Category: Memoir

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.

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

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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“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

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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.

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.

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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

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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

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.

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.

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

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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!

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.

Man, I love art. It’s one of the best parts of being alive in the western world in 2020. We get to enjoy all kinds of art and we can ignore the kinds we don’t like. It’s great!

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What Is It?

I don’t know! One workable definition of art is this: a thing that doesn’t have a purpose except to exist. It usually has some aesthetic appeal, but not always. Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal with something written on it) is not exactly beautiful, but it’s definitely art. The obvious things that nobody would debate, like the Mona Lisa or Girl With the Pearl Earring, or Donatello’s David, don’t need to be defended. They’re obviously art.

What was the first art? We have no idea! The artifact most widely believed to be the oldest art in the history of the world is this:
It’s a bunch of red lines drawn on a piece of rock approximately 73,000 years ago. Its incredible age, 30,000 years older than the previous record-holder, is one reason why not everybody thinks it’s art. This skepticism is consistent with debates that go on even today about contemporary creations that, some decide, is not art.

Roger Ebert

I always enjoyed Roger Ebert’s writing and I was sad when he died. One unfortunate thing he’s remembered for is saying, repeatedly, that video games were not art. He mounted a major defense of his point, which I won’t get into here. That made me sad, too, but not because he didn’t think video games were art. What made me sad was that he felt justified declaring that anything isn’t art.

A game of baseball isn’t art, but if I take a photo of it and put it in a frame, it is. If I get a bunch of my friends together and dress one side up like German philosophers and the other like Greek philosophers and have them play soccer and film it, that is art. Even hard rules, like “sports aren’t art,” are flexible.

So what is art? Art is anything we say it is. We can therefore debate the merits of a certain piece of art (“how artistic is this art?” Or “what is this art saying?”) but its existence as art is undeniable. It might not be pretty but we should not be willing to say anything isn’t art. When someone says “this is art,” we should never say “no it’s not.”

Performance Art

It’s hard for a lot of people to appreciate performance art. I confess to once being one of those people. It wasn’t my experience of performance art that changed my mind (in fact, I once saw some performance art that simply reinforced my opinion, at the time, that it was not art). What made me come around was the the slow erosion of my preconceived notions, a process that naturally happens as we age. I got older and more appreciative of things that I had at one time dismissed. This is an ongoing theme of this newsletter because it is an ongoing theme of me. I am, broadly speaking, more apt to accept things and appreciate them, than I was when I was younger. I am less certain that my opinions are correct, so they take on a certain plasticity. This is supposed to be the opposite of what happens when you get older. Your opinions are supposed to calcify as your biases are reinforced. I feel lucky to have this experience of wonder rather than skepticism. I was extremely skeptical as a younger man, and I am less so now.

But enough about me, how about that Marina Abramović!

This TED talk is a good summary of her work, in her own words. The difference between performance art and theater, according to Abramović, is the participation and complicity of the audience. She talks about one of her most famous performances, Rhythm 0, which she performed in 1974.

Rhythm 0

I’d call this piece emblematic of what performance art is to me, even though it’s an outlier and not representative of how most performances are constructed. Abramović is, herself, an outlier, and calls herself the Grandmother of Performance Art. I think it’s a good representation both because of how it was constructed (echoed by her most famous performance, Artist is Present) and some unsettling realizations about the audience. The setup was simple: Abramović stood completely motionless near a table with 72 items. The audience was encouraged to use them on her in any way they liked. One of those items was a knife. One was also a loaded gun. The acts performed on her grew progressively more brutal and dehumanizing as the six hours went on. This outcome was not entirely unexpected, but even the artist was surprised by how it all went. In her own words:

I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.

While all art engages the audience in some way, even just as a passive viewer (as in the painting Las Meninas, in which the viewer takes the perspective of the King and Queen of Spain, whose portrait Velázquez is painting — they can be seen in a mirror reflection in the background), performance art often includes the audience in some way. Indeed, without an audience to perform various acts on her during the performance, there is no Rhythm 0, which would be a powerful statement of its own. Am I suggesting that an unobserved person standing alone in a room with a table covered in objects for six hours is art? Yes, it could be!

My Favorite Art

First of all, my favorite artist is my mother. I own a few of her paintings, and it warms my heart to look at them. Not only are they good paintings, but she’s my mom and she made them and I love her. I particularly love her watercolors. The attic of her house is a mini-gallery of her watercolors, specifically of dogs, and I adore each and every one of them. I also love the art made by my friends, who are my second-through-seventeenth favorite artists (you know who you are).
“Dolores”

One artist I love is an artist I’ve never met, Simon Stålenhag, from Sweden. Sure, he paints giant robots and unnatural creatures, but they’re only part of what I love about his work. My favorite of his paintings are the ones that turn the fantastic into the mundane. I love the cognitive dissonance of a person encountering something unimaginable with a sigh of familiarity.

Here are two of his paintings that I love, and what I love about them.

The eye is immediately drawn to the giant robot, of course. And there’s a kid with a gun! Where did he get that? Is it real? Probably his dad’s, because semi-rural Sweden is a lot like semi-rural West Virginia, where I grew up, and this kid is up to no good. His sister, or neighborhood friend, is bored, and doesn’t care about the gun or the giant robot, she just wants to do something else. The fantastic and the familiar collide and we see it in the girl’s body language and her expression. (Here’s a bigger version where you can get a good look at the details)
I also love the body language in this painting, which is also the cover of his book, The Electric State, which is a series of paintings like this one tied together by the story of a woman, Michelle, and a childlike robot traveling across the country. It’s America, not Sweden, but one that’s been ravaged by a virtual reality simulation that replaced real reality for so many people that civilization appears to have collapsed around it. What I love about this painting is the familiarity of the parking garage and the cars and the (again, bored) expression of the woman. I know that pose, hand out, waiting for a curious kid to stop staring at whatever captured his attention and come along already. (Here’s a closer look at the detail)

Charlie White

When I was doing data entry at a big company, it was my first Real Job. I was so comfortable there that I stayed for 8 years. I tend to get very comfortable in my comfortableness, even in bad situations, which is also something that happens to me less and less often as I get older. The Me of 2020 would never have stayed there for that long, because I’m less and less inclined to let my comfort command my better judgment. A little discomfort is good when it leads to a better place.

One thing that I carried with me at every cubicle (they shuffle you around a lot in big companies like that) was a photograph from an issue of Wired magazine. It was a feature story about an artist named Charlie White and his work immediately grabbed me. In particular, I loved Fleming House, and kept a two-page spread of this work thumbtacked to the wall of my cubicle.
This photograph is another clash of the fantastic with the mundane. Reading that article again I see that he was influenced by The Raft of the Medusa and Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya, which are paintings that loom large in my mind, also. I love the reactions, the capture of a moment in time that could never happen in reality (luckily for us), and the fact that there’s a giant monster about to eat some college students.

I freely admit that I am drawn to these works because of the robots and monsters, and that without these fantasy elements, I probably wouldn’t have taken a second look.

I have a fondness for the extraordinary. Maybe it’s childish, or escapist, and a sign of arrested emotional development, but I don’t think so. I won’t turn this into some wide-ranging defense of science fiction and fantasy, as much as I’m tempted to. I can’t explain precisely why space ships and dragons make me happy, they just do!

But Not Everything I Love is Science Fictiony or Whatever

I love those things, and I love Stålenhag’s work for those elements, but I love plenty of things that don’t have anything weird or fantastic or magical in them. I’ve written before about the Raft of the Medusa and the amazing story behind it, and a video project made about the painting, in my newsletter about Routines. I confess that something needs to have a hook to keep my attention, but that hook can take many forms. Even when the hook is science fiction, like Star Wars, my favorite moments from movies like that are the human ones. My favorite scene in all of Star Wars has nothing to do with space ships or laser swords — it’s two people having an argument in a hallway.

I Feel Like I’ve Used This Example Before

I like to write, as you might have noticed. I enjoy the process of converting thoughts into words and communicating and telling stories. I love doing it! I also love it when people read what I’ve written (so, you know, tell your friends).

What I tend to write tends to have a tendency toward the fantastic. That’s not to say that it’s all space ships and dinosaurs, but the hook that interests me enough to propel my fingers to write a piece of fiction is usually in the category of what is largely referred to as “speculative,” which combines science fiction and fantasy and all that other associated weirdness. I need some level of weirdness to make me want to write something, but I make sure that not everything I write has weirdness or speculative elements.

The example I referenced above is from the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, so stop me if you’ve heard this before. The show was fun and disappointing at the same time, and I rarely watched it. I was a kid, and didn’t appreciate that George Lucas was using a young Indiana Jones to explore the history of the early 20th century. Lots of stuff happened in that era, including the invention of the blues.

Young Indiana Jones often encountered some famous person and, from them, learned some valuable lesson. In this episode, he learned how to play jazz, but he only practiced improvisation. One musician plays the Saints Go Marching In on the piano, and plays it perfectly, much to Indy’s amazement. The lesson imparted to our hero is one imparted to me, too: you have to know how to do it right before you can start improvising it. You must master the mundane before you can start messing with the fantastic.

I lurk on a few message boards for writerly types, and I see a lot of people asking questions about their magic systems, or the power levels of their characters, or what they should name their character’s sword. My advice to them all is the same: who cares? They’re almost always new writers who have never really tried anything before and, influenced by something they’ve watched or read, have lassoed their imaginations and are expressing themselves. This is good! I’m glad they chose to write. But unless there’s something meaty on those bones, it doesn’t matter.

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Post Script

In researching Charlie White, I discovered that he very recently joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, which is mere minutes from where I live. I’d love to meet him sometime, but I’m content to enjoy his work. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I know only from their art (but I wrote about that, too) and I’m not sure I’d know what to do.

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

Death is a character in Pratchett’s work, and he always speaks in all-caps. He is a tender-hearted being who likes cats, but is very serious about his job, which is to help the dead get to their final destinations. He tends to be blunt. People who die in Pratchett’s work often encounter Death, who is usually sympathetic, but being a personification of a concept, can’t really relate.

Terry Pratchett himself died recently, of Alzheimer’s. He got it much earlier than most people, and it finally killed him at age 66. That’s 24 years older than me. I have a history of dementia in my family. Alzheimer’s is part of that terrifying constellation of diseases that slowly, inexorably rob you of your ability to think. Many people think this is a worse fate than slowly losing your physical faculties and dying, infirm but aware of your surroundings. Having seen both processes of aging up close, I cannot say that I prefer one to the other. The looming, large, intractable similarity they share is that they only happen if you get old. We cannot overlook this.

“Hard times? I’m used to them,
Speeding planet burns? I’m used to that,
My life’s so common it disappears.”
— Paul Simon, The Cool, Cool River.

Everybody knows someone who died young. Everybody knows lots of people who died young. It’s so common and tragic that most of us won’t traverse our childhoods without losing someone. But you can’t build an identity around it. It’s sad and it’s terrible. That’s not what this is about. This is about me.

At the age of 42, I have succeeded in not dying young.

I don’t think about dying very much. I don’t fear death. This is not a result of any experience I had. I’ve been ambivalent about death for most of my life. At some point I realized that dying is, at worst, going to sleep and never waking up. As someone who enjoys sleep, I am not bothered by this.

A new wrinkle in my worldview has been the grudging acceptance that I might be wrong. Wrong about what? All of it. For most of my life (let’s say 13 to 35), I was convinced of the impermanence of the physical universe, that human beings are all happenstance conglomerations of matter that get to live for a few decades of interrupted nonexistence, after which we return to a state of not existing. The more time you get, the better. But, fundamentally, we are all animals. We are (mostly) hairless apes who managed to live long enough to receive the genes of our successful ancestors. Consciousness, rather than some kind of end goal of evolution, is a bizarre side effect of the combination of beneficial cognitive variables. Consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, is just a byproduct of the adaptations we developed to survive the conditions of the African savannah. We aren’t even the only ones — Neanderthals and Devonians were pre-human (or protohuman, if you’re feeling deterministic) that emerged around the same time we did, and likely had the same existential questions we do. The actual qualities of being Homo sapiens that made us the dominant hairless ape on this planet are lost to history and are far beyond the scope of the point I’m making which is this:

I’m not so sure about that stuff anymore

I don’t mean I question evolution, only that the physical universe is all there is to it and we hairless apes have the vast mystery of the universe all figured out. I don’t know what caused the spark of doubt in my own certainty. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t the result of any singular moment. I experienced a slow skepticism of orthodoxy, all kinds of orthodoxies, that I could no longer ignore. My thirties were a decade of big changes for me, none of them very visible to someone on the outside, and none of them were spurred by astounding revelations. I just kind of thought about things more and found I was less certain of the old certainties.

I learned more about Zen Buddhism

It feels like a cliche but I was a white man in his mid thirties who got really into eastern philosophy. My doorway into this world was Alan Watts. I happened to be looking at videos on the internet somewhere and happened upon a video somebody made using a bit of one of his lectures. He talks about the fundamental Buddhist concept of existence as a function of being, and the nature of choice.

Watts says this (emphasis mine):

You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups.

And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. “Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration?” And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.

So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth.

You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.

For someone who deals with anxiety and indecision as frequently as he breathes, this is a shattering concept. This is a shaking of the foundations. This is a tectonic shift.

This is a revelation

I hate to mix my religions, but I will anyway. The concept of the revelation is integral to Abrahamic theology. Sometimes the revelations are personal, and God speaks directly to the stunned listener (the listener, I imagine, is always stunned; nobody receives a communique from the divine and thinks “yes, this is exactly what should be happening”). More often, they are second-hand: an Angel, a messenger, comes down to earth and speaks to them for God. Even more potent, and I think more effective, is the public revelation, a kind of celestial music festival where the main stage is, for example, a guy handing out commandments.

Moments of revelation are a reliable narrative device that gives me endless pleasure. I love when a character realizes something that alters the course of his life and, thus, the story. The music swells, the camera zooms slowly in, and the neurotransmitters for pleasure hit me like a brick. God, I love it so much. Here are two of my favorites:

Luke Skywalker is a kid in over his head. A plucky rebellion short on able pilots gives him a rickety old star fighter because an old friend and one of their own can vouch for him. He is just one among an entire fleet, doing his best. He’s given the fifth position in a squadron of five, tasked with defending far more experienced bomber pilots who have to land the football directly into the arms of a receiver so far away and so small that even otherwise hopeful rebels can’t imagine hitting such a small target. Luke watches in horror as every other experienced pilot is put out of action and he, alone, can save the rebels from certain death. He can’t do it. How could he do it? He just watched veteran pilots try and fail. It’s hopeless. He squints into the unfamiliar bomb viewfinder. The galaxy is doomed to fall as the rebellion’s secret base is blown to pieces by the Death Star.

Until a voice pops into Luke’s head. It’s the Jedi who just died at the business end of the sword of the guy who’s also blowing up all of Luke’s friends. We watched Obi-Wan Kenobi give Luke some rudimentary lessons on the true nature of the universe. It’s nothing very complicated. Use the Force. Luke knows what that means: reach out with his feelings, and don’t rely on what his machines tell him. Kenobi even tells him not to trust his own eyes, to trust his instincts, his connection to the universe, the energy field surrounding everything. It’s ridiculous, but it suddenly makes sense. It’s a counter factual, unmoored and against everything he was previously led to believe. So he turns off his targeting computer and trusts his feelings. [1]

Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/zR7CeC-rqiE

That’s the first one. The second one is much more recent and not nearly as famous. It’s a revelation in a very religious sense, because it’s happening to a pastor who has lost of faith after witnessing the death of his wife. She lived just long enough after being struck by a vehicle to unleash a string of nonsense non sequiturs. The pastor interpreted them as the meaningless words of a woman dying a meaningless death in a meaningless universe and abandoned his faith. But the universe of the movie Signs is anything but meaningless.

It’s not until the pastor’s remaining family is threatened by an intractable, deadly creature from another planet (!) that his wife’s revelation is revealed to him. They spend a terrible night in the basement, menaced by these beings who try over and over again to get to them. The pastor calms his terrified daughter with the story of her birth, the first of every person’s revelations, as the monsters close in. The morning brings hope that they lived through it, until the shocking reveal where we finally see one of these creatures in full view, in stark daylight, cradling the body of the pastor’s asthmatic son. Here comes the second revelation, as the Pastor flashes back to the meaningless babble of his dying wife, which now suddenly has context. One of her utterances was “swing away, Merrill.” The pastor looks over at Merrill and sees him standing below the mounted trophy he got for hitting a ball extremely hard for the longest recorded home run. We know from earlier conversations that Merrill was an unparalleled talent, but struck out more than he hit. “It felt wrong not to swing,” he explains in an earlier scene, unapologetically. The pastor repeats her words to him, and suddenly that night she seemed to speak nonsense makes perfect sense after all. These are three revelations in one scene. It’s like this movie was made for me. [2]

Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/bjv7CVhZXNs

My own revelations

I do most of my best work when I’m thinking, and thinking about Alan Watts‘s words was, I suppose, a kind of personal revelation for me. I had never heard what he was saying before. It made sense. It was an explanation of the universe that, to use a word heard most in creative writing classes, resonated. It’s tempting to use the word “resonate” because it has an attractive physicality. It’s an accurate description of the way a revelation bounces around inside you like an echoing musical tone bounces around inside the body of a violin.

Alan Watts has a nice, English-accented voice with the bristly edge of a tobacco habit. A quick perusal of his biography shows a man of many dimensions, just like any of us. He died young (58, only 16 years older than me), of complications from alcoholism. Even a man who spoke so eloquently of the freedom from the chains of a mortal existence was bound by them. He addressed this in many of his lectures, so it’s not much of a revelation — we are all creatures of the universe, and that sometimes includes destructive habits. His choice to drink his heart to death (he died of heart disease, technically) was spurred by an addiction, but he made his choices. It is the rare person with a drinking problem who does not suspect that they have a drinking problem.

Alan Watts, warts and all, gave me an excuse to not worry about things. He gave me a reason to stop the spinning brain cycles I spent worrying about things I could control and things I couldn’t. The solution to indecision is to decide. The cure for anxiety is information. Even more startlingly, the enemy of worry is action.

Don’t sit and stew, plan and do

The above is a quote from my therapist, who might have gotten it from somewhere else, but I learned it from him. It’s a nice summation of cognitive behavioral therapy. Rather than baste in our own juices, or masticate the gristle of our worries, devise a solution to your problems and execute it. When I learned this, when I really absorbed this lesson, it was likely the first of many revelations I would have in that office. This is how it works: you’re worried about that mole on your arm, the one that looks funny. You can sit in misery and worry about having cancer, or you can go to a doctor. This won’t prevent you from getting cancer, but it will eliminate the worry. It might lead you to additional worrying that you might die from the cancer you might have, but there’s a long way between a diagnosis and death. The point is nicely summarized by this quote from Alan Watts: “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

If I dig a bit deeper in my own biases, I can see a tendency toward Zen Buddhism specifically for its similarity to the cognitive therapy that has been responsible for so much of my personal growth. They both speak to the importance of reason and clear thinking. My life got measurably better when I started internalizing those concepts.

Thank you for reading, dear reader. This is the longest one yet, and I hope I didn’t bore you.

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1. What we don’t see is another revelation — Han Solo changes his mind about the Rebellion and comes back to rescue Luke. He, too, trusted his feelings.

2. People like to criticize this movie for the apparent plot hole that aliens vulnerable to water decided to invade a planet covered in it. I take issue with those who take issue with this because they’re missing the entire point of the movie: there are no coincidences. They picked a planet with water so they could be defeated by clever humans who noticed they were vulnerable to it. The Pastor’s wife had a dying revelation that her husband had to “see” and that Merrill needed to swing. Their daughter left glasses of water around the house specifically so Merrill had a ready supply of ammunition. Her brother had asthma specifically so his lungs would be closed when the alien unleashed its poisonous gas into his face. The unlikely coincidences of the final act of the movie are entirely the point the movie is making: there are no coincidences, and the universe might actually have some meaning behind it after all.