in names on the part of my mother. She cares a lot about names, something I inherited.

    I resemble the man I’m named for. I will share with you a photo of him, my grandfather James, though you might not see much of a resemblance:

    my grandfather

    I don’t think I look very much like him, though people who knew him say I do. I think if I do resemble him, it’s deeper than simple physical appearance. We have similar mannerisms, interests, ways of speaking. It’s funny that of all my siblings (and I have a few), I most closely resemble the very man I’m named after. Why is that? How did that happen? Pure, random chance. There can be no other explanation, unless you want to get spooky. I rarely want to get spooky, so I stick to the material realities. He was like that, too.

    It’s All About SEO

    Why I chose to blog under this name, James Hazlett Foreman, is because I finally settled that, at the age of 43, on a name to put my creative writing under. I was content to be James Foreman, but Google has made it very difficult. My profession is in SEO, or the business of ranking pages higher on Google search results.

    The name I was happily using, James Foreman, was terrible for my personal brand.

    When you search for James Foreman, Google doesn’t think you’re looking for me. It thinks you’re looking for James Forman, a famous civil rights leader. If not him, then you’re probably looking for his son, James Forman Jr., a famous lawyer. Even if you put my name in quotation marks, Google doesn’t think you’re really looking for me, and gives you the results for the James Formans anyway.

    There’s Only One Me

    I am the only James Hazlett Foreman, and I am using this website as a way of firmly establishing my own brand of me-ness. It will grow as I continue to blog, using this as another distraction from the business of writing, which is what I should be doing.

    Note: I had a feeling I had written about my choice of names before, and I was right. I have an unreliable memory, but sometimes it works and coughs up something true.

  • The Joy of Being Unmoored

    I don’t know how else to describe how I feel, so I went with something nautical.

    The nautical thing is an affectation, not an endorsement. I like nautical things in the same way I like wars that never happened—nobody was actually hurt, and it’s all just imagination (the star wars, for example). I like the culture of sailors from the 19th century, when ships were wooden. I enjoy the romance of those ships, despite knowing next to nothing about them and, not likely to enjoy the water. My relationship with bodies of water is entirely one-sided. I have no interest in them, and they leave me alone. 

     

    It took me days to write those first few sentences (not the tweet, the sentences before it). I spend all day writing and yet, when it comes time to write for fun, which I used to do with some regularity, I am all stopped up. I wish I could yank out the cork and chug the champagne of creativity, or whatever, but the cork never pops. I have taken some steps to shake the bottle, which I will further relate to you below. 

    Ugh, extracting every word of this is like pulling my own teeth. You hear that phrase a lot, and I’m certain that it was first written by a person describing the act of creation when every part of you is reluctant. I resist every tap on the keyboard. I don’t want to do this.

    It’s so much easier to give in. The easy path begs for my footsteps. 

    This Is Not New

    I have never been able to simply sit down and write. This has not been true for writing assignments, like homework and actual work—though some days it’s harder than others to write about subjects I don’t personally care about, I’m never so stumped that I simply give up.

    For the fun stuff (which I define as anything that I’m not being paid for), writing itself is an insufficient reward. Some people say they enjoy writing, but I don’t think I do. It is hard, and it is taxing, and I am prone to avoiding things that I know are going to be hard that offer no reward. All humans are. If we ran into every hard thing, just because it was hard, we would constantly break our noses.

    Everybody who does something hard does it because there is some reward for doing it. The satisfaction of a job done well is not enough, or I would throw a deck of cards into the air and put them back in the deck in order, over and over again, each time satisfied by the excellence with which I had accomplished the task. 

    I suspect that anybody who claims that they do something unpleasant simply for the satisfaction of having done the task is surely being disingenuous. I don’t need to get money for my work, but I do need something. I would love it if that “something” were money, but I would gladly trade it for attention. 

    This is true about painting a room, organizing a sock drawer, or making a sculpture. Nobody does those things just to do them. If they didn’t get a painted room, an organized drawer, or a sculpture after the work was done, they wouldn’t do it.

    Specifically to my writing, I want people to read what I write because they enjoy reading what I write. I want to write things that people want to read. I am repeating myself. 

    I am in a constant state of repeating myself, into infinity. 

    I am not alone in this. Many people would gladly trade money for attention. The evidence is all around us, but definitely on the internet. Have you seen Instagram? It’s an endless scroll of attention-seeking behavior. The more strenuously they deny it, the guiltier of it they are.

    The words you just read are a deck of cards I threw into the air. Now I’m going to put them back in order. 

    Reward for Writing: Early Childhood -> College

    Casting back my memory like a fishing lure, specifically for the reward I received for writing I did when I first started writing, it was attention, and good grades, not dissimilar to what I receive for my writing today (a paycheck and thankful recipients). A teacher is a captive audience. They have to at least pretend to read what I’ve written because that’s what they’re getting paid to do, by somebody, if not me. I got good grades in writing classes, but more importantly, I got a pat on the head and told that I was good at it and that I should continue to do it. Eventually the praise piled up and I could no longer dismiss it. My low self esteem causes me to ignore praise far more often than I accept it.

    Reward for Writing: After College

    I used to say that I did not smoke cigarettes while writing but that I wrote while smoking cigarettes. This was a glib way of avoiding the question of why I didn’t want to quit smoking when, in fact, it was because it was too hard and the reward not as immediately apparent. When I entered the dating pool in my early 30s, I cut my hair and quit smoking, and I was afraid that at least one of those things would impede my creativity. I didn’t smoke while I wrote, I wrote while I smoked.

    Reward for Writing: After Quitting Smoking

    I was successful in quitting smoking. I have not slipped in 14 years, and I rarely want to. I find that if I do feel a craving, it is because I feel like I’m not in control in other areas of my life. Habits like smoking are compulsive gestures toward control. They make us feel like we have control over our lives. This part of my newsletter isn’t about smoking, it’s about what I do to reward myself for writing after I took cigarettes away. 

    Reward for Writing: Booze

    At the beginning of the pandemic, when my beloved coffee shops and libraries had been cruelly ripped away from me, I would pour a rusty nail every Friday and write something that always, eventually, passed through the foggy banks of incomprehensibility. I would write, but it wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t rewarding. I was writing while I drank, not drinking while I wrote. 

    This, thankfully, only lasted a short time. After a series of poor decisions marked by texting people who didn’t particularly want to hear from me, I revised my lifestyle and went back to my much happier relationship with alcohol: passing, and only in social occasions. In our current climate, this means I very rarely drink. That’s okay by me.

    But without the reward of a buzz, I was back to where I started.

    The Third Place and Body Doubling

    I can identify two rewards, two aspects of my writing in the past 14 years that did not require cigarettes, scotch, attention, adulation, or money. Until recently, I didn’t really have a lexicon to describe these things, but now I do. 

    The Third Place

    Wikipedia has given me insight I did not have before, though I knew the outlines of it. I knew that the coffee shops and libraries I went to in order to write were “third places” but I didn’t really know what that meant. I now know that it’s part of a discipline called “community building” and people who study such things have identified places like the ones I described, often associated with leisure time, as “third places,” in order to differentiate them from first places (where we live) and second places (where we work). Some people find it difficult to, for example, do second place stuff when they’re in their first places. This is a problem that many of us have had to address recently.

    Body Doubling

    The great McKinley Valentine, Australian writer and author of one of my favorite newsletters, the Whippet, recently wrote about the concept of “body doubling,” a technique for productivity specifically for people experiencing ADHD.

    These patients find that a person sitting nearby, accomplishing tasks of their own, make it easier for them to focus on their own work. There need be no communication between these parallel processes. It’s because of this preference in me that I reached the conclusion, as I started to work a full time job from my First Place, that I “do better in offices.” I don’t have ADHD, but it still applies to me.

    Bodies in the Third Place

    I realized that I do better in offices because of one of those things (the body doubles around me) and that I write more easily in coffee shops because of these two rewards: the third place, with its coffee, or tea, and its body doubles, or other people doing their own work, act as passive rewards. These two things delight me, for reasons I can’t determine (nor am I particularly interested in dismantling them, for fear of ruining their effectiveness). My process involved going to a Third Place and having Body Doubles around. The pandemic took those things away. 

    Shaking the Champagne

    Until I can go back to those places and recover some sense of either Third Places or Body Doubles, I have to find new rewards. One of them is the occasional “good job” I get from you lovely readers. That helps. It keeps me going. 

    Another reward is that I refuse to listen to my favorite music except when I’m writing. I’m listening to Andrew Bird right now, and enjoying it immensely. I don’t listen to any music except when I’m writing something for fun and when I do, I use my best headphones. This helps, a little. 

    I drink seltzer all the time, but especially when I’m writing. That helps, too.

    Masterclass, Goddamn It

    I have returned to this newsletter because David Sedaris compelled me to. He’s one of the dozens of contributors to Masterclass, a walled garden of lectures by people in a wide variety of fields. I was skeptical that this product had anything for me that could not be supplied by a few YouTube videos, which are considerably cheaper, but the relentless advertising eventually won me over.

    I have watched as their roster of teachers swelled and incorporated more people whose insights I could see myself benefiting from. I was pretty sure that I would encounter these things:

    • a lack of depth. I don’t need to see Neil Gaiman talk about things I already know about, I want to hear something I might hear in a class

    • content for beginners. I am not a beginner (at least as a writer), and while every teacher has beginner-level lessons, they also get pretty deep into the catacombs of their ideas and processes.

    • extremely niche content, or content that wasn’t niche enough. I want a writer to talk to me like another writer would talk to a writer. But I also want to watch Penn & Teller talk about magic and learn something about my own creativity from that, too.

    I am annoyed by Masterclass because it is providing what I hoped it would. I don’t know why a company doing exactly what it says it does annoys me, but it feels like it makes it harder to identify the scams. I paid around $200 for a year of access and I already feel like I’ve been privy to education that I couldn’t have accessed without spending even more. I feel like that enormous sum is a good value.

    Among some of the insights I’ve collected, after only a couple of hours worth of classes, include the following:

    • David Sedaris talks to his sister in a lesson about writing about your loved ones. Sedaris talks about what he does when he writes about his family members. They have a very frank conversation about how it makes her feel, though she is largely happy about it. One lesson I learned that I hadn’t really considered was that if you write with love as your first motive, then it can guide you on the path of what you should and shouldn’t tell.

    • Salman Rushdie is a pretty decent artist, and supplements his writing with sketches. He also seems to have a booger lodged in his left nostril and is constantly scrunching his nose in a fight with it (or it’s just a tic).

    • David Mamet shares the wisdom, not from him, that anybody can write a good first act and that a second act often ends with a reinvigorating confessional by the main character. I never thought about that before.

    • Penn & Teller do an extremely simple lesson about how to do a “French drop.” I can do a French drop now.

    I can only watch the writing “lessons” for about a half an hour before I get excited about my own writing again and have to hit pause and go back to my notebooks. Neil Gaiman suggested writing everything you know about the story you’re going to write before you write it. That all changes as you develop it, of course, but I wasn’t doing that before. David Sedaris shared his habit of keeping a daily diary. I was doing something similar, but stopped because the bland description of my day was boring and repetitive. But now I’m going to write a little story about my day and see what that does for me. I wasn’t doing that before.

    My progress is slow. I’m not back to writing the way I was before, but I’m getting closer. The reward I feel for writing this stuff is the delight of writing again. This will not last, but it’s nice for now.

  • A Year in Review: 2020

    There’s a lot of “happening” happening and frankly I’m sick of it. 

    Oh man. Oh jeez. Where do I even begin?

    There’s no central narrative to Jim’s 2020, though COVID will dominate. That’s just the A Plot. The B and C Plots for your 2020 were different depending on who you are—maybe you lost your livelihood, or lost your favorite hang out spot, or lost someone you loved, or lost your coping mechanisms. Nobody’s getting out of this year unscathed. Some of us are more scathed than others, but I’m glad to have shared the struggle with you. I’m glad you’re still here. Have some coffee with me.

    I don’t want to fail you so
    I tell you the awful truth
    Everyone faces darkness on their own
    As I have done, so will you

    Forgive me if I run to the maudlin side of the room so early (that usually happens later). I think everybody deserves to be maudlin sometimes. Hey, it’s 2020. We all need a little extra this year. 

    2020 was the year of A Lot of Stuff. The writers of the simulation really packed a lot in, like they had to use up their extra budget on the last episode of the season. 

    2020 Was the Year of Letting People Do Things 

    It’s 2020, so you should give yourself permission to [whatever]. Be lazy. Eat something you shouldn’t. Play video games in your pajamas. Indulge in something you normally go without. 

    2020 Was the Year of Kindness

    It’s 2020, so we need to worry about each other more than ever. 

    2020 Was the Year of Forgiving Yourself

    You probably did something you’re not proud of, or acted selfishly, or hurt somebody’s feelings, whatever. It’s 2020. Give yourself permission to be a flawed person. 

    2020 Was the Year We Discovered Everything We Should Have Always Been Doing

    Empathy, kindness, sacrifice, mercy, patience, especially for ourselves, is the lesson of 2020. You don’t have permission to be good to yourself because it’s 2020, but because you always had the right to those things. We lost some things we can never get back, people we can never see again. 2020 took a lot out of us. We must give ourselves permission to be ourselves.

    The Story of the Year 

    On a purely personal level, it’s hard to get a firm grasp on the narrative for Jim’s 2020. 2018 was easy: tumor time! 2019 was a year of collapse, both personally and professionally. So much happened in 2020 yet nothing really happened, too, yet everything actually happened and it’s still happening. It was hard in ways I didn’t expect and nothing was easy, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Fate’s cruel finger never found me.

    Using Garbage as an Analogy for Writing

    There’s a huge pile of cardboard boxes sitting in my living room. This often happens after the holidays. I have to break this stack down and take it someplace to be recycled. I know every single step. I know what I need to do and how to do it and in what order.

    These three things are simultaneously true:

    1. I have decided what I need to do.

    2. I will do it when I’m ready.

    3. I will never be ready.

    The fact that there is not a pile of cardboard from last year is evidence that I will do it eventually, before I’m ready. That’s because there is no such thing as “being ready.”

    Every fortress falls
    It is not the end

    If Not Now, When?

    I was in therapy, many years ago. I had been working hard on my social anxiety with my therapist, who was helping me toward the goal of being able to talk to strangers without having a panic attack. I had made great progress in his office, I had done my homework every week, and I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to get over my social anxiety.

    “So, how did it go?” he asked.

    I was speechless. I probably made a face like my favorite emoji: 🧐

    I explained that I hadn’t actually done any of the things we had practiced. Why not, he asked. Because I’m not ready. He didn’t quote Hillel the Elder to me, but what he said was a gentle, therapisty way of saying the same thing. I’m paraphrasing, but this is what he said:

    “There needs to come a point when this stops being theoretical. You won’t feel ready. You have to take those steps anyway or you’ll never get where you’re going.”

    It was such a simple lesson to learn but it has informed every part of my life since I learned it. Like any lesson, I have to remind myself of it periodically. Sometimes, I have to rediscover it, like a book I forgot I owned and bought again.

    What does that have to do with writing?

    When I think about My Writing Career, it’s like looking at the sun. It’s like thinking about what happens after we die. It’s like moving a giant rock out of my yard so I can plant a garden there. I don’t know where to begin, and I don’t know what I need to do, and I’m not ready. I don’t want to confront it. I don’t want to answer the question lingering at the edge: should I just give it up?

    More than once this year, I’ve considered throwing it away. I write every single day for my lensgrinding job, so it’s not as if I’ll stop writing words. But as far as my career as a fiction writer goes, I feel like I’ll always be a person who tried for a while but gave it up.

    It ain’t if you fall
    But how you rise that says
    Who you really are

    I Decided to Continue

    I decided that I was simply being dramatic, as I often am. Stop being dramatic, I told myself. You’re just having a hard time of it. Save some of that sympathy for yourself.

    I rediscovered that lesson I learned in my therapist’s office twenty years ago: I just have to do it. The only way to get through something is to go through it. All those doubts and fears and questions have one answer, a clanging, loud, ringing of a very large bell that says, in the language of bells, “just fucking do it.”

    So I will. I’d rather be the dumb schlub who didn’t know he wasn’t any good and kept trying anyway than the person who stopped before he really got started.

    Do you hear the bell?

    I’ve Been Here Before

    My memory is a tattered, unreliable thing. Stories I hear about people and who those people are don’t always converge, so somebody will tell me about something that happened to them and then bring it up later and I’ll have no memory of it, at first, but then they reframe it with a rough outline of what they already told me once instead of whatever signposts they thought were the important signifiers and I’ll remember it (usually).

    Somebody might say “it’s like when Guy stole my air conditioner” and I don’t remember the story but then they’ll say “I told you about this, Guy stole my air conditioner on the hottest day of the year and drank all my seltzer, too” and then I’ll remember the story because the signpost that remained with me wasn’t the air conditioner at all but the seltzer. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.

    The point I was trying to make is this: I already wrote about giving up writing. It was over a year ago! Here we are again. I think all creative people can relate to that feeling, so it’s natural that I should experience it again.

    Sometimes I Get Lost

    I don’t mean literally lost, though that does happen, even in the age of GPS and omnipresent tracking, I mean in my own head. It’s not enough to simply forget things, I also enjoy worrying about forgetting things. Worrying is one of the dumbest things I do. Sometimes it pretends to be “planning” but it’s not.

    Dementia lies heavy on my family tree. It doesn’t hit all of us, but when it does it hits hard. Some of us, like my great aunt, lived a very long time and only slightly lost her edge right at the end. Some of us, like the paternal grandfather I barely knew, died from Alzheimer’s. The paternal grandmother I knew very well died of vascular dementia, which is the medical term for a gradual, inexorable atrophy of the brain. People who die of dementia do so usually because their bodies simply forget how to sustain them. It’s an awful, terrible experience for everyone.

    If you’re wondering if I’m going to pivot into how I worry that my memory problems stem from early onset dementia (and it would be extremely early, though not impossibly so), then you must be a subscriber.

    I don’t have early onset dementia. One of the (few) benefits of having had a brain tumor is that I have a neurosurgeon, a radiologist and an oncologist examine a very detailed MRI scan of my brain once a year. They are specifically looking for bad things. They would have noticed if my brain had atrophied.

    This Was Supposed to be About 2020

    I wrote a year-end post for 2019 and in reading it again, a year later, I am chagrined. Some of the things I wrote about ended up being far worse than they appeared at the time. Many of those things I was thankful for went away. Such is life. Good fortune, bad fortune, they move in and out like the tide.

    2020 is over, and some great things happened for me. I got a job I love during the worst pandemic in a century. I’ll stop there, because even if the last twelve months had good parts for me, I can’t ignore the suffering going on around me.

    We are currently living through a massive humanitarian crisis. Even those who haven’t been killed or debilitated by COVID are under enormous threat. I won’t innumerate all of those, either, because if you’re reading this then you’re living through it, too, and I don’t want to be a bummer. For so many people, 2020 is a giant bummer, the worst year of their lives, and my problems shrink in comparison.

    The truth is, I’m fine, I’m actually great, and if you’re not, I will help you as much as I can.

    2020 can die in a ditch. Even if 2021 isn’t markedly better for you, at least it will be different, and that’s something.

    If your fortress is under siege
    You can always run to me
    If ever your fortress caves
    You’re always safe in mine

    All the quotes in this newsletter were from a song by Queens of the Stone Age called Fortress, which you can watch and listen to here:

  • What It’s Like to Have a Brain Shunt

    This isn’t going to be gross, I promise.

    On this, the eve of the third anniversary of my second brain surgery, I am going to tell you about my shunt. 

    I have a peritoneal shunt installed inside my brain. Here’s what it looks like: 

    It’s a straw inside my brain ventricle with a long tube that goes down into my peritoneum. If I have any extra cerebrospinal fluid (that tastes like bananas, weirdly enough), it is siphoned off by the shunt and goes down the tube and empties into my abdomen. The first surgery I had, a little over three years ago, was completed after a week of heavy steroids and visits by my friends and family. Here’s a photo of that:

    My memories of those days before my first surgery are actually pretty nice. I can’t deny that I enjoy being the object of attention, and nothing much gets peoples attention like the big C, and it was nice to hear from so many people and to know they were thinking about me. My girlfriend at the time was great, and extremely attentive and calming, pretty much the perfect person to have by your side when you’re going through the ringer of brain cancer. I’m sorry things didn’t work out in the long run, but she was amazing when I needed her. Here’s a photo of us together. I’m not using one of her face because that feels like a violation, somehow. I dunno. Her name is Kate and she’s great. 

    It’s also hard to be in a bad mood when you’re on massive amounts of steroids. I never would have thought that steroids were necessarily mood-elevators, but I think they were in my case. Also, the nurses were truly lovely, and if I could remember their names or what floor or what department I would thank them personally. 

    HUMOROUS ANECDOTE: For an unknown amount of time (months, maybe), I told people I had a “perineal” shunt. Your perineum is not your peritoneum. You probably knew that. I didn’t. 

    You can touch my shunt. It’s my party trick, if there isn’t a Rubix cube around for me to solve. There’s not much of a trick to it, except some people get a kick out of pressing the squishy device just under my scalp. That it’s connected to a straw deep inside my brain makes it even cooler.

    The shunt itself is bolted into place in my skull, and probably will remain there for the rest of my life. I asked my neurosurgeon about whether I’ll ever get it removed, and he said it was unlikely. Unless there’s a problem with it, they leave them in, even if you never need it again. Hopefully, I’ll never need it again. 

    AN ADDITIONAL HUMOROUS ANECDOTE: There is no drug on earth better than the absence of pain that was previously unrelenting. I had spent months with intense headaches, and the first surgery I had eliminated them. The implantation of the shunt ended the squeeze of my overflowing ventricles. I was also taking pills for the pain of the surgery, so I was, for all intents and purposes, high as a kite. I had to stop at a Burger King to pee, and I stopped to look at myself in the mirror. What I saw made me laugh so much I took a photo. I have no explanation except that I thought a man with an obvious head wound wandering around in a Burger King, laughing, was hilarious and absurd.

     

    Both surgeries I had were free of complications. Double vision plagues many brain surgery recipients. Not me. I had an easy tumor to remove, right on my brain stem. Yes, it was cancerous. Yes, it was malignant. It didn’t spread. I was lucky. It happened to be in a place that was easy to access. Not everybody is so lucky. The next time you’re tempted to say “at least it was benign,” remember that. Benign tumors in the wrong place are just as deadly as the other kind. There is no good cancer to get. It’s all bad. 

    My memory isn’t great. I forget things sometimes, so I use my notebook more than ever. I have little headaches every day, but Advil takes care of them pretty handily. I get bouts of tinnitus more frequently than before, but it doesn’t last. I am extraordinarily lucky. 

    There isn’t much slack in my shunt tube. When I stretch a certain way, I can feel the tube tighten against my skin. It’s visible when I turn my neck. Sometimes it itches and there’s nothing I can do about it except think about something else. 

    That’s what cancer is, and that’s how you deal with it. You go from one day to the next, one scan to the next, until your story is over. 

    I’m so very grateful that mine isn’t yet.  

  • Me and The Baron

    I only mentioned cancer once this time

    I am writing this from my latest Instagram impulse purchase: a surprisingly inexpensive (at least it was when I ordered it—I see they’ve substantially raised the price since then) and extremely responsive e-ink tablet with a pen. I can write long hand, with decent character and handwriting recognition, for a fraction of what an iPad costs, and this thing is also thinner and lighter than a notebook of similar size. I’m pretty amazed, I don’t mind admitting, though it definitely qualifies as a silly impulse buy. I don’t need this thing. I have more paper notebooks than I could ever hope to fill. I even have one of those iPads, and it does more stuff. I can’t watch movies on this tablet. 

    Even so, I am a believer in e-ink. When it got good enough to replicate paper on a functional level (and in a way that made reading still feel like reading), I shifted most of my reading to a Kindle. There is something to be said for electronics that feel like analog. Maybe that’s only true for people like me, digital adoptees, not digital natives. Would a kid who only ever had iPads get the same kind of enjoyment from these almost-devices? I don’t think so. 

    What’s Old is Old

    There’s a tendency for implementations of new technology to mimic what already exists until someone who doesn’t know any better comes along and breaks all the rules they’re supposed to follow because they don’t know about those rules, and everything changes. That’s why the earliest movies resembled stage plays so much. 

    But those things never really completely go away. We still have plays. Almost exactly three years ago, I was in London watching a production of Much Ado About Nothing (the link does not go to the version I saw, but it was at that location and with some of the same actors) at the Globe that would solidify it as my favorite Shakespeare play and, in Beatrice, see something of the kind of woman I’m drawn to most. Aye, there’s the rub. If you know the play, the relationship between Beatrice and her beau is a bit, uh, contentious at first. That’s the fun of it. 

    Here’s an empty stage:

    I promised someone I would stop writing about relationships, so I won’t break that oath here. Whenever I do, on other platforms like Twitter or what-have-you, this person swoops in to smack me, nicely, but not too nicely. I always take their advice, except when I want to cause trouble on purpose. 

    Where Ya Been

    It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, but I can’t say that I’ve done much of anything to justify it. I’ve been in what my ex wife (and now dear friend) calls a “bulking phase” — rather than write much, I read. I know others have said they have trouble reading books in Times Such as These, but I have not had the same experience. In fact, I’m more voraciously reading than ever. Those same people often report that they watch tv shows and movies instead. Weirdly, I’ve found it almost impossible to watch anything except documentaries about English history, for reasons I can’t explain. There’s something exotic and yet familiar about them that I can’t get enough of. 

    I’ve been reading books, and watching documentaries, and working, and petting my cat, and talking to my cat, occasionally streaming on Twitch with my cat, talking to my family, a few friends (but not enough) and very little else. I’m not depressed. I bathe as often as I did before and still brush my teeth twice a day and wear deodorant, even though Emmitt doesn’t care. I order food from Target and pull up in a parking place and someone very kindly comes out of the store with everything I ordered and puts it in my trunk. The only time I ever have to go into a store is to pick up my medications from the Giant Eagle, which also allows me the chance to buy some of the few fresh produce items that Target doesn’t really carry. 

    That’s all I do. I might occasionally play a video game, listen to a podcast, or take a walk. I certainly don’t write anything that isn’t a work assignment. 

    Do I Have a Fever or am I Just Cold?

    I play that game with myself almost every day, and I have yet to have a fever. I lost weight (and then found some of it) at the beginning of the pandemic, so temperatures that would never register before are suddenly making me put on my housecoat. 

    This video popped up in my head as I was writing something for work (it is related, but only tangentially) and it is both still funny and also cringingly dated. To paraphrase Paul F. Tompkins, there was a period there in the 1990s where “he’s gay” was an adequate punchline. You didn’t need to do anything except imply someone was gay in order for a joke to land. We are thankfully beyond that, or at least I am, and any comedy I enjoy is. 

    Anyway, this sketch has that quality to it, unfortunately, and is also inexplicably racist in its depiction of someone speaking an African language. Adding random pops or clicks to your fake African dialect was, alas, also enough for a punchline. 

     

     

    Oh, That, Too

    I also celebrated something I’ve come to think of as an additional birthday, celebrated only by me and Emmitt (who gets more treats): the anniversary of the brain surgeries that saved my life. I have noted in other places (social media, mostly) about how difficult it is for me to write about my experience, despite putting “writer” next to my name a lot and mentioning the whole cancer thing whenever I can plausibly work it into a conversation. I can talk about it, but writing about it requires a deep dive into my memories and they’re still too fresh. I suddenly find that I’m experiencing the terror and pain again and I’d really rather not. I’ll take my occasional dizzy spells, bad memory, daily little headaches and an optimistic neurosurgeon any day. 

    Baron Samedi

    There’s a pivot for you, but I’m allowing myself to write about one of the memories I have of my experience that is more interesting than “oh yeah, that hurt a lot and I thought I was going to die slowly and in pain.” On the night after my first surgery, I hallucinated that Baron Samedi was dancing around the edges of the shadows of the doors and windows.

    For the record, this is the person I saw: 

    Here’s a relevant passage from his Wikipedia page: 

    He is noted for disruption, obscenity, debauchery, and having a particular fondness for tobacco and rum. Additionally, he is the loa of resurrection, and in the latter capacity he is often called upon for healing by those near or approaching death, as it is only the Baron that can accept an individual into the realm of the dead.

    This was not exactly on the forefront of my mind, and it was not an otherworldly experience. I can’t explain the appearance of Baron Samedi, a character out of my memory, whose appearance also happened to be extremely appropriate to the circumstances. Is it spooky? Yes, it is, in the telling of it, but not in the moment. 

    When I say I hallucinated a dancing vodou god, associated with death and resurrection, what I mean to say is that it was an extremely peaceful, almost joyful thing to see. I had survived a surgery I was convinced was going to kill me and I knew that I was hopped up on a lot of powerful painkillers and steroids and it was in the middle of the night and hospital was very quiet, and I couldn’t move my head, and I was a captive audience to the cartoony dancing. I was alive. I had made it through the first half of the journey, through the first surgery, and it was just me and the Baron. I was not scared, because I knew it was a figment of my imagination. It was fun? Yes. Maybe a little.

    That’s Enough

    I’ve had enough writing, and I’m boring myself, which is a terrible sign. I will leave you with two things:

    One of the things I’m doing is my podcast, which is delightful and fun and I get to talk to two of my favorite people. I forgot to include that in the things I’m doing. I’m putting up the newest episode tomorrow, so subscribe etc. 

  • Interrogating the burden of delight

    Eye Roll Emoji

    The title means nothing. I’ve recently found myself using those three words a lot and when you put them all in a line like that it looks like an extremely pretentious version of this newsletter (that can already get a little pretentious, if I’m honest). 

    It’s incredibly goth of me to even suggest that I could approach the topic of “interrogating the burden of delight” and I confess that the concept appeals to me. But that’s not what I’m writing about today, because I don’t feel like asking too many questions about my feelings. They are what they are and I deal with them.

    My dear friend, during a conversation about Fetch the Boltcutters, said she was delighted by my Thou Doth Protest Too Much denial of my own romanticism. She pegs Fiona and I as hopeless romantics who have been pressed into self-imposed asceticism by our own need to, say, interrogate the burden of our delight. I asked her if I could relate this observation, and she allowed it, but then told me to go for a walk. What she meant was “stop spending so much time in your head, dum dum, you’ve done enough of that already.” And, of course, she was right. 

    “I didn’t smile, because a smile always seemed rehearsed
     I wasn’t afraid of the bullies, and that just made the bullies worse” – Fiona Apple, Shameika 

    Nature vs Nurture Revisited

    When we’re babies, how much of who we are will be who we are as adults was the topic of the last newsletter, so I won’t dwell much on it again, except to say that I heard from some of my pals who had similar stories of their young selves very closely resembling the adult versions. 

    My favorite was this one, from Andrea, lately of the Washington Damn Post, but also a great newsletter that deserves your attention. If you know Andrea (and I just gave you a couple of links to do so), you’re as delighted by this as I am:

    “A bunch of my cousins went sled riding and I tagged along. I went down the hill one time, and then at the bottom, I put one hand on my hip, leaned on a snowbank and said, ‘Hey girls, why don’t we go back inside and get some hot chocolate?’” 

    Even Little Andrea knew what was important and it ain’t sledding.

    A small but manageable drinking problem

    After Howard Stern left terrestrial radio, he was replaced with David Lee Roth. I enjoyed the show, because it featured the surprisingly good storyteller, David Lee Roth, telling interesting and occasionally funny stories from his storied life. He didn’t last long, but I listened to it, because I was working a boring data entry job and had nothing better to do. I remember his advice to becoming a rock star included the heading, which he alluded to having.

    “I used to jog but the ice cubes kept falling out of my glass.” ― David Lee Roth

    I worry that I have one of those. It’s small because I don’t drink every night, just most nights, and manageable, because I don’t drink a lot. As any alcoholic will tell you, that’s how every large and unmanageable drinking problem begins. 

    I have only ever been addicted to two things, coffee and cigarettes. I quit one and the other will be with me until my life depends on not drinking coffee anymore, which is not beyond possibility, but at least has not happened yet. 

    Addiction and dependence are two different things, though one often follows the other. Casual use becomes constant use, which becomes problematic. One’s life starts to take a turn for the worse because the small amounts you take in the beginning to get high are no longer enough and you take more than you did before and you’ve gone from one drink at night to relax to, well, a lot more. 

    The rough guide for alcoholism is more than 14 drinks per week, though it’s not the only sign. Worrying that you might have a drinking problem is one of the first warnings. 

    Addiction 

    Being addicted to something has two features: physical and mental. The physical addiction occurs because, and this is a radically oversimplified version of the mechanisms involved, your body gets used to having a certain chemical in it, because you’re using it to get high, and it crosses an invisible boundary where you no longer use the chemical to get high but to keep from feeling bad. 

    There’s a mental element that covers non-chemical addictions, like sex, love, relationship, etc. They might have chemical factors involved but the addiction is in the feelings you get from the behaviors you’re addicted to. 

    There is some debate about whether an addiction to anything that’s not a chemical counts as an actual addiction, but that seems to be missing the point. Much like people who like to dismiss cancer that doesn’t spread as “not real cancer,” the real measure of an addiction is not in what caused it but how it fills up your life. 

    The pursuit of that thing we’re addicted to is the problem, because if it were as easy as just setting it aside, it wouldn’t be a problem. This is compounded by addiction to chemicals that are dangerous to the body using them. Drinking til you’re blotto might be fun (or so I’ve heard, I never enjoyed it much), but you tend to make very bad decisions when you’re uninhibited by alcohol. You do things drunk you would never do sober. 

    The removal of inhibitions brings out those parts of your character that you might not want anyone else to see, parts of yourself that you’re embarrassed by, or that might be hurtful to other people. We all carry with us the capacity to inflict damage on the people around us, and we wisely keep those feelings inside, where our better angels can isolate them and browbeat them into silence. 

    “Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.” – Dr. Who

    Radical forgiveness

    There is nothing worse, no personality disorder, no mental illness, no personality quirk, worse than an unrepentant addict. An addict who wants to get high and have fun and doesn’t care who gets hurt is one of the most destructive forces one is likely to encounter. Add to this the layer of whatever their drug is doing to them, and it’s an unspooling ribbon of disaster. The ribbon ends, eventually, the same way every time: death. 

    There’s no use pretending otherwise. An addiction ends with a snuff of a candle. Either you stop doing what you’re addicted to, and acting like an addict acts, or it kills you. Untreated addictions always lead to death. Always.

    I have turned away very close friends who diverted into unrepentant addiction and refused to even consider trying to get better. They chose death, and I am not going to watch anyone die. You can do that on your own time, and I don’t need to see it happen. 

    A person who is trying to surpass their addiction, and is really truly honestly making a go of it, deserves understanding and compassion. They are fighting for their survival, in a very real sense. They are struggling in ways I can’t imagine. 

    Every addict began as a person with a small but manageable problem. We shouldn’t see addicts as others, but as ourselves. 

    The title of this section is “radical forgiveness” because sometimes that’s what it takes. When a person who has done you wrong comes along, maybe long after the damage has healed, talking about their sobriety, or asking for your understanding, or apologizing for what they did, they are expressing a desire to live. They might not be ready to apologize, but they’re ready to live. 

    The minimum you owe any person is to allow them to live. You don’t have to let them move in, but you do have to let them survive.

    I’m Not Done With Forgiveness

    This discussion makes me think of the topic that has occupied many minds lately, especially on social media, and the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” which is what it’s called when someone makes comments or engages in behaviors that are reprehensible to polite society, or at least a segment of it, and that person is therefore “canceled,” a term borrowed from entertainment, where a show that doesn’t perform well is canceled, and is no longer produced.

    You can’t really cancel a person in the same way, because a person is more than just a bunch of opinions or actions or statements. Even those who apologize are often questioned even further, and their apologies aren’t enough. They didn’t apologize adequately.

    I’m not sure what an adequate apology is, but I don’t think anybody else does, either. We demand one but then the person apologizes and it’s still not enough to quell our desire to see them punished. I don’t even think we could ever reach a consensus on what transgressions earn cancelation and which ones we can forgive.

    I think we should be open to forgiving anyone who appears contrite. Everybody should get a second chance. And then a third chance. More, if we’re feeling generous. I think we should always feel generous. It’s easy to say this as someone who is of the ethnic group that most often gets canceled in the modern sense. Some would say that this was appropriate, since so many generations of vulnerable people had much worse things done to them by people like me simply for existing. I don’t support what happened. I want to fix it, if I can. I am trying to be better than the people who came before me. I am imperfect. I am trying.

    What more can I do?

    I can forgive. I can do that.

    Anyway, that’s kind of a bummer.

  • Jimmy accepts grover – then cries

    Are we nurtured or is it nature?

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

    I’ve always been a version of the person I am today. There is a portion of matter, roughly Jim-shaped, that moves through the universe. I am a happenstance collision of events that became a person, fully-formed and one of the most improbable things in the universe. I am, as is every human, Dr. Manhattan’s thermodynamic miracle.

    That’s how the story begins, but how much of the story that follows was determined at the beginning, and how much developed as I grew? Is everything I was ever going to think or do written down in my genes when the cell division started and I’ve just been acting out the script? I’m going to answer the question definitively, so warm up that Nobel Prize.

    “But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen

    If you follow me on my other social media, you might have seen me promise to tell the story behind this image. I interviewed my mother, the writer of those words, about what I was like as a baby, and will distribute the audio to you all via this newsletter’s capabilities. I liked talking to my mom and I think it’ll be fun to try it out, but I also know that I need to make good on my promise to show the photo itself. The audio is in the can and ready to roll so expect that in your inboxes soon.

    I think that’s my father handing it to me, and one of my older brothers in the background. It’s a standard Christmas morning photograph. A little kid gets a new toy. Big deal.

    But the “then cries” part is what I want to talk about, because it’s a tantalizing look into what kind of baby I was, and maybe what kind of grown up I am.

    It’s Nature, Dummy

    Little details about my childhood pop out at me as emblematic of who I am today.

    If I believe that a large part of who we are is determined by our genes, then this can be explained by a certain kind of bias that has a name I don’t know, but the kind of bias where you only remember certain events because they reinforce your prejudices. My mother sees the man I became and the times I acted in a way consistent with that man are the events she remembers. There are two events that are canonically the Extremely Jim Things That Happened to me, one of which is mentioned in the short interview I did with my mom but I’ll mention here because I always talk about it and it’s very much me.

    This is what’s supposed to happen when you’re a certain age: you try to get out of your crib. It’s a totally normal part of childhood development. But here’s the thing about me: I never did. Ever. Of the six children my mom had, I’m the only one who was satisfied to stay where he was until the arrival of the next brother in sequence, when I was around 4 years old. I stayed in my crib because I had to make room for the next baby, and I probably hated it.

    This is exactly like me today. I get complacent and comfortable and I don’t like change. I also have a tendency to follow rules and respect the authority of those who expect me to stay where they put me. They say that the real test of a person’s character is what they do when unobserved, and when I was at the age that most kids try to leave the bosom of their comfortable beds and explore the tantalizing world beyond the bars of their crib, I stayed put.

    Hobbity

    The ultimate defining characteristic of any person is what they name their wifi network. It’s more reliable than tea leaves, more true than horoscopes. The name of my wifi network is Bag End. I describe myself as a hobbit when given the chance to talk about myself and Tolkien (two of my favorite subjects).

    I am happy in the exact scenarios that make a hobbit happy. I like good food, good drink, a good smoke (well, I used to), the easy company of good friends and the certainty that tomorrow is going to largely resemble today. In the furry feet of Bilbo Baggins, I would have the exact same reaction to Gandalf in this scene, which is a truncated but mostly unmolested scene from the book, because it was perfect and even Peter Jackson knew not to tinker with a perfect scene:

     

    “Sorry! I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Not today. Good morning!”

    J.R.R. Tolkien – The Hobbit

    Or maybe it’s nurture


    We can’t really study it in a laboratory, because it would be wildly unethical to intentionally subject a human being to a less ideal life. It would be like a dystopian Truman Show where one person is given advantages and the same person a complimentary set of disadvantages, and we see how similar those people are when they come out the other end.

    This is fertile ground for thought experiments, for sure, but also an entire genre called alternate history (usually classified as science fiction). Some alternate history is a wild revision using time machines to alter the course of an entire war, while some is simply a look at what would happen if a regular person missed a train.

    Evel Knievel shot up from dead grass.
    I loved him better each time that he crashed.

    – Tin Foil by The Handsome Family

    My own alternate history

    There are clear markers in my life when things could have gone differently. Here are two:

    1. When I was twelve or so, I steered a go-cart off a cliff and into the Ohio River, though I hit a mound of dirt at the edge which stopped me from careening off the ridge and into the water, some 30 feet below. I don’t think I would have survived it.

    2. When I was in college, and about to graduate, I was on the verge of going to graduate school and suddenly balked. I saw the path I was on and didn’t like where it was going, so I went to live with my Aunt Posy in Washington DC and discovered that the anxiety which had been my constant companion over the years was keeping me from enjoying the life before me and I retreated back to live with my parents and started taking Zoloft and going to therapy and got a job and a girlfriend.

    If I had gone to graduate school, I don’t think I would have found the source of my suffering as soon. Academia, specifically the environment of Morgantown, would have sheltered me from the world for at least another few years, and it was that shelter that kept me from facing the demons crouched over me. 

    Those are only two divergences, but I could name a dozen more that happened between my birth and today. I have no regrets about the way I navigated those incidents, or those jobs I said yes to or those decisions I made that seemed right at the time. No, all my regrets are in how I occasionally treated other people, and the times I was selfish or unkind. I try to be better, now, and sometimes fall short, but I have a target that I always aim for.

    Who cares about all that, what Harry Potter house would you be in?

    It’s fun to pick yourself up and plop yourself down in another time. We like to do the same with fictional worlds, which is a common source of online quizzes like Which Harry Potter House Would You Be In? The online quizzes all like to sort me into Hufflepuff, probably because I’m so hobbity.

    Think about it for a while and you can entertain yourself for hours. What would my life had been like if I had been born fifty years earlier? A hundred years earlier? If I had the same parents, I likely would never have been born at all, since my mother required the RhoGAM shot when she had me. I was a very sick child, so any time before antibiotics would have been dicey. Even if I had lived through all of those infections, I would have been easily taken out by my brain tumor, though the cause of it is unknown so maybe under different circumstances I might never have developed it. 

    Time Travel

    Going back across my family’s timeline and placing myself into the different eras is a fun experiment for me, because my family has a solid thread of wealth and privilege going back at least to the Scottish royalty that I am allegedly descended from. This makes time travel along my family’s history a fun diversion rather than a terrifying exploration of the depravities of slavery, institutional misogyny and poverty that so many others faced, that face still today. As a white man with an education, I would have been fine in nearly any era of western civilization. This is privilege and I acknowledge it.

    Even so, intersecting with that thread are Irish peasants and starving immigrants who married into my family and contributed to the line of heredity that led to me, so an arbitrary toss of a beanbag on my family tree would have seen me either as in the family of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence or an incompetent Captain who likely led his fellow impoverished riverside men into an ambush during the days of the eastern American frontier. Another toss and I’m either in the company of a mechanic in New Cumberland or a physician in Wheeling. Yet another toss, and I’m in a mental hospital and getting the occasional letters from my family in Tarentum. 

    Even a privileged lineage like mine is fraught with eddies and backwaters and other water-related metaphors. What I mean to say is this: the unbroken thread that led from those first cells to me didn’t always make a straight line, and sometimes it doubled back, and sometimes it nearly didn’t make it at all.

    Here I go, being maudlin again

    It’s this tendency I have, to be maudlin and sincere in my optimism, that keeps me from being a great writer instead of a good one. I don’t have the killer instinct of a good salesman or great writer. I am too easily enchanted. Having said that, here I go:

    To be alive is a privilege. This year, so terrible for so many, has seen me reconnect with my capacity for joy that I have not known for many, many years. Though I was an unhappy adolescent, and a mostly miserable adult, my middle age is marked by a nearly constant state of excessive, annoying joy. I sometimes have difficulty falling asleep because I’m so excited about all of the things I’m going to do tomorrow, and sometimes I have no plans for tomorrow beyond nailing a painting to a wall. I am thankful and happy to simply be alive, and I expect nothing more from myself than to remain that way.

    I measure my mood every day. This is a snapshot of the last 27 days:

    The unbroken thread through misery and hardship have at least resulted in this happy, slightly fat, slightly hobbity, slightly gray, slightly wrinkly man with a cat and a computer and socks that keep my feet warm. If this is all I ever have, then I have more than enough.

    Songs I listened to while I wrote this, that have nothing to do with what I wrote (except the first one):

     

    I love this for two reasons: it, also, is largely unchanged from the book. One failing of the movie versions of the books is the leaving out of almost all of the music, which is unfortunate, because people in these books are constantly singing. The Hobbit is an exception, keeping a couple of great songs by the dwarves, like this one.

    It has a monastic quality, heavily reliant on the deeper parts of the audio spectrum, because Tolkien’s dwarves are an (entirely intentional) examination of a society made from a single gender. All dwarves are male, though not all dwarves have the corresponding genitals of a man. One could encounter a female dwarf and never know it, because they all present as male. They have beards, deep voices, wear armor, fight in wars, everything the dwarves do. Indeed, any dwarf in the books could be female, but we would never know. They all have a single gender. Tolkien was ahead of his time in ways he could never have predicted.

  • A Field Guide to House Cats

    Some people are also animals.

    Some people are just regular people. I would say that, in fact, most people are regular people. A person is smart, knows what they need, what they want, and what they need to do. But some of us are also animals, and it’s easier to understand us with the additional dimension of what kind of pet we are.This is not some online Harry Potter quiz about what your patronus is or a His Dark Materials test to see what your daemon is, or some poorly conceived Buzzfeed quiz for discovering your “spirit animal,” which is not what you think it is anyway. No, some of us are animals in addition to being humans. Some humans are just humans, and that’s fine. It’s probably even the better option. They like sports or cars or something’s ing and they don’t think too deeply about things. They represent the middle of the curve where most people live, content in predictable ways. At least, it’s comforting to think they are, but it doesn’t usually work out that way.

    There is no curve

    It’s an illusion that we accept, that there is something essential about us that makes us not like those other people, when there actually is no such thing. The people we comfortably dismiss as “regular people” aren’t regular at all. They have opinions you wouldn’t expect, or interests that would surprise you, and secret desires that they don’t tell anybody.

    I often look to this quote, from Dr. Who, because it’s the closest thing I’ll come to a motto: “In 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.” I would amend that to include the proviso that I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t interesting, in some way.

    Everybody has a story that I want to hear. 

    That was a digression

    I said that stuff in the last paragraph to give this next bit some context. One of these is not better than another, they just are. They probably don’t completely apply to someone. They’re like horoscopes.

    You can read a horoscope and say “yes this perfectly fits me” one day and then the next day, it doesn’t. Life is chaos and change and entropy and human beings are dazzling lights, constantly shifting, changing. But patterns emerge and there is some predictability, and knowing where you’re predictable is good knowledge, like knowing where you put your keys. 

    Dogs

    I used to think I was a dog. I think I am, sometimes, but not lately. A dog appears carefree, but there are things it cares about. Dogs like it when you pet them and say nice things to them. Dogs thrive on attention and affection, and they can’t get enough of either one. No matter what time of day or night, you can say something nice to a dog and scratch its chin and it’s going to wag its tail and cheerfully go back to whatever it was doing, or follow you around hoping you’ll pet them again.

    You never see a dog without a person, and if you do, there’s something amiss and that dog is either having an adventure off the leash and out of the yard and its human hasn’t found it yet or it’s a stray that would still be happier living with a human. 

    Indoor cats

    Nowadays, I’m an indoor cat. I don’t want constant attention. I want attention when I want it, which is the only time I want it. I mostly want to be left alone, in a predetermined space that I might explore a bit once in a while but I am largely content with everything just as the way it is and my relationship to it, in the spatial sense, which is to say: I like things the way they are.

    I need to be kept fed, and I clean myself regularly, and I am mostly independent. But not too independent. I will happily stare out the window and watch the birds come around, and I might occasionally enjoy a walk out there, maybe, it depends on my mood.

    If you see an unattended indoor cat outside, something’s wrong. Somebody screwed up. That dude is not supposed to be out there. The outside is where outdoor cats live, and it’s full of danger.

    Outdoor cats

    These are the free roamers, the ones you don’t need to watch, the ones who go on adventures like traveling to exotic places by themselves (!!!) and hunting down their dinners. You don’t have to keep an eye on outdoor cats, and it would be tough to do it anyway.

    They don’t want your attention at all except when they do and you’ll know, because they’ll tell you, but most of the time they’re happy out there, doing things that, to indoor cats like me, seem incredibly risky.

    Life, to an outdoor cat, is enhanced by risk and unpredictability. If one day too closely resembles the day that came before, something’s amiss. 

    Here are some things outdoor cats enjoy that indoor cats don’t. 

    1) Exploring places that people don’t go.

    2) Having new experiences

    3) Hunting for something to eat

    4) Not being absolutely sure they’re going to have a comfortable place to sleep

    I can say with utter sincerity that none of the above items appeals to me. 

    Other animals

    I’m not the first to make these comparisons, nor am I the first person to identify as an animal of some kind. Gay men, specifically, were forced by a bigoted society to disguise their preferences with coded language, and they developed a lovely lexicon of bears, otters and bulls to describe themselves. I think heterosexual society would benefit from a similar system, one independent of anything that came before, lest we ape the cultures that came before us and do them a disservice. I propose starting with the above taxonomies, but there can be so much more than dogs and cats.

    We all know some snakes. And a few rats. Use your imagination.

  • 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?