Go to Costco for all the other shit. Put on the songs of the dead man who makes you remember that we are all just here for a moment. That we are tumbling through this life and are lucky when our fingers brush against one another, when we can look around with gratitude. That money is an indignity we must weather without losing sight of other more important things. Remember to thank god for Costco despite the bill somehow always being at least $200. It has surely saved you some other indignity along the way, or at least that’s what the promise of Costco entails.

Research business licenses. Research home chef platforms. Research fines for operating without a business license. Shit, undo that search and do it again on incognito mode. Is it too late? Probably too late. Guess you’re getting a business license.

Meet with Hollywood producers over Zoom, who always have great things to say before they end the call and return to their mysterious lives without another word. Wipe down the dusty surface you noticed out of the corner of your eye while you were reading your pitch for the 388th time. Look one more time for those keys you lost two weeks ago. What a small and persistent and laughable headache.

Sit with your child and wonder what he will be like when he can speak. Try to remember your eldest at this stage. Could you have predicted his sense of humor? His sudden toddler fury, the look on his face when he just as quickly lets go of what has enraged him and returns fully to love, forgiving you with the ease of a Zen master. Remember the dead singer’s three year old and be willing to weather anything your child throws your way, feel the same desperation to cling to him as he does to you.

Fuck! The dish soap. Add a splash of water to your current allotment and hope that the weakened suds can still clean and keep your family safe.

Write three sentences for a new book you’ve begun, despite having four other so-far-unpaid projects in the works. Check flight prices to go see your family, then see if your agent has somehow emailed you good news that you missed. The magic of this career, the possibility of an email with a check attached to it. Or at least the promise of a check. The promise of an email with the promise of a check with the promise of…. Plan a simple dinner at home, but run around too long and feel the pangs of hunger, see the family unraveling in discomfort, so overpay for a delivered meal by $16, promising yourself frugality tomorrow.

Sign up for the free trial of Canva for the third time, and create another flyer to market the skills that you believe are marketable. The wider world might ask for more tangible evidence of these marketable skills, but it will not provide you the opportunity to prove you have them. Just answer the yes or no question, please. So you play around with a flyer, despite the fact that flyer-making is not one of your aforementioned marketable skills.

Add three events to your calendar and find yourself sighing. Roll your eyes at the sighing. Take a beat and appreciate the body’s ability to sigh. How it has designed a little valve in order to better carry the weight of a life lived. Roll your eyes at your own phrasing, at the melodrama that a life of privilege can be capabale of, then return to videos of the dead singer and remember: we are only passing through. Hang onto the gratitude of the sentiment, slippery as it may be, as if your fingers were covered in—

Fuck, fuck, fuck, the dish soap. As soon as you open your computer up that’s on your list. Do it. Do it.

Which begs the question: what is one of your book clubs that you haven’t attended in months reading next? Place a hold at the library. Gah, 12 weeks. Return to your flyer. Make another cup of coffee and, since your family will not have dinner with you today, plan the penance of a meal to make up for the other day’s $16 fiasco. Be thankful that you are the thankful kind, that you have an armory of hot sauces that can make almost any dinner palatable, if not a downright treat. Consider becoming an online gratitude influencer. Hot sauce influencer? Gratitude for hot sauce influencer? Is that a paid gig?

Indulge your guilt and take inventory of everything you have not done recently. Called your mother or reached out to old friends; spent a few hours alone with your spouse; written 1,000 words in a day; earned a paycheck; sat for a moment outside without reaching for your phone; practiced your French; communicated well; watched a good film; prioritized your sleep; hung onto gratitude.

Remember the dead singer asking if you’re carrying around guilt unworthy of being carried. Fuckin’ shed it, he said. Is it of any use to carry it now? Would he wish he felt more guilt if he were still singing today? Would he absolve himself, or merely wish he could? Surely there is guilt that you deserve to carry.

Kneel on the ground and coo back and forth with your infant for a while. Pick up your eldest from his daycare and delight at his cry of “papa!”, at his smile. There are some things in the end that the indignities of money cannot touch.

Place the order for the dish soap and feel on top of the goddamn world.

If you knew about him before his death, maybe you cried at the news. Thought back to when you saw him live, the special hold he had on a crowd, the way he sang with such love for the music. Maybe you remember the stories he told between songs, long metaphorical explanations of the feeling he was trying to capture, or how the inspiration for this next one was about a couple who spoke to the dead. You may remember who he invited onto the stage with him, or how he brought the audience to sing along. Or maybe when he unplugged his guitar and let just the instrument and his voice carry through the venue, through a crowd holding their breath in wonder.

I went to see Glen as part of The Swell Season in 2009. My sister and I drove from Las Vegas to watch the show in LA, and drove back after the concert to make my 8 a.m class. Except Glen loved playing music so much that the encore was approximately—in my memory and in the repeated story I’ve told of that concert—two hours long (and featured Jason Segel singing out his phone number). We didn’t leave LA until around two in the morning, arriving in Vegas just long enough to take a cat nap in the car before class. There was some spine-tingling story he told about a woman he met on an elevator and the loss she’d encountered, though the details escape me and the lone video I took is sitting somewhere in the purgatory of lost concert footage. Then LA Lakers coach Phil Jackson was in attendance. During Glen’s unplugged rendition of When Your Mind’s Made Up a string on his guitar snapped but he just kept right on going, to rowdy applause. These are details that aren’t very meaningful but which I feel compelled to share for some reason, reminescence as grief processing, I suppose.

Maybe, like me, you’ve been engrossed in the tributes people have posted for Glen. Fellow musicians, but more often than not, just someone who watched him play. I imagine almost everyone who watched him play has felt the urge to pen their own tribute these last two days. Even if you didn’t know about him before Wednesday morning, you might have gotten the sense already that Glen Hansard was a man who lived in a way that inspired tributes.

“You’ve built the chair that will serve people beyond you.” He often revealed this admirable life philosophy of caring about the music itself, and caring about others.

Here he is on becoming a father at 52:

“For 52 years I was the most important person in my own life, and then suddenly I got a complete perspective shift, and I’m absolutely loving it. To be of service to this young mind, to this young life, is just ...” Unusually for such a loquacious person, he is temporarily lost for words. “I can’t believe I didn’t do it before now. Isn’t it true that when the student is ready, the teacher appears?”

I came across all these videos, all these versions of him singing his songs, or other people’s songs, and he’s singing like he still loves every word of it. The sense I am left with after all of this is not as straightforward as grief or sadness. That’s there, yes. I feel the literal loss of this man and his soul. The world feels worse off because he’s gone, noticeably lacking.

But just beyond that sense of loss is awe. It’s an appreciation for how Glen Hansard seemed to approach his art, and his limited time on this earth. More than most, he understood it was limited, often ending concerts with Leonard Cohen’s Only Passing Through. I’m filled with apprecation for the goodness he spread in interviews, in his banter with the audience. I can’t and don’t aspire to the breadth or scope of his life, but I do aspire to the manner in which he viewed and impacted the world. At the heart of every Instagram tribute I saw, there is this often an acknowledgment that we are not just fans of his music, but his world view. At the passsion and selflessness and appreciation he carried with him, on and off the stage.

I’ll leave you with perhaps my favorite Glen Hansard performance. A capella, whiskey glass in hand, singing The Parting Glass, a folk song often sung at Irish funerals.

A sheepish smile, a tamping down of the acknowlegment of my luck, knowing that a certain amount was expected and healthy (we must count our #blessings), but too much of it was gloating. A fine line to walk, but in a relatively unburdened life, I didn’t complain about being forced on that plank.

Of course, it was hard to truly appreciate that luck, not having known much of anything else. I had a only few years of privileged struggle and aimlessness out of college before my first book deal catapulted me into this sort of indepenence, into the kind that no one would really mistake for wealth, but which can be clearly recognized as good fortune. My schedule was the open source of envy, a running joke among my friends (this same friend and I once joked about meetings, how the biggest perk of my career might have been how few I attended—though it turned out I had a rare one the very next day to which I was embarrassingly late).

Now? Now I’m stealing the moment to write these words in a rocking chair my wife uses for middle-of-the-night breastfeedings of a three-week old. He was quick to soothe, my tiny child, and since last night I had given up hope of sneaking in a writing session and gone to bed relatively early, I found myself relatively awake as the sun lightened and what sounded like an owl hooted improbably between the rumble of the train headed between the airport and downtown. So I put my infant down, hovering over his bassinet to make sure his initial squirm would not escalate, and then I grabbed my computer to write. Used to be that I was so rich in time that I gave it away freely, eagerly. I was gladly the first one to raise my hand if a friend needed a favor. I could write always write later. Start the day with all the others for a change, or, end it deep into the night. Skip one of my two midweek matinees to catch up on my word count. I slung rice bowls at my friends’ food truck and carried kegs of my friends’ beers, stood in line, handed off keys to a friend of a friend.

Now? Now I steal.

Somewhere in my Word or Google files, there’s a document that has a lone sentence, written in the middle of the night some time ago, borne out of writer’s block or imposter syndrom or perhaps merely the yearning for a new book deal: A moment of silence for the writer I used to be. The melodrama!

I must have written a bad chapter or something and gone scrolling through old documents looking for proof that I used to be able to do this better. I know that there have been times in the past couple book-deal-less years where I’ve second guessed my abilities. Where I’ve been critical of my prose and wondered if it still carries any sort of flair. Where, I have wondered, is the whimsy I was prone to? Where are the speculative short stories I could churn out at a moment’s notice? Have I forgotten how to weave insights into my writing, the kind that made readers find my work relatable, the kind that made my voice so clear?

Of course, what I was forgetting when I wrote that woe is me missive into the void, is that the writer I used to be longed to be better at plotting, and never thought of the economy of language, could not employ succinctness if he tried. He second-guessed his abilities just as often, scrolled through one-star reviews to self-flagellate, failed to finish fifty percent of the short stories he started.

That jerk also had the luxury of time. He had the gall of a 9 a.m alarm clock with an “alright, let’s not push it” backup at 9:15. The luxury of book deals with hardly a gap between, and of earning dollars while living in pesos. He was not yet jaded by multiple publishers promising the world and delivering two instagram posts, had already forgotten what it was like to spend months on a book only for it to be rejected.

How could I possibly be that writer again? I am not the same person anymore, nor, necessarily, would I want to be. Oh, sure, I’d love to have the time again. Would love a favorable income-to-expenses currency exchange.

But I have always professed to be a believer in change, an evangelist repeating the gospel: the only constant is change. Grasping onto the past is a fool’s instinct, fingers gripped around an unraveling rope, the other side of which is no longer even tethered to what we think we’re holding onto. We’re just holding on to the memory of what we had. An idea, always. The past is not a truth, but a story we tell ourselves.

Much better to let go and reach for something new, and not with desperation, but with tenderness. To hold the writer I am now in my arms the way I do my sons. Perhaps with a frustration that they don’t let me sleep as much as I like, or don’t say please, or poop in uncontained ways, but with love nonetheless.

I should embrace this new stage of my career as I have embraced the new stage of my life. Putting aside the things I cannot control (even if I may grumble as I do) and honoring the best part of who I used to be: someone who could appreciate the luck he had. Easier, perhaps, under the circumstances I mentioned above—9:30 chilaquiles and a deadline not quite looming in the distance, merely forecast—but now is when I get to use those muscles I developed then. Writing muscles and appreciation muscles alike.

I can appreciate being able to deftly pace out a sex scene during nap time on Monday, perhaps pivot to the goofiness of a children’s graphic novel later that night when everyone’s asleep, pitch usable ideas to my partner on a high-concept TV adaptation of a book on Tuesday when kiddo #1 is at daycare. I have hundreds more books read and movies watched under my belt than who I used to be, alongside the wisdom they brought me.

Yes, my next book might have to come via a hurried sentence typed into my phone at night, or scribbled into my notebook during my shift at the bookstore. But I am lucky, after all, to still be able to steal these moments. To have a partner with a steady income and insurance that tempers the lull between book deals. That I still have inspiration, an agent who believes in me, health.

Maybe I cannot produce a book a year with six or seven(teen) trips mixed in, but I could once, which is not necessarily something that I have lost, but something I was lucky enough to have before life changed, as it was always going to.

“Used to be” is a wonderful phrase for the purposes of nostalgia, for a brief harkening back to another life. But a more useful question to me is who am I now? What could I still be?

Maybe I am a thief now. So, what? Let me be a deft one. Let me pickpocket a book into existence. Let me concoct a literary heist around my schedule, one hand rocking the baby to sleep, the other playing with the toddler, the sleight of hand all the more impressive for my lack of available hands.

This is terrible news for every argument I formerly “won” about how the arts are inherently human and can never be replicated by machines. It’s even worse news for all those I planned to win in real or imagined conversations moving forward.

At least the article was released right before the deadline to join the class action lawsuit of authors vs Anthropic, providing a convenient reminder for me to cash in on perhaps the last paycheck I’ll ever get for my writing (I’ll be dubious that the courts in the US will actually force a corporation to write checks to artists until the money hits my bank account).

I went to a show recently here in Chicago, a variety act of sorts honoring actresses of the 80s and 90s, put on by local star and and prolific performer of delightfully weird shows Grelley Duvall. It was accompanied by a killer band pairing clips and recreations of scenes from deep cuts with over-the-top, impressive dance numbers, and, perhaps strangely, but for which I’ll offer no further details here, my son’s cinematic debut.

I left the theater feeling energized, delighted not just by the content and comedy of the past two hours, but for the fact that it was a show I could attend, for the show’s love letter to actresses, film, music and the human urge/desire/ability to create. And though it was an homage to an era, an impressive exercise in discovering niche performances, it was also the always-brave undertaking that every piece of art is: revealing to the world a sliver of your brain.

Even the most vapid, cynically-produced, bottom-line-driven action flick or serialized spy thriller reveals some sort of soul, some hint at the innerworkings of the mind most responsible for its creation, the view that mind holds of humanity.

Most works of art are to one extent or another are acts of collaboration, and are all the more interesting for it, a revelatory string of decisions leading to a final product. If those decisions somehow come together to create something profound, moving, comedic, or in some other way scratches the itch of what it means to be alive, it’s an impressive testament to the human ability to create, to express itself, a monument to talent, or better yet, talents working together.

If that string of decisions misses the mark, it is still delightfully revealing. Of how hard it is to make art. Of our willingness to attempt. Our burning desire to, regardless of the pitfalls. The many, many pitfalls. Our burning desire to make fools ourselves in the attempt to share some piece of our soul, some story that won’t unclaw itself from our minds unless we tell it to the world (or a room full of people, at least).

So perhaps AI can fool us. Congrats, robots, you’ve learned how to trick 7 billion simpletons. Now the least talented among us can write like an amalgamation of all the most talented voices in the course of human literature. And it seems that, unless we are told, we the audience are none the wiser when it comes to the final product.

But that’s just the thing. Art isn’t about the final product, not really. I’m sure a million tech-fanboys and girls are losing their shit right now and setting up “debate me” kiosks, some of them preparing their arguments by asking ChatGPT for talking points, many of which I’m sure will be valid and borderline convincing.

AI-produced art is focused on the product and not the process, which misses the point of creating art (exactly how you’d expect someone who didn’t care much for the humanities in school to miss the point).

If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.

-from Before Sunrise

Part of the beauty of the Grelley Duvall show—of the opera I was fortunate enough to attend the next day, of the sporadic concerts I attend when the time and funds are right, of watching movies written by people, directed by people, performed by people—is knowing the time dedicated to whatever I’m taking in. Dance rehearsals, voice lessons, nights spent plugging away on some story burning to be told, and which fails again and again to unfold on the page the way it does in your head. Hours spent tinkering, whole drafts scrapped, one sentence you’re tinkering with for days, twelve takes of the same shot, wanting all the pieces to align just right. Failing anyway. Failing spectacularly.

Having the time to fail again and again until there is some slight measure of success (however we’re defining success here) is a luxury, particularly for artists, who aren’t exactly known for our ability to bring home the expendable income, save for the tippy top of the pyramid.

I know this better than most. After twelve years of sustaining myself just with writing income, I now work at a bookstore, teach classes online, tutor a Spanish student, am ghostwriting a romance story for a stranger across the world, and worked with an after school program running virtual escape rooms for elementary students. All this while caring for my child a few days a week, dropping him off at day care the other days, being the one in charge in my family for grocery shopping, cooking. Which is to say: time is absolutely a precious commodity to me. If there’s one thing artists and AI evangelists can agree on, it’s that.

But even as my time flits away, becomes more and more precious, I do not want any bit of code that will make this part of my life less time-consuming.

Yes, I want more time. I silently (and sometimes not so silently) beg my son to go to sleep earlier, to get out the door sooner, nap longer, all for an extra few minutes of time in front of the computer stringing words together. Yes, I fantasize about functioning off 4 or 5 hours of sleep rather than 6 or 7 (though a little less so after reading Leila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel), and despite my annoying instance on cooking things from scratch, have begun buying jarred tomato sauce for pasta (gasp!).

As the world further funnels finances and resources upwards, consolidating more and more into the hands of fewer and fewer, making time more fleeting and less financially viable for anyone but consultants and those in private equity, of course I find myself greedily grasping for more time. Time to go watch a show with friends, time to sit on the couch with my wife and watch a terrible 80s movie together, and yes, time to write.

But the very time and effort spent on the final product that AI companies are trying to save us are crucial to what the final product is. Regardless of its quality, regardless of its financial success. The shortcut AI provides undercuts the very venture of art. So maybe the machines have fooled us now. Congrats.

I would never allow a computer algorithm to tuck my son into bed, regardless of how much more efficiently it could accomplish the task, regardless of how maddening it is to sit at the foot of his bed and fail at it. Because that’s a sort of art, too. Inefficient, slightly embarassing, always humbling. But what am I going to do? Not attempt? Outsource the task as if it’s a job and not part of life?

That is why I will never care how good AI is at recreating a final product. I don’t care that it can fool me. The beauty of art, of humanity, is in the attempt.

She’s moving already, gathering jackets and passports, and now I see the glow, now I hear that it’s not rain at all. The crackling is louder now, the world being ripped apart. I reach for the first article of clothing in my drawer, just to be decent when I go peek around the building to see what’s causing the noise outside our bedroom window. Basketball shorts. Chicago in January and I’m in basketball shorts. I’m still fooling myself into thinking I’ll go back to sleep soon.

I open the back door by the kitchen and see smoke, embers. I shut the door, get some pants on, go get a better look from the window by the dining room as I dial 911. 1:14 a.m, my call log marks the occasion. There’s a boom at some point during all of this, too loud for comfort, and yet its place in the order of events in my mind is already lost. Was I in bed still? Reaching for the phone? Rushing out the door?

Now I see that the flames from the restaurant next door are crawling over the wooden fence they put up just this past summer before they opened. This was after they put up the brick wall that blocked all our sunlight, long after the neighborhood spot they took over shut its doors. “Tony’s tired of sweeping,” the owner was quoted when asked by a local paper about his reason for closing up shop. I had spoken to him at least once a week for years and had never known him to speak in the third person. “Tony just wants to sit on the porch.”

I get more clothes on, appropriately lengthed this time, as my wife gathers our toddler, who immediately bursts into confused tears. I double check passports, but my wife’s brain is serving us both better than mine is. I double back and grab my citizenship certificate, because these are the times we live in. The call with 911 drops (my phone is shit) when I’m still giving our address, but by then we are out in the January air, and the lights are already dancing on the neigboring buildings. The trucks are there, plugged in, at work already. I turn back to summon our downstairs neighbor but she’s already pushing the door open.

I go back in to find my cat, accompanied by firefighters with their axes, just like the illustrations in the book I’ve read my son half a dozen times the past two days. The smoke is building, and I see glimpses of the fire reaching our deck. She’s not in her usual hiding spot under our bed, which I’m not surprised by. Eight years ago during the earthquake in Mexico she also found clever spots to hide. I whistle for her, note that the firefighters are wearing their muddy boots inside with a quickly-dismissed but not insignificant measure of annoyance. My poor girl will have to weather another disaster in hiding. It’s only later that I think about how the sound of the earthquake surprised me too, the way the buildings groaned in protest.

And then we are across the street, watching it all go down in safety. My son is shivering in my arms. He’s a Chicago boy through and through, has almost never admitted to being cold, and a part of him must be thrilled that he’s been allowed out without wearing a sweater. But now he comments on how it’s cool to see the trucks, the firefighters plugged into the hydrant. A couple of weeks ago I carried him through the snow at 6 a.m to catch a flight, calling it an adventure. He nodded happily then, and he will again soon, when the two mostly disinterested cops ask me and my neighbors if we have somewhere warm we can go and I suggest we go get a lollipop at the 24 hour convenience store a block away. A firefighter comes by and says they’ve looked for our cat and haven’t found her, but assures us the smoke is light and clearing, that they’ve “got a good knock” on the fire, and that she’ll be okay.

We traipse to the store, our neighbors and us. A young man in a suit speed walks past us, stumbling in the way of young men at 2 am on a Saturday headed for a convenience store. He buys a bag of chips and a gatorade. The employee at the convenience store gifts us water, and a grape lollipop, and some chocolate milk for our little Chicago boy, who’s now in great spirits and eager to play the slot machine by the front. The store clerk casts only passing strange glances when my wife and I take turns running up and down the aisles so that our son can watch us on the CCTV and giggle. It strikes me that I am just like my cat, because eight years ago after the earthquake I gathered with neighbors in the aftermath of two chaotic minutes and felt bonded by what we had all survived.

I walk back alone through the cold to see if the firefighters have cleared away. It is amazing how quickly the night air can turn into something to behold. A few scant snowflakes catch the glow of a streetlight, my footsteps scraping quietly on a street that’s almost never quiet. The fire investigator tells me it will be another twenty minutes, so I saunter back to the store, watching cars ahead of me u-turning as they spot the firetrucks blocking the road. Some drivers wear their curiosity on their faces, others their annoyance.

There’s a lottery machine by the entrance of the store, and my son learned his penchant for gambling from somewhere, so I slip a $5 bill in, feeling lucky. How could I not?

The proximity of death, I am not the first to point out, so easily brings to mind the sanctity of life.

Well before Saturday night and its hellish wake-up call, that sound that I will not be forgetting any time soon, decidedly not rain, I had these words in mind as my next topic to write about here. The sanctity of life, and our utter failure to honor it as a society.

Oh, we say the words often enough, though it hardly ever seems to be with wonder. It is rhetorically, sanctimoniously, with little attachment to life itself. To the snowflakes caught in the street light; the warm body shivering against us; the joy of a grape lollipop; peaceful, uninterrupted sleep; the shock of cold air when we know we have the relief of shelter coming soon; a million quotidian details that feel holy under a magnifying glass but fade to oblivion when not lit by the fire’s glow. It is so easy to forget, I feel it fading even now, two days later, with life and its practicalities intruding on the impulse to marvel at my luck.

The sanctity of life is something I wonder about so often these days when I look to the wider world, to people in power, whether the power they wield is a nation or a gun and impunity from their actions. I wonder when I see a country marching its way toward concentration camps carried by the fervent shouts of a third of its residents, many who claim their bloodthirst is in the name of the sanctity of life. I have never felt so blessed by the world that I would like to stomp others beneath my boot, but maybe I have not experienced the right kind of disaster.

Have they not placed themselves at the shore of death’s lake? Have they been so lucky as to not even feel it lapping at their toes? Have they not imagined it, those final moments, however they may come, and then felt the rush of thankfulness? Have they not thought of the ripples that extend back to the living? Have they never once taken a look at their power and their luck and felt thankful rather than possessive? How can you muster any anger at all if death is kept in mind? If you have held your child in the cold after being awakened to the sound of a fire licking at your bedroom wall?

I think, maybe, it’s because it is so much easier to act big and brash. To scream and beat your chest about how much you care about life and safety and people. But no one I know who values the sanctity of life does so loudly or with fervor. It is not a fire that rages, but rather delicate embers in the aftermath of something more harrowing. You do not fan them in order to burn more, consume more, but rather just to keep the glow alive, something with which to see by, a light with which to remember the only thing that matters.

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The world I assumed I’ve been living in is informed by what I do in my other job (this one, kind of), in which I stare at a computer screen and click around on the internet until I get a good enough idea to jot down, until I focus my energy away from the terrible world of the screen and return to tinkering with words. As anyone who’s spent even a little time online knows, there’s a direct correlation between being on the internet and thinking the world is a terrible place. Which isn’t to say that it’s only terrible because of the internet, buuuut, if you spend all your time in the ocean you’re going to think everything is wet.

In the few months since I started working at the bookstore, people have asked me about my new job and several have made the easy joke, “People still read?”

And yes, the joke is ridiculous because it shows more about the asker’s exposure to the world than the state of the world itself. While it’s a bit of a knife-twist every time I hear it, every time I force the chuckle and say, “We’re out there,” it’s also easy to laugh off. I’m someone who’s in book clubs, who works in the book world, I exist within a bubble of people who enjoy reading more than the average American population. But it’s also a perfectly fair question given…you know, the world. The world which my job on a computer constantly reminds me of.

But when I step in the doors of the bookstore—and remember to stop judging people right away—I am entering a new world. One where everyone reads, or nearly so.

I tend to come back happy from my three or four hour shifts. Not just because my main source of income—and now my secondary source of income—still comes from people buying books. It’s not because I merely like the idea of people reading books; it’s quite crucial to my worldview.

My writing career currently rests in the limbo searching for a new deadline, necessitating more work, more ideas, more pitches, more side gigs, all of which sends me back here to the computer screen, and its pathway to the world of the internet. This, at the same time as fatherhood, especially stay-at-home-dadhood, has shifted my schedule and made time a scarcer commodity. These two coinciding factors, coupled with the financial strain they each incur, have limited my opportunities for socialization with all those people I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself by; people who read books, or are otherwise thoughtful human beings, and who have helped bring balance to my perspective for the past 12 years of being an author, and thus the past decade and a half or so of getting splashed by the internet every day. If that metaphor is tracking.

The argument could surely be made that the world in the past 15 years has grown darker, thus making the need for some world-balancing to be felt more acutely, regardless of what’s been going on in my life, or what percentage of my time is spent on the internet. But that’s really a moot point, or at least one I don’t care to explore right this second.

At the bookstore where I’ve worked for the past few months, I’m now surrounded by strangers who read. Toddlers excited to rush into the children’s section and pick out a book. Teenagers and college kids, this generation we worry is so engrossed in their phones, they come in with nary a glance at their devices, eager for recommendations, eager for the newest graphic novel, the latest installment in their favorite series. In just a couple of months I’ve overheard twenty somethings that were more well-read than plenty of sixty-year-olds wringing their hands about the youth.

My small talk with coworkers invariably veers toward the question, “what are you reading?” which yields much more interesting conversations than society’s usual array of pleasantries with strangers and acquaintances. It’s not necessarily because it’s a more thoughtful question. It’d be easy to answer it superficially, and often the conversation does stop at a title, a synopsis. But I find that more often than not, it ends up being a thoughtful discussion. On the content of the book, or some tangential topic. A discussion on the latest fad genre, on how capitalism and machismo killed the Edmund Fitzgerald, some recollection of a book we read in high school, a confession about what we were like then, some revelation of who we are.

Strange, unearned intimacy perhaps. But we are surrounded by books at all times. These are exercises in human thoughtfulness, four hundred pages (at the most, ideally, according to several of these conversation) of intimacy with a stranger. They represent humanity’s impulse to thoughtfulness. To examine life, unravel the many mysterious threads that make up humanity’s existence. Our virtues and our faults, our vices, our yearning for mearning, our desperation for survival, and how all these things have wound together to create the world we find ourselves in.

When you spend time immersing yourself in thoughtfulness, in, as T.H White wrote, “why the world wags and what wags it,” you can’t help but consider other beings. You care about those outside of yourself. You can see how someone else’s existence might feel, and so you try to act accordingly.

If you consider a caterpillar, for example, actually devote time to it as you might in a book, how are you not filled with wonder? How can violence or ill-intent enter your head if you have spent reading abotu or writing about a fuzzy green tube that wiggles its way up pavement searching for food or habitat we haven’t destroyed, then builds itself a cocoon where it turns itself into soup—a process which our most talented, advanced, well-funded, and, yes, thoughtful, minds still can’t figure out—only to build itself back into a new mesmerizing horrifying creature that is also in search of nature’s scant supply of food and shelter, how do you become a selfish human being after doing that?

The same applies to when you regularly spend time in another’s brain. When you expose yourself to the thoughts and brain processes of another human being. Ruminate on the grief of the world’s most renown English-language writer after losing a child for three hundred pages and you’ll be hard-pressed to not think about the precious, fragility of life. You think anyone tearing families apart or starving children has read and absorbed Hamnet?

I don’t actually know, of course. But we all get a sense that they haven’t, right?

For those few hours three times a week, I exist in an entirely different world. Or maybe not a different one, just the one that exists forgotten beneath out usual world, the one whose digital access paints a grimmer picture. Maybe it’s the simple fact that I am not generally connected to the internet during those hours, and this whole extrapolation is me overblowing what it’s like to exist in the real world.

With the caveat that there are shitty books out there who lead people to think less, or think less generously, surrounding myself in these human paragons is transporting. Not just to the many worlds on the shelves, but to a different world entirely. One in which life is more closely examined, cherished, marveled at. One in which those around me also routinely reflect. On what, it hardly matters, just that they do. Or at the very least, I assume they do. And that, it turns out, has made all the difference.

To be clear, I don’t care if someone has legal status or not. There are legal avenues with which to approach deportation (even if I am morally against it), and these people who are sucking up taxpaying dollars to play soldier on our peaceful streets are not following those legal avenues. They’ve had to be barred from courthouses in Illinois because they keep snatching people who are trying to attend their immigration hearings. They’ve detained citizens and people with legal status because they are out to cause fear, not corral criminals. 2.5% of those swept up in raids in Chicago had a criminal record.

They’ve made it clear they don’t care about the law at all, as they continuously break the law to snatch people who are at work, who are not criminals, who are US citizens. They lie when judges confront them, they lie to the media, continuously saying that they feel threatened. They shot at a woman claiming she rammed their car when video evidence proved they initiated the contact, and then further evidence showed the officer who shot bragged about it. Charges against the woman involved have been dropped.

Every video you see of these sadistic cosplayers on the streets shows them decked out in military gear while teachers in vests blow whistles and cars honk their horns. They respond by pointing weapons, breaking windows, dragging people out of cars, tear gassing children, and generally acting as if they’re badasses. As if tough guys need to lie about getting rocks thrown at them, or as if they need to repeatedly punch a 60 year old who’s on the ground, as if anyone decked out in military gear with legal impunity and the full force of a corrupt federal government is in any way tough.

They’re dressed like they’re going to war, they cover their faces to hide who they are, and I don’t for a second believe they care about their own safety. They do it because they want to get away with what they’re doing. Because, until something changes, until all of this is over, they will get away with whatever they want to do. Whatever laws they want to break. Whatever atrocities they want to commit. They do it not to make anyone safer but because they are bringing camera crews with them and will edit it all to look like badasses instead of the feckless cowards they are, hiding behind power and a centralized federal government that I imagine most of them have spent their lives ranting against.

They are breaking windows to haul people out of their cars without warrants, then sending them into a blackbox of a detention center where people who make it out testify about the inhumane conditions.

All of this…to what end? This phrase keeps bouncing around my skull, growing in volume and despair with every repetition. To what end? How has anyone at all been convinced that this is going to create a better country? Is that even a claim that people are making anymore?

Every time they comment on some travesty caught on camera, DHS asserts that they’re getting rid of dangerous criminals, but without a warrant, without due process of law, how are we supposed to believe them. How do they even know? They have already been caught lying, and every quote from them feels like another lie, of course using dehumanizing language referring to people as nothing other than “illegal aliens.”

The motivations for that choice are easy to suss out from anyone familiar with how fascism operates, or anyone who’s cracked open a history book (or at the very least read a book where the bad guys are modeled on real world dictators and autocrats): the more people see a perceived enemy as other or less than human, the easier it is to turn away when cruelties are unleashed on these people.

Tearing teachers away from kids in front of them, disappearing their parents, throwing them in cages meant for ten people but packed with eighty, not providing adequate food or water, keeping pregnant women locked up resulting in miscarriages…if your base sees the people these tragedies are happening to as, well, not quite people, then it’s so much easier to get away with doing it.

But again. To what end? Is it because they want to keep escalating the cruelty? Is it because Broadview and Alligator Alcatraz and whatever other “detention facilities” are going to be places where the atrocities are ratcheted up?

Is the goal to…what, deport every single undocumented immigrant? To pull taxpayer money from every other function of government in order to pretend every left-leaning American city is a warzone in need of saving? Is it to establish a militaristic presence ahead of elections in order to secure a continuing regime?

The detention facitlies already resemble concentration camps, though I guess they aren’t yet murdering detainees en masse. Is that the end goal? What problems, exactly, will this cruelty solve? The only argument that is often thrown out to justify this is that it’s ridding the country of violent criminals. Which is largely false, unless you’re the kind of sadist who is okay with catching a few criminals in a wide net that includes mostly innocent people. Likely because you don’t care about those innocent people in the first place, thanks to the aforementioned dehuminization, the severe lack of empathy for anyone that isn’t within arm’s length.

My hope is that most of these people are not smart enough to be that nefarious. They’re evil and shitty and if others don’t stand in their way, they might very well reach some of the worst case scenarios I’ve laid out above. I hope it’s just ranting though, and there are still some safeguards in the threadbare remains of American democracy and decency to keep us from reaching that point. All of these people though, the men in the masks and the fascists sending them out onto American streets, they suffer from the same impulse that I accused thirteen-year-olds who kicked my butt playing video games online and then hurled slurs at me. The only way they know how to make themselves feel big is to make others feel small.

We’d go to pee and think about what to pack for our kids’ lunch and share posts on our social media about what areas required visibility or invisibility from its residents, depending on the geographic coordinates of their birth, or perhaps their appearance.

We struggled to get our children to brush their teeth and we escaped into three pages of a novel while they watched some morning television and we begged them to put their shoes on so we could leave the house on time, the world carrying on with a schedule despite it all. We checked the weather because we had no idea what late October called for anymore, and we pressed our cheeks against our toddler’s, thankful amid the chaotic morning for the luck in our lives. There are much worse ways to press your cheek lovingly against your toddler’s, just beyond your door, in fear, in terror, shielding them not just from the hypothetical dangers of the world, but the real ones. How, how, how can people have this luck and not want it extended to others? Why is it a human impulse to want to hoard luck rather than share it?

Biking to daycare, we saw the ghosts of tear-gas, clawed-off stickers on lightposts, posters in storefront windows. We went about our jobs, sometimes with abandon, thankful for mundane tasks, for problems that were not existential in nature, did not threaten to snowball in our minds. We opened up social media to repost valuable information, then scrolled past ads, people creating content to give us all stuff to scroll past. We scrolled past videos of horrors, videos of people mocking horrors, ads, a funny cartoon, a sports highlight, horrors, content, memes, horrors disguised as content.

We limited ourselves to reading the words of government officials, lest the head-spinning lies force us to scream into a pillow again. We turned the televison on, thankful for art and entertainment and sports. This was a cowardly distraction from life and yet absolutely crucial in order to continue with the will to go to work, to build up some tolerance for the next day’s events. We had to pick which calamity to think about, and stories cushioned the blow these calamities imparted. Laughter to build up the spirit, emoitions other than rage and powerlessness.

We rummaged through the fridge trying to find ideas for dinner. We stayed strong and did not glance at our phones for an hour, knowing the havoc it wrought on our minds. Little match for the havoc the world itself was bringing to our doorsteps, but at least here we were in control.

We went apple-picking and to pumpkin patches and found joy and made necessary purchases, sat outside on nice days, peered into dark-tinted cars wondering if today was the day we’d have to face masked, unaccountable cowards who point guns at pregnant women and tear gas children and lie, and lie, and lie. We read lighthearted books when we went to bed, and begged our minds to be quiet in the time between setting the book down on the nightstand and blessed sleep. We signed petitions and we made donations to organizations in need, we bought stupid shit online and we took to the streets, sometimes to raise our voices, sometimes because we needed milk.

We thought about our luck and whether it would last, whether we were letting something slip through our fingers, this moment in time before things got worse, the opportunity to do more.

ICIRR

I remember, too, laying on my friend’s floor during a sleepover. The urge to keep giggling about whatever bullshit we were giggling about, but also a deep desire for silence. Not just out of tiredness, but because I so desperately wanted my friend’s cat to approach. I remember once laying uncomfortably on my belly for hours on the carpet, sleeping bag tossed over me, unwilling to move for fear that my motion would scare the cat away after it had finally deemed me worthy as a mattress, my secret goal for almost all of my sleepovers with this friend. maps

We often remember the past in the inital feeling that it conjures. The yearning of young adulthood. The nostalgia of childhood. The wild freedom of our collegiate days. An image flashing in our brains, a swirl of emotions, a detail that stands out. But we dismiss our ability to reach deeper, to inhabit our previous selves.

When I was a basketball coach, I learned to share this one exercise with my players. I’d have them stand in a line, then reach up as high as they could go. All of them, in keeping with what the coaching book I read had predicted, kept their feet on the ground as they extended an arm up. Okay, now reach a little higher than that, I’d say. Same instructions, but the prompt made them think about what muscles they hadn’t yet employed. They rose up on their tip toes, they extended the shoulder a little more. Okay, now reach a little higher than that. They gained another half inch, maybe more.

While it’s true that some of the past is lost to time, forever misplaced in the convoluted and enigmatic self-erasing folds of memory, we do have the ability to reach a little further.

And here lies the doubled-up comfort in the exercise: the realization at how much, too, we have forgotten. For one, there’s the ability to disappear in the past in a way that we did not think ourselves capable. We can escape, for however long we can stay focused on the memory, whatever is troubling us right now. We read books and watch movies for the escapism, and stepping into our past selves is not unlike re-reading a faovrite book, or re-watching a movie we grew up with. The other comfort in the exercise is the realization that the idea of a rose-colored past exists because joy outlasts trauma. That’s a reductive way to put it, I know. But! The pains and despairs, the wider world, and whatever was going within it that was causing us grief, those get softened by time. We might be able to reach and arrive at an approximation of those feelings, but they’re ghosts. The good and the bad.

And one day this will go that way too.

One day, most of this will have been forgotten. It will have passed. Who knows what surrounds that future. It might very well be worse than this. But all of that has not yet been written, could be altered, is unknowable and therefore could be very different from what we imagine. It’s for us to worry about later.

All this to say that, in these terrifying times of fascist hordes disappearing neighbors, tear gas in my neighborhood, at a grocery store I shop at, in these times of endless videos of masked cowards tearing families apart, endless images of dead and starving children at the hands of governments who somehow believe this is the right thing to do, meatheads on social media asserting confidently that tragedy should befall others because of the geographic coordinates of their birth, in these times where wealth seeks to consolidate itself against all reason and godamn humanity, in the face of all of this, and the myriad small actions we can take to fight the horrors, the acts still in our power to push back against these horrors, acts we should absolutely be undertaking, learning about, encouraging others to undertake, as we scream at the top of our lungs to just for the love of god make this planet as good as it could be if only people could find it in themselves to not be raging dicks, all of this to say…

We might need the occasional escape. A screenless, content-less (but content) escape into our own minds. Into who we used to be. The joys we’ve hung onto, the traumas we’ve escaped. Let us reach a little further into ourselves.

When the earthquake hit Sunset Lanes in Monterey, CA, Richie had already let go of the last bowl in his so-far perfect game.

It wasn’t The Big One, but it was a 6.4, the biggest one in years. Some people at the bowling alley would tell you that it felt bigger than that, especially Leslie Truffles, the man playing Richie in the Monterey County Silver-Senior Singles League championship match that night.

Leslie Truffles, who’d finished with a score of 297, argued that the earthquake had been massive, catastrophic, had clearly knocked down the pins well before Richie’s peach-colored size 14 could hit them. A re-bowl was in order, he said. Many of the people watching the match from the snack bar area had a grudge against Leslie Truffles, certain that he had overcharged them that time they took their car into his mechanic shop. He’d overstated how much labor had been required to replace their alternators. They knew how long it took to replace an alternator, and it certainly wasn’t what Leslie Truffles had written down on the invoice. So even though they had been busy taking cover from the earthquake and weren’t entirely sure whether Richie’s ball had hit before the earthquake, they loudly proclaimed that this was the case, that the earthquake was barely felt. Some of them hadn’t even really noticed the shaking and didn’t know why everyone was making such a fuss.

The problem was that there was no established protocol set forth in the League rulebook, and so League president Billy Gabes was unable to make a decision. The two sides argued endlessly. Some of the audience members insisted that they’d heard the smack of Richie’s ball hitting the pins. Leslie Truffles argued that those members of the audience were insane, and liars, and for that matter, their hearing aids were turned all the way down. After they asked Leslie to repeat this argument, they were forced to surrender that point, but insisted this didn’t change a thing. They stood by their argument, despite not being able to prove how they knew it was the sound of Richie’s ball and not one of the many other balls being bowled at the time the earthquake hit.

Richie, however, stayed quiet. Normally he would have gladly taken a replay on the frame and avoided all the brouhaha. But Richie had never done a single perfect thing in his life. He had averaged low B’s throughout school, his sinusitis kept him from ever feeling completely healthy, he’d never cooked a burger just right, they were always too raw or overdone, too fat in the middle or crumbled at the first bite. His work performance reviews were always satisfactory, never excellent, he’d married a woman who lied to him. At the age of fifty-seven, Richie was ready to do one thing perfectly, even if it was with the help of an earthquake.

So instead of arguing, Richie just sat back and observed the bowling alley. The clownish shoes, their leather cracked with wear, their laces knotted beyond undoing, all of them tossed uncaringly onto the counter into a pile that split pairs apart. Florescent bowling balls rolling imperfectly toward the pins, causing white explosions that only a few seconds later would undo themselves, everything back to normal, as if life had a rewind button. The unseen machinery spitting the balls back out, people holding their hands over the air current to dry the sweat from between their fingers, sending the ball down the lane only to have it come back an undone explosion later. A group of teenagers in Lane 1 were being raucous, throwing the ball between their legs, behind their back, high up into the air so that it landed with a satisfying boom, the sound like a promise of violence, the kids’ laughter coming across as intentionally amplified, as if they were trying to convince the world that they were having fun. The snack bar, with its greasy pizza slices drying out under heating lamps, one lone pretzel left hanging in the glass case, the soda dispenser leaking cola syrup, the fridge being emptied of its beers by people who had tired of arguing with Leslie Truffles and needed alcohol’s calming presence to keep from getting physical against him. One of those spectators brought Richie a beer and offered words of encouragement, then went back into the argument, ready to point out logical fallacies in Leslie Truffles’ protestations.

After an hour of this, a few beers, pleasant observations of the bowling alley, the argument still at a heated impasse, Richie stood up and announced that he would re-bowl the last frame of his so-far perfect game. Yes, he was tired of aiming for perfection, of struggling for it, of believing in his bones that he could achieve it for once in his life only to be denied, only to be proved yet again that what he was best at was messing things up in one way or another. But he was also used to it, and it was getting late, and maybe he could throw another strike anyway.

He re-laced his shoes so that they were just right, readjusted his wrist brace, aired out his palm, picked up his size 14 peach-colored ball, and walked up to the lane. He took two deep breaths, picturing, as he always did, the way his wife had looked at him that one night at the billiards hall, her eyes bright with love, her smile tight with lust, the lighting in the room seemingly intent on making Richie remember his wife exactly that way, at her most beautiful. He lined up his toe with the center marking on the floor, took two long steps and let go of the ball.

That’s when the aftershock hit.

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I don’t mean to say that I know every ounce of my being, nor do I know who I will always be; it’d be clear I haven’t been paying much attention to books if I thought that for a moment. But I’ve spent the vast majority of my life throwing myself into narratives, learning how dots connect, seeing causality at play, and being swept up in prose’s insight into character, into the way the world works. And because of that, I think I can take a big-picture view of myself and my life and come up with a semi-clear picture.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s the only way to get a picture of yourself. All art probably helps, as does therapy, or just prolonged and repeated bouts of self-reflection coupled with a little bit of guidance.

Since I’m saying stories are how I learned about myself, it’s fitting to use one of the central conceits of a movie to give structure to the answer. Inside Out is widely accepted as a delightful, tear-jerker of the kind Pixar regularly churns out. The film establishes a concept of “core memories”, five crucial moments in the main characters life which shape who she is.

There is, of course, trauma. Like most lucky and privileged people, life has generally left me alone and let others do the shaping. My parents and siblings, my friends, stories. But tragedy is doled out to all of us, and I’ve written before about one that likely had a heavy hand in shaping me; an unfortunate snowmobile accident that killed my best friend when I was seven. While the reasons for my response to this trauma are hard to pinpoint, the ripple effects have long been clear to me: a fear of death, and an appreciation for life. Some of my predisposition to loneliness might have stemmed from that, but based on other stories about me, I think that might be more of an innate trait.

From my recollection, Inside Out makes a glaring omission. Which is that while we are shaped by our experiences, we also absorb the lessons of songs and movies and books (and other people), using words as the lens by which we process the things that happen to us. Maybe not the lens, admittedly. And it’s not everyone’s lens, but it definitely does shape some of us.

For example, I was sixteen when I was rummaging through a used book sale my school was putting on. I happened across a book called Timbuktu by Paul Auster. I’m not sure why it called out to me, though if I were to venture a guess it’s that I started reading the first page and was intrigued enough by the prose, and the fact that this literary novel seemed to be told from the perspective of a dog.

At the time, I had just started a document collecting quotations from books I was reading, and Timbuktu quickly made an appearance in the document. I’ve now been keeping this document going for the past twenty years (with considerable gaps in activity), and in all that time, the entries from this short little novel are some that have made the deepest impact. They’re not just sentences I can recite from memory. These quotes have lastingly shaped my worldview.

There’s also the not-quite memories, but the moments of our lives that fade because they’re so everyday, and which nonetheless shape who we are. Like this fabricated image composed from various stories of my childhood: my mom reading on the couch, my dad on a chair scooted up close to the TV to watch Larry Bird lead the Boston Celtics, me on one of their laps, joining in on one of the two activities. My mom’s love of books and my dad’s love of basketball repeated day by day, parental examples that guided me toward two activities that would dictate much of my life.

Then, another memory from when I was seventeen. I had recently joined a basketball team and was present for a talking-down the coach was giving the other players. I felt it didn’t entirely apply to me because I’d only been on the team for a couple of weeks. And I forget exactly what the transgressions the team had committed that had led to such an onslaught of attempted life lessons by the coach, but at some point he said something along the lines of, “You make one mistake and then that’s it, you’ve fucked up your life forever.”

A possibly true statement to make in a few circumstances, especially rhetorically. To a group of privileged teens getting ready for a Jewish basketball tournament, it is at the very least comically hyperbolic. I also remember thinking, even as a teen, and perhaps due to the wisdom of books, that it was utter bullshit. Human beings are incredibly good at adapting to our ever-changing environments. Evolutionarily, psychologically, there are very few mistakes (other than the Big One—see my first mentioned core memory) that can’t be adjusted to. A life might change course, shape, form, flavor, sometimes dramatically based on one mistake, and maybe tragically too. But human beings are adaptable, able to bend to new circumstances and still find joy.

Which brings me to another quote from my quotebook, and another innocent sentence in a book that has shaped my worldview, that makes me adept at brushing things off when they don’t go my way.

See? I keep referencing quotes rather than life events. I was shaped by so much more than books, obviously. But books and movies and songs are how those events are remembered for me, they give voice to the lessons I’ve taken from life.

All of this to say, this is who I am: someone who brushed up against death when he was young, and through the lens of stories, parental influence, and perhaps genetic predisposition, has a knack for optimism. My basketball-heavy childhood has made me a disciplined person who enjoys competition, and my obsession with words has made me prone to sentimentality and self-reflection. I’m a middle child, making me a peace-keeper among my family’s strong personalities, someone who likes to placate others to mimize conflict (for better and for worse). My views lead me to be forgetful about things that I feel are less consequential than death (so I’m quite forgetful), and I approach new scenarios with the view that they could all be enriching, a perspective either established by similar quotations, or which was already there and simply given a voice. Occasional bouts of childhood/adolescent loneliness have turned me into an eavesdropper who suffers from FOMO, but who’s learned that appreciating others doesn’t always have to happen up close.

The above paragraph doesn’t capture me entirely, but it’ll have to do for the purposes of this post, since who wants to hear all my flaws laid out before them. And, as Susan Orlean wrote in The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup:

What does any of this have to do with Bluey, you may be asking, if you read this post’s subtitle and it’s beeng niggling at you this whole time. And why, you may be further asking if you are not a parent of small children who watch television, is everyone so fucking obsessed with this goddamn children’s tv show? Why is it on every bit of children’s merchandising, and why does every adult who talk about it immediately use the phrase “we love Bluey” with stars in their eyes?

Let me tell you, from my specific lense as a storyteller. Every episode manages to convey a delightful story in 7 minutes or less, which is succinctness that I’ve been striving for since I began writing, and which almost every writer I know would sell their souls for (save for maybe Lauren Groff, who already possesses that Blueyesque gift). And in that succinctness, it packs silliness, parenting tips, ideas for games, insight about the modern world, and relentless wonder and joy, nearly always sticking the landing with a laugh or a tug at the heartstrings.

There’s the episode where Chilli, Bluey’s mom, is recounting her mad desire to have Bluey meet baby milestones like walking before anyone else, and which ends not with just a well-delivered message about letting kids advance on their own schedule, but with a reveal to the audience (and not to Chilli herself, or to Bluey, for whom she’s recounting the story), that Bluey took her first steps while reaching out for her mother. This payoff is perfectly set up by occasional glances from Bluey’s perspective throughout the episode of her arms reaching out for Chilli.

Or there’s the episode where Bluey’s dad Bandit pretends to have been born yesterday, and allows his daughters to take him around the world explaining everything to him. A romp, mostly, a Seinfeld-esque opportunity to see a child’s deconstruction of the world. It leads not to a lesson about trusting people who have been around longer, but with Bluey and Bingo deciding not to explain the wonders of a living thing (a leaf), and rather letting their dad just enjoy the leaf. The episode ends with the game already over, and Bandit is sitting on the grass looking at a leaf with the sheer awe of someone appreciating life for the first time.

These are not just life lessons bundled in a cartoon, they are extremely solid examples of properly structured stories. It is why Bluey has the ability to surprise, delight, and engage a slew of emotions, and why the brief episodes nearly always end on a pitch-perfect note.

From a non-storytelling perspective, there’s plenty to love too. There’s the fact that the show is so encouraging of joy in parenting, while acknowledging the difficulties. Like the episode where everyone is just slogging through another day, looking forward to the weekend, until Chilli suggests a game called musical statues. Picture musical chairs but with dancing, freezing when the music stops. Eventually they drop the pretense of stopping the music, ending the episode with the line “You’re just supposed to dance while the music is being played.” A not entirely subtle metaphor for life itself. It’s an element that might go over the heads of children, but—if my readers will allow the sentimental turn of phrase—not their hearts. They might not absorb the lesson of the metaphor, but they absorb the lesson of dancing, and perhaps start to comprehend the notion of metaphor.

Or there’s the episode where Bandit is trying to make a cake for Bingo, chosen specifically because it made Bingo’s tail wag with joy (a reminder that the characters in the show are dogs). Bandit is struggling mightly with the cake while Bluey insists on playing rather than cleaning up. With the cake falling apart and the house still in disarray, Bandit sinks to the floor with his hands covering his face, a familiar pose to many a parent in the grips of despair. And in a moment of empathy, Bluey decides to clean up, her tail wagging not at the joy felt while playing, but at the sensation of helping her dad feel better.

I sit on my couch in the mornings and allow my toddler to have a few precious moments of screen time, precious to him because they are rare and valuable, precious to me because I can prepare his lunch for the day, or take a 7-minute shower, or sit beside him with a cup of coffee and read. I push down the guilt that there is relief in letting the television parent for a while (but I don’t push that hard). And then I remember how much I have been shaped by stories. How, in a world that to many is meaningless, unknowable, and dark, stories have shaped my view of life into something that often holds wonder. Again, nature, nurture, who knows which is to thank. Was it an early brush with death? Picking up the right book at the right time? Thinking critically about an overzealous coach’s messaging during a halftime peptalk?

Regardless, there is something to the fact that during times of hardship or struggle, I remember lines from stories. If I am tempted to lean into selfishness or greed, I think of Timbuktu. Over the past few weeks, if I find myself in a funk, worried about the state of the world, I picture myself as Bandit sitting in the grass and studying a leaf with fresh-eyed wonder.

I said at the beginning that I’d be a fool not to acknowledge that we all continue to change. We may grow old and stubborn in our ways, but we are still changing (growing more stubborn, for example). And as ridiculous as it may seem, Bluey often manages to strike the same chord in me that the books and songs and movies of my past have. It’s shaping who I am as a parent, yes. But who I will continue to be. How I will view the rest of what life throws my way.

My little lump of screen-time-loving clay sitting next to me during these mornings is going to be shaped by a lot in his life. Some in my control, and most of it not. But others’ words are going to be a part of what shapes him. And so I click on ‘next episode’ one more time, for myself as much as for him. If stories are going to be a part of who he becomes (and god do I hope that’s the case) then there are worse lenses to view the world by than Bluey-colored ones.

The Babushka1 Dolls of Concerns.

Unlike Maslow’s tidy pyramid, which implies that the next rung cannot be reached until the bottom is satisfied2, the babushka dolls of concerns always exist within one another. You might be able to set aside the biggest one and look at the tiniest concern (what to make for dinner)—and maybe it is your favorite of the lot, the cutest to be sure, and the one that feels most managable—but it will always belong nestled within the other concerns.

For the metaphor to work, we have to envision a truly unwieldy set of dolls. Which shouldn’t be too hard to do. Just take your biggest concern and give it an intricately designed, portly ceramic body. Climate change and its devastating effects on the planet’s ability to sustain life, for example, is not a doll that can comfortably sit on a table. Even the thought of lifting it should make your muscles ache with effort.

My philosophy is that no concern is so big that nothing can be done about it, so this ceramic body should not be city-sized. Maybe just about the size of a Fiat. It seems impossible to move, but you can imagine a world where one might be able to carry the concern away. Probably not without help. And though moving it might be a possibility, we can’t be expected to carry a Fiat with us at all times. We leave that concern parked where we left it, though we aren’t too surprised every now and then to find it late at nights in our beds.

Within a Fiat it may not seem like there’s a lot of space, but you have to remember just how small some of our concerns are, and how tightly our dolls can fit within each other. Some so tightly that they stick when we try to seperate them, that we have trouble identifying which is bigger at just a glance.3 We have to really twist them apart, and often don’t even realize that we’ve left one concern within another, giving one some added weight.

But of course we do rend them apart, lest they paralyze us with their weight.

We go about our days as best we can, trying to keep the concerns we carry with us to those that at least will not break our backs during our day-to-day. Finances, careers, the state of world, yes, but in a hazy way. Not the doll itself, but a portrait of the doll rolled up inside a smaller doll to fit into our financial concerns. Not job security, but keeping a grocery tab below $100.

Yes, lawmakers want to cut services from the poor, the needy, and the middle class to give tax breaks to billionaires; a travesty while staring at that particular babushka doll, but at the grocery store it is a sigh while deciding whether to pay an extra two dollars for the eggs encased in plastic instead of styrofoam (to appease the Fiat—wait, will the Fiat be appeased? Which is the less evil choice?).

The grocery bags are heavy enough as it is.

Sometimes we think the teensiest babushka doll is deciding what to make for dinner, but its weight is still a burden, and so we set it aside and open it up and find a concern so small it is quaint: we have not read enough books this year. And our concern about what to make for dinner is not about dinner at all, but about the time it takes in deciding what to cook, and the cooking time itself, and the cleanup. In my case, I listen to audiobooks while cooking and cleaning and so the concerns aren’t quite related. They are maybe more like Schroedinger’s babushka dolls; they both exist within the larger concern of time’s limited resource, just not at the same time. Time’s limited resource, of course, nestled within other concerns, so it kind of looks like this:

• MORTALITY!!

  • Life as we know it will not survive a climate-changed planet.

    • Oh right, the billionaire class are fueling authoritarianism and climate change.

      • Actually, they’re ruining industries. There are other forces ruining other parts of society. Like the modern day gestapo, and warmongers, and the industrialists pillaging the earth.

        • Venture capital money is ruining everything

          • The publishing world and the film world, your industry and potential industry, are funnelling money upward to just a handful of heavy hitters, thanks partially to larger corporate controls that care more about the bottom line than the products/services they offer

            • The finnicky publishing world has not offered you a deal in a while

              • Finances are not as strong as one would like

                • How to stretch the limited resource of time to work more/sleep more/read more and still have time and money left for fun

                  • Time is a limited resource

                    • Needing more time to make dinner/read books

                      • I’d like to listen to this audiobook but am getting distracted by what I need to make for dinner

                        • Will I reach my reading goal for the year?

  

Despite what the above might intimate, I am not the kind to spiral, concern-wise. It is more like I’m playing with babushka dolls. Putting them all together so I’m only staring at the big one, setting aside smaller worries (is that half onion in the fridge still good?) so I can properly consider the state of the world.

Though, like most people who at least try to hang onto their sanity, I don’t spend too long on that big babushka doll. I’m a concerned citizen of the world and want to leave this place better than I found it, but I know how much weight I can reasonably heft on a daily basis.

Wait a second.4

Real-time epiphany here, folks. Or pherhaps real-time unraveling of this post’s entire argument. The metaphor isn’t quite right. The babushka dolls are a little more Escher-esque than that. The smaller concerns open up to reveal a larger concern hidden within. And one with perhaps several offshoots. I started attempting a crass pictoral representation, but I got as far as the following image before I decided to concern myself with something else.

As you can see, my pictoral representations leave quite a bit to be desired. Or maybe there was a reason that Maslow chose an easy to draw and comprehend shape to embody his theory.

I wish it were as convenient as a pyramid. But I think that what concerns us is a constant unraveling and restacking of larger concerns within smaller ones. Small, manageable, every day concerns that we can carry with us because our actual concerns—the state of the world, maybe—could crush us like a small Italian car. The cherry on top of the pyramid is that the dolls sometimes have minds of their own. We may choose one doll to focus on (applying for a job) but it’ll scurry away and climb into a larger one (am I qualified to do anything but what I’ve done), and then those two will open up and reveal that inside them is an even larger doll (is capitalism going to kill everything). And just facing that thought might empty your soul for a moment, until you shake your head and twist the doll open and get back to the delightful, maddening concern that eats away at all of us:

What am I going to make for dinner?

In brief, this essay is about a particular word in Mexican slang. Chingar. A verb which ostensibly means “to screw”, but, as Paz points out:

En México los significados de la palabra son innumerables. Es una voz mágica. Basta un cambio de tono, una inflexión apenas, para que el sentido varíe. Hay tantos matices como entonaciones: tantos significados como sentimientos.

Or, my imperfect translation:

In Mexico, the meanings of the word are innumerable. It’s a magic voice. It needs only a shift in tone, a mere inflection for the meaning to change. There are as many hues as intonations: as many meanings as feelings.

One of the main varations is chingón, which can either be an adjective or noun. When it’s a noun it’s usually applied to a person, someone who, as Paz argues, is doing the screwing, implying that there is someone getting screwed. My rough interpretation (again, the meaning can shift with just a light breeze) of this variation of the word is that it denotes someone who is a badass, exceedingly skilled at whatever they are doing, often at the expense of others. In Mexico, and, really, the rest of the world, one longs to be a chingón.

The essay, if I recall correctly, is making a wider argument about machismo, but my memory of it, and really of the Spanish Literature class, coincides with the fact that I was learning to drive at the time. (I also particularly remember the fact that the professor’s rants—as much as I’d probably enjoy them now, and as much as I appreciated him as a person—often led me to navel-gaze (or, more accurately, window-gaze)). I was waking up to the world of the road in a way that, as a lifelong passenger up until that point, I had been somewhat blind to. Mexico City is a particularly interesting place to learn how to drive, a swirl of chaotic factors that I still believe forces one to become a better driver: traffic laws are rarely enforced, and when they do they’re often escaped from with relatively low consequences (a small cash bribe is common, but that’s a whole other essay). The lanes are narrow, the roads are pot-holed, and the other drivers are unpredictable. You have to be aware of so many things at once that it is ideal training ground; once you’ve driven there, you can drive almost anywhere. Especially a traffic simulator.

At the time, my analysis of the essay was one I thought applied particularly well to Mexico City drivers: it explained the near maniacal impulse to drive faster, cut others off, refuse others from slipping in ahead of you, all for the privilege of inching ahead in standstill traffic. This was especially confounding given the warmth and friendliness that often exuded the people in my hometown. Despite the massiveness of the city, and the idea that megalopoles are marked by a hectic pace of life, if you walk down the streets of Mexico City you see people strolling languidly at all times of day. There’s even a term for it: “dominguear.” To move at a Sunday pace. They arrive late, stay late, resist the urge to fall into the trap of rushing. Being a chingón felt somewhat antithetical to being a chilango (someone from Mexico City). I’m not entirely sure this is a conclusion of my own or if it was part of the professor’s original rant.

Now I know that the urge to be a chingón is not unique to my hometown. It occurs in most places where cars rule the road. There’s some strange alchemy of ego that happens when we’re at the wheel. We close ourselves off in our little worlds, and that layer of steel and glass and plastic (I don’t know what cars are made of) is all we need to feel like our decisions affect no one else.

The reason we speed, roll through stop signs, look at our phones, swerve in and out of lanes, drive on the shoulder to get ahead of traffic, step on the pedal to make the light, honk when someone else brakes when we feel they should be going, curse at pedestrians, park in bike lanes, inch ahead to block a path, all these little actions we do when at the wheel of the world’s foremost accidental murder-suicide machine is not necessarily because we’d like to be chingónes. It’s because we don’t realize we’re chingando those around us. Or maybe we don’t care.

At the wheel, we are the most important people in the universe. Literally closed off from others, we overrate our own driving skills while asserting others are worse. We drive a few miles over the speed limit because we’d like to shave a few minutes off our ETA. In the US, the average driver commutes 42 miles in a day. In a 21 mile journey, going 70mph rather than 60mph shaves 3 minutes, and adds a 25% fatality rate to a head on accident.

Not that we’re thinking of these graphs while people are zooming past us on the highway, or the fact that the increased fatality risk we are taking on by speeding doesn’t necessarily fall on our shoulders, but on those around us. Of course that’s not on our minds, because we are better drivers, and it won’t happen to us. We won’t harm others.

Which, of course, is the unfortunate fallacy at the root of so many other societal ills. The insistence that our actions do not have consequences on others. That we get to be chingónes without someone else getting screwed. And it’s true that that’s often the case. That we continue on with our actions because usually, there are no consequences. Especially none that we notice from the comforts of our isolated worlds behind the wheel.

A few weeks ago, I was biking along a boulevard here in Chicago. I was on the side lane that’s seperated from the main street by a large grassy section, and the streets that intersect this section of the boulevard have stop signs on them. As I approached one of the stop signs, I saw a car that noticed me, made the calculation that I was far enough away (this is me giving the driver the benefit of the doubt), and decided to roll through with minimal braking. Feeling sanctimonious (have you guessed that I feel this way often toward cars?), I called out, “Nice stop!”

Without a second’s hesitation, the driver yelled back: “Oh, shut up.”

Which, to an extent, fair enough. I was in no danger of getting hit right then. I myself didn’t come to a complete stop on my bike, and could have safely avoided her even if she didn’t see me. To an extent, I am the asshole.

But just a block later, chained to a stop sign and painted white is a bicycle commemorating someone who died at that intersection. Every day, I cross streets with my toddler, who at his height would likely be invisible to someone rolling through a stop sign. It probably doesn’t help me to sarcastically yell “nice stop!” at someone. Her behavior is unlikely to be changed by my sanctimony, nor are the several cars a day that I flash enthusiastic thumbs up to and yell “So cool!” when they roar past red lights.

We all know these things about cars. We know the statistics. But we are too chingónes to become statistics. Those are for the chingados.

And since I’m on the topic, and because I haven’t found another way to share this, here’s a fun little list to end on.

Bumper Stickers I’ve Fantasized About Designing After Witnessing Someone Being An Ass On the Road (and others)

• Driving fast is for dweebs.

• We are at the wheel of one of the world’s foremost murder-suicide machines. Can we all just agree to be chill?

• Did that move help your ETA or just your EGO? Zing!

• Baby on board. I don’t have a baby. Who put this baby in here? Why won’t it leave?

• Driving on the shoulder? You are a sociopath responsible for the downfall of society. Oh, you just were taking the exit? I guess that’s okay.

• IT IS BEAUTIFUL OUT, WHY ARE YOUR WINDOWS DOWN?

• Look out for motorcycles! And then ask the drivers how their mothers feel about the fact that they own one.

  I’m not always this cantankerous. Subscribe to find out my other moods.

This…this is embarrassing. Deeply, deeply embarrassing. Showers. Of course it’s showers versus flowers. The other way didn’t even roll off the tongue.

Showers.

Not Show-ers, like I originally thought. Not show-ers vs flow-ers, which isn’t even the expression, Adi. Showers.

Well, this piece might land a little differently, I guess. Maybe give it time to grow on you.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to groan at me for 7 minutes, that was a bit. Very convincing I’m sure. I thought about committing to it for longer than I care to admit, and knowing write club audiences, 7 minutes of dick jokes probably would have secured me the loving cup of deathless fucking glory, but alas, I couldn’t rise to the occasion.

Let’s talk about showers!

A picture which makes it seem like I was killing it.

I do this thing when I’m done showering. I grab my towel and bring it into the shower with me, sliding the door or the curtain shut because at some point in school a teacher told me condensation makes it warmer in the shower than the colder bathroom air, and I’ve never forgotten that. Or I made it up and have told myself that story so many times it now feels true. Brains are weird.

For as long as I can remember, once I have wrapped the towel around myself in the shower I start gently biting on the towel’s threads and let my mind wander. Though that’s an overly romantic term: my mind usually just goes to the same five or six locations. Food, bad dick jokes, errands or the tedious crushing weight of responsibilities, convoluted analogies, story ideas, of which one subset is off-genre sequels no one asked for to movies that should be left alone (example: Truman Show 2, a courtroom drama where Truman is suing Ed Harris’s studio for emotional damages).

Sometimes I pull on the threads, unraveling the towel the slightest bit. Not on purpose. It’s a tic, of sorts. A habit implanted long ago.

I wonder if this habit began around the time when I may or may not have heard about condensation warming the inside of the shower, giving me more idle time to let thoughts in. Or maybe in high school, lazy and letting the towel do the work of drying while I thought about a crush, or a fresh unfortunate spattering of acne, or how quickly I could get dressed in order to eat again or masturbate again, my two most crucial activities at age 16. Sometimes I had snippets of stories floating around in my brain, and I pursued them the way one does a butterfly. With clumsy awe, and tenderness, and almost no success. Mostly I considered the strangeness of the world I was growing up in and how hungry I was.

Sometimes though, I would get what I have only recently taken to calling The Dread. It’s not a panic attack, just a temporary and intensive focus on my own mortality. One such moment was instigated by seeing the length of my shin in a mirror and suddenly becoming so aware that I am housed in a body, one which I know will one day be gone. I can almost conjure the sensation of oblivion, and it is like watching my atoms float away on the wind like bubbles. I have this mad desire to reach out and capture the bubbles and shove them back in the bottle, as if that’s achievable.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fairly healthy this happens to me. For one, it provides plenty of fodder for my write club performances, which I keep telling myself don’t have to be about death or dick jokes, but here we are again.

I don’t love The Dread in the moment, but I think I’m a happier person for it. Better equipped to handle whatever comes my way that isn’t…you know, death itself.

I know how to control The Dread these days. I learned long ago, thankfully, and maybe that’s why it comes less often these days.

If at the start of this performance about showers and growers you were guessing I’d use the phrase “comes less often these days” congrats. Your math was probably off, but you arrived at the right answer.

The trick to establishing boundaries with the overbearing relative that is The Dread is to think of your thoughts as threads on a towel, and The Dread is just one of them. Biting the threads is fine, natural, almost encouraged…okay, convoluted analogy, the towel thing is not natural, it’s weird, but it’s still fine. You just have to learn to not unravel the thread. Or to unravel it with a sense of control. Bite and pull at the thread to the point of satisfaction but not so much that you will be left towel-less. By all means chew, just don’t use your fangs. Know that if the thread starts to comes too undone, if you start chasing bubbles, all you have to do is hop over somewhere else. Pick at some new thread.

This is nothing new to you if you’ve been to therapy, or watched a television show written by writers who went to therapy…or, perhaps, from the general modern zeitgeist we’ve reached thanks to enough people having gone to therapy for society to have made it past a sort of therapy tipping point and now those of us who get our therapy from literature or film or self-expression in a room full of mostly strangers and a few friends (hello, you!), get to reap the benefits without having to call insurance a hundred times to find an in-network provider in our area.

Rather than trying to put the bubbles back in the bottle, you have some options. You can recall those acne-spattered high school days and those self-indulgent, incredibly water-wasteful twenty minute showers. The pink, scuffed boombox you’d bring into the bathroom to listen to Bright Eyes or the Garden State soundtrack, choices which basically guaranteed thoughts about mortality or eventually naming a feeling The Dread. Chase that thread and remember the bulky binder full of mixed CDs that you’d have to use to keep the boom box’s busted CD reader shut, one of which was a compilation of Irish punk songs that you played almost daily in your sophomore art class because no one else ever remembered to bring music with them until the teacher faced almost certain mutiny if the class was subjected to one more goddamn Flogging Molly song.

Follow the tangents of memory, marveling at the brain’s capacity to conjure up the past. Or the future, too. Fantasize! Come up with a rom com Saving Private Ryan 2, I dunno. You don’t have to be a teen taking a twenty-minute shower to make the future, the past, the present bend to your will.

I suppose my brain, most brains, I’d venture, are not, in the end, to the chagrin of my joke’s set-up, showers. They do not instantly reveal their worth, are not simply the first Dreadful thread your teeth land on. On first glance, our brains are primitive beings struggling to grapple with mortality. But they are, in fact, growers. Enormous, luxurious, five-star hotel towels, with a nearly infinite spread of threads to unravel and play with.

Which is perhaps the kind of statement made only by an annoyingly neurotypical person, but I’ve never claimed to be anything else.

Whether passively drying in the possibly slightly warmer condensated-air inside a shower, chewing on a towel or laying in bed late at night unable to sleep, glancing at ourselves in the mirror, whenever the dread of mortality shows itself, those universes are there, ready for us to pick at threads, to dive into our past, fantasize, analogize, come up with a dick-joke-adjacent premise to talk about death on stage.

Death-less cup of glory my ass!

Me, performing this piece in August 2022.

Almost none of this is true, but here’s how I imagine it could have happened:

Jordi Valdez is seven years old when he starts getting an allowance. It’s especially exciting because he lives in Mexico and at the time, the Mexican peso has a whole lot of 0s attached to it. He gets 50,000 a week! It only buys him a few bags of chips at school, but one of the perks of the very young is the optimistic insistence that any amount of money equals wealth.

That first day he is a king. He buys five different flavors. His friends, myself among them, ignore their own lunches and watch with hungry eyes. But a king can’t eat all he can buy, and so Jordi decides to become a generous king.

His friends feast, their always sticky little boy hands accruing more and more of the spicy umami dust, that red gold of snacking. They lick their fingers and look at Jordi as if he is the reason they can feel joy. Not least of all because Mexican chips are objectively the best on the planet.

The next day he has nothing left, and while there is leftover goodwill, talk at the cafeteria table about what a golden day yesterday was, Jordi feels the pang of not being able to provide. Not even the chips themselves, but just that joy. He thinks next week he will stretch it out longer, scoop out tiny bits of joy day by day, one bag at a time, maybe. But Monday comes and it is hard to resist another golden day. He spends.

Then come new pesos, and their cruel lopping off of those zero halos. 50,000 becomes 50. “I’m rich!” optimism notwithstanding, it’s hard not to feel the blow. For the first time in their lives, second graders grumble about the economy. They try to sell the old bills to collectors, but run into the obstacle of not knowing any.

Then the peso gets devalued, and the same amount of money brings in one less bag of chips. Even the adults, rich as they all are, worry about money. And Jordi starts looking at his measly 50 a week with the pessimism of someone who’s lived through several economic crises.

Winter break his family goes to Vail. His parents have saved up for this ski trip, miraculously spared by the peso’s shenanigans. They have a lodge with a hot tub and all the hot chocolate he and his sister can ask for. They have saved so they can say yes to everything, and Jordi takes note. Save long to spend big. Jordi shifts gears and decides to save his allowance. A year, he decides. Then he will splurge, treat those around him. It isn’t even the money he’s spending, he knows. It is how the day is spent.

Back in Mexico he makes the announcement that the Monday splurges are over. The cafeteria table is scandalized by this decision. His friends look down at their lunchboxes, their sliced carrots and cucumbers, and they despair, despite their tiny accompanying bottles of tajin. They yell about taxes, certain those are somehow to blame. They cannot imagine a year without the feasts, they have made mondays holy.

But no matter how much they beg, Jordi holds strong, knowing the day is coming when he will spend. He keeps his 50 peso bills in an emptied out stuffed tiger he won at a claw machine game at the Denver airport. The year goes by and it slowly grows plump again, feasting on weekly feedings of Jose Maria Morelos and Benito Juarez.

The lore of The Days of the Chips gets brought up less and less often. By summer it feels like an apocryphal legend, by next winter break it is forgotten, and Jordi is dying to blow all his savings, become a generous king again. But it hasn’t been that arbitrary year yet, and Jordi feels beholden to it, so it is back to Vail for another ski trip, biding his time.

Last year he was too scared to do anything but play in the snow and gorge on hot chocolate, but now he is wizened; he has savings. He skis the bunny hill and upgrades to the green circle within the day. Proud, his dad splurges and rents them a snowmobile as a reward.

With the sun and wind on his face, the blur of evergreens in the sea of white, Jordi feels like a dolphin, if dolphins had access to high-powered engines. A dolphin on a jet ski headed for the trees, that’s what he feels like. That is what saving provides.

He looks over his shoulder at his dad and he can identify the smile on his face as the joy of spending on others, and that is when he decides that on the day he returns he will buy all the chips his money can buy, even if it hasn’t exactly been a year yet. He will share not just with his table, but with everyone at the school who wants chips. Even the teachers, if they have not grown too old to crave that red gold that gathers on fingertips like spicy pollen.

It will be beautiful. And it will be all worth it. What is money, he thinks, as they speed through and around and toward those beautiful pine trees. What is it when compared to the joy of a day well spent, with people?

He thinks of that stuffed tiger and wonders if human beings have found a way to save days. To accrue them like cash. He would save that first day of the chips, and this one. He would save, even, the days after the chips, that buzz of remembering in the air.

And if humans have not found a way to save days, then he will spend them instead. Spend them well. If he cannot buy chips for everyone he will share his one bag. He will eat everything as if it’s covered in Dorito dust. He is eight years old and he is learning something big about life and he is headed for the trees.

And this is when Jordi’s dad loses control of the snowmobile.

But I gave the caveat that most of this was a lie, so let’s get back to fiction.

Jordi doesn’t die. The stuffed animal doesn’t get tossed out, the pesos within not lost forever. He gets to throw his planned feast, almost a year’s worth of savings gone in a flurry of crunching chips and crinkled aluminum. Everything he dreamed, even without the extra days of saving.

Since this is a lie, Since this is fiction, he gets many more days to spend, with chips and without, in the snow and in the city, with friends and on his own, playing with lucha libre action figures, planning his Halloween pirate costume. He’s never again quite as good at saving money. It just doesn’t seem right to withhold the joy. He sleeps through the few economics classes he takes. He never again chases the feeling of being a dolphin on a jet ski, though he does swim with dolphins, once, in Fiji.

And years later, on days when he has no money to spend, he sits in a park with a book or some friends and looks at trees and wonders how close he came to never spending another day doing anything at all.

We are all headed for the trees. Spend accordingly.

He does not remember when this version of himself got to be so small, and, actually, he hardly considers the size of it anymore. Most days he gets home and hangs up the jacket before his cat can get her littery paw prints on it. He rolls a lint roller to get it ready for the next day, but usually forgets to go through all the pockets.

He no longer feels the weight of himself sitting in the pocket, not often anyway. Every now and then when he’s at his desk and has to throw the jacket on (Susan from HR and Bert from Sales have teamed up to terrorize the office into polar conditions), he’ll notice how it exerts the slightest bit of pressure against his chest. He’ll pause before he responds to another email, remembering himself for just a moment. How unwieldy he used to be. And though there’s a pang of longing for being whole again, he’s only got five minutes before the next meeting, and he’d like to pee and top off his coffee in the breakroom. It’s terrible coffee, and though he always brings enough from home, it’s a habit that emerged after a month or two at this job; a necessity to make it through the afternoon, and punishment he feels he deserves. Punishment for what, he doesn’t know. By the time the burnt office coffee has swirled together with the cold dregs of the good coffee from home, he no longer feels the weight in his pocket, and he carries on.

There was a progression, of course. One he can remember if he’s laying in bed late at night and sleep can’t come unless he focuses his thoughts in one direction. He remembers how he used to paint whenever he could. His first paycheck from his summer job before college, and how it went to a canvas and a set of good brushes instead of the textbook fund he knew he’d need. The feeling of getting lost trying to find the right shade of blue, mixing and dabbing until it sang in the right key. It would drive him crazy these days to spend so long on such an unproductive task. But back then there was an unmistakable joy in the act itself, regardless of what he produced with it.

Then came the world and the practicalities of surviving it. Of exchanging time and energy for money in order to spend your remaining time and energy as freely as possible. Just finding his place in that world though took up time, and so he folded himself in half, consoling himself with the fact that it was not an amputation. That part of himself would still be there when the resumes had been sent away, the interviews conducted, the follow-up emails finally leaving the draft folder and into the outbox (could he perhaps send a thankful sketch to follow up instead? It was a torturous time-suck to rephrase what he’d said in his cover letter, in the interview, to convince someone he was worthy in three paragraphs after just having tried to convince them over thirty minutes). He would just have to turn over to the other side and mix the paints there, play with brush strokes, try to capture the light of the world on the many canvases he would be able to afford once someone gave him a job.

Once he did, he’d underestimated how it would feel to get back home. How he would see those canvases still wrapped in plastic, and he would see his couch and the enticing glow of the television, how there were friends to see, new people to meet, plays to watch, travel he could afford, the aching desire for the warmth of the sun after eight hours of Susan and Bert’s A/C tyranny. And so he folded himself in half again, repeating to himself that it was only making space, and not an abandonment. As if to prove it to himself, he bought an easel for future paintings, and he even kept it out in the living room for months rather than storing it away.

At his meeting, Roberto finds his mind wandering. Sometimes he thinks that meetings are a brilliant tactic by the corporate world to work in some mind-wandering time into employees’ schedules. His coworkers all type away on their laptops, but he has adopted the quaint/pretentious affectation of carrying a notebook. He says it helps him stay focused, but it is the margins he cares for.

The way he starts to doodle before he even realizes, like . A cartoon of himself, a sketch of his boss Linda’s pantsuit, a bird perched on the window. It is in these moments that he feels the sharp corner of that part of himself he keeps in his breastpocket. Rather than shifting to ease the discomfort, he finds himself leaning into it, the way he would tongue a loose tooth when he was younger, the way he sometimes still presses on a bruise.

He has brought a pencil today, and it allows him to shade. He remembers spending hours whittling a piece of drawing charcoal away, playing with lines and pressure. Erasing the same tricky corner of shadow over and over again until the paper almost tore. Hands and wrists a mess of black smears that would transfer into the sink as he washed his hands, the dark swirls in the bubbles a work of art in their own right.

When was the last time he cared about something enough to get it wrong over and over again? Had he known when he was folding himself up to fit into the world that he was tucking that away too? The burning urge to create? The patience inherent in fucking up?

In the moments before he knocks on Linda’s door to enter her office, he’s heard her singing quietly to herself. He’s seen Bill in Customer Service working on a screenplay, then click away when someone else approaches. He wonders if they, too, have folded themselves up. All these people around him, the entire office, the building; surely he’s not the only one who remembers a fuller version of himself. Who feels the sharp corner pressing into his ribs for a moment, just a moment before the world returns.

True, you are just a little buzzed and, at this hour, prone to sweeping sentimental statements. To be honest, you hate a not insignifcant amount of this situation.

That it’s a Saturday night and it feels like you are well past your bedtime. There’s the ever-present ticking of the clock, and how you know the later you stay up the less sleep you get, because this delightful bundle of warmth and joy and pee-in-his-pajamas is gonna start singing Raffi songs and “happy birthday” to himself at 6:23 a.m no matter when he or you went to sleep. No matter what you do, you will be under-rested. And now, by the time you are home and ready for bed, you will have to choose what to cut from your list of bedtime joys: your ten minutes of Duolingo, fifteen pages of your next book club pick (meeting on Wednesday, so it should be thirty), maybe fifteen minutes of one of the twelve shows you’re in the middle of streaming.

A part of you wishes that if you are under-rested that it would be because you were up late working, and then another part of you hates that that’s what you’re thinking about after a wonderful night of socializing with other adults. You are forgetting already the joy of two stolen hours around a fire with some drinks and banter, forgetting so quickly that it’s exactly what you long for in this parental life of diminished free time. All of this swims around in your head while you smell his almost-clean shampoo scent and he rubs his little nose against you, and you know he feels safe in your arms, weightless, at home. You have had a lot of love in your life but you never knew you could be that for someone.

When your wife was about 10 weeks pregnant you ran into your friend from middle school, who told you you just HAD to have kids. And even though you were on that path already, however tentatively, your stomach twisted around itself. You smiled, trying not to show it, nodded dumbly. What luck, you would think later, after the brief, initial flash of anger. How fortunate to think that having kids was a simple matter of choice. Of deciding. Like going out for a night of drinking. You do or you don’t. There is no trying.

You forgave him long ago, just like you forgave the people who claim that having kids is the best thing you could ever do, and all those who claim it is the worst thing you could ever do. In a world of false dichotomies, a black-or-white world that fights against nuance, this is yet another senseless battle waged against the wonders of the gray spectrum. A million thinkpieces that insist you are either on one side or the other. Blessed or cursed, that’s it. As if you can’t be both at once, as if blesses and curses don’t know how to don disguises, as if they do not contain multitudes. As if we don’t come to resent our benedictions, or learn to find joy in our nadirs. As a society that constantly craves more, we have a strange resistance to the concept of and.

It is strange to think that this two-block walk home with thirty pounds of sleep could exist in anything but grayscale. Especially when it could have never happened, so easily. You resented others their luck, and yet you have been so lucky. “And yet” is not a negation. It is an addition.

There is another world where you are walking home at 11:36 at night carrying nothing, and you’re thinking that it’s the best possible feeling to be so unencumbered. Perhaps just another hand in yours. Maybe, in another world, your sweeping sentimental thoughts are all you have for company, if we are exploring all possible worlds. You forget, when you consider other worlds, that they are also not black or white. You forget those worlds, while full of imagined joy, would also carry the weight of having missed this life. It hardly matters what universe you’re in or what good fortunes you find ourselves with. You’ll forget them.

In this universe, you’re begging your good fortunes to please whisper in the morning so that Mama can sleep in, which gives them the idea to call out for her and barge into the room, and then you try to redirect their attention it turns to screaming louder than any non-whispering could have been, so of course you forget. When you’re calling insurance again, figuring out if the long list of fertility medications have been approved, or if they’ve been approved by the wrong specialty pharmacy again, you of course forget to be enchanted. How could you find joy in these moments? What person can maintain the sweeping sentimentality when it is not 11:36 on a Saturday night? When they don’t sink into you like you are home and instead are demanding milkshakes for dinner or trying to yank toys out of younger kids’ hands at the park screaming “mine!” as if they don’t know what a damn cliche it is.

Finding charm in the minutiae of parenthood is not unique to those who have struggled with fertility, nor are you immune to forgetting the charm when your unlikely child lays down on the grocery store floor, holding himself hostage until certain unintelligble demands are met. In this sense it is the miracle of life exactly like all others; just because it is miraculous does not preclude it from the occasional bad mood, from getting bogged down by the every day. Parenthood or not, vitamin supplements and progesterone shots notwithstanding, forgetting life’s charms is the human condition.

Until it isn’t. Until somehow, the less than ideal circumstances that could be pointed at in any universe seem to fall away, and the only thing that remains is the And. You are tired and undersocialized and prone to sentimentality and carrying that thirty-pound, 6:23-a.m.-waking “I don’t want to”-repeating semi-bully is one of the greatest things you’ve ever done.

Since I began in February, I’ve found a topic each week, some little kernel that arrived on Mondays or Tuesdays and was starting to pop by Wednesday evening. The Thursday late-night delivery was an arbitrary self-imposed deadline with absolutely no stakes, but I still liked the mad dash to send the newsletter off into the ether. I liked (almost as much as I simultaneously hated) checking to see the next morning how many people had opened the email, or if others had stumbled onto it somehow through the merciful and loving acts of the Substack Algorithm.

When I first joined the masses of Substackers, I wrote this:

There’s something funny and strange and the slightest bit tragic that happens when you write full-time as a career. Art gets mixed up with the practicalities of life. This thing you spiritually have to do becomes a thing you financially have to do (lest you—gasp—get a regular job). There’s a clear privilege in having your job be something you love to do, something you would do either way, if no one was paying you (you would just do it less). And yet through this luck and privilege and desire to keep the luck going, there’s a longing for this little passion you had way back when, before you became a writer. It existed almost entirely within you, yet unvalidated by the world, all full of hope and promise and joy (and frustration and longing and envy, I’m sure past-me would add).

Reading it now, it feels prescient, although in a perhaps entirely predictable way. I’ve been enjoying myself, writing whatever was on my mind, writing with the kind of urgency that I remember feeling back before deadlines. Which isn’t to say that the feeling has been entirely absent during my tenure as an author, just that it was surprisingly consistent for all of two months. Granted, I still felt a sort of pressure. Realistically, it was to not disappoint the 100ish of you who are currently subscribed. Unrealistically, it felt like if I didn’t continue to write, if I didn’t open myself up compellingly, then I wouldn’t achieve my secret goal of making this newsletter a viable source of income.

So, in these last two weeks, as inspiration has failed to take hold, the honeymoon phase ended, and a desperation grew to keep this thing alive. To not disappoint you mostly silent but still loyal (I think) subscribers. Especially those of you who have so generously become paid subscribers. I needed to make this whole thing worth your while, your $10/month, or $100/year.

I scoured for inspiration. I cooked risotto and thought to myself: this is one of the most pensive foods you can cook. Not the food itself, but the process of stirring gently to avoid the burning. Scooping another half cup of stock and stirring, watching the grains of rice plump up, your mind can’t help but wander. There was something to it, to be certain. But I was afraid that it was too soon after my other recipe post, and I didn’t want to risk the newsletter becoming too one-note, committing to that particular shtick, much as I enjoy it. As I dallied about whether or not to write the post, the brief moment of inspiration fizzled away.

Then one night in bed, I reached for my phone and wrote the start of a good post, I believe. Something about how each person is driven by the fact of their own mortality, and how every small man’s chest-thumping belief in their own greatness is just a clear, desperate reaction to not wanting to die. But, in my late-night brain fog, I have no idea where I saved it. I tried in the next days to recreate the inspiration, and instead, somehow, landed on: We are all such simple creatures, with about 8 billion nuances. The thoughts are related, to be sure, but I failed to recreate the same late-night fervor. I found the draft a week or so later, and then almost instantly lost it again. Perhaps it exists in some other universe, one which I can only access when I’m not searching for inspiration.

As another self-imposed deadline passed by, I scrolled through my Substack feed, hoping to find ideas there. I noticed a pattern, and for a couple of days, it seemed that I’d found my topic. Some sort of commentary on the two type of posts that stood out in my scrolling: writing advice, and melodramatic-leaning take-downs of some pop-culture phenomenon or another. This is what that post looked like:

No surprises here. A self-depracating subtitle, an interesting thought that is impossible to elaborate on without becoming hypocritical, a quotation that way more succinctly summarizes the point I wanted to make. I wrote more than what I’m showing here, but it devolved quickly into scatter-brained musings on what turned out to be unrelated topics. Rather, if writing advice and pop-culture takedowns are related somehow, I failed to find the thread to connect them. Then I went out with a friend and had a good discussion on whether digital communication can be as honest as its in-person counterpart (or even more honest, in my argument), which of course meant that I needed to shoehorn that into my writing. I tried to hammer out all these ideas into one by talking to my wife about the post, which helped us come to the conclusion that it was time to banish that particular idea into the drafts folder and move on.

That same conversation at a bar with a friend led to what I was sure would at last (at last!!) be the topic for this post. A story. Fiction, my true little passion (no one tell my thinkpieces). And a silly one at that. On brand! (Note to self: at some point in time write about how silly it is that we all say this all the time, having convinced ourselves that we are just marketable assets).

This story would be the continuation of a joke I giggled to myself about while attending bingo in Las Vegas with some friends. I pictured a bingo hall somewhere in Western Australia. At a church, perhaps, or the kind of semi-large open room that I imagine is good for hosting fun events as well as Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. In the outback, a creature lifts her snout, catching a whiff of something interesting. Baked goods, perhaps. Or a cheap charcuterie board, one of the kind the grocery store throws together for you, the salami rolled into cigars, the slightly sharp cheddar perfectly cubed in a way that somehow cheapens the whole thing, makes it feel less artful, points at its pre-fabricated origins.

Not that the creature cares. The creature is instantly intrigued, and follows her nose. She is not surprised at the building the smell seems to emanate from. She has found food there before, in the bins that are easy to knock over, or offered tentatively by humans. Others like her have made friends with them, become almost entirely domesticated. And despite the draw of croissants and cheap charcuterie, she has resisted, preferring to remain on her own.

Inside the church, a man named Jason daubs at his bingo board with an equal measure of excitement and resentment. Jason has not won at bingo. Not once. In twenty years of coming to this goddamn church every other Thursday. 520 Thursdays, give or take, of self-inflicted torture. How hope can hang on that long he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if what he’s feeling can even be called hope anymore. It’s been beaten to a pulp. It’s more mush than hope. And yet when Susan Reynolds calls G50, putting Jason one square away from winning the coverall and it’s $250 prize, the mush is recongizable as hope. Despite it all. He tries to tamp it down. But this is what he comes here for. Not the cash. He could not care less about $250, even though there is a nice bottle of whiskey he’s been eyeing as a reward. He comes here for the hope.

Outside, the creature moves at a trot. Her ears are perked, alert to the rustle of people inside the building, wary that they might be hiding from her. No matter how much food they seem to toss away, they seem unwilling to part with it except on their terms. For now, they are still inside, where the smell is coming from. Fat and salt and meat that she’s already salivating over. How she will get to them is of little concern right now. It has been a hard couple of days, with only a lizard here or there, one measly scrap of almost-rotting bacon in the parking lot.

“G…Fifty…one,” Susan says, and Jason nearly storms out of the room. Bingo daubers are intelligently designed not to explode when squeezed, though one teasing drop does leak out and lands on Jason’s G50. He could kill Susan for her delivery. A few seats away, Rick Clark leans over to tell his wife that he’s one number away from winning.

Susan reads three more numbers, none of them Gs. After each one, the room fills with excited murmurs, and the moments until she reads another number grown tense with anticipation. Hope and rage intertwine, a rope around Jason’s heart. Others laugh at the fact that no one has won yet. Jason just closes his eyes and thinks to himself that this might be it. He either wins today, or he has nothing left in him. The hope will finally be squashed and suffocated.

Meanwhile, our creature sniffs her way around the building. It is maddening to be so close to the source of the smell and not find it. Her tongue hangs out of her mouth, which she can’t or doesn’t want to close, afraid that any food she might come across will be snatched away by some other animal if she is not fast enough. After a lap and a half, she hears a door open, and she runs toward it. Low to the ground to stay hidden, but turns out there is no need. Someone has propped open the back door.

Jason watches Susan’s movements from across the room. Surely, there is no need to spin the bingo ball holder that slowly. Every turn of the cage squeaks, the sound seeming to shoot straight into Jason’s soul. He squeezes the dauber, which hovers over his board at the ready. Someone coughs, and to Jason’s nerve-wracked mind it sounds like they’re calling bingo.

The cage stops spinning and Susan reaches to grab the ball. Jason purposely holds his breath. If he doesn’t, he fears he’ll miss her reading the number, fears he won’t be able to get the word out in time, fears it’ll stay in his mouth, in his stomach, twisting around the way it has all these years.

It is as Susan brings the microphone closer to her mouth that our hungry creature finds the snack table in the back of the room. She knows there is a room full of humans here, many more than she should be comfortable with. But they seem blind to her and she is thankful for their lack of awareness. Just in case, she slinks toward the table, toward the riches that the humans are just letting sit there, ignored.

The meat, she decides. That will be first, before the humans can react. She will hope for the croissant, for the cheese, but they will have to pry the meat from her jaws before they chase her back out. Knowing that her time is running out, she sprints toward the table.

Susan pauses for effect as she reads the ball, and Jason can swear she’s smirking right at him as she does, as if she knows exactly which number he’s missing. “G…Fifty…”

Jason waits. The dauber is milimiters away from the board, but he dares not press it down in case she’s building suspense again.

Then the terrible call comes from somewhere behind him.

“Dingo!”

I hadn’t actually planned on finishing the story. I gave up on the idea last night, when I started leaning into the approach of showing my work. The false starts, the internal, incessant cycle of inspiration and doubt.

That’s writing. Blindly grasping for subjects, feeling a fervor for whatever you lay your hands on, and then having it squirm away eighty percent of the time. Maybe that counts as writing advice. You just keep doing it until something doesn’t squirm away. Or it squirms away and comes back, just when you were ready to declare it dead.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can spot a false dichotomy and those who can’t.

But seriously, I think people generally fall into two camps1. There are those who believe authority is there to help others, and those who believe authority is there to punish others.

Be it God or Government, there is a pervasive worldview—more pervasive than many of us realized, it seems—that says authority has its watchful eye on poor behavior, and will lash out to correct it. That its sole purpose, perhaps, is this lashing out. And what constitutes poor behavior2 is dubious.

I think there’s a doctorate thesis3 to be written about how someone’s parents or upbringing could lead to this view of a vengeful god or administration, but I’m not so interested in exploring the roots of this worldview.4 Like many a self-serving essayist before me, I’m just going to ruminate and pontificate on where we are now without trying to dig up the how of it all. I’ll wade around in the waters in the hopes that it will help me understand the tide.

And though it will recede, as these tides tend to, the question is how much damage will be left behind when it goes. And before this metaphor threatens to obfuscate my point rather than clarify it, let’s be clear about what’s causing today’s tides, in my humble opinion. It is this latter group of people who believe authority—and let’s ignore the umbrella term and admit we’re talking about government, shall we?5—is there to punish.

Not us, of course. No, no. We are good and deserving. We are the lucky children of this invented nation, and the luck is ours to keep because we have somehow earned it. It is others who will be punished. Those who are here to take what belongs only to us. Those who dare tell us how to live our lives without listening when we tell them how to live theirs. If government is to exist at all6, may it be a vengeful one which rains down its brimstone on the hordes of the undeserving reaching with their greedy fingers at what only we deserve. Those who are threatening our existence and livelihoods.

Which, of course, comes down to the idea that there’s an “us” and a “them.” A vengeful governing body is not a welcome one unless we can imagine ourselves safely on the side of the “us”, and imagine that all others are a “them” who want nothing more but to destroy us. And thus, punishment.

And why wouldn’t we feel this way? There is such comfort to this layout of the world. Because if others deserve to be punished then we deserve to be rewarded. We are good, and have worked hard to get all that we have. They are wretched, undeserving, trying to take what belongs rightfully to us, by virtue of our…well, virtue. If others are punished and we are not, then we are right about how special we are. If an iron-fisted government is around to deny entry, tear families apart, take away resources from those deemed undeserving, strip the rights of people different from us, but does not turn its punishment on us, then our worldview is confirmed. We must be good, and they must be bad.

Suffering—all suffering—is validated, as long as it is happening to others. In fact, others’ suffering is to be celebrated, because it further cements us in the camp of good. And if others are being punished somehow, we are likely gaining. The world is a scary place, but only if the scary stuff is happening to others. It follows that with “them” suffering, the society we inhabit will further benefit us, instead of them. By punishing, our government is indeed making it a better world for us.

This, of course, confirms our belief that the world is a scary place7, and the only way to be protected from it is to redirect its brutality onto others.

Sigh, it even feels icky to take on the point of view, even rhetorically. No use being facetious in the face of the tide. I’ll drop the shtick.8

It seems to me that if government is not there to help as many within its society as possible, then clearly it is there to punish. It is a parent with a belt. Not one meant to hug or nurture or teach , not one meant to feed us unpoisoned food, not one meant to protect us from disease, or ferry us safely from one place to another. This parent stands there with a belt, telling us to be good, telling us no one loves us like them, and then runs out of the house and whips anyone who dares to say they are the type to whip. They whip anyone they don’t trust. They whip and say that the world is brutal and they are protecting us. They pick the most vulnerable and point the finger, saying that is who they will whip to protect us. If they don’t, then all hell will break loose and we will join the suffering.

It’s not even the cognitive dissonance that makes me throw my hands down in resignation9. It’s the sheer blindness to luck, and the unwillingness to share it. I understand fear might be the root cause, but I cannot fathom feeling entitled to the world and yet not making the leap that others are entitled to it too.

I don’t understand crafting a society in which we are not meant to care for each other. I don’t understand building a government of any kind if its purpose is not to provide as much as we can to as many as we can. And I do not how we provide to as many as we can if we are looking to punish instead of helping. If poverty exists, it is not a government’s duty to punish the poor, but to try to help.

I do not understand wanting to become a parent just to wield a belt. And I do not seeing someone begging to hold the belt and not immediately distrusting them. Even if they say the belt will not be turned on me.10

Look, I don’t disagree with the premise that the world can be a scary place. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s one of the few things everyone around the world might generally agree on.11 It’s just that I fundamentally disagree on how to make it less scary. Surprise, surprise, it’s not by making the world scarier for others.

If we improve others’ lives, we improve society, simple as that.12 If we provide them with food and shelter and the means to survive, the world around them blossoms. Better schools, more green spaces, more opportunities.

It’s likely that the punishers of the world would scoff at my worldview, dismiss it as naive and unrealistic. I’m sure some would even feel the urge to punish me for it. Hell, one of these scared-of-the-world punishers13 has been quoted saying “the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”

It is just so logical to me that the more we help others, the better off our society is. A society where we feed14 and clothe and heal others is significantly less scary to me than one in which we hoard our good luck and hiss at those who eye it.

Look, if this post is circular and repetitive and broken up by jokey or patronizing footnotes15 it’s because this all feels like something that shouldn’t have to be said, but urgently needs saying. Punishing and destruction, undeniably, is one way to govern, one way to view the world. Slash, punish, destroy everything that isn’t mine in the hopes that it’ll improve my life. And yes, I know that there might be more nuance to it than how I’ve laid it out. That people might believe in helping others sometimes and punishing “them” another time.

I don’t care in the slightest if providing help is imperfect. Give me inefficient attempts at help over efficient destruction any day.

The hidden edge to a blessed life: twelve years later you emerge from the dream, faced with the real world and its resumes, its CVs, its years of required experience, and it asks of you, “What the hell else can you do?”

My answer: Everything! I think. Nothing, probably. Somewhere in between, I just don’t know how to present it other than in writing. Oh irony.

I’m a fan of languages, and I imagine I’ll be studying one or another for the rest of my life. Despite that, and my grasp of romance languages and their latin roots, I had to look up what exactly “curriculum vitae” translates into. The answer: Course of life.

An oddly poetic title for a document that aims to reduce us to our marketable characteristics. If a CV were a true examination of the course of my life, then I would feel much more confident writing it.

For over ten years, I have not added a single line to a resume. Have had no official titles. No start date, no end date. No salary, no real responsibilities but the deadline on my calendar, or the hunt for the next one. But I’ve had a life! I promise. There has been a course to my life, even if I cannot summarize it in bullet points that will make me a promising candidate to…whatever.

Don’t you worry, I can stretch the truth like anyone else. Hell, stretching the truth has been the one thing I’ve consistently done over the past decade. So my current, updated resume sure sounds like I have marketable skills. Ish. I could, theoretically, be a teacher, a coach, write in some other capacity that is not vested in the lives of children and teenagers.

What am I good at other than writing? For one: questioning what I am good at—including writing, But we can leave that little tidbit unexamined, lest this spirals into the billionth thinkpiece on Substack about imposter syndrome.

In the course of my life, this is what I’ve learned: I know how to work late into the night on a lump of imagined clay, shaping it hour after hour, keystroke after keystroke, into something impossible. Into something that matches the impossible perfection that exists only in my mind, only vaguely. I know how to take a memory and stretch it out into something meaningful, if entirely false. I know how to connect the dots. I know how to erase dots that are superfluous, that are redundant, that are just not that interesting.

I know how to make a plan for my day, and when it is disrupted by the unforseen, I know how to fold it into something new. And I don’t mean that I tuck that plan away resentfully. I can take the joy of that imagined hope for the day and origami it into something new. Or, at the very least, helpful to someone else. I can set aside a chapter to run an errand, to make a meal, to flounder while I substitute at a daycare for a long morning.

I know how to listen to the world around me, and absorb it, and let it marinate for months or years. I know how to sit on a panel and shut up for fifteen minutes and then make a single joke that breaks the tension but does not derail the conversation. Are there any jobs out there, I wonder, who might benefit from someone who is adept at watching bad films or reading subpar books and knowing how they might be fixed, what little choices could have been made differently that would result in a more compelling story? More importantly, are there any jobs out there that could benefit from someone who can watch a bad movie or read a subpar book and not dismiss it as merely and entirely bad? Someone who knows that faults can lead not just to a path for betterment, but to humor, to pleasure, to an appreciation for how hard it is to create?

A lot of jobs that I feel like I might be able to do require a knowledge of SEO. Do I have any idea what that is, other than a useful acronym to know for crossword puzzles? Only vaguely. But I’m willing to learn. There’s no line for that on a CV. No appreciation for someone who spends half his time searching for answers to the questions which arise—however tangentially—in the act of writing. What happens when a person has a puncture wound exactly two inches below the bottom-most rib? What is the least efficient but still plausible route to drive from New Orleans to Fairbanks, Alaska? What fish would be visible while scuba diving off the coast of Malaysia in January and, since there’s a whole lot of Malaysian coast, in which part of the country would a scuba diver be likely to find themselves in January, taking weather patterns into account.

Where is the part of the standard CV that allows me to flaunt the fact that for years I have had no one standing over me asking me to write, and yet the work comes pouring out of me? Where oh where can I point out that, in the course of my life, I have had no way to measure if my work was any good, other than to sit at the screen and come up with a standard which I felt reflected excellence? Maybe not every, every time, every word of every draft. But excellence which was consistent enough and excellent enough so that I could keep my life on its miraculous, blessed course?

Where, in the current job market being shrunk by AI and billionaires unwilling to part with another percentage point of profit margin can I point out that for almost every day of the past dozen years, I have been able to go to sleep at three a.m giddy from the work, and knowing that I could have breakfast on a Tuesday at the leisurely time of 9:45? At my favorite place in Mexico City, too, where lines tend to be long on the weekend, but on a Tuesday I can waltz in and have a cup of coffee while I stare at the fountain and know there is no rush to place my food order? This is not to gloat but to say that I, for a time—and hopefully not the last time—knew of job perks. Not health care, of course, but fresh air and a cup of coffee at 9:45 in the morning.

What else can I do but write? What about how to take my work with me wherever I go? How to never clock out, not all the way? Which is not by any means an endorsement of “grind” culture, more of an admission of guilt. Look, it’s no secret that writers and artists are particularly adept at beating up on themsleves, especially those facing the ppossibility that they may have to stop getting paid for their art. So maybe I should beef up this cover letter a little bit, flex for a moment. Point out that I can have the view below and not go immediately rushing down the hill toward those reefs. I can sit with my brain and my hands and nothing else and work.

Look, I wrote a few hundred words and then rushed down that hill, yes. I’m no fool. But I can’t quite find the space to say that on a page-long CV. To simultaneously point out the dedication it takes to stare at beauty and not immediately throw yourself into it; the skill it takes to capture that beauty in words, and the—ahem—strategic foresight it takes to know when to set aside the work, recognizing the rare gift of a job that allows you this office, and bask in the beauty.

If this document is going to ferry me into some other life, shouldn’t it ask me what else I can do, truly? Shouldn’t I be able to express in a way that is not a professional template, nor broken up by bullet points, what I have carried with me? Shouldn’t it actually speak of the true course of my life?