I don’t know if you’re aware (I certainly wasn’t til I marinated in this piece for several weeks): “vandal” traces its long, ambling roots through German (“a word originally capitalized and referred to a member of a Germanic people who sacked Rome in the year 455 CE. This sacking is what likely led to the use of the lower-case ‘vandal’ for someone who damages or destroys property,” according to our old buddy, Merriam-Webster) then also through Late Latin (“vandali, a word borrowed from a Germanic verb meaning ‘wend, turn’ that also gave rise to the Old English ‘Ēarendel’, the name of a mythological figure that inspired Tolkien’s creation of Eärendil, a mariner who wends his way across the sky of Middle Earth carrying the morning star.”).

“You say: damager of property. I say: carrier of the morning star.” —Tolkien, I imagine.

“Yes, I’m aware that ‘morning star’ might evoke the sun. Yes, I’m aware that a ‘mariner who wends his way across the sky’ carrying—or flying too near—said morning star might evoke Icarus. Yes, I’m aware of that particular morning star’s light and glow, its vital sustenance and lethal heat. Yes, I’m aware. And yes, I think Icarus gets a bad rap and needs a better PR team. ” —Tolkien, I imagine.

20 springs earlier, on a cold, bright day in early bloom, on our class trip to DC, three classmates of mine, 14-year old Ferris Buellers, stood next to The Reflecting Pool and told a half dozen Camerons, including me:

“You won’t run around it.”

A negative inviting a positive. Inconclusiveness suggesting definitiveness. A contracted verb welcoming an expanded, wending activity.

“To form a question is an active creative stance,” the poet Tracy K. Smith offers. By the inverse, then, is to NOT form a question—to manipulate a question into an imperative—a passive creative stance?

“You won’t run around it.”

I should note, again, that these Ferrises emphasized “you.” Not “won’t” or “run” or even “around.” I should also note that nowhere in their brief sentence, repeated several times to different gaggles of Camerons, did they include a first-person pronoun in either singular or plural forms: they removed themselves entirely from the syntax; they removed themselves entirely from the scene.

To quote George Saunders: “false prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility.”

False prose, evaded responsibility: we toed the line. Someone in our vicinity yelled GO. We SPRINTED the WHOLE first straightaway. Then turned. Then passed Abe. Our sprinting became a labored wending down the back straight. Then down the back edge of the pool. Then we turned onto the home straight, wended and winded.

I’m sure, during the second half, I asked myself: wait, why are we doing this again?! To form a question is an active creative stance.

Just as we’d reached the far corner of the pool, just around the halfway point, just as the Icarian rabbit fell back to the pack, to mix metaphors, to mix mythology with metaphor, to mix an airbound mariner with an earthbound hopper, just as we passed our 16th president, who seemed visibly distraught, from what I remember, clearly disappointed in the future of this nation, just then, our bus peeled away for the Air and Space Museum.

(Yes, all three Ferrises made it back to the bus in time. Because, even in this spin-off limited series, the Ferris character is still a confident sociopath who suffers zero repercussions, and the Cameron character is still a limp strand of fettuccine unable to set basic boundaries or overcome peer pressure.)

Someone snapped a photo at the start: six degenerates on the line; several more degenerates behind the line, cackling. The school paper included the photo, bus slightly out of frame, cacklers very much in frame, with the caption: “The Reflecting Pool Race. Gibbons won.”

Here’s the thing about Pyrrhic Victories: no one really wins! Famously so! Even the winner! Especially when all runners wear Timberland or LL Bean boots on an unseasonably cold day in March. Especially when Forrest Gump had once splashed through that same shallow water, making The Reflecting Pool seem like an enlarged kiddie pool rather than a vast, 1200-meter (!) rectangle.

“How long could it be?” I remember one Cameron asking. To form a question is an active creative stance. “It’s only ONE lap.”

All six of us felt, to quote the great James Parker after moving from England to America, “a phenomenon I named Ameripanic: an overwhelming apprehension of distance, a kind of horizontal vertigo.”

A kind of horizontal vertigo: finishing the race, Lincoln 600 meters away, still staring straight at us, still underwhelmed (“O Captain! My Captain…my captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,” to quote Whitman reflecting on Lincoln reflecting on six goobers running by his reflection, reflecting if these hooligans might spray-paint phallic phorms on the steps leading up to his feet, Whitman famously thought—people are saying!), us picturing MLK down those same steps, a full quarter mile away, probably disenchanted as well.

An overwhelming apprehension of distance [and time, scope, and history]. Ameripanic: trying to keep a respectful volume as we huffed past the Vietnam Memorial, despite lactic acid flooding our hamstrings and lungs, despite the nearby fumes from George W. Bush’s weed and Donald Rumsfeld’s cigars, despite our bus having just left, despite several Camerons chirping at one another mid-race.

Ameripanic: finishing then waiting ~four impossibly long minutes, the Washington Monument lurking in the background, before the bus eventually turned back.

All our classmates were banging on the bus windows, cackling, banging, hooting, Ferris-ing. Nearly all the faculty supervisors giggled.

One teacher, though, sure wasn’t giggling. The veins in his forehead and neck took the shape and color of two cherry Jolly Ranchers. I vaguely recall steam coming from at least two of his ears, mouth, and nose.

He waited til we got to the Air and Space Museum food court (the backup location to the Watergate parking lot—people are saying!). He said how inconsiderate we were to waste everyone else’s time. Senseless shenanigans in an unfamiliar place. Dangerous, even. Selfish.

Then, briefly, he chuckled. Briefly.

We apologized. Something resembling an apology from middle school boys (see: “false prose, evading responsibility”), still stinking of dank sweat and nervous toots.

We had lunch. Took a wending tour into the atmosphere, past the troposphere and stratosphere, rocketing right past the throwaway line that earth’s atmosphere is, was, is, yes, expanding from global warming, then continued out into the mesosphere.

We got back on the bus, wheels wending into traffic, wakeful eyes closing to snooze, a morning star still animating an afternoon sky.

The Atlantic (!!) recently asked The Black Seed Writers Group “for its thoughts on America’s condition” at 250 years. “Their responses,” writes our trusty pilot/director, James Parker, “come from a place beyond journalism and beyond safety…The Black Seed writers are abrasive, wistful, humorous, and loaded with insight. Theirs is essential testimony, and it comes from the streets of Boston, where the Revolution began. It comes from the inside of the outside of the American project. It comes from out here.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/america-250th-homelessness-poems/687760/

And you can “help us keep our community comfortable and dry this summer by donating items from our wish list here. We are especially in need of men’s underwear, T-shirts, and shorts.”

Thanks so much. Lots of love.

Birbiglia doesn’t specify whether this jealousy pertains only to comedians. And still, I’ve heard more “Chris Fleming!!” responses than any other name.

Chris Fleming: the impishness of Weird Al Yankovic with the hair of Weird Al Yankovic. The wardrobe of Harry Styles with the bounce of Robin Williams. The witchiness of Stevie Nicks with the itchiness of David Byrne. The vocal range and vocal precision of Maria Bamford with the vernacular of Gary Gulman. “If Big Bird went to Wesleyan,” to quote Birbiglia (personally, I’d say: “if the lovechild of Miss Piggy and Gonzo went to Hampshire,” but the point remains.).

“My hands / keep giggling while reminding me / I don’t get to be a human being / for very long,” the poet Mikko Harvey offers in his wonderful collection Let The World Have You. Lines I re-membered while watching, and rewatching, Fleming’s most recent special. Lines I re-membered while recently seeing/hearing/experiencing Fleming and his giggling hands live at The Wilbur.

The real question, though, isn’t: why the comedian envy? But rather: how did the goofy llama from The Emperor’s New Groove become such a nimble performer? How does a stand-up incorporate dance so freely, compellingly, amusingly? How does a physical comedian incorporate brilliant, insane, brilliantly-insane rhetoric AND crowd work AND song so freely, compellingly, amusingly? How does such kinetic movement incorporate such precise language? How does such precise movement incorporate such kinetic language? (And, most remarkably, how did someone incite such gushing praise from human Grinch, Marc Maron?)

“Incorporate” draws from the Latin “incorporatus,” meaning “to form into a body; absorb; embody.”

I sense that’s the root of this comedian jealousy, tangled up with other (prominent, thick, subterranean-and-superterranean) roots of inspiration and awe: the freedom with which Fleming performs in a body. The joy with which he moves in said body. The glee with which he forms language and movement into one body. The capacity to embody himself so fully. The extent to which he absorbs himself in his material. The freshness of material. The looseness and enthusiasm incorporating the material. The giggling hands, both on stage and in the audience. The playfulness with which Fleming’s giggling hands communicate to, and seemingly hold, and guide, and clap along with, other giggling hands.

The four divine abodes, or Brahmavihāras, according to The Buddha: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity. I think sympathetic joy is a near-synonym for this flavor of Fleming envy. Or what Greg Boyle refers to as “affectionate awe for others.”

For years, I’ve felt a similar awe for—and joy from—Fleming. The wild abandon with which he moves. The hyper-specificity with which he writes. The hyper-specificity with which he moves. The wild abandon with which he writes.

As a writer, I’m particularly in awe of—enchanted by—his written specificity. Even in casual conversation:

He doesn’t say, like most hacky “comedian” bros from the Rogan-sphere would, “I stopped drinking because I’d get wasted and spend all my money!”

What he actually says: “When I was drinking, I was losing all my money on GoFundMes. And not good GoFundMes. If I had $300, I’d give $250 to a guy in Cleveland trying to put jets in his bathtub. It’d be, like: ‘Help Darren get a jacuzzi.’ BOOM. You got it, Darren!”

He doesn’t say, “Seth, I bet you were a stud in high school.”

What he actually says: every word, every emphasized syllable, every detail, every physical expression, every intonation here.

Paul Newman eyes, Ethan Frome neck.

Birbiglia also asks podcast guests if there’s a song that makes them cry. Fleming said anything by Stevie Nicks.

Birbiglia: “What is it about Stevie Nicks that makes us cry?”

Fleming: “I think she’s just so tapped into The Source…‘Landslide’ is definitely the saddest song they’re gonna play in a Target.”

To quote John Ashbery: “I don’t look at poems as closed works. I feel they’re probably going on all the time…and I occasionally snip off a length.”

The saddest song they’re gonna play in a Target.

A guy in Cleveland trying to put jets in his bathtub.

Paul Newman eyes, Ethan Frome neck.

“god is in the details,” they say.

“The more specific, the more universal,” they say in writing classes. The more particular, the more resonant. The more acutely specific, the more paradoxically accessible. The closer attention to details and minutiae, the more (expansively, surprisingly) universal.

god is in the details.

I’ve heard spiritual teachers say god—or your experience of the divine—is simply awareness or consciousness itself. I’m also reminded that “enthusiasm” traces its roots to the Greek “enthous,” meaning “of divine inspiration.”

At The Wilbur recently, I saw Chris Fleming finding and sharing acute particulars. Wild details with wild specificity. Wild antics from a wild consciousness. A wild consciousness with wild enthusiasm. The cleanest syntax from a prancing paradox. And let me tell you:

My hands / [kept] giggling while reminding me / I don’t get to be a human being / for very long.

I think both independent clauses (“my hands…” and “I don’t get…”) carry equal weight. Despite the first clause feeling lighter and evoking more levity. Despite the second clause feeling heavier and taking the stage later as the overhead lights dim. I think the first clause incorporates the second clause before the second clause even appears. I think the second clause incorporates urgency back into the first clause. I think it’s worth noting, again, the embodied subject of the verb “reminding” (“my hands”), the state of said subject (“giggling”), and the existential, urgent reminder thereafter. I think ALL real art comes from a place of urgency: creatively, emotionally, intellectually, physically, viscerally, psychically, interpersonally.

Chris Fleming, when I saw him last week, re-minded me of all this: an urgent playfulness. A playful urgency. Playfully, urgently discovering. Then urgently, playfully sharing. I don’t think my hands (or knees or shoulders) have ever giggled more. I don’t think my limbs (or joints or orifices) have ever felt as sore from giggling.

Zadie Smith writes in her most recent (dynamite!) essay collection, Dead and Alive, about what, ultimately, connects her to fiction. Which is to say: what connects her to the unbelievable, or rather the believable-but not-immediately-familiar-or-recognizable, the unfamiliar-yet-distinctly-specific:

“Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain kind of sentence. Familiarity, kinship, and compassion will play their part, but if the sentences don’t speak to me nothing else will. I believe in a sentence of balance, care, rigor, and integrity.”

I’m in lockstep with Zadie: care with craft on an elemental level, which communicates to the audience that we’re in good hands. Care with the actual ingredients, and their preparation, presentation, and delivery, regardless of what’s on the menu.

In good hands. Which is to say: trusty hands. Trusty hands despite unruly material. Trusty, steady hands incorporating wild play. Steady hands incorporating giggling hands.

My new roommate—Cal, Callahan, Bubba, Bubs, youthful 10.5-year-old pup, Tony Hale in canine form—in May 2026:

And “something of the sky” :

Well, now that you ask—thanks for asking—I fill that space with stuff like this. I redirect myself toward stuff like this:

“You’ve become this legend of—I won’t say mediocrity ‘cause I know you think I’m gonna say that. It’s not mediocrity. It’s more than that. Not a lot more.”

Funny junk like this, filling that space, redirecting me elsewhere.

Kevin Nealon: a comic’s comic, as they say, a polite way of implying, suggesting: “an acquired taste! Not for everyone!” An indirect way of saying, suggesting: “admirably un-pandering! Aspirationally un-panderable!” A more-caffeinated Steven Wright. Gary Gulman’s cheeky uncle. Norm Macdonald with a conscience. “One of the most agile minds I’ve ever known,” to quote Conan.

Apparently, when Lorne Michaels asked a young Conan, newly hired as a writer at SNL, who his comedic heroes were, Conan says he responded, “Kevin Nealon,” who’d also just joined the cast. An oddball, fringe character. Michaels, apparently, then said, “no, really. Who?”

I also adore Kevin Nealon’s mind, a muppet comedian with a muppet brain: the restless banter of Statler and Waldorf (Statler and Waldorf), the stage presence of Fozzie Bear (loose, grinning, delusional), the performance art of Gonzo (gonzo yet low stakes, gonzo antics from an unthreatening temperament).

“What, instead, fills that time and space?”

Fills or its many synonyms: packs, stuffs, pervades, saturates, jams, crams, occupies. A very different synonym: replenishes, meaning both fills and restores, a verb that simultaneously crams and nourishes.

Nealon: “Where do you live exactly?”

Conan: “Where do I live exactly? I live on Catalina Island.”

Nealon: “Good to know. Good to know.”

Conan: “I live in a geodesic dome on Catalina Island.”

Nealon: “I found this beautiful beach on Catalina Island. It’s like RIGHT on the water….[slight pause, something resembling silence between these two]...where IS our waiter?”

To paraphrase many psychologists: “we tend to fill our awareness with a familiar anxiety rather than an unknown potential.”

The Nealon: filling our awareness with an unfamiliar anxiety. Unfamiliar junk. Junk with unknown potential. Junk that overtly crams yet surprisingly replenishes. The between-dish, palate-cleansing sorbet that, somehow, provides real nourishment despite its cotton candy flavoring.

As the ancient Sufi saying goes: “Before you speak, your words should pass through three gates: 1. Is this kind? 2. Is this true? Is this helpful?”

The Nealon: 1. Is…THIS?! 2. IS this?! 3. This is!

“How do you redirect yourself elsewhere?”

Redirect or its many synonyms: divert, turn, reorient, deflect, shift, transfer.

When I think of diversion, I think of Nealon’s YouTube talk show: Hiking with Kevin, diverting conversation as well as efficient foot travel:

Nealon: “Do you pay for your own clothes?”

Conan: “I haven’t paid for anything since 1993.”

Nealon: “What about hotels?”

Conan: “What about hotels?”

Nealon: “You ever stay in one?”

When I think of diversion, I think of transitions in Nealon’s stand-up: bigger and more abrupt and more memorable than the jokes themselves, less throat-clearing than throat-FILLING, frequently interrupting himself, declaring, shouting, with no context, “ANNNNNND we’re back!” Back from where?! Where’d we go?! We never left! We’re back! We’re here! Even though we were, and still are, here! MORE here, in fact: rerouting—briefly—away from actual jokes, away from solid substance toward airy distraction, prioritizing the distraction, making the distraction itself the homecoming, the chorus, the melody.

When I think of diversion, I also think of cognitive reframing in Cognitive Behavior Therapy: catching an unhelpful thought, an untrue belief; challenging its veracity; pausing then changing the narrative altogether. A possible synonym for these three (active!) Cs: rerouting. Turning away from rumination, from thought patterns that don’t serve us, not as escapism but rather as an intentional detour.

Kevin Nealon: turning directly TOWARD what doesn’t serve. Rerouting—us and him—toward junk. Wonderful junk. Joyful junk. Mindless, transcendent, mindlessly-transcendent junk. The nonsensical, connective tissue. The banter on the way to the joke. The banter dismounting from the joke. The banter that becomes the laugh through the backdoor cracked window of a dank basement. The Between Joke. The rerouting filler. The filling reroute.

“If gifts and responsibilities are one,” Robin Wall Kimmerer offers in Braiding Sweetgrass, “then asking ‘what is our responsibility?’ is the same as asking ‘what is our gift?’”

The gift of gab. A responsibility to gab.

Midway through Nealon’s most recent special (Loose in the Crotch on YouTube), he tells the audience, filling a brief lull, “I’ve been so stressed out lately.”

Before Nealon even explains his stress, before adding any context or specificity, before the audience can even respond with any reassurance, or recognition, or any noise at all, before anything else can slip in and occupy this now-open space, he tells the crowd:

“And it’s not your fault. Don’t beat yourself up.”

This essay has given me such sustained, sustaining delight: I started working on it—it started working on me—in October during the baseball playoffs, and I wanted to share it now, in April, at the start of a new baseball season. An unexpected (and very joyful), baseball hibernation project.

1

If there were a Moneyball sequel in the year 2026, the Billy Beane character, I imagine, would suggest that he only wants hitters whose at-bats produce one of three outcomes: home run, walk, or strikeout. Minimizing the risk of double plays. Maximizing the potential for immediate runs.

“BIG swing or NO swing,” I imagine him reminding his dinosaur scouts who, I imagine, still wonder aloud who this Fabio character is.

“High launch angle, or don’t even launch at all,” I imagine him, alone, shouting at the TV in the Oakland dungeon gym, while cranking out sweaty lat pulldowns.

“Even if Giambi slides or beats the tag, he should still be out on principle,” I imagine him saying, barking, whiskey in hand, alone, rewatching distressing reruns from a playoff loss a quarter century earlier, a sequence known as The Flip in which Derek Jeter performed the most unexpected clean-up ever on a baseball field:

Flip, the noun: a sudden, sharp movement.

To flip, the verb: toss; turn over with a sudden movement; change from one state, position, or subject to another.

For years now, I’ve felt a glacial flip. Or rather, I’ve flipped glacially. I’ve flipped on the shortstop behind The Flip. I’ve flipped about the player towards whom I used to flip off.

Can flips, though, sudden and sharp by nature, happen glacially? How slowly can a flip flip before the flip no longer constitutes flipping? What if a flip is less of a quick turn, by definition, and more like subterranean plates softly bumping over billions of years, forming entirely new mountain ranges, distinct peaks, separate continents?

When I rewatch The Flip, I find myself wanting a wider frame or even a split-screen. I’m familiar with—mesmerized by—the ending: the arriving that becomes reaching, the reaching that becomes flipping, the flipping that nearly becomes falling (“the reaching that makes of falling flight,” to quote Ross Gay); making The Flip just as his body flips between fair and foul territory; flipping on a football field in Oakland that continually, for decades, flipped to baseball; floating into the foreground, in brief flight, after the highest third-base camera finally flips to the lowest angle in the first-base dugout, after The Flip, after reaching what the poet Kaveh Akbar calls “magnetic north”: “so much of escape is luck, a magnetic north…the value of joy is in its asking, what now shall I repair?”

I find myself wanting to see and savor the beginnings of Jeter’s trip, the joyful asking en route to the repair, the escape itself before reaching magnetic north: whether he first flares to second base, anticipating a routine double from Terrence Long; whether he first waits or wobbles, drifts or darts; how deep in the infield dirt he begins, presumably not shallow with two outs, in the seventh inning of a one-run playoff game no less, not needing to make the final out at home until Shane Spencer’s throw forces Jeter’s hand, so to speak, until Spencer’s left shoulder tips Jeter’s hand, so to speak; how quickly he flips from second-base coverage to improvised roaming, how quick a flip from presumption to precaution, from preamble to postlude; how quickly he gains momentum, roaming through vast negative space to an unknown point; how directly he roams to this precise, unknown point. Dirt to grass. Grass to dirt. Dirt to chalk. Chalk to dirt. Dirt to grass.

Western psychology views attachment in terms of security. Eastern psychology views attachment in terms of control or clinging (and non-attachment in terms of surrender). When I rewatch The Flip, I see secure surrender. Surrendered security. Security in surrender.

“We are most asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all,” Annie Dillard offers us. Are we then, by the inverse, most alert at the switch when we don’t fancy we control any switches—or flips—at all?

Sometime near the end of Jeter’s career, in my early 20s, after a childhood spewing his last name (a convenient near-homophone of “cheater”) with a blend of disdain and fear, tonally like hearing “SNAPE” from the voice of Harry Potter, after a childhood abstaining from Jeter’s #2 altogether not only for sports uniforms but for any choice of any number in any context, any card game, board game, airplane seat, school bus row, after a childhood dressing as Jeter’s shortstop rival Nomar Garciaparra three consecutive Halloweens, after watching Jeter imitate Nomar’s batting stance in front of the Fenway faithful at the ‘99 All-Star game, bat flips and toe taps and bat taps and toe flips and glove tugs and ear pulls and glove pulls and ears tugs, less of an impression, really, than a full-grinning full-embodiment, flipping to Nomar physicality on Nomar’s home field, after seeing this flipped physicality, as an eight-year-old, as forced and cloying rather than connective and charming, gradually, glacially, over decades, I began seeing more clearly, less flippantly: here was the most humble superstar. Cary Grant’s grandson if he grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. An unassuming teammate, at the literal center of the biggest diamond in The Biggest Apple, who, very quietly, has more hits than any Yankee (yes, Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle), who, very quietly, has more singles than anyone in the last century not named Pete Rose.

Very quietly. Steadily.

My mom calls an artist’s practice “sticking to your knitting.” Tactile. Within arm’s reach. Ongoing and offline. A practice requiring persistence, patience, and presence. Quiet. Steady.

There’s nothing quiet about playing shortstop for the New York Yankees. The volume of noise and heckling. The volume of pressure and exposure. And yet, when I think of Derek Jeter, I think of quiet. Quietly graceful. Quietly grounded. Quietly centered despite and amidst all the noise. Lots of quiet knitting. Lots of blankets and sweaters that kept others cozy. That still keep others cozy.

In his Hall of Fame speech, he thanked everyone: family, teammates, coaches from every level. He shared a story of meeting Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow. Then he shared of story from the ‘99 All-Star Game at Fenway:

“Pregame, they were honoring the all-century players. All the players, past and present, were gathering around Ted Williams, so he could throw out the first pitch. And I sorta just hovered around the back. Because, quite frankly, I was in awe, and I didn’t want to get in the way. I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around. And someone told me, ‘I wanted to meet you.’ And I said, ‘you wanted to meet me?’ That was the very first time I met the great Hank Aaron…during my career, I wanted to make Mrs. Robinson proud. I wanted to make Hank Aaron proud. I wanted to make all of [the hall-of-famers] proud.”

I was in awe, and I didn’t want to get in the way.

How slowly can a flip flip before the flip no longer constitutes flipping? How much does a butterfly flap and flip before its flipping and flapping qualifies as flight? How far between the Butterfly’s Affect and its far-flapping Butterfly Effect?

A caterpillar already possesses the innate qualities—the Imaginal Cells—of a butterfly. Long before its chrysalis. Long before it flaps itself into first, unknown flight. Long before it emerges into new color.

Imaginal cells, a term I’ve learned from both meditation teachers and a neighborhood Ms. Frizzle: the ever-present butterfly cells that anticipate and facilitate every metamorphosis. That trust and empower what the caterpillar itself can’t immediately see. Cells that already hold the capacity for each future flip.

Imaginal cells which return me to Fleabag’s therapist, when Fleabag asks if she should sleep with The Hot Priest: “you already know what you’re going to do.”

An innate, already-knowing.

An innate, already-turning.

Earlier this year, I had the most vivid dream of my adult life. The sky was bright blue. The birds were singing. My grandma, deceased since I was two, stood next to me, as real and solid as any daytime visitor, delighting in the birds, delighting in the blue sky. She smiled. Tilted her head back. We both looked up, higher, higher, smiling, higher, smiling, my head craning back, back, the highest birds singing above the highest branches. As I kept looking up, kept smiling, smiling, she said, in a voice I immediately recognized, unmistakable even after 32 years, a voice broadcasted across the whole landscape, booming but gentle: “we are here to live in joyful connection and to keep looking up.”

Just as I heard “joyful connection,” I saw the highest few birds rotating, turning themselves over, a cyclical and circular flipping, flipping in place while still in flight, flipping while still in song.

2

Derek Jeter’s swing—much to the distress of Billy Beane in this imaginary Moneyball sequel, I imagine—is short. Compact. Comparatively level and modest relative to more powerful strokes. An “inside-out” swing, they say, spraying singles into the opposite field gaps (the right-center gap, in particular, as a righty) rather than launching moon shots to left. Staying inside the ball, leading with the hands, following through the strike zone with the bat’s barrel: a quietly profound practice of working with one’s instrument, trusting its force and power, trusting in shared velocity, trusting in collaborative future flight, but ultimately beginning each cycle within oneself, initiating far-reaching momentum from closest reach.

“I wasn’t good enough to guess pitches…I looked fastball down the middle every pitch…I would stay inside the ball…because it gives you more time…I would try to stay gap to gap.”

Let’s briefly parse the Baseball Speak:

“Guess pitches.” There are many pitches, essentially all but one of which are off-speed. Change-ups. Curves. Sliders. Slurves. Knuckleballs. Knuckle-curves. Cutters. Splitters. Sweepers. Sinkers. Pitches with sharp, sudden movement. Pitches that, near the end of their 60-foot commutes, flip.

“I looked fastball.” Anticipated the only pitch that doesn’t flip. Prepared for the fastest, most direct route. And when this non-flipping pitch, in fact, flipped, his early hands could still flip the ball into play: getting to work not just on time but early, even after navigating unexpected delays.

“I would try to stay gap to gap.” Middle of the outfield. Balance over bluster. Serving simple, nutritious ingredients instead of immediately gratifying fast food. The unshowy antidote to Turning On One, let alone Swinging For The Fences.

Sticking to your knitting: quiet and steady.

Sticking to your hitting: trusting in flight.

Sticking to your knitting-hitting: quiet trust, steady flight, steady trust, quiet flight.

What I only recently noticed: among all the great singles hitters who’ve stuck to their knitting-hitting—Tony Gwynn, Rod Carew, Ichiro, Wade Boggs, Stan Musial, Rose, Luis Arráez—only Jeter bats right-handed. That’s an extra three feet, every time, to first base. Three feet times 3465 hits = 10395 feet. Two miles! 40 Manhattan blocks! How far between the Butterfly’s Affect and its far-flapping Butterfly Effect?

Earlier this year, I went for the first time to a breathwork and Reiki facilitator (Reiki: the old Japanese practice of energy alignment.). I closed my eyes. Cycled through double inhales and sighing exhales. They gently pressed the center of my forehead then right under my collar bone, and an image arose. No, an image didn’t arise: an IMAX-quality scene enveloped everything in my mind’s eye. A tree and its branches cocooned me. A familiar tree. A tree I remembered from Ithaca, New York but hadn’t seen in 28 years, before we moved. The sky was stormy. The branches were swaying. I imagined a few branches snapping. I sensed and imagined imminent thunder. And still, it felt supremely safe. Resting at this seemingly ominous threshold. Cocooned in this lucid pause. Held in this familiar unknown.

When I hear “inside-out swing,” I imagine Jeter. Then I imagine a cocoon, swaying, swinging, flipping, on one of those branches.

Inside out, the adverb #1: in such a manner that the inner surface becomes the outer.

Inside out, the adverb #2: to a thorough degree.

Inside out, the adverb #3: in or into a state of disarray often involving drastic reorganization.

Watching YouTube clips of Jeter, a quarter century later: Inside out #1, 2, 3.

I’ve kept watching, kept delighting: old, familiar clips with fresh, old eyes (the word “autopsy,” my dictionary alerted me, traces its meandering roots back to Greek, meaning “seeing with one’s own eyes.”).

I was in awe, and I didn’t want to get in the way [of what I was seeing with my own eyes].

I was in awe, and I didn’t want to get in the way [of how quickly, a quarter century later, this flip gained momentum, how directly I may have roamed to this unknown, precise point].

There are clips of Jeter in stasis, or relative stasis given his profession: walking out to the mound with Andy Pettitte, pulling a sobbing Mariano Rivera from his last game; Billy Crystal eulogizing Jeter’s career; an interview with Joe Buck, in which Jeter laughs remembering his last game: “I never thought I’d get cheered at Fenway Park.”

And there are clips of Jeter in motion. Most of these kinetic clip titles include the ubiquitous “The” article paired with a Jeter Verb, now resting as static noun in perpetuity, both words capitalized for even more gravitas (many sound like track listings on early Bruce Springsteen albums: just the right blend of sentimental but soaring, mythologizing but elemental):

The Flip. The Leap. The Jump. The Jump-Throw. The Tip. The Dive.

When I watch these permanent installations from the main Jeter gallery, I keep returning to—imagining—the most routine Jeter play not even housed in the museum: the standard, ground-out double play. “Turning two,” as they say. Grounder to Jeter, #2, at shortstop. Flips to second base. Onto first for two outs. #2 flips to two, yielding two. Two sudden, sharp movements, sudden and sharp but still calm, each connected to a #2. The same number—same fundamental shape, same cellular makeup—on either side of both flips. #2 as the subject, as the pivot, as the hinged conjunction of an ongoing sentence, as the hopeful outcome. Two turning to two, turning into two.

I’ve found myself most drawn to a non-titled clip. A non-named, non-the’d clip. A clip of a flip, only in this clip the flip isn’t of the ball or bat or glove but rather a flip of Jeter himself. A full-bodied flip. An involuntary flip. A flip that occurred during the same series as The Flip, when I was in fifth grade, near or at the peak of my Jeter angst, near or in the basement of my Jeter awe, another flip that, yes, also began off the thankless bat of Terrence Long, only two days after The Flip, after, I imagine, Billy Beane flipped over his entire office desk again, just as Brad Pitt does in Moneyball, flipping his desk, I imagine, after each of these Jeter flips:

Dirt to grass. Grass to chalk. Chalk to grass. Grass to dirt. Dirt to foam. Foam to floor. Feet to hands. Hands to waist. Waist to head. Head to feet. Feet to dirt. Dirt to grass. Grass to chalk. Chalk to grass. Grass to dirt.

I imagine some small part of Jeter, while running, imagined colliding.

I imagine a small part of him, while colliding, imagined flipping.

I imagine a small part of him, while flipping, imagined landing again.

I imagine.

As always, these are books not that you should read (“I’m tired of being should upon,” to quote Timothy Leary) but books in the past year that “blew my hair back,” to quote that cheeky MIT janitor:

What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life—Mark Doty (2020).

Mary Oliver blurbed books about as often as Boris Johnson combs hair, and yet she said this about Doty’s writing: “one of the things that has been constant about Mark Doty’s work, poetry and prose, is his intense search for the exact word or phrase, of whatever issue, which leads him (and us) into the very furnace of meaning within the human story.” (!!)

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a poetry close-reading this affectionate and incisive. I’m not sure I’ve ever consumed nutrient-rich, literary superfood this flavorful. If I had to place this genre-less book into a shippable UPS box: memoir by a poet / biography about a poet / literary criticism of and through Whitman, in joyful conversation with Whitman, who appears and appears in Doty’s life. Not to mention: the most stunning final paragraph of a non-novel I can remember (sublime commentary throughout on Whitman. The occasional, cringey, personal sex anecdote. We contain multitudes, to quote Walt himself.)

Whitman was my first favorite poet in life (and will always be a favorite): I first read him in a 19th Century American Lit class in college and had never read literature that so sang the body electric. The ecstatic joy. The remarkable presence (as in presence of being but also an eternally present tense, most memorably in “Song of Myself,” that truly sounds more immediate and trusting from his voice: I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.). The loving attention towards all. The exhilarating maximalism and breathtaking pace. Calling Whitman *just* an erotic poet is like saying E.T. is a movie about Reese’s Pieces.

What’s that Roy Kent line? “You shouldn’t be with someone unless you feel like you’ve been hit by fuckin’ lightning (?!)”

Lightning: Now I will do nothing but listen, to accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

Lightning: I stop somewhere waiting for you.

44 Poems On Being With Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection—Pádraig Ó Tuama (2025). Pádraig Ó Tuama hosts the wonderful Poetry Unbound podcast (in the On Being Krista Tippett podcast network), where, each Monday and Friday, he reflects on a single poem. He reads the poem. He unpacks the poem with “unhurried reflections,” “keen insight,” and “warm personal anecdotes,” to quote his previous book’s blurbs. Then he reads the poem one more time, attentively, deliberately (all with a delightful, Irish lilt). Each episode is all of 14 minutes. I adore it.

This is the second book in this Poetry Unbound book series (after the de-light-full Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems To Open Your World in 2022). The poems themselves are knockouts (from hall-of-famers like Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, and Lucille Clifton to thrilling newcomers like Kandace Siobhan Walker, Mosab Abu Toha, and Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley), and the ongoing feeling I’ve had reading, re-reading, dropping in for a few poems and reflections every few days is: sitting in a comfy passenger seat, going no faster than 25mph on quiet backroads, accompanied and driven by an incredibly thoughtful tour guide.

(Relatedly, my phone autocorrects “Pádraig Ó Tuama” to “Parfait O’ Trauma.” Also, his own recent collection, Kitchen Hymns, similarly blew back my happy follicles.)

Exit Opera—Kim Addonizio (2024). Kim Addonizio has become one of my favorite poets: the spare lyricism, the sassy comedy, the truly fresh (often bananas!) imagery, the playfully jarring line-breaks. She writes some of the snappiest, least pretentious lines, and yet she still never reaches for the clearance shelf of language. I can’t get enough of this blurb from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of all people (yes, Fleabag): “Kim Addonizio’s poetry gives me physical energy.” (I would categorize this Addonizio-drawn physical energy in myself as: squirrely, defiant joy.)

Lighthead—Terrance Hayes (2010). To quote Hayes himself, years ago: “How close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I’m just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.”

Very few poets, or writers in any medium, make language musical quite like Hayes, alchemizing Big Feelings & Timeless Ideas into quiet song, a sort of singing I would call: subtle yet soaring? Subtly soaring? Soaringly subtle? All the above? (not to mention, the most memorable piece of art about avocados I’ve ever consumed.)

Postcolonial Love Poem—Natalie Diaz (2020). To quote the great June Jordan: “Poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or a bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.”

I can’t think of a contemporary poet I read all year who better exhibits and embodies all this, so humbly and so powerfully, blending the mythological with the political, the personal with the communal.

Pilgrim Bell: Poems—Kaveh Akbar (2021). ^^^ ditto! If Rumi grew up with access to the internet.

Mouth to Mouth—Antoine Wilson (2022). I first read this novel, in 2022, in one, very satisfying gulp. I returned to it a few months ago and can confirm: minimal gulps, maximal satisfaction! So re-readable. A Russian doll of a book. If Knives Out took place in the United lounge at Newark airport. “A perfect narrative machine, working by its own laws,” to quote Jonathan Lethem.

Lost & Found—Kathryn Schulz (2022). One of my favorite books of nonfiction this decade (second time on an MGL book review, first since ‘22, a book I now re-read every even year!). A profoundly hopeful memoir, on loss and love, grief and discovery, etymology and origins, from the great New Yorker journalist, told in three sections: 1. Lost 2. Found 3. And.

Mother Mary Comes to Me—Arundhati Roy (2025). Roy’s most known for the sprawling novel about fraternal twins, The God of Small Things. Here, 30 years later, she writes a different sort of sprawling, family epic: a memoir about her relationship with her complicated mother, a memoir by a novelist reckoning with memory, writing towards clarity not from certainty. Honest, intimate, moving. In the emotional, literary, and creative lineage of James Baldwin.

Let The World Have You—Mikko Harvey (2022). The surreal goofiness of a Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman movie (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, etc.) if a modern Emily Dickinson poet wrote the screenplay. Lots of delightful weirdness Trojan Horse-ing in lots of heart.

Tao Te Ching—Lao Tzu (2500 years pre-Y2K). I like Pete Holmes’ working definition of spirituality (I’m paraphrasing from his podcast years ago): “the practice of getting back to your—or the—baseline, beyond likes and dislikes, beyond preference and surface identity, where everything belongs.” For my money, the Tao Te Ching is the most elemental *spiritual* book ever written in this sense. 81 one-page chapters, reflections, musings, relaxed poetic verse. Where Stoicism meets Zen Buddhism. Wise yet completely unpretentious. Drop in wherever. Feel refreshed, remembering your baseline. (Famously a baseline book for Bruce Lee, Ursula Le Guin, and Jeff Bridges. To be a fly on that wall. You can’t go wrong with any translation, but I particularly enjoy Stephen Mitchell’s.).

P.S. While we’re here on writing/books: 1. I can’t recommend more highly the great Kate Senecal and her coaching services for all things writing/editing/manuscript feedback-ing. Where craft meets community, savvy revision with welcoming pals. My next-door studio neighbor at Vermont Studio Center and just an awesome teammate.

And 2. The annual Writers Without Margins journal recently came out, which you can purchase here.

Facilitating workshops through WWM (“dedicated to the fusion of art and advocacy… expanding access to the literary arts for unheard and under-resourced communities,” including homeless shelters, psychiatric outpatient centers, drug rehabilitation centers, public libraries) has been a wonderful gig. This year’s journal is a compilation from the past decade, with poems and flash prose from both participants and facilitators (I have a short piece about a particularly glowing neighbor in LA called “Have You Noticed?”).

“[Make Gibbons Laugh], a game whose name was as simple and direct as its objective: try to elicit giggles from THIS goober here, the dumber and shorter the joke the better (it was almost like they were searching for the lowest common denominator of what would actually make somebody laugh, and I was the nearest trial run.) Teenage boys are bored morons who lean into anarchy. I was, and am, an easy laugh. It was the perfect storm.

But in a game where the sole purpose was to make me laugh, the content of the funny line often mattered much less than the context of the funny line. Diarrhea Croutons, in a vacuum, is moderately funny at best even to sophomoric degenerates. Yes, I laughed at how a gross thing unexpectedly joined forces with a random food (the more random, the funnier. ‘Falafel’ also killed.). Yes, I laughed at how a fecal noun became a fecal adjective or fecal compound-noun. But really, I laughed because we were in places where laughing was a hard no-no: during teacher announcements, during silent study hall, during classmate presentations, during somber school meetings where some outside speaker ran the gnarliest PowerPoint on the perils of chewing tobacco. That was precisely when they’d strike. Pete Holmes calls these Church Laughs: how the most uncontrollable laughs happen in rooms that strictly forbid them; the tighter the room’s collective sphincter, the stronger the tea-kettle pressure of the laugh.”

Which is all to say, I recently returned to—experienced—Church Laughs. A church-like atmosphere that Made Gibbons Laugh. Or rather: a church-like atmosphere that occasioned laughs already within Gibbons.

Instead of an actual church, these laughs giggled and wiggled their way out from me in a Zen Buddhist meditation center, a gentle space I wouldn’t deem tight sphincter but rather silently still. Collectively still. Mindfully noiseless. Noiselessly mindful.

Giggles, giggles, skittering, scattering through the whole, silent room.

“You haven’t really meditated deeply if you haven’t cried deeply,” Jack Kornfield offers us. I agree and would now add: “or laugh deeply.”

In meditation, everything arises: worries, regrets, joys, aches, uncomfortable physical sensations, cries, LAUGHS, “every morning a new arrival,” to quote Rumi in “The Guest House,” colloquially known as The Meditation Poem:

“All you really do in meditation is sit and sweep the garden,” I’ve also heard from Jack Kornfield. “It doesn’t matter how big the garden is.”

I would now add: “and leave the guest house door ajar on your way in from sweeping.”

I’ve spent the last 11.5 years sweeping different gardens, patchy lawns, dense forest, scraggly grass at vacant bus stops, across different seasons and different climates with different irrigation systems or droughts altogether. Each garden has weeds and flowers. Each garden has debris and sustenance. The sweeping, I’ve found, tends to the garden walkways, stone, dirt, or otherwise: close enough to water the plants, observing them without obstructing them; gently maintaining the paths we walk on with ourselves and, in turn, with others.

When I was 23, I swept my first garden at a wonderful meditation center in Denver, which sadly closed during Covid. They could clearly see my restlessness sitting and sweeping for hours. Three different employees, weeks apart, offered me an old iPod and headphones, if I wanted them, that included Buddhist dharma talks and guided meditations. I asked which teachers they recommended.

“Jack Kornfield.”

“Tara Brach.”

“Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield.”

After the third response, I asked the employee what about Brach and Kornfield spoke to them.

“They just make it seem easy.”

I wasn’t sure what they meant by “it.” Equanimity. Forgiveness. Graceful presence, maybe. And I definitely wasn’t sure how “easy” this “it” really was.

I’ve since heard Jack Kornfield refer to enlightenment as “simply having a trusting heart.” I’ve since heard Tara Brach offer the same prayer, over and over, to “trust in everyone’s basic goodness.”

You sit and sweep and trust the garden. And all its gardeners.

This Zen meditation center is a weekly, longer, group sit. ~20 sweepers in one, bigger garden. A reading before. A longer sit. A “sangha,” or communal discussion, after.

I’m moved that “sangha” is one of the three “jewels,” or pillars, of Buddhist meditation (along with practice itself, “buddha,” and “dharma,” as in “cosmic law” or “reality”): a solitary practice that still requires others, a contemplative silence actually nourished by community.

I’m moved by how quickly time passes in a group sit.

I’m moved by the very real, felt sense of support, sitting in silence around strangers and friends.

I’m moved by how all writing is a silent conversation across time and space.

I’m moved by how “the Chinese character for ‘poetry’ is made up of two parts: ‘word’ and ‘temple,’” the poetry press Copper Canyon offers on the first page of all their books. I’m moved by the quiet, inner-and-outer temples that occasion these words.

And I’m moved—very tickled—by old laughs resurfacing in and from this silence.

By about minute 40 meditating my second week: giggles, giggles.

I covered my mouth. More giggles.

I’m sure people were staring. I kept my eyes closed. More giggles.

“The quieter you become, the more you hear,” Rumi reminds us.

I took a deep inhale. Held my breath. These giggles pressed their wily faces against the guest house windows and waved. Poked their limbs into the open screen door. I smiled at these very amusing, and amused, visitors. We all had some chamomile tea together. Eventually, they went on their way.

But what actually made me laugh, you ask? What unexpected visitor arrived? It must’ve been something really clever. Highbrow satire. Elevated wit.

Yeah, no.

Four years ago, in LA, I gave my good pal Ben a fist bump. Only, instead of a fist bump, my hand decided to offer Ben JUST the knuckles closest to my nails. No reason at all. Only these first knucks. Ben laughed. I laughed. He said my hand looked like a gorilla’s hand. We laughed.

I believe that inside jokes compound interest over time.

I’ve known Ben since 1991. I believe our giggling interest rates hover north of 70%.

We’ve greeted each other ever since, whenever I see Ben back from LA, or virtually on the phone, only with our first row of knuckles. Then we say the word KNUCKLES in whatever silly voice acting moves through us in that moment. Then we cackle. Every time.

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people,” Victor Borge offers us.

The shortest distance: the immediacy of the laugh, the immediate interconnection from the laugh, the immediate trust in the other person.

The shortest distance: whether in person or from afar, up close or virtually.

“Laughter is when two opposites collide and create a third,” Gloria Steinem offers us. A silent meditation center + the sheer volume and chaos of KNUCKLES, internally = a true L-O-L.

the content of the funny line often mattered much less than the context of the funny line.

(With all these garden metaphors, the most grounded non-metaphor: Ben worked for years in a greenhouse. Sweeping the garden, vocationally!)

You sit and sweep and trust [and remember the interconnectedness of] the garden. And all its gardeners.

“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness,” Thich Nhat Hanh offers.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” MLK offers (who also nominated TNH for the Nobel Peace Prize. Has any CV in the 20th century featured a bigger flex, as the kids say?)

The inescapable mutuality of laughter: laugh-instigator / laugh-propeller / laugh-facilitator all becoming one role in the same scene.

The illusion of separateness between the live event and all the ensuing reruns.

P.S. When you just want to watch some NBA highlights, but James Lindberg won’t stop gambling from his phone while brushing his teeth!!! 🤣🤣🤣

I’d like to insert an addendum: the hardest I’ve laughed all calendar year *while watching TV*

Because, as we leave 2025, there’s really one laugh that stands apart plays with different instruments from all other 2025 laughs, performs in a different band, sings at a different pitch and tempo, uses a different dialect altogether, a laugh that lingered, that’s still lingering, a sound and sight and scene I continue to reenact to others, to myself, ever-immediate, ever-relevant, ever-funny, ever—

Will, was it last January when you got sideswiped EN ROUTE to getting your car inspected?

It was not.

In that roundabout off the BU Bridge, coming onto Mem Drive, where one of the lanes decides to end RIGHT as you enter the roundabout? All while you were narrating aloud in your car to yourself how much you loathe and fear that very roundabout? Only THREE blocks from the inspection itself, which you somehow passed? Despite the hinge of your door looking like Rocky Balboa’s nose and sounding like a haunted window in a Stephen King motel?

Yes, those details are all accurate. But I didn’t chuckle til later. Very amusing in hindsight. Really not amusing at the time.

No, the laugh took place—still takes place, ever-fresh, ever-present—late August, at a coffee place. I’d gone several days in a row. Tuesday to Thursday, at this point. I’d seen and met several regulars, including a very outgoing, older woman. Carol Burnett’s younger, spicier sister. On my third trip, this very outgoing, older woman was picking up a to-go cup as I was sitting there, drinking coffee, this spot still very quiet at 7:45am.

She asked about my mismatched socks. I asked what coffee she’d ordered then took a gulp from my own cup.

And, friends, this is what ensued:

“NO coffee for me anymore. Had it early this week then: DIARRHEA. CRAZY diarrhea for DAYS. NO more for me. NO more. No more HERE at least. Don’t know WHAT they’re putting in it. CRAZY DIARRHEA.”

I was mid-gulp by the first “DIARRHEA.”

I did an actual, involuntary spit-take. Or rather: a spit-drool-take. A spit-laugh-drool-take. Down my chin. Onto my shirt.

I tried to wipe my chin while keeping a straight face, attempting to keep my shit together (so to speak) but only giggling more.

I looked at an employee in the kitchen giggling, hand over their mouth, giggling, scurrying away, giggling, scurrying back, giggling, looking down, giggling, looking away, giggling, looking at me, giggling.

This complete stranger then mentioned “DIARRHEA” a few (~three) more times, each reference a higher, sharper musical note than the last (“all that is musical in us is memory,” the poet Ilya Kaminsky offers us.).

She accentuated each “CRAZY” and “NO” by swiping her hands down, opposite shoulder to opposite hip, with each arm, in big, repeated Xs, faster and bigger as she went. An air traffic controller signaling—warning—the whole runway at 3x speed. A cross-country skier, if this cross-country skier were Leslie Nielsen: cartoonish and flailing while still maintaining a stoic face. A toddler playing charades, forming an all-caps X every time a teammate guessed incorrectly.

X, I imagine, as in: NO MORE COFFEE HERE FOR ME.

X, as in: DO NOT ENTER, COFFEE. ROAD CLOSED. EXCEPT THIS ROAD, IN FACT, REMAINS OPEN. AUTOBAHN HOV LANE: FULLY-FUNCTIONAL.

“CRAZY diarrhea.”

She raised her tea, cheersing me from 10 feet away.

Then she left.

Some louder writers/performers distract with purple prose. Unhelpful, frilly qualifiers. Very assertive voices ironically relying on the (constipated) passive voice and dangling (dingling?) modifiers. Introductory, dependent phrases that halt rhythm, clog syntactical toilets, leaving the reader with layered, dense messes requiring multiple, firm flushes.

Not Donna Diarrhea! Clean syntax, despite the messy toilet. Active verbs. Doesn’t even bother with implied first-person pronouns, beginning instead in motion via transitive verbs (“had”) or the direct object itself (“coffee,” “diarrhea”). The sole adjective/adverb: “CRAZY,” which adds just the right amount of flavor (texture?). Succinct bursts of prose. No backup here!

Some louder writers/performers bury the lede. Clear their throats and/or orifices with exposition.

Not Donna Diarrhea! No time and/or TP wasted. No tape delay from the cordial hello to “CRAZY DIARRHEA.” This wasn’t a long walk for a short drink of water but rather a short walk for a powerful stream of (brown) water.

I’ve since returned to the St. Louis Sushi scene from Somebody Somewhere:

I’ve since returned to Ross Gay’s wonderful reminder, in Inciting Joy, that a line of poetry functions as breath. Occupies a breath. Inhabits—and reinforces—the rhythm of a breath. How this elemental unit of a poem aligns with—and reinforces—our most elemental, biological need (I see you, Eating, Sleeping, and Shitting. You are seen as well.):

“...and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace of the tempo of the body. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart…all of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily proportions,” the gentle giant of Bloomington, Indiana offers us.

Body to body. Voice to ear. Heart to shart.

And, yes, I’ve returned to Donna Diarrhea’s rant poem itself: its possible line-breaks; its possible enjambment (where one line spills—floods—into the next without end-stop or hard punctuation; where fluidity in form allows for more fluidity in meaning); its spare syntax (depending on the day, I either think: caffeinated Bukowski or drunk EE Cummings), funneling through open valves with easy momentum (even easier thanks to all the single-syllable speed!); open bowels with open vowels; poetic verse bringing time back to its bodily proportions; and, despite its breathless voice and restless content, the poem’s steady—if frantic—breathing, in and out, in and OUT OUT OUT, taking in the breath and weak drip coffee, sending out the breath and slightly-more-watered-down drip coffee:

NO coffee

for me anymore.

Had it early this week then:

DIARRHEA. CRAZY diarrhea

for DAYS. NO more

for me. NO more.

No more HERE

at least.

Don’t know WHAT

they’re putting in it.

CRAZY DIARRHEA.

P.S. Much love to Stone Canoe, where a piece of flash prose I wrote a couple years ago (“Carl Sagan”) found a home recently in their 2025 issue. I’ve since expanded the piece a smidge, but you can purchase the issue here with the original, slightly-shorter piece.

“Carl Sagan” is partly a celebration of, yes, Carl Sagan: I have such admiration for him as a person, an awe-full writer and thinker, an open-hearted enthusiast. But really, the piece explores the wild timing of being classmates with Carl Sagan’s son in kindergarten, right before and right after his dad passed. I only knew Carl Sagan then as that sick dad of that sad kid in our class. I now know him as Mr. Rogers for outer space: That dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love. Everyone you know.

Stone Canoe started at Syracuse and has since moved off campus to their Downtown Writing Center. The piece takes place down the road in Ithaca, so this felt like a neat homecoming 🌎🌔🌠

It’s so weird, and wonderfully scattered, and wonderfully messy, and indefinable in genre, form, and structure, veering between talk show, variety show, and late-night hang, featuring some unsurprisingly funny Mulaney monologues, and he takes calls from strangers throughout LA, which might be my favorite part of the show, and they track coyote whereabouts, and they have wholesome intermissions with LA randos, and there’s live music, and Mulaney brings in experts on palm trees and earthquakes and hypnotherapy, and he interviews Ray J and Marcia Clark, and the whole thing is such a big, weird swing and made me giddy watching and felt roughly how I imagine it must’ve felt watching Late Night with Conan circa 1993.

With Everybody’s Live, your mileage may—will definitely!—vary. The city bus I’m driving here still gets 90 miles to the gallon, even in gridlocked LA.

I love Mulaney’s writing. I love his improvised conversations. I love that the show invites both and practices both. Precise-yet-playful, scripted writing. Tangential-yet-interconnected, fluid dialogue (“no transactional scenes,” they teach in Level 1 Improv: words to live by, I’d argue, in any life scene/conversation!).

This recent season, Mulaney and friends discussed current issues (The Real ID) and other pressing topics (cruise ships, dinosaur presentations in museums), joined each week by a professional in the field. The great Richard Kind, Mulaney’s sidekick, wears New York Mets attire, claiming he’s coming from The Mets Gala. Mulaney gives monologues with the wit and charming snark that only Mulaney can. There’s an ongoing PSA for men to “know your H,” as in height, delivered with the same gravitas and urgency as a reminder for a prostate exam.

And, yes, John Mulaney fights three 14-year-old boys.

“We checked with Netflix’s legal team,” he reassures us, “and they said it’s fine if it’s for television.”

The boys—Adarsh, Ben, and Jacob—begin introducing themselves via video, in the episodes preceding the fight. The boys remind Mulaney they’re gonna kick his ass. Mulaney practices fighting stunt actors dressed as middle school boys. The whole thing feels like a bit. The live studio audience certainly thinks it’s a bit. We gradually learn it’s very much not a bit. Or, if it is a bit, this vaudevillian, 42-year-old theater kid with self-proclaimed “high-waisted, feminine hips” commits so fully to the bit, as does the rest of the show, that any semblance of performance becomes irrelevant: the comedy originates in its situational irony, an absurd premise housed in an unlikely vehicle, a wobbly Vespa that quickly gains speed teetering down the runway; the comedy takes unexpected flight—and somehow sustains flight—from the show’s commitment, never winking at the camera (i.e. continuing to inform passengers of the fight/flight’s expected arrival time despite the ominous thunder ahead and the Vespa’s lack of doors and wings), gaining elevation and speed from all the co-pilots supporting Mulaney in the cockpit/in the Vespa economy cabin, serving beverages: Andy Samberg, Robby Hoffman, Wanda Sykes, Bill Hader, Pete Davidson, John Waters, Sarah Silverman, Ayo Edebiri, Conan, Ben Stiller, a local AAA agent, Supreme Court lawyer Neal Katyal.

I should now iterate as well as re-iterate: I’m not a fan of professional fighting, or amateur fighting, or professional wrestling, or amateur wrestling, or gratuitous violence on screen, or mild violence on screen, or gratuitous violence off screen, or mild violence off screen.

And yet, we don’t consciously choose when we laugh: a gangly, 42-year old indoor cat wrestling three feral 14-year-old boys makes me laugh. It just does.

I should also iterate as well as re-iterate: I’ve gotten into two physical kerfuffles in my life: one at 12.75 years old, one at 14.25—pathetic shoving matches, really, both, one where I shoved a Draco Malfoy bully into the wall of our seventh-grade study hall, one where I shoved a Nelson from The Simpsons bully into a different, adjacent wall in our eighth-grade study hall, breaking a window that my eyes and/or rage hadn’t noticed—two episodes which, if my math serves, average 13.5 years old. Which we’ll round up to 14. Two episodes that occurred just as my shins had begun outgrowing my pants every day by about 2:45pm, spouting a jagged 14 inches across two years. Just as my upper lip had begun growing enough peach fuzz for a quaint farmers market. Two episodes where a similar, dense heat throttled its way from chest to face to hands.

I’m reminded of these eighth-grade tidal waves, hormonally, emotionally, physically.

I’m reminded of this middle-school-boy bravado.

And I’m convinced eighth grade is the funniest age for this fight.

Exhibit A: “Eighth graders will make fun of you but in an accurate way,” Mulaney famously said in his first special, in 2012. “They will get to the thing that you don’t like about you.”

Exhibit B: “Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know,” to quote the Tao Te Ching, 2500 years before Everybody’s Live.

(I didn’t announce to Draco or Nelson that I intended on shoving them, let alone weeks prior in a video call to strangers. Still: lots of talking—lots of loud Not Knowing—before and after these kerfuffles.)

Eighth-grade shoving and blustery, eighth-grade talking: both appear front-footed, literally and/or figuratively; both seem unaware of where their assertive limbs/words end, and where the audience/opponents’ begin; and, I’d like to add, both make me laugh.

“Humor is the truth told more directly than we’re used to,” George Saunders reminds us.

“Laughter is proof of freedom,” Gloria Steinem reminds us.

Comedy/humor/laughter = Tragedy + time.

By the transitive property (which, poetically, I don’t think I’ve used since eighth grade):

Tragedy + time = Truth told more directly than we’re used to = Proof of freedom.

Again, I don’t condone fighting. Also again, based on my ongoing cackle: proof of freedom.

In the spirit of Mulaney’s show, in the spirit of its joyful maximalism, radical looseness, and inclusive YES AND-ing on and near its couch of guests, in the spirit of scripted writing opening itself to unscripted performance: I wanted to rank—very spontaneously here, like a conversation with a random caller (Dave from Long Beach, say) sharing with Mulaney their bad cruise ship experiences—the eight moments leading up to, during, and after the fight that most made me CACKLE. Truly, chirpily cackle. Truly, gutturally chortle. Eight moments in honor of the eight arms involved in the fight.

8. Mulaney, being interviewed by Jon Stewart two weeks later: “I’m moving slower. You ever fought three boys and get that lactic acid buildup in the lower body?”

7. Sean Penn, on the couch, during the show, discussing all his brawls as a kid. Sean Penn, during the fight, next to the wrestling ring, smoking a pack of cigs indoors, staring off into the void, probably wondering why this appearance on Johnny Carson took such a weird turn.

6. The boys’ blustery entrance, down the aisles, through the audience, strutting in tough-guy rugby headwear yet still radiating a dweebiness I can only describe as: the cast of School of Rock if they skipped band practice to hype up the crowd at a UFC fight. I canNOT overstate how much funnier, and more endearing, it is that these boys are dweebs. I canNOT overstate how much less funny the fight is if Mulaney’s opponents are jocks (a fish-out-of-water story works when a landlocked jelly fish deludes itself or somehow overcomes itself and its environment, not when a shark simply changes tanks at the aquarium.).

5. Adam Sandler, standing next to the ring, cackling on screen, cackling out of frame, cackling pure Sandler cackle, having just shared stories on the couch about his own teenage angst and anxiety-fueled diarrhea.

4. Mulaney and Stewart riffing on that guy who threw his shoes at George W. Bush.

3. The fight lasted all of 47 seconds. From about second 31 to 47, it becomes apparent the three boys will win. Mulaney, face down, hits the mat to surrender, roughly 52 seconds after asking the referee—so confidently—how the boys will signal that they’re surrendering the fight.

2. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony (yes, famous ‘90s hip-hop group) arrives for a live performance right after the fight then bestows a bedazzled championship belt to Jacob, who pinned Mulaney.

Earlier in the season, an internet scammer posed as Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s manager, nearly scamming Mulaney obscene amounts of money, resulting in Mulaney’s most flusteredly funny monologue.

That the actual group actually arrived: hilarious. That they incorporated these dweeby boys into their act, welcomed them, swayed and danced on stage together, became fast friends with Adarsh, Ben, and Jacob: NO notes.

1. Before the fight, the referee reminds each fighter: “No pokes to the eyes or mouth.”

Then he turns to Ben.

“And, Ben, your mom wanted to remind you: NO swearing.”

Ben throws his head back. Heaves his hands into the clouds. He *says* nothing. No words. And yet, his body language shouts: “MOM. GIVE ME A BREAK. UGHHHHH. LET ME LIVE MY LIFE.”

I pulled into the hotel parking lot JUST as the shuttle bus was leaving for the ceremony.

Which is PRECISELY when I realized: I’d forgotten my dress shoes.

I wondered, 31 minutes before the ceremony, if there was a Good Will somewhere along the 26-minute route to the wedding.

I wondered if I could ask the front desk for a left-behind pair.

I wondered if I should just continue wearing my bland, white, geriatric Asics walking shoes to the wedding, a sartorial choice not unlike a dweeby, seventh-grade boy wearing his bland, white sneakers under belt-less khakis and a tie-less, baggy, white collared shirt to his middle school clarinet recital.

I even wondered, briefly, if I should go full Kevin Malone in his kleenex box kicks to Jim and Pam’s wedding.

And then, I remembered what I always keep in my trunk:

No, not the wet suit. Next to the wet suit:

Basketball shoes, for whenever alluring hoops might present themselves.

Phyllis The Passat screeched into the wedding venue (“As a person who buys a lot of erotic cakes, it just feels good to be represented on one,” Phyllis Lapin Vance Refrigeration famously said. “I wonder how erotic tonight’s wedding cake will be,” I imagined my car’s namesake wondering aloud.).

Parking attendants waved me in.

I opened the trunk. And a new sentence arrived, an independent clause that had never before poked its big, prominent ears into the frame: “I’m wearing Shrek’s feet.”

“Observe what’s vivid,” Allen Ginsberg reminds us.

The shoes themselves have always felt vivid. They’re a flavor of green you’d find sliming Nickelodeon audiences or packed in radioactive bags of Gushers. But, after all the traffic, after all the sudden shoe stress, this Shrek characterization felt, inexplicably, freshly vivid.

“You haven’t written anything until you say something you didn’t expect to say,” Jericho Brown reminds us.

I’m wearing Shrek’s feet.

“Poems aren’t things you get. They’re things that get you,” the poet laureate of The Hundred Acre Wood, Winnie The Pooh, reminds us.

Poems. Impromptu phrases. Unexpected, lucid connections. Fresh ideas wearing old language. Old thoughts dressed in spontaneous syntax.

I’m wearing Shrek’s feet.

(Several hours later, the reception paused when the emcee announced a car had parked on a beehive. They’re things that get you.)

I scurried to the ceremony.

“I love your shoes!”

“Thanks! They’re Shrek’s feet.”

I almost told this friendly parking attendant I’d forgotten my dress shoes. That these were my basketball shoes. Instead, I kept the Shrek gag going.

I stumbled into the last row among the last few empty seats. An elderly neighbor to my right had a bright green cane with pink flowers. She looked down: “We match!”

An elderly neighbor two seats to my left: “Now those are shoes. Do you wanna switch?”

(I assumed these folks weren’t familiar with Mike Myers’ portrayal of a green ogre. So, instead, our conversation remained on shoes, the beautiful day, how we knew the couple, and arthritic joints.).

The groom is an old poet friend of mine. The vows were as poetic—and moving—as anything I’ve ever heard (“If this isn’t nice, what is?” Kurt Vonnegut asks). Lovely. Affirming. A wonderful connection among wonderful people.

And yet, and yet, at this point, by the end of the ceremony, I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in about three business days since I left Boston one large water bottle, one strong espresso, and one Spindrift earlier. Sitting wasn’t helping.

I waited for all the rows to empty. Then scurried past the tent, across a grassy field, to the bathroom.

“Sick shoes!”

A caterer at the bar performed two excited finger-guns firing down at my feet while he said this, as I continued waddle-scurrying, the finger-guns being the close-cousin to the more ubiquitous thumbs-up gesture for folks whom, I gather, identify with Phil Dunphy’s body of work.

I got to the bathroom and released a stream roughly the same volume and turbulence as Loch Ness, a body of water I imagine Shrek frequenting back home in Scotland.

I reconvened with the rest of the happy post-ceremony pre-reception.

These shoes, these portable Shrek feet: I’ve never had a more amusingly-unintentional conversation-starter (or been more amused by an unintentional conversation-starter). Uncles from Las Vegas. Neighbors from Connecticut. Bathroom-line neighbors from Colorado. I’ve also never felt more scattered, in my adult life, putting on an item of clothing. Both. Yes. All the above.

(I’ve since returned to these wonderful lines from this same poet friend, finding—following—language in step, in and from all steps:

If we could trace hoofprints,

we might make a new language. We might

go primal. We might learn how to love

open air, solemnity, the hush of water

enveloping you

And to his dynamite debut book of poems, Men with the Throats of Birds, which you can buy here from CutBank at the University of Montana.)

The cocktail hour became the reception.

The newly married couple arrived, glowing, entering the dance floor to, yes, “I’m a Believer,” the 2001 Smash Mouth cover of The Monkees from, yes, the movie, Shrek.

My mouth involuntarily dropped then grinned. My head involuntarily bobbed. My green feet involuntarily tapped.

The reception became the cake-cutting. On the top of the cake: yes, Fiona and Shrek figurines.

Cake-cutting became photo-boothing. In front of the camera: yes, a large cutout of Fiona and Shrek.

I’ve known this friend for almost a decade. And yet, somehow, someway, somehow, I was completely green to this Shrek enthusiasm.

The reception became the dancing which became the farewell.

I went to the bathroom one last time, feeling less urgent but following the same Tinkle Trail: past the tent, across the grassy field. And a new sentence arrived—or rather, three complete, compact sentences, all told in the imperative voice, declaring, asserting in peppy harmony, three sentences which hadn’t poked their small, wooden ears into the frame since I’d first heard them sung, decades ago, next to Lord Farquaad’s castle:

“Keep your feet off the grass. Shine your shoes. Wipe your...face.”

P.S. So grateful for the Vermont Studio Center—its wonderful staff, its inspiring residents across all media, its beautiful space and facilities, its generous supporters—for the recent fellowship and residency. Very nourishing place for slower, deeper projects. A real trip working at the same desks as heroes like Ross Gay, Fanny Howe, Ilya Kaminsky, Ocean Vuong. Much love. Special place!

“Home opener” makes me think of a Zillow open house. The Fenway version had more happy tears and fewer mentions of mortgage rates, I assure you.

The home opener was seasonally affirming: all the apt spring metaphors, beginnings and renewal, birds singing, flowers blooming, Zyrtec working on the rare warm, sunny April day in Boston (of course, the next day was 41 degrees and rained out.).

The home opener was joyful and communal: before the game, the 1975 team walked out from The Monster toward the mound, not unlike the ghosts in Field of Dreams arriving from the cornfields: Carlton Fisk holding, guiding, walking with a frail Yaz who then threw out the first pitch to Alex Cora (“how can you not be a romantic about baseball?” Brad Pitt asks in Moneyball). Michelle Wu was on the field with her infant daughter. A local performing arts high school sang the anthem. Luis Tiant’s entire family said, “PLAY BALL.”

The home opener was Very Boston: during the seventh inning stretch, a bro with a chinstrap dropped to one knee in the row in front of us and proposed to his girlfriend. Who then gave me, and many others, first bumps (“Bro! We’re engaged! On the friggin’ home OPENAH!”) then told everyone taking pictures to “just aiiihdrop it to me, kid, ‘cause we don’t need YA NUMBAH!”), all while completely ignoring his fiancée who spent the final two innings scrolling Instagram.

And yes, the home opener was very moving: before the game, they held essentially a Fenway memorial service for Tiant who passed away last fall. There was a slideshow with photos of Tiant over the years—smiling, beaming, glowing—with his arm around everyone from Jim Rice to Dustin Pedroia, Pedro Martinez to Fred Lynn.

Let me tell you: Luis Tiant! What a life!

For younger fans, Tiant was the friendly owner of El Tiante: the cubano sandwich spot right outside the park, down the first base line, where, for decades, he sat and beamed and chatted with everyone, employing friends and family who joy-ned him every night. Twice, he gave me a fist-bump as I asked for peppers and onions. It felt like the sun patting me on the back.

“Even / after / all this time / the sun never says to the earth / you owe / me,” Hafiz reminds us.

Tiant remained, around the team, beloved, involved, well into retirement, coaching the young guys at Spring Training, right up until his passing at 83. A lifelong teammate. A lifelong presence.

He remained, at the park, at every home game, up until last year, glowing, beaming, whenever the camera approached, glowing, beaming, even when he wasn’t aware of a camera.

“Smiling doesn’t result *from* good things. It results *in* good things,” a Hallmark aphorism that, I’m sure, would’ve made teenage-me cringe but something I now find tremendously affirming.

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house / I’d like to see you living / in better conditions,” Hafiz also wrote, almost 700 years ago. I’d argue Knee-Jerk Cynicism and Righteous Indignation pay even less rent. I’d assume Gratitude, Contentment, and Ease live in the three nicest top-floor units. I’d also assume Grace does the top floor’s maintenance work, and Smiling sublets all three units and provides its own original furniture.

There’s Luis Tiant, the historical figure: “The Son of Havana,” the breathtaking, young talent who entered the major leagues right after The Bay of Pigs, who then didn’t see his family for 17 years; the greatest major leaguer ever from Cuba; one of the most underrated great pitchers of his time or any time (the volume of innings and whiffs is alarming, as is his actual *stuff*: Steve Carlton’s durability with Juan Marichal’s movement, equipped with a curve, changeup, knuckleball, screwball, and “hesitation pitch”); “the best player not in the hall of fame,” to quote baseball bard Peter Gammons.

The Son Sun of Havana.

There’s Luis Tiant, the fashion icon and cool dude: if any athlete has ever pulled off a better or bigger mustache, or puffed a bigger cigar with more delight, or made Prohibition-era hats cool again, I haven’t yet seen them. I’m not sure there’s ever been a cooler dude who happened to list “baseball pitcher” on his taxes (honorable mentions: Vida Blue, Bob Gibson. Coolest position player: Ken Griffey, Jr. Next question.).

There’s Luis Tiant, visual artist and athletic workhorse—qualities that don’t often converge. On the mound, he was truly a performer. The beginning: the long, patient step back, his glove bouncing nonchalantly off his belly almost down to his knee all the way up above his head like a beer-league softball pitcher going through the motions, seemingly feigning indifference or fatigue or both. The middle: glove hand and pitching hand joining WAY up there, over his head, WAY back there somewhere down I-93 in Everett or Medford. The end: the uncorking, the downhill momentum, the rotation that turns his whole goddamn back towards home, his number squarely facing the hitter, his head facing the opposing dugout (I’m sure mouthing to them what pitch was coming, *while* grinning), the blip of a sliver of a mirage of a moment where the hitter could actually see his throwing hand within the frame, the precursor to Hideo Nomo’s windup made more famous in the internet age 25 years later. All the while, pitching *with* this flair, Tiant started THREE games in the 1975 World Series, completed 25 innings (!!), including two complete-game wins, against arguably the strongest lineup in baseball history, whiffing Rose and Morgan and Bench, on the biggest stage with the biggest workload and the least rest.

Which begs the question: without Luis Tiant, does Carlton Fisk’s iconic “he waves his arms” walk-off homer even happen?! Do the Sox even make it to the 12th inning?! Do they, much more likely, exit stage left in Cincinnati, after game 5, before the series even comes back to Boston?! Tiant kept the bullpen fresh throughout the series, particularly the late innings of game 6. By his third outing, he was losing steam, but I doubt any other Sox pitcher could’ve kept The Big Red Machine in neutral quite like Tiant.

Which begs another question: without Tiant, does “I gotta go see about a girl” in Good Will Hunting then also never happen?! Do the Sox lose unceremoniously a game or two before Fisk can even wave his arms?! Does Robin Williams’ Sean then not have to sleep outside Fenway to get tickets for a game that didn’t happen, let alone not have to slide his game 6 ticket across the bar counter when he sees his future wife?! (Yes, I’m sure that line would’ve found its way into the script, even if the stakes were much lower. I’m sure a different “Helen of Troy” would’ve enchanted Sean at a different dive bar: the Cantab Lounge in Central maybe, the TAM on Tremont perhaps, a random February Tuesday night at the Silhouette in Allston instead of a bar next door to Fenway during the most meaningful Sox game of the 20th century. The point remains, though: the necessity of Tiant!)

But mainly, to me, there’s Luis Tiant, the warm presence, the smile that crackles: he had, and has, a grin that not only lights up a room—an entire stadium—with its immediate-and-lasting voltage but one that makes everyone within it feel lighter themselves. More at ease. From his being and presence alone. Lighter. Accompanied by light and lightness. Re-turned to and re-membering light and lightness, through him (other all-time baseball smiles: Ernie Banks, Markus “Mookie” Betts, Lou Gehrig, Francisco Lindor, Ozzie Smith.).

Tiant’s smile somehow radiates both loving acceptance and wild abandon. Security and feral joy. Welcome and mischievousness.

And like a certain other warm presence, a certain glowing orb in the sky, Luis Tiant glowed even when it was cloudy, even when he wasn’t ostensibly grinning, even during the decades when the Sox were lousy, uninspiring, uninteresting: the Dan Duquette years, the later Clemens and Boggs years, the middling John Farrell years.

“Make of yourself a light,” supposedly The Buddha’s final words.

“Enthusiasm is the most adorable quality in a person,” I’ve heard Mike Schur say, quoting Amy Poehler from their time together on Parks & Rec (I’m reminded of Leslie Knope’s speech in the series finale: “now go find your team.”).

“Whatever you are, be a good one,” Honest Abe offers us.

Whatever you are, on whatever team, be an enthusiastic one. An enthusiastic, good one. A good, enthusiastic light. An enthusiastic teammate. A light-filled teammate. A Knope. A Tiant.

inhale through the nose, turning the shoulders to the…

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**

“I’m not your father,” my great uncle, Bob, told my mom once.

She was three or four. She’d greeted him as “dad,” in the living room, I’m told, in her childhood home in Hopkinto…

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You can purchase the issue here: https://cdcshoppingcart.uchicago.edu/Cart2/ChicagoBook?ISBN=9780913785980&PRESS=arkansas

For all of preschool, I wore the same velcro, very colorful shoes—different pairs of the same model, self-selected. By nature of velcro, these shoes were easy, and empowering, for small hands to guide small feet into place without the hassle of knots and laces, without requiring adult help. Often, I’d inadvertently place my left shoe on my right foot, and vice versa, so thrilled to put my shoes on, to insert my feet—and self—into such color, to inhabit such color, that I didn’t mind the slight squeeze in my toes or the awkward landing. And often, teachers and friends’ parents would look concerned at me, and my feet, and say, “Will, your shoes are on the wrong feet.”

I’d look even more concerned—distraught, my mom says decades later—and would respond, always, “but they’re my feet.”

Which remains a true statement as well as a standalone sentence, an independent clause beginning with a conjunction defending its entire reality.

But they’re my feet (I’m not sure which word I emphasized. But they’re my feet. But they’re my feet. But they’re my feet. I suspect the second.).

The essay is my rambling attempt at celebrating the shoes themselves, exploring the language and meaning of “but they’re my feet,” reflecting on larger ideas of joy, color, and play, with big inspiration from van Gogh, Emily Dickinson, and Chris Pine’s “commitment to joy and play” after his directorial debut, Poolman, was utterly panned.

Wearing those colorful velcro kicks felt not unlike how I feel now wearing this:

Or how I feel when I hoop in these:

May your shoes meet the ground—and propel you onward—with great color!

“What if there were no punchlines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punchline, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.”

This evolving mission statement includes some of my favorite things—creatively, interpersonally, intrapersonally: artistic freedom coupled with (paradoxically) artistic restraint, taking huge swings but not holding the audience’s hand (to mix hand and limb metaphors); inner trust becoming outer surrender; giving space and, in turn, agency to oneself; giving space and, in turn, agency to others. (Lauren Groff wrote a wonderful intro to the 2024 Best American Short Stories, where she reminds us that art is not something we master, as if it could be “wrestled into submission,” but rather “a lifelong companion where one creates oneself…a rarefied atmosphere in which one can breathe freely.” When I hear what if there were no punchlines? I hear someone breathing freely.).

Steve Martin’s question-asking in itself I love, too: the seeking, an ongoing conversation, asking, listening, discovering rather than imposing, receptive to the intuition of this lifelong companion, comedy that functions without guardrails but originates from real inquisitiveness.

“Thy right is to work only but never to its fruits; let the fruit of action be not thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction,” the Bhagavad Gita reminds us, 2500 years before Steve Martin performed nightly comedic skydiving: skydiving in the bravery of the leap, in the thrilling, physical act of it, in the inherent groundlessness and novelty in every leap, skydiving in the mental detachment needed 10,000 feet above trees and their (possibly-unwieldy) branches and their (often-poisonous, usually-irrelevant) fruit.

“Did someone say, ‘detaching from the fruit?’”—Steve Martin, I imagine.

What if there were no punchlines? I don’t think there’s ever been a more influential or medium-expanding paragraph written about the mechanics of comedy.

I don’t think there’s ever been a more influential or medium-expanding stand-up than Steve Martin. Truly stunning: he sold out stadiums more than Fleetwood Mac, all while performing the weirdest alt-comedy you’d find at a Tuesday open mic at a Somerville laundromat.

I don’t think I realized until watching the documentary how radical this Steve Martin manifesto was at the time, a tectonic shift in comedy writing and performance.

And I don’t think I realized until recently, watching the documentary a second time, how so many of my favorite comics are essentially inhabiting this Steve Martin ethos—or if not inhabiting it then aspiring to its spirit, pointing themselves towards the glow of his lighthouse, consciously or not, orienting themselves within this lived scaffolding, trusty scaffolding despite skydiving within it.

Will Forte! The disregard for punchlines. A dweeby dude performing (i.e. obsessed with exploring) arrogance (see also: The Colbert Report).

Fred Armisen! The musical anti-comedy. The smiling ease with which he surrenders to an anticlimax. The generosity and trust in allowing the audience to pick their own place to laugh (and the stronger potency of those laughs) (see also: Bo Burnham).

Maria Bamford! The unreleased tension. The very-subtly-released tension. The meta-narratives about and through tension.

Tig Notaro’s monk-like patience letting a story unfold into the hint of a suggestion of a whisper of a punchline.

Nathan Fielder’s willingness to sit with discomfort and/or an antagonizing audience and his unwillingness to offer joke indicators (see also: Amy Poehler).

Kevin Nealon’s “beautiful trainwrecks” every time he’s appeared on Conan’s show. On Conan’s podcast. On Conan’s front steps, unannounced. Antagonizing Conan. Delightfully enraging Conan. What if I created tension and never released it?

(What If There Were No Indicators: also the unofficial slogan of Los Angeles freeways, six lanes of Mad Max thoroughfare that make Boston traffic seem quaint, high on speed and abrupt exits, low on blinker use or sensical signs).

Tim & Eric. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross on Mr. Show. The whole troupe from The State. Yes, Steve Martin’s flavor of silly and absurd.

And for all the reasons above: Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson. All roads in this Steve Martin love letter lead to my favorite contemporary comedic duo, best friends who met in improv class two decades ago, Steve Martin’s spiritual nephews, one of whom lives on my fake plant:

(pictured out of frame: TR on the zipline, maybe the hardest I’ve laughed at a scripted piece of comedy this decade. What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?)

I’ve written plenty about I Think You Should Leave. As has the rest of the internet. Instead, I wanted to briefly write about Detroiters, a direct descendant of Steve Martin’s The Jerk, the first cousin of Wild & Crazy Guy, the down-the-block neighbor of Martin’s balloon tricks and big, physical gags, a show that finally appeared on Netflix this fall, six years after it was canceled on Comedy Central.

Seth Meyers wrote on Vulture, in 2018, about the show getting cancelled:

Robinson and Richardson play inept ad men making local Detroit commercials, where they’re from, a pitch I was immediately sold on: Richard Splett from Veep (a peppy C-SPAN in human form)! That especially-weird dude from all the weirdest SNL sketches in the early 2010s! The endless humor of low-budget, local ads! Produced by Jason Sudekis and Lorne Michaels!

I started watching in the spring of 2017 on Comedy Central, on actual cable, channel 117. I laughed A LOT—squeal-cackled, really—without being told exactly when to laugh.

I circled back over the years on YouTube. But I hadn’t returned to the full episodes til a few months ago on Netflix. Giddy is a word I’d use to describe this state of being. Floating might be another, at times. Vicariously feeling the thrill of their wild leaps: other words that come to mind.

What if I created tension and never released it?

The audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation:

I remember Bill Hader once saying, “I’ve never felt funnier or laughed harder than at the cafeteria table in high school.”

Detroiters, for my taste buds (your palate may differ!), is a professional cafeteria table. A table with two parallel benches for ever-performer and ever-audience. A lunch period that ostensibly begins at 12:00 but includes—then extends beyond—study hall. A cafeteria table where the hot dogs include more toppings, where the laugh seems stronger to me:

I remember Jack Kornfield once telling a story of a Buddhist monk who asks their teacher how they’ll reach enlightenment. The teacher gives them a cryptic koan to solve. Says they’ll reach enlightenment once they solve the koan. Says they’ll be back in a few months to hear the student’s answer. A few months later, the teacher returns. The student answers the koan. Not the right answer, the teacher says. Says they’ll be back in a year. The student hunkers down. The teacher returns. The student tries again. Not the right answer, the teacher says. Says they’ll be back in five years. The student hunkers down, again. Five years later, the teacher returns. The student answers the koan. Not the right answer, the teacher says. Well, to be truthful, I don’t care what you think, the student says. There. You’ve solved it, the teacher says.

Let the fruit of action be not thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction.

What if there were no indicators?

Writers like us need to continuously, constantly, and endlessly build, maintain, and grow a strong online presence across all social media platforms, says the marketing professional who keeps reminding us they’re a writer—the noun, the title—and yet never seems to do the actual verb.

When I hear continuously, constantly, and endlessly build, maintain, and grow, coming from this restless voice, equipped with this migraine of redundant adverbs, I picture Sisyphus relegated to a much worse punishment than pushing the boulder up the mountain in perpetuity: Twitter.

When I think of presence, I think of Leonard Cohen. Thich Nhat Hanh. Toni Morrison. Personally, I don’t think of internet imperialism.

When I think of presence, I don’t think of a reactive rush to nowhere. I think of a gentle center. A sturdy anchor. A stillness inhabiting nowhere now here.

When I think of the word inspiring, I think of its Latin roots: inspiare, meaning, yes, to influence, move, or guide through divine power. But also meaning: to breathe in. As if that which moves us arrives in conjunction with our innately slowing breath. As if that which influences us ecstatically coincides with our own embodied, calmer rhythm. An inner spaciousness. A grounded presence.

When I hear online, I also hear online’s fellow two-syllable neighbor who sublets down the hall: on edge. Then I hear another two-syllable resident down the same street, across town lines but still in the same zip code: dis-ease.

The marketing professional continues: I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer ever since I felt the THRILL of receiving Google Alerts.

Suddenly, I remember the study that revealed: cars with vanity plates cause more accidents with their aggressive driving.

The marketing professional is now suggesting—asserting—that we should send them our work.

I took a writing class in high school. So, you know. I can definitely give notes.

My book group reads along with Reese’s Book Club, so all nine of us can give you lots of feedback.

I used to read through TONS of cover letters when I worked at McKinsey, so I’d be happy to edit your poems.

I’ve contested two parking tickets before. And yet, despite this extensive background practicing law, I’ve decided not to offer legal advice to strangers filing for divorce.

I’ve occasionally mixed Grape Nuts with Honey Nut Cheerios. And yet, despite this groundbreaking culinary work, I wouldn’t call myself a chef.

I’ve seen Finding Nemo several times. And yet, despite this doctorate in oceanography from Pixar, I don’t think I’m qualified to lead deep-sea scuba tours.

I had six cavities, incredibly, between the age of five and eight—surely from Fruit By The Foot and Fruit Roll-Ups, always leaving a diarrhea trail the same color as the all-natural fruit. And yet, despite this early dental internship, despite attending a residency on the large intestine, I’ve decided not to stick my hands into the mouths of strangers during their root canals or offer colonoscopies wherever I go.

Years ago, I was on a very whelming first date where a stranger talked at me about their work and their ex-partner but took a brief intermission to suggest—assert—that I should send them my writing, after I’d mentioned I was in school for creative writing, so that they could offer some feedback on [my] novel or screenplay or poems or whatever. They worked in accounting for a tech firm. And yet, I didn’t assert that I should read through this stranger’s W-2s. Or whatever.

You can’t spell PATRONIZING without IGNORANT, I write in my notebook. That and… RIGATONI.

The marketing professional continues: I think of myself as a writer. But really I’m a STORYTELLER. My eyes roll back so far I worry my retinas might detach.

But I only write when I hear the perfect idea knocking at the door, now an advertisement for noise-canceling headphones.

I’ve heard Martha Beck say that our bodies involuntarily relax and release tension when they encounter truth. During this marketing presentation, more knots have formed in my neck and shoulders than in the garlic ovens at Olive Garden.

The Chinese pictograph for BUSY is composed of two characters: HEART and KILLING, I’ve heard from several different spiritual teachers.

I hear an echo of the marketing professional’s opening refrain: continuously, constantly, and endlessly build, maintain, and grow…

I hear the poet Gregory Orr: To grow / at all / is to grow / slowly.

My mind leaps to Mary Oliver: One day you finally knew / what you had to do and began / though the voices around you / kept shouting / their bad advice.

I picture the marketing professional’s revisions: One day you finally knew / what you had to do and began / first with an Instagram Live Stream / announcing the title of your screenplay / you had yet to write.

My mind again leaps to Mary Oliver. Instructions for living a life: pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I picture the marketing professional’s unsolicited feedback: pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Tell Twitter. Tell your Uber driver. Tell your match on Hinge even if you don’t end up going on a date. Tell about it when no one asks. Tell about it and market it before you even know what IT is.

In this presentation, I’ve already counted two dangling modifiers (the grammar equivalent of: abruptly switching lanes, without signaling, during commuting traffic). Two butchered apostrophes (a case of the Monday’s is going to give me an ulcer.). An alternative-reality use of commas. A constipated gridlock from the (impossibly-low-fiber) passive voice and piles of vague Tech Bro nouns, clogging those poor sentences, in and around parentheticals and appositives not tethered to their subject or seemingly any subject, blocking multiple lanes of rush-hour traffic, blocking the breakdown lane, blocking the ambulance trying to get through, miles apart from actual verbs on this figurative freeway, the verbs themselves in the passive voice, remarkably, despite all their breath-less striving, the weakest verbs coming from the loudest voice, the most confident speaker delivering the most convoluted syntax (I associate simplicity with authenticity, to quote Sara Bareilles). They also have a 3:2 ratio of times mentioning they went to Dartmouth to times misusing I instead of me as an indirect object. We’ve yet to cross over onto the fifth slide.

Suddenly, I remember a line from the great Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries: not everything that works *helps*. But everything that helps *works*.

The marketing presentation mentions The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt as an immediate hit. Top of the charts. Quick to sell, even though it takes forever to read, and I gave up reading it quickly, but don’t tell anyone.

My mind leaps to a quote from Donna Tartt herself: if you’re not enjoying the work, you’re doing it too fast.

My mind leaps to George Saunders, when asked why he’s not on social media: I prefer writing slowly and honestly rather than quickly and insincerely.

My mind leaps to the poet Naomi Shihab Nye: when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem.

Calm leaping, I write in my notebook.

The marketing professional reminds us, again, how exciting, helpful, and simplistic it is building an online presence across all social media platforms.

They really emphasize simplistic.

Simplistic. Simplistic. Simplistic.

A word that, no, does not mean simple but rather superficial, reductive, shallow.

It writes itself, I write in my notebook.

As always, these are books not that you *should* read but books that “blew my hair back,” to quote that MIT janitor:

Essays That Blew My Hair Back:

Get Me Through The Next 5 Minutes: Odes To Being Alive—James Parker (2024). If Ross Gay had a British cousin, who wrote (wonderfully-short, nutrient-rich) essayettes and “odes to being alive” as opposed to Gay’s famous daily delights, that cousin would sound awfully like James Parker: joy-full, awe-full, sarcastic, tender, witty, “spiritual and salty.” Odes to balloons. Cold showers. Hugs. The nature of self, as seen through Jason Bourne. Constipation. His dog’s balls. The odes are “short exercises in gratitude. Or in attention, which may in the end be the same thing.” (!!)

It’s probably my favorite book I read all year from maybe my favorite prose stylist working today (you can read his column for The Atlantic where these odes began)—gems like these on every page, here describing playing in a band:

“We sound like Neil Young falling out of bed… the more seriously you take it the more fun it is. So with life, so with being in a band. An earnest commitment at ground level gets you access to higher playfulness…we blend, mingle, lose our outlines.”

Dark Days: Fugitive Essays—Roger Reeves (2023). While we’re on literary extended family members, this collection felt like a close relative of Hanif Abdurraqib (also a brilliant poet also writing stunning essays and cultural criticism without compromising their lyricism, dancing freely—but still always on beat, regardless of the song—between the first person, and all its subtle, inspired varieties, and the close third)—that or the grand-nephew of Louise Glück and James Baldwin. My favorite essay: “Beyond the Report of Beauty,” on dancing, its beauty, the dancing of and by and for the dead, and the late, great Michael Williams aka Omar Little.

Poetry That Blew My Hair Back:

You Are Here: Poetry In The Natural World—edited and introduced by Ada Limón (2024). The great Ada Limón (current US poet laureate, author of books I love like The Hurting Kind and Bright Dead Things) curated this collection of (85%) previously unpublished poems from 50 poets—including everyone from Joy Harjo to Ilya Kaminsky (who writes one of the most thrillingly minimalist poems I’ve ever read and is becoming one of my absolute favorite poets).

As the front flap suggests, “each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the the United States.” The poems are certainly *about* nature. But to me, their work seemed more concerned with the first half of the title than the second half: affirming, grounding, rooting, us and them, and you, in direct address, in place, here, with intimacy, and care, without needing any direct objects or prepositions. Presence, awareness, and clarity occasioned by nature.

Alberto Ríos enchanted me with backyard spiders. Camille Dungy enchanted me with clouds. Ilya Kaminsky enchanted me with rain.

Break the Glass—Jean Valentine (2010). Jean Valentine is probably one of your favorite poets’ favorite poets. When I read her work, I’m reminded of William Carlos Williams’ lines: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

What I’ve “found there,” in her poems, are, yes, some of my favorite things that don’t usually make the news: obscure animals, secular spirituality, exploring heavy things with acuity yet restraint. I’ve found someone enlivened by poetry’s imaginative leaps and its line-breaks that, in her hands, serve as a profound reminder beyond the page: to truly inhabit this, here, just this, whatever this is, with acceptance and trust, before assuming what’s next, before scanning for what’s next. What I’ve always “found there,” in her poems, is a rare blend of dream-like surrealism and Emily Dickinson-quality minimalism.

(Also, utterly delightful that she was the poet-in-residence of Ross Gay’s community orchard in Bloomington, Indiana in her 80s before she passed.)

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators—Martín Espada (1993). Espada is a breathtaking poet in his own right. But throughout this, I kept thinking of other New York artists who might as well live in Espada’s creative family tree: Alice Neel (really seeing and loving the unseen among her neighbors), Audre Lorde (in her decolonizing strength), James McBride (in his attention towards the gritty and mundane).

“Political poetry at its best,” reads a blurb. “...gives dignity to the insulted and the injured of the earth.”

Tropic of Squalor—Mary Karr (2018). If you’ve followed these book reviews over the years, you’re probably familiar with my nervous, bumbling encounter meeting Mary Karr when she gave a reading at Emerson for Tropic of Squalor then did a book signing.

I’d long been a huge fan (her famous commencement speech, her episode of On Being, The Liar’s Club and Lit). I brought my copy of Lit. I was wearing a sweatshirt that read HARRY across the sleeve (as in Styles). She asked if that was my name.

“NoUHHH. TheeeeeeeAH. ehYEAHwellWill-uh. WillWILL...Is. UMhaHA. It’s…yeah.”

She graciously took in my bumbling.

“Will! That’s always been my favorite name.”

I’m sure she sensed I could use this inscription slash reminder slash mantra (couldn’t we all?):

I finally got to Tropic of Squalor, and it’s Mary Karr at her best: elegant but dry. Sassy with a scalpel but still soulful. Sentences, in both prose and verse, that resemble magic tricks: sleight of hand that folds me over in its turns and precision. (The power of Mary Karr: she writes a poem about playing basketball as a patient at McLean’s, decades ago, a poem which is unsurprisingly incandescent in her hands, but it’s the dedication itself that’ll first shoot lightning across your horizon. Other gems: downpours in Manhattan, pretentious dinner parties, wandering post-9/11 rubble with buddy George Saunders).

Stay lit. Take no guff.

Memoir That Blew My Hair Back:

Grief Is for People—Sloane Crosley (2024). The two things I most seek out/savor/delight in as a reader, regardless of subject, plot, tone, form, anything: 1. grace, care, and joy with language and 2. authentic feeling in an engaging voice (i.e. voice). You know who has an indelibly cheeky-yet-trusty voice? Razor-sharp wit and snark but also vulnerable and intimate without ever feeling jarring? You know who writes some of the most polished, elemental sentences? The great Sloane Crosley, whose essay collections and novels feel like Nora Ephron crossed with Nick Hornby. But here, it’s like she wrote the funnier, cheekier sequel to Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. (A third thing I really seek out/savor/delight in: work that’s writing toward clarity not from clarity, with urgency, discovering in real time. E.g. ^^^).

Spiritual Books That Blew My Hair Back:

The Seven Generations and The Seven Grandfather Teachings—James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw (2023). Come for the timeless Ojibwe wisdom and spirituality, the Native American respect for nature and each other, lessons on interconnection, humility, and inner harmony. Stay for the Ojibwe linguistic tutorials (E.g. six out of every seven words are verbs (!), language with such nuance, malleability, and ecological roots, so to speak).

Novels That Blew My Hair Back:

James—Percival Everett (2024). The elevator pitch: the great Percival Everett wrote a much-overdue redux to Huck Finn from Jim’s first-person perspective. It’s an essential reimagining, obviously, but also, in its own right, brilliantly paced and a brilliant meditation on language, expression, and code-switching. And, per Kiese Laymon’s blurb, a reminder that “Percival Everett is a genre.” (i.e. his own subgenre of satire: huge-hearted but restrained, biting but never bitter).

Housekeeping—Marilynne Robinson (1980). I first read this in 2018 and loved it. Loved how it dealt with profound (almost biblical) loss and upheaval with such lightness—not as in levity but a light touch, light on its feet, not diminishing or downplaying grief but making its weight somehow almost, paradoxically, light to hold. Depending on your perspective, Housekeeping can feel like folklore or a lucid dream. Loved its language, the most genuinely fresh metaphors while still being grounded in scene (does anyone write interiority this beautifully while also this efficiently? Maybe Virginia Woolf with a stopwatch?).

I re-read this last summer. Very few contemporary novels break open my heart and blow back my hair to this degree. I’m not sure any contemporary novel forces me to slow down my reading this much (independent of its wonderfully puttering plot) in order to savor its language, its wisdom, its non-judgemental attention toward everything.

The misconception with art that’s deemed a “slow burn” (often used dismissively, as if narrative speed is the only reason we consume art!): from the right distance, that glow is never not keeping you warm and never not providing light.

Nobody Is Ever Missing—Catherine Lacey (2014). Your mileage may vary with the hazy plotting or the tight (very insular!) first-person narration. But holy shit: 1. the perceptiveness and existential wit, an endlessly-compelling mind at play, ruminating, leaping, circling, cycling and recycling, rehearsing and grieving, in bites and gulps and fits and starts, 2. the actual turns of phrase that often made me keel over (like Michael Scott at Beach Games, I’m sure there’s a conversion chart somewhere for this scoring rubric: single and double “!”s in the margins, passages underlined, underlines enveloped by circles, underlines with circles and double “!”s in the margins), and 3. a story so admirably quiet and combustive. Like a modern On The Road, in New Zealand, with higher stakes.

Journalism That Blew My Hair Back:

Boom Town—Sam Anderson (2018). It’s 430 pages but reads like you’re careening downhill on a skateboard: I don’t think I’ve ever read a longform journalist who writes with this level of gusto, joy, and humor. For a couple weeks there in April, I’d wake up earlier than usual, without any alarm, giddy to start reading again. Boom Town blew back my literary frosted tips not unlike how the gusts of Oklahoma (featured in Boom Town) took its prairies in flight.

What’s Boom Town even about? I’ll start by simply copying and pasting the subtitle:

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, And The Dream Of Becoming A World-Class Metropolis.

I’ll now copy and paste a section from its Notes On Sources:

“On my first flight out to OKC, I stumbled across the following sentence about the origin of Oklahoma’s violent weather: ‘the state is situated in a zone where three climatic regions—humid, sub-humid, and semiarid—meet and mingle.’ My mind made a little leap; in the margin I wrote, Westbrook, Harden, Durant.”

And now, I’ll copy and paste the book’s very first sentence: “Red Kelly was the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James.”

P.S. Both of Conan’s parents passed away recently (within three days of each other! In the same room! Their bedroom for the last 62 years!). I’ve heard Conan talk about them for years, but it wasn’t until I read their obits that I learned: 1. his dad was med school classmates with both my mom’s parents, who all graduated together 71 years ago, back when there were only 104 people in their class (100 men, four women…). So, it delights me picturing a young (20-year-old!) June Murray and a young Richard Senghas doing bits, in lab coats, with Dr. O’Brien. Conan, Sona, and Matt in the Team Coco podcast studio. Thomas, June, and Dick in the hallways on Longwood Ave. Trios of silly anarchy. Bits and quips. Riffs and gags (and by “bits,” I mean discussing antimicrobial resistance. And by “silly anarchy,” I mean meeting one another in class next to a cadaver—which is how June and Dick actually met.).

And 2. his mom, like my grandma, was a real pioneer in a male-dominated field. Resilient. Gracious. Seemingly incapable of sweating the small stuff, I’ve gathered. Dry sense of humor. Reaching back down the ladder to lift others. All the while, both were moms to six/seven. Big Irish/Scottish Catholic families in Boston. Born at the beginning of The Depression. Teenagers during WW2. Had to grow up QUICKLY.

Very moving, his parents’ story. Very moving, hearing Sona and Matt talk about Conan’s family with the boss out of office. I’ve since been thinking of June in January, ancestors, and how miraculous it is any of us end up here.

P.P.S. Thinking of LA. The sheer loss. The homebound people. All the folks I got to know through Meals On Wheels. The (six!) friendly, widowed, old ladies puttering with their little dogs down San Vicente (including “Magic Johnson,” first and last name every time, Eleanor’s 12-year-old maltipoo). My 102-year-old neighbor, Thelda, who moved into our building in 1957. Who did her daily walking exercises while smiling at—and pointing to—all the flowers. Who, every time I saw her, glowingly told me about her hometown Brooklyn Dodgers. Families watching the sunset from Palisades Park. That cheerful dude who was always at Temescal Canyon, always singing while hiking. The wonderful (treehouse-like!) Little Free Library in Santa Monica Canyon. The old horse stables at Will Rogers. The Coast Live Oaks in Eaton Canyon, Altadena. The Coast Live Oaks off the PCH. The basketball court hiding among the Eucalyptus and Redwoods in Rustic Canyon. Seeing that RED map already covering or quickly approaching all that…😢 To quote Santa Monica transplant, George Saunders: “if you’re a praying person, say a few for Los Angeles and for all victims of dislocation everywhere in the world.”

Those afternoons followed roughly the same itinerary: 1. Eating something foul in the food court (eg. Panda Express General Gao’s chicken: the texture of a dank kitchen sponge, the natural orange glow of Sunny Delight). 2. Sitting, immediately after, in those Sharper Image massage chairs for the full, free, JOLTING, five-minute massage (it’s really a miracle no one ever yacked). 3. Commenting on those lusty, nipply ads outside Abercrombie. 4. The more worldly kids among us making out with those Victoria’s Secret kiosk advertisements, only for the bikini pics to change—mid-makeout!—to a Cialis or arthritis commercial. 5. Racing each other down the hallways and back, past Auntie Annie’s Pretzels, past the same sad Sears with the same unsold, on-sale vacuums. 6. And always, while leaving, always, noting the enormous, dirty mound of snow at the edge of the parking lot.

I always noted—mostly internally, sometimes out loud—that this mound was gross. It took me a solid two decades to appreciate the malleability of the word “gross” here. Of course it was gross, the adjective. Gross as in filthy, less white than sidewalk gray, snow plows dumping cigarette-ash frozen yogurt onto an ungodly pile of Cinnabon wrappers, Dunkin’ cups, and yellow snow. Gross as in massive, an ice pyramid, a two-story snow cone, a precarious sledding hill that began with a day’s hike and ended with a skyline view of The Rainforest Cafe. Gross as in overt, as in obvious, unsubtle, conspicuous, a striking tourist attraction, a sight to behold while sitting in rush-hour 128 traffic, looming, standing by, a sturdy mountain holding what I can only imagine were as many tetanus snowballs as pages on the Cheesecake Factory menu next door.

I can’t quite convey how gross this mound was. I can’t quite convey how much of an eyesore it became by Presidents’ Day. I can’t quite convey how amused I am that my phone now autocorrects “eyesore” to “Eeyore,” which somehow feels unfair to both the pessimistic donkey and the disfigured landscape.

When I was recently at the Burlington Mall, the dirty mound of snow was neither dirty nor snowy nor there. Where the mound once towered now lives a Sweetgreen (Where There Was Once Snow Now Lives A Sweetgreen: Al Gore’s next climate change documentary). And even if it had snowed by then, well into fall, the parking lot—the whole mall, really—seemed infinitely cleaner than I remembered. Too clean for Thursday afternoon shenanigans. Sterile. Not lived-in. Jarringly pristine. More Chestnut Hill Mall than the movie Mall Rats (I’m all for upkeep, but when does a renovation become a facelift? How much forceful overhaul has to happen before we’re just resisting nature? Which is to say: I once lived in LA and saw lots of Botox!).

Suddenly, I missed the dirty mound. Or rather, I felt its absence acutely. Or rather, I suddenly, belatedly, found its presence charming. So gross and ugly it was endearing. So gross and massive it was a Middlesex County landmark. So gross and unsubtle that it was the only thing at the mall they weren’t selling.

The mound just was. Aspirationally so. Sitting. Resting, not resisting. Building upward and outward in dumps and heaves, slowly, intermittently, continually, growing and becoming, in its “graceful receiving” to quote Mr. Rogers, a gross pile. A gross tree, its rings from different storms. A gross mountain. Weathering it all, surrendering indiscriminately. Gross, the verb: to receive, accumulate.

The Buddhist meditation teacher, Mirabai Bush (co-author of Walking Each Other Home with Ram Dass), reminds us that “patience is the antidote to anger.” Maybe patience is where acceptance meets grace. Where this season arrives and keeps building, as long as it might.

I’ve heard Ram Dass say that our spirit’s many lives and incarnations stack up like a tree-lined mountain. That the duration of all those lives together is the time it would take a bird—flying over, flying past—to chip away at the whole mountain itself.

I’ve heard Thich Nhat Hanh say, “meditation is sitting like a mountain, solid yet relaxed.”

In my mind’s eye, I only saw the mound near its peak. Maybe I was just closer to the ground then. Maybe we just avoided the mall in nicer weather. Maybe it also took me a long time to appreciate the deceptively-profound meaning behind one of my favorite bands, Bon Iver: good winter.

I was at the Burlington Mall this recent trip to get help for a frozen iPhone home screen. A very friendly, sharp Apple Store employee identified the root of the problem: I needed more storage space. Yes, I was only using 3.1GB of the allotted 5GB. Yes, 3.1 seems to be < 5. But, when you’ve downloaded long-ass podcasts for offline listening, that number adds up I learned.

To remedy the storage problem: buy more storage, 99 cents a month for 50GB. To do so: enter your Apple ID and password. To do so: remember your Apple password. Or: change your Apple password. To do so: enter one of two passwords you always use then randomly capitalize a different letter.

My phone responded to—blurted at— my new password attempt: WEAK PASSWORD.

The helpful employee blurted back: “NO need to be so SASSY, phone.”

Which, yes, made me laugh—the hardest I’ve ever laughed, I’d have to imagine, at an Apple Store.

That is, until about 17 seconds later.

I thanked the helpful employee. Collected my things. Started making my way towards the familiar, main artery of the mall, getting an early whiff of kiosk cologne that smelled like a Matthew McConaughey car commercial.

Then I heard a voice behind me, near the Genius Bar:

“Alright alRIGHT. Here we GO. Here. We. GO. What TIME is it?! GAME time! For our iCal tuTORial class. What do ya say?! What. Do. You. SAY?! On your mark. GET set. MARK those calendars. Well, NOT just yet. That’s WHY you’re here. GREAT. I said ‘MARK’ twice, didn’t I?”

I turned around, giggling while turning:

“Should’ve been GO instead of MARK, I’m REALlizing now. But NOT a problem. ‘Cause we’re learning how to MARK those calendars, going FORWARD! ‘Cause you don’t plan a schedule looking at the PAST! alRIGHT. Here we GO. Here. We. GO. Let’s GOOO!!!”

This may sound cartoonish. A fun-house rendering.

“Yeah, no,” to quote Trader Joe’s poet-in-residence, Gary Gulman.

The speaker: a very loud man (some might say: the loudest!) with slicked-back hair, marinating in gel, wearing, yes, a mouth-piece headset—not unlike Tom Cruise in Magnolia in both volume and bluster, in both confidence and prominent mouth-piece headset, in both shoulder-length hair and hair gel for said hair, in how you just knew this 5’8.5’’ goober listed himself at 5’11” in his 1998 high school lacrosse program.

I wouldn’t say I enjoyed his presence. I would say I found his presence funny. A gross, conspicuous performance. An entertaining eyesore, if you will. I’m not proud of this immediate judgment. And yet, that was my intuitive Eeyore/eyesore response.

Three people had shown up for this iCal tutorial: three older ladies, definitely born before FDR’s third term, all huddled around, eager to learn about this new technology.

Did Dax Shepard’s louder brother on Monster Energy lower his voice once the class began? He did not. Did this triumvirate of Hazels in Hokas come bearing questions? They sure did.

One wanted to know how to add her grandson’s graduation to her calendar, in June. One wanted to know how to make her physical therapist appointment a recurring, weekly event. One wanted to add her friend’s birthday, so she didn’t forget.

I giggled. I lingered. I giggled. I pretended to look at an iPad. I kept giggling.

Headset Hank replied to every question—and yet, never with any judgment or cynicism or impatience (patience is the antidote to anger). His responses maintained the volume and gusto of a Tony Robbins pep talk. But his language and tone, with each passing question, grew softer. More patient. Accepting. Gracefully receiving. Aspirationally so.

I canNOT overstate the cognitive dissonance: “you’re gonna CRUSH this scheduling. You will NOT miss your grandson’s graduation, rest aSSURED. A LOVEly life ceremony that you will CERTainly be notified of, thanks to your TRUSty iCal.”

Suddenly, unmistakably, I found his presence charming. So gross it was endearing. So gross it became a sight. So gross that this free iCal class was the only thing at the Apple Store they weren’t selling.

Then, I wandered over to the Sharper Image Relax The Back massage chairs.

P.S. Truly honored, grateful, and thrilled: recently received a very generous fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center—so excited to be back in the Green Mountain State/The Land of Zero Highway Billboards for a bit in 2025! (“All roads lead to VerMONT.” —Bernie Sanders, I imagine, in the Senate cafeteria, unprompted, with a mouth full of eggplant parm, to a random Nevada representative at the salad bar.). A real trip to learn that Ross Gay worked on Be Holding (a book-length poem I revere and read once a year every year) during a fellowship there 💙

I hope your holidays have this kind of joy and love:

I love its progressive politics and its parks. I love its walkability and its trees. I love its old, brick sidewalks and its public art. I love its big-college-town size and its diversity. I love its libraries and bookstores, its local bakeries and coffee shops. I love its new institutions and its old charm. I love its universal, free composting. I love its proximity to a much-bigger city. I love its independence from said much-bigger city. I love the type of celebrity it attracts (Julia Child! John Malkovich! Skip Gates! Elizabeth Warren! Yo-Yo Ma!). I love that Howard Zinn was Matt Damon’s neighbor and childhood babysitter. I love that Cantabrigians take equal pride in Patrick Ewing and ee cummings.

I lived here as a newborn. Then again during high school. I lived here in grad school. I recently moved back. Four different homes within a 1.25-mile radius. I love it here! I’m very grateful for this place! My parents met here 45 years ago! I wouldn’t be here without this place! 

All that goes without saying. I’ll say it anyway.

“You can’t really make fun of something unless you truly, deeply, madly love it,” Patton Oswalt reminds us. 

I adore Cambridge. Now I’d like to shift our attention to the first clause in Patton Oswalt’s sentence there.

In the last few months, since I moved back to The People’s Republic, I’ve discovered—rediscovered—an inescapable archetype in these parts:

Crazy Cambridge Boomer.

Who is Crazy Cambridge Boomer, you ask? These descriptions may sound hyperbolic. I can assure you they’re quite…bolic.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer still has the same Dukakis For President sticker on the back left bumper of their mustard yellow 1986 Volvo station wagon.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer has one tattoo, on their ankle: “AND VIEWERS LIKE YOU,” all caps, written along the opening of their clog, a shoe from, yes, Cambridge Clogs on Mass Ave, a store where, yes, Crazy Cambridge Boomer has maintained their Frequent Buyer Plan since the store’s inception in 1987.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer looks like Annette Bening if she’d gone to Woodstock (or rather, if she’d written a thesis on the political ethnomusicology of Woodstock while back at Sarah Lawrence). Crazy Cambridge Boomer looks like Bradley Whitford if he asked the barber for “The Doc Brown from Back To The Future on the sides but The Noam Chomsky on top.” 

Crazy Cambridge Boomer once got sidetracked en route to an Allen Ginsberg reading (that took place in a mutual friend’s kitchen on Putnam Ave) and ended up smoking The Devil’s Lettuce with Bobcat Goldthwait at a Harvard Lampoon after-party at Dunster House.

In 1983, Crazy Cambridge Boomer once camped out for 36 consecutive hours next to WBUR’s studios to see a live taping of Masterpiece Theater, for a new production of The Six Wives of Henry VIII. CCB made the same quip to every passerby: “I’m not one of Henry’s spouses…that I KNOW of.”

Crazy Cambridge Boomer still tapes Antiques Roadshow every night, on VHS, and asks their neighbors—unprompted—NOT to spoil the previous night’s episode.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer runs a two-to-seven person Current Events Club at Simon’s Coffee, holding office hours from 8:00 to 10:00 every morning, beginning with domestic political affairs, then international, then veering into local Cambridge topics, before concluding with Garden Talk. They meet outside in nicer weather, inside near the windows in colder weather (*Command C, Command V from real life*).

Crazy Cambridge Boomer doesn’t seem to mind (notice) that Simon’s Coffee exclusively plays (blasts) the same eight pop songs from 2015 on repeat because their Currents Events dialogue about street-cleaning protocols is the only thing louder than “My House” by Flo Rida. 

In the late ‘90s, Crazy Cambridge Boomer would drink decaf coffee after work on Wednesdays with Harvard Law Professor, Elizabeth Warren, at the Good Will Hunting Au Bon Pain. On special occasions, when CCB was “feeling a little naughty,” they’d get caffeinated green tea and have even “more feisty energy” to “conquer the Junior Varsity mid-week crossword.”

Crazy Cambridge Boomer sounds like a mix of both feminist bookstore owners in Portlandia but at 1.75x podcast speed.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer was bringing their reusable PBS tote bag for groceries and errands in the ‘80s.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer is bringing the same reusable PBS tote bag for groceries and errands today.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer thought Harvard Square SOLD OUT when Newbury Comics moved into The Garage.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer has the existential angst of George, the sociability of Paul, the psychedelic spirituality of John, and the mustache of Ringo.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer loves the IDEA of jam bands but never got into The Dead or Phish. Crazy Cambridge Boomer loves the IDEA of improv comedy but prefers the “avant-garde humor” of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me to the “barbaric madness” of fellow Mather House history major, Conan O’Brien.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer thinks Terry Gross SOLD OUT.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer was there in the ‘80s when Upland Ave neighbor, Bill Walton, brought in the new hoops and nets at the Raymond Park courts and hasn’t left. CCB has a surprisingly smooth game—tosses a nice skip pass, works gracefully around screens—but really needs to simmer down with the continuous HANDS UP on defense and the Kevin McHale elbows boxing out. 

Crazy Cambridge Boomer once sprained both ankles, at once, going up for an uncontested rebound in Tevas, and then struggled mightily crossing the street in the allotted 26 seconds that they petitioned the city for new crosswalk legislation. Which is why, even on dead-end streets off Mass Ave—and this actually true— they give you FIFTY SIX SECONDS to cross five stripes.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer thinks Skip Gates SOLD OUT.

Crazy Cambridge Boomer agrees with me that if you’re texting while jaywalking across Mass Ave while also wearing any Harvard merchandise you probably deserve to get hit by a car. 

Crazy Cambridge Boomer throws an annual potluck party commemorating the end of the city’s public library late fines. You’re welcome to join. It’s this Saturday. I know I’ll be there. 

Sincerely,

Crazy Cambridge Millennial