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Accept
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to the server to view the underlying object.
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"content": "The secret to our future lies<br /><br />In the dark corners of the library I am looking for my past. The corners are dark because it is the early 80s and I can barely picture it now. The new library has just opened in the old part of town, modern looking with bean bag chairs and potted plants, tall windows and lots of light. The card catalog, the center of things, with index cards and pencil stubs. The lobby where they stamp the inside of the books with a due date two weeks out. It is well before the digital age so we work in paper and ink, life is quiet and slow.<br /><br />It is the early 80s but we are very much a part of the 70s still in the art and the library furnishing, bright orange and yellow. It is called modern art and instantly dated in its attempts to claim the name, modern. It portends a future exaggerated and distended by the sculptures placed around the streets. The small shops are going out of business because of a new mall just opened outside of town. Cities die from the inside out.<br /><br />But here at the library all is civil and quiet, and the future looks bright. There is so much to learn and know in the world and the library is a symbol for all of that. It’s like the hardware store, there is so much to fix but everything you need is right here, everything we know.<br /><br />I have come back to the library to research a school paper on the sacred shroud of Turin. And make photocopies from a text book with photos of the alleged burial cloth Christ was wrapped in after he was crucified. Through some mystery, a sudden flash of light like a camera from the sun, his likeness is imbued on this old material, a solemn-looking Christ as evidence to the world of his existence, a film negative, proof. And the photocopy I took from the book is ironic as the shroud itself is a kind of photocopy, a well-contrived fake some say to fool the future, to rewrite the past.<br /><br />It is many years later and ironic again, I’ve taken up the book 1984 in the year 2016 as we’re living in Germany and Donald Trump is running for president. The book is hard to believe, that the lead character would work in a news agency that rewrites the news, replacing facts with lies. An imagined future where war is ever present and people aren’t allowed to think for themselves. Where we are all subject to mind control and surveillance, obedience to the state.<br /><br />So it’s ironic that Orwell forecast this in 1949 and bit by bit it’s become true. Or it always has been true, it’s just more apparent now. I’ve flown back to the States after months of being away and as I’m riding down the escalator to Customs all you see on the TV is Donald Trump. He has not been elected yet but he is everywhere, it’s like he’s already won. It’s as if he controls the media and because he’s all we see anything he says we believe.<br /><br />The books are precious, these relics of our past, because they contain truths of who we are and glimpses of who we’ll become. And Orwell is a kind of prophet by what he wrote, though his vision is dark. Hidden in the story is a warning, a message in a bottle from a not-so-distant past.<br /><br />There is a kind of duality inherent in mankind, that we have evolved as social creatures who work together to build societies and tribes, to build cultures, and yet there is also the desire to undo and destroy all of that, to wipe out whole cultures and people by destroying all they’ve made, their art, their language, their history. Orwell could argue that duality is the human conflict between how much we care for each other or for ourselves. And if the state can divide us, we can be controlled. Because our power is in our humanity and our loyalty to one another. The race before the state.<br /><br />I am searching the dark corners of the library looking through my past to preserve what I can. The physical place is the embodiment of a time, a jar of keepsakes. We are all individuals with unique histories and a people with a treasured, riddled past. A past where the secret to our future lies.",
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"content": "The secret to our future lies\n\nIn the dark corners of the library I am looking for my past. The corners are dark because it is the early 80s and I can barely picture it now. The new library has just opened in the old part of town, modern looking with bean bag chairs and potted plants, tall windows and lots of light. The card catalog, the center of things, with index cards and pencil stubs. The lobby where they stamp the inside of the books with a due date two weeks out. It is well before the digital age so we work in paper and ink, life is quiet and slow.\n\nIt is the early 80s but we are very much a part of the 70s still in the art and the library furnishing, bright orange and yellow. It is called modern art and instantly dated in its attempts to claim the name, modern. It portends a future exaggerated and distended by the sculptures placed around the streets. The small shops are going out of business because of a new mall just opened outside of town. Cities die from the inside out.\n\nBut here at the library all is civil and quiet, and the future looks bright. There is so much to learn and know in the world and the library is a symbol for all of that. It’s like the hardware store, there is so much to fix but everything you need is right here, everything we know.\n\nI have come back to the library to research a school paper on the sacred shroud of Turin. And make photocopies from a text book with photos of the alleged burial cloth Christ was wrapped in after he was crucified. Through some mystery, a sudden flash of light like a camera from the sun, his likeness is imbued on this old material, a solemn-looking Christ as evidence to the world of his existence, a film negative, proof. And the photocopy I took from the book is ironic as the shroud itself is a kind of photocopy, a well-contrived fake some say to fool the future, to rewrite the past.\n\nIt is many years later and ironic again, I’ve taken up the book 1984 in the year 2016 as we’re living in Germany and Donald Trump is running for president. The book is hard to believe, that the lead character would work in a news agency that rewrites the news, replacing facts with lies. An imagined future where war is ever present and people aren’t allowed to think for themselves. Where we are all subject to mind control and surveillance, obedience to the state.\n\nSo it’s ironic that Orwell forecast this in 1949 and bit by bit it’s become true. Or it always has been true, it’s just more apparent now. I’ve flown back to the States after months of being away and as I’m riding down the escalator to Customs all you see on the TV is Donald Trump. He has not been elected yet but he is everywhere, it’s like he’s already won. It’s as if he controls the media and because he’s all we see anything he says we believe.\n\nThe books are precious, these relics of our past, because they contain truths of who we are and glimpses of who we’ll become. And Orwell is a kind of prophet by what he wrote, though his vision is dark. Hidden in the story is a warning, a message in a bottle from a not-so-distant past.\n\nThere is a kind of duality inherent in mankind, that we have evolved as social creatures who work together to build societies and tribes, to build cultures, and yet there is also the desire to undo and destroy all of that, to wipe out whole cultures and people by destroying all they’ve made, their art, their language, their history. Orwell could argue that duality is the human conflict between how much we care for each other or for ourselves. And if the state can divide us, we can be controlled. Because our power is in our humanity and our loyalty to one another. The race before the state.\n\nI am searching the dark corners of the library looking through my past to preserve what I can. The physical place is the embodiment of a time, a jar of keepsakes. We are all individuals with unique histories and a people with a treasured, riddled past. A past where the secret to our future lies.",
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"content": "In the mouth a desert<br /><br />They care a lot about their looks. They’re teenage girls, they’ve always been that way. But now it’s amplified by their phones, by the platforms. Everyone is on a platform looking at everybody else. Now that our kids are so fixated with how they look they never miss a chance to check themselves in the mirror. They move from the mirror to their phones and only occasionally glance up. I’m desensitized to it now but I remember what it was like at first, watching them pose for selfies in the car. And how it went on and on. Like they’re oblivious to their physical surroundings. And that upsets me the most, how the phone has enabled a virtual world that’s siphoned our attention away from what’s real, that’s created a world with its own set of truths reflecting the worst of us like a fantasy mirror with a witch’s curse. See what you want to believe no matter the cost.<br /><br />There are many comparisons to make with the smart phone because it does so many things! It’s a pocket-sized computer, to start. You can find recipes for anything in the world you want to cook. Take pictures, video, measure a piece of wood, scan QR codes, dictate, watch porn, light your way down a dark flight of steps, check the weather, track your step count for the day, buy anything you want, hear any song you want, even call your mom! Because it does so many things we carry it around with us everywhere we go. What can compare throughout all of history to a thing that could do so much? It is the most marvelous tool, it far surpasses the hunting knife, the flint used to start a fire, the compass.<br /><br />So we give it to our kids when they turn 12 and start middle school (in case there’s a shooting), and then we get mad at them when they can’t put it down. The phone becomes a rite of passage, a form of identifying as a member of society at an age where kids are desperately grappling with their identities, the core of who they are, and when they get to the other side of that passage there’s the internet and Chinese social media waiting for them on the other side. And they’re soon to be exposed to drugs and things like self-harm (<a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=KYS\" title=\"#KYS\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#KYS</a>) as they’re going through puberty and learning about pandemics and war in Ukraine.<br /><br />So getting back to our two teenaged girls (14 and 17) I look to the oldest and wonder how she’s going to reflect back on this period, if it will feel like surviving some brush with psychic ruin, a soul death, assuming she can get to the other side of what the cell phone and associated content has done to her.<br /><br />Like many people around the world, two years of dealing with a plague and physical isolation naturally drove us to our phones. If and when we did go to a restaurant, our phones replaced the menu. The video calls replaced face to face. And on and on. The phone became the ultimate tool for “contactless,” revealing both its saving grace and downfall.<br /><br />As parents we knew letting our kids sink into their phones was dangerous but we didn’t know what else to do. Their anxiety and depression deepened, as many suffered similar effects around the world. But in the dark of their rooms at night, having confronted the terrors of their minds and struggled with the meaning of their existence and so on, it is the phone that is the one thing even therapists say you can’t take away. It’s a life line. They don’t know what they’d do without it. That’s true, and that’s distressing! It has become not only a charmed mirror from a kid’s fantasy book, it’s a vacuum attachment fixed to their souls! A remote control turned back on us.<br /><br />I sit at the stoplight in my car outside the middle school where I drop Charlotte off every morning and watch the kids cross the street with their phones in front of them like way-finding devices, like divining rods people once used to locate water underground. They believed some had the gift to divine water and the Y-shaped twig held by these diviners would magically lead them to the source. Those “divining” would jerk and twitch in response to the rod, or the rod would jerk and twitch in response to the diviner.<br /><br />I wonder where the phones are leading our kids, are leading all of us, what it’s done to us and if it’s too late to undo. I think of our oldest and how it’s a part of her DNA now, it’s tattooed to her existence, and what I’ve heard about getting tattoos removed. It’s a real bitch.",
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"published": "2022-03-12T18:22:49+00:00",
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"content": "In the mouth a desert\n\nThey care a lot about their looks. They’re teenage girls, they’ve always been that way. But now it’s amplified by their phones, by the platforms. Everyone is on a platform looking at everybody else. Now that our kids are so fixated with how they look they never miss a chance to check themselves in the mirror. They move from the mirror to their phones and only occasionally glance up. I’m desensitized to it now but I remember what it was like at first, watching them pose for selfies in the car. And how it went on and on. Like they’re oblivious to their physical surroundings. And that upsets me the most, how the phone has enabled a virtual world that’s siphoned our attention away from what’s real, that’s created a world with its own set of truths reflecting the worst of us like a fantasy mirror with a witch’s curse. See what you want to believe no matter the cost.\n\nThere are many comparisons to make with the smart phone because it does so many things! It’s a pocket-sized computer, to start. You can find recipes for anything in the world you want to cook. Take pictures, video, measure a piece of wood, scan QR codes, dictate, watch porn, light your way down a dark flight of steps, check the weather, track your step count for the day, buy anything you want, hear any song you want, even call your mom! Because it does so many things we carry it around with us everywhere we go. What can compare throughout all of history to a thing that could do so much? It is the most marvelous tool, it far surpasses the hunting knife, the flint used to start a fire, the compass.\n\nSo we give it to our kids when they turn 12 and start middle school (in case there’s a shooting), and then we get mad at them when they can’t put it down. The phone becomes a rite of passage, a form of identifying as a member of society at an age where kids are desperately grappling with their identities, the core of who they are, and when they get to the other side of that passage there’s the internet and Chinese social media waiting for them on the other side. And they’re soon to be exposed to drugs and things like self-harm (#KYS) as they’re going through puberty and learning about pandemics and war in Ukraine.\n\nSo getting back to our two teenaged girls (14 and 17) I look to the oldest and wonder how she’s going to reflect back on this period, if it will feel like surviving some brush with psychic ruin, a soul death, assuming she can get to the other side of what the cell phone and associated content has done to her.\n\nLike many people around the world, two years of dealing with a plague and physical isolation naturally drove us to our phones. If and when we did go to a restaurant, our phones replaced the menu. The video calls replaced face to face. And on and on. The phone became the ultimate tool for “contactless,” revealing both its saving grace and downfall.\n\nAs parents we knew letting our kids sink into their phones was dangerous but we didn’t know what else to do. Their anxiety and depression deepened, as many suffered similar effects around the world. But in the dark of their rooms at night, having confronted the terrors of their minds and struggled with the meaning of their existence and so on, it is the phone that is the one thing even therapists say you can’t take away. It’s a life line. They don’t know what they’d do without it. That’s true, and that’s distressing! It has become not only a charmed mirror from a kid’s fantasy book, it’s a vacuum attachment fixed to their souls! A remote control turned back on us.\n\nI sit at the stoplight in my car outside the middle school where I drop Charlotte off every morning and watch the kids cross the street with their phones in front of them like way-finding devices, like divining rods people once used to locate water underground. They believed some had the gift to divine water and the Y-shaped twig held by these diviners would magically lead them to the source. Those “divining” would jerk and twitch in response to the rod, or the rod would jerk and twitch in response to the diviner.\n\nI wonder where the phones are leading our kids, are leading all of us, what it’s done to us and if it’s too late to undo. I think of our oldest and how it’s a part of her DNA now, it’s tattooed to her existence, and what I’ve heard about getting tattoos removed. It’s a real bitch.",
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"content": "Tipping up and touching down<br /><br />You could think that way if you wanted to, it was a funny way to think. Like you could go back for a redo. I’d been thinking that way for a while leading up to February. It was right when the shit hit the fan with the Corona two years ago. They said it was here now and the sanitizer was coming out but not the masks so much, anyone wearing masks I looked upon with distrust like they had something to hide. We had plans for Disneyland, our first time. The kids were almost old enough they’d outgrown it already. And the four of us all pale and blanched from the mossy Northwest headed down to sunny California. And me at the airport by the gate ordering a beer with my breakfast and the waitress coming back to see if I wanted a refill and me shaking my head (don’t be ridiculous!) but having to really think about it, having to weigh my options in that state, the tipping up and taking off.<br /><br />I wanted a redo because I spent too much of that trip drinking in our hotel room at night. The room wasn’t much to speak of and nor were the drinks but the hangovers were truly remarkable. And three in a row! A hat trick as they say in sports. And it went unacknowledged but expected, and when we got home the virus started about the same time I started a new job and everyone got scared shitless and then really started drinking, started messaging each other about their drinking, like this is the end of the world so I’m tapping into the good stuff, and then they all mobbed the stores for toilet paper.<br /><br />So to think we managed a trip to Disneyland without getting sick, with thousands of snotty kids and free breakfast buffets where everything’s laid out under heat lamps, well that’s remarkable too. Dawn whipped out traveler size bottles of sanitizer before meals, but that’s about it. And what a place to be hungover with all those sounds and kids and colors. Even the sun was hard to confront. And my clothes wet all day from a water ride, having to just stand there in line like that with wet clothes, I did it as a kind of penance no one even acknowledged or credited me for, my secret.<br /><br />I wanted a redo, to go back as a family sometime sober, but that probably wouldn’t happen. Instead we made plans for Laguna Beach, near LA. I added the location to my weather app like adding a new playing card to my hand, deal me in. And just the anticipation lifted me up. It was a tingling, a magical sensation impossible to describe. Not alcohol or drugs, life. Life combined with youth and imagination. Both a yearning for what would be and an immense appreciation for what was. In fact there was more of it than I could take in, and maybe that’s what caused the tingling. Flutters in the heart, butterflies. I wrote it down because it had been so long, I wanted to remember it. What it felt like to be high on life. Touching down once more, what’s real.<br /><br />I could sit there watching that moon plump up in the evening sky like a river rock floating in a thick black pool, all pockfaced and sallow with empty seas for eyes, an empty mouth. It spilled out across the whole night sky and lit up the dark roads below. I could drive all night like this. I was feeling clear-headed and bright. We had plans to be somewhere, we were going away.",
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"published": "2022-02-17T21:39:44+00:00",
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"content": "Tipping up and touching down\n\nYou could think that way if you wanted to, it was a funny way to think. Like you could go back for a redo. I’d been thinking that way for a while leading up to February. It was right when the shit hit the fan with the Corona two years ago. They said it was here now and the sanitizer was coming out but not the masks so much, anyone wearing masks I looked upon with distrust like they had something to hide. We had plans for Disneyland, our first time. The kids were almost old enough they’d outgrown it already. And the four of us all pale and blanched from the mossy Northwest headed down to sunny California. And me at the airport by the gate ordering a beer with my breakfast and the waitress coming back to see if I wanted a refill and me shaking my head (don’t be ridiculous!) but having to really think about it, having to weigh my options in that state, the tipping up and taking off.\n\nI wanted a redo because I spent too much of that trip drinking in our hotel room at night. The room wasn’t much to speak of and nor were the drinks but the hangovers were truly remarkable. And three in a row! A hat trick as they say in sports. And it went unacknowledged but expected, and when we got home the virus started about the same time I started a new job and everyone got scared shitless and then really started drinking, started messaging each other about their drinking, like this is the end of the world so I’m tapping into the good stuff, and then they all mobbed the stores for toilet paper.\n\nSo to think we managed a trip to Disneyland without getting sick, with thousands of snotty kids and free breakfast buffets where everything’s laid out under heat lamps, well that’s remarkable too. Dawn whipped out traveler size bottles of sanitizer before meals, but that’s about it. And what a place to be hungover with all those sounds and kids and colors. Even the sun was hard to confront. And my clothes wet all day from a water ride, having to just stand there in line like that with wet clothes, I did it as a kind of penance no one even acknowledged or credited me for, my secret.\n\nI wanted a redo, to go back as a family sometime sober, but that probably wouldn’t happen. Instead we made plans for Laguna Beach, near LA. I added the location to my weather app like adding a new playing card to my hand, deal me in. And just the anticipation lifted me up. It was a tingling, a magical sensation impossible to describe. Not alcohol or drugs, life. Life combined with youth and imagination. Both a yearning for what would be and an immense appreciation for what was. In fact there was more of it than I could take in, and maybe that’s what caused the tingling. Flutters in the heart, butterflies. I wrote it down because it had been so long, I wanted to remember it. What it felt like to be high on life. Touching down once more, what’s real.\n\nI could sit there watching that moon plump up in the evening sky like a river rock floating in a thick black pool, all pockfaced and sallow with empty seas for eyes, an empty mouth. It spilled out across the whole night sky and lit up the dark roads below. I could drive all night like this. I was feeling clear-headed and bright. We had plans to be somewhere, we were going away.",
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"content": "You can never hold back spring<br /><br />Spring came quick. One day the birds were back and it seemed like life just resumed. Like everyone had been released from a witch’s spell, that’s how it felt.<br /><br />He worked in the yard and dug the heels of his hands in his eyes and sighed. For lunch he warmed leftovers and worked his fork and knife over the plate as a mason might work a trowel. There was enough sun he was tempted to throw open the windows. It was coming in at angles it hadn’t for months, lighting up the rugs and floors. He had the garage doors open and put on the radio, loud for a Sunday but no one was around. Outside it still felt plague-like, everyone hiding in their basements or on a plane headed somewhere else, somewhere they could pretend there wasn’t a plague.<br /><br />The fog had spread over everything, the whole earth. It moved uncaring to smother anything in its way, creeping across homes and yards, play sets, driveways, thinning randomly in some parts, leaving others untouched. It moved with an indiscriminate force, a life of its own. People argued about the fog and what it meant or where it came from or if it was even real. They checked their feeds and started Podcasts. The fog didn’t care.<br /><br />It had been so long, the fog’s persistence drove people mad. It had a way of blurring and obscuring what they’d always known, they started to question themselves, their common sense. One day it was everywhere and the next, suddenly gone. Then back once again unexpected.<br /><br />He leaned back so far on the La-Z-Boy recliner he was almost upside down, a Hanged Man. And when he threw the crank the chair thrust him back like a ride at the fair. Now the fog had lifted, replaced by cotton ball clouds lazing across the sky, a herd of floating sheep. Bugs, larva-looking things half spiraled in the dirt. He saw after-images like this when he closed his eyes, bits of life poking through. The Fibonacci pattern in the foxglove petals like blades in a fan. He was there too, crouched, snatching the ground with both hands. Combing the sward of the earth with a hoe. The therapy of weeding, the real-time editing of anomalies and defects. A way to restore the balance. To make believe you could right any wrong.<br /><br />It was the first Sunday afternoon in February, a day that would begin and end with birds, new birds he hadn’t seen or heard before. And the light was the same as it had been before, the beginnings of that white Zinfandel light mixed with pale blue at the end of the day.<br /><br />And he felt alive again because that’s what spring does: it makes you remember we all live again no matter what. That we are born into a world of symbols and sense memory, though we may only realize this in dreams. The ancient language of metaphor, none more primal than spring.",
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"published": "2022-02-12T15:08:26+00:00",
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"content": "You can never hold back spring\n\nSpring came quick. One day the birds were back and it seemed like life just resumed. Like everyone had been released from a witch’s spell, that’s how it felt.\n\nHe worked in the yard and dug the heels of his hands in his eyes and sighed. For lunch he warmed leftovers and worked his fork and knife over the plate as a mason might work a trowel. There was enough sun he was tempted to throw open the windows. It was coming in at angles it hadn’t for months, lighting up the rugs and floors. He had the garage doors open and put on the radio, loud for a Sunday but no one was around. Outside it still felt plague-like, everyone hiding in their basements or on a plane headed somewhere else, somewhere they could pretend there wasn’t a plague.\n\nThe fog had spread over everything, the whole earth. It moved uncaring to smother anything in its way, creeping across homes and yards, play sets, driveways, thinning randomly in some parts, leaving others untouched. It moved with an indiscriminate force, a life of its own. People argued about the fog and what it meant or where it came from or if it was even real. They checked their feeds and started Podcasts. The fog didn’t care.\n\nIt had been so long, the fog’s persistence drove people mad. It had a way of blurring and obscuring what they’d always known, they started to question themselves, their common sense. One day it was everywhere and the next, suddenly gone. Then back once again unexpected.\n\nHe leaned back so far on the La-Z-Boy recliner he was almost upside down, a Hanged Man. And when he threw the crank the chair thrust him back like a ride at the fair. Now the fog had lifted, replaced by cotton ball clouds lazing across the sky, a herd of floating sheep. Bugs, larva-looking things half spiraled in the dirt. He saw after-images like this when he closed his eyes, bits of life poking through. The Fibonacci pattern in the foxglove petals like blades in a fan. He was there too, crouched, snatching the ground with both hands. Combing the sward of the earth with a hoe. The therapy of weeding, the real-time editing of anomalies and defects. A way to restore the balance. To make believe you could right any wrong.\n\nIt was the first Sunday afternoon in February, a day that would begin and end with birds, new birds he hadn’t seen or heard before. And the light was the same as it had been before, the beginnings of that white Zinfandel light mixed with pale blue at the end of the day.\n\nAnd he felt alive again because that’s what spring does: it makes you remember we all live again no matter what. That we are born into a world of symbols and sense memory, though we may only realize this in dreams. The ancient language of metaphor, none more primal than spring.",
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"content": "Then the mid-life part began<br /><br />In a sense it is like I am not here. And that is the thing about parenting, perhaps the point. To be there when you’re needed and then not at all. You see it in the wild with mother whales helping their young. Their job is to extend the species, not themselves. They recede.<br /><br />There is a time you might remember, a night at a little league baseball game you were in, maybe 1980. You are about 10. It is late spring, so close to summer you can taste it. The nights lengthening and the lightning bugs coming out, sleeping with the bedroom windows open, the sound of bugs and car radios blurring past. No one has this memory but you. The wood baseball bat painted red, signed by the Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt. No one uses wooden bats in little league, they all do aluminum. When you hit during batting practice the red paint leaves a mark on the balls that looks like a blood stain, like lipstick.<br /><br />It is the ninth inning and the game is tied but you’ve got a runner on third and now it’s all up to you, you’re up to bat. You hit a line drive to right field, the pitch is high, you tomahawk it. A triple. It’s taking the right fielder forever to get to the ball and then it’s taking him forever to throw it and in fact he can’t even throw that far, can’t reach third. You’re standing there trying to catch your breath and can’t believe it, it happened so fast. Everyone is on their feet shouting. You are standing on third, you drove in the winning run. Better yet, your parents are there and one of your dad’s friends from work, and you’ve made him proud. Everyone is so happy. You stop by the 7-11 for a slurpee. You’re like 10 years old and nothing in the world matters more. From a distance now it is a foreign time and place, impossible to believe. Your whole life feels like this, hard to make out.<br /><br />So you’ve got memories like this that no one knows, not even your kids, it’s hard to get anyone’s attention, no one cares. The depth of that memory and how it feels, it’s a part of you no one sees. They know as much as they need to about you already, this thing between parents and kids. In fact it’s okay, it’s supposed to be that way, you’re better off not knowing much more. You likely know less than one percent of what the other one is really about. And you realize that when they’re gone, maybe wish you knew more.<br /><br />It is a good light at the end of the day now, that gray-blue smear of February. Takes me back to our time in Germany, a strange time of year to be there. The bitter feel of winter in one frame, the warm orange of the fireplace in the other, the pop of burning wood, the purr of the fan. A cat on the lap was good. A place to fill in the gaps.<br /><br />Now it is bedtime and you lay there recounting scenes from the day. It is like thumbing through an animated film short, the way they used to animate things. You fan the pages like a deck of cards to make it look like it’s moving. You nod off hopeful for what dreams are playing tonight. You show up with your popcorn to watch. A feature film you will enjoy but soon forget.",
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"content": "Then the mid-life part began\n\nIn a sense it is like I am not here. And that is the thing about parenting, perhaps the point. To be there when you’re needed and then not at all. You see it in the wild with mother whales helping their young. Their job is to extend the species, not themselves. They recede.\n\nThere is a time you might remember, a night at a little league baseball game you were in, maybe 1980. You are about 10. It is late spring, so close to summer you can taste it. The nights lengthening and the lightning bugs coming out, sleeping with the bedroom windows open, the sound of bugs and car radios blurring past. No one has this memory but you. The wood baseball bat painted red, signed by the Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt. No one uses wooden bats in little league, they all do aluminum. When you hit during batting practice the red paint leaves a mark on the balls that looks like a blood stain, like lipstick.\n\nIt is the ninth inning and the game is tied but you’ve got a runner on third and now it’s all up to you, you’re up to bat. You hit a line drive to right field, the pitch is high, you tomahawk it. A triple. It’s taking the right fielder forever to get to the ball and then it’s taking him forever to throw it and in fact he can’t even throw that far, can’t reach third. You’re standing there trying to catch your breath and can’t believe it, it happened so fast. Everyone is on their feet shouting. You are standing on third, you drove in the winning run. Better yet, your parents are there and one of your dad’s friends from work, and you’ve made him proud. Everyone is so happy. You stop by the 7-11 for a slurpee. You’re like 10 years old and nothing in the world matters more. From a distance now it is a foreign time and place, impossible to believe. Your whole life feels like this, hard to make out.\n\nSo you’ve got memories like this that no one knows, not even your kids, it’s hard to get anyone’s attention, no one cares. The depth of that memory and how it feels, it’s a part of you no one sees. They know as much as they need to about you already, this thing between parents and kids. In fact it’s okay, it’s supposed to be that way, you’re better off not knowing much more. You likely know less than one percent of what the other one is really about. And you realize that when they’re gone, maybe wish you knew more.\n\nIt is a good light at the end of the day now, that gray-blue smear of February. Takes me back to our time in Germany, a strange time of year to be there. The bitter feel of winter in one frame, the warm orange of the fireplace in the other, the pop of burning wood, the purr of the fan. A cat on the lap was good. A place to fill in the gaps.\n\nNow it is bedtime and you lay there recounting scenes from the day. It is like thumbing through an animated film short, the way they used to animate things. You fan the pages like a deck of cards to make it look like it’s moving. You nod off hopeful for what dreams are playing tonight. You show up with your popcorn to watch. A feature film you will enjoy but soon forget.",
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"content": "You can never quarantine the past<br /><br />JT has taken the glass chessboard from its place on the coffee table and moved it to the kitchen island, what feels like the beginning of a drug ritual. He looks like the actor Ron Howard, boyish and wholesome, but there’s an underlying malice too, the kind you see in the eyes of psychopaths. It could be the drugs because it’s rumored he’s into the hard stuff. He’s one of the few in our fraternity who’s of legal drinking age and lives in a condo at the top of the hill. It is a high quality chess board, the surface marred with razor cuts. So Gibbard, he says, what are your plans?<br /><br />My plans are to avoid making plans, to react to opportunities rather than make them. But he doesn’t mean life plans, he wants to know about the fraternity. Do I want to move up, to hold office after I’m done being a pledge? JT is leading a faction against the current president, his rival James Esplen. In fact they are both named James and he is James Taylor, but apart from the drugs I don’t see any similarities between him and the singer.<br /><br />When you become a brother there’s a graduation ceremony where you get a jacket with your letters and a nickname, and that name gets stitched onto the jacket. The best nicknames are the ones people actually use, and everyone calls JT JT because it suits him. The best names also have a back story only known by the inner circle. JT’s roommate is nicknamed Captain Jack, a reference to a Billy Joel song (“Captain Jack will get you high tonight / and take you to your special island.”) In a sense we are all islands in the fraternity, a grouping of islands, an archipelago.<br /><br />I become a pledge not long after starting college to distract myself from missing my girlfriend and because the jackets are really cool, red and black with a laughing skull on the side. I’m not worried about getting hazed because they swear that no one uses paddles anymore even though the Hegemon (Greek for pledge master) grips one as he marches up and down the line, smacking it into his hand, swinging it through the air, making a dramatic “thwack.”<br /><br />Instead they put blindfolds on us in the basement of some shit rental and make us memorize things and shout back in unison. We lock arms at the elbows in a form of male bonding rooted in psychic abuse. One night they divide us into groups with half of us taken to the woods and the other half locked in a dark basement, forced to listen to a CD of animal distress sounds used by hunters, played on maximum volume and infinite repeat, everything from wounded coyotes and rabbits to bleating fawns. They tie us together and aim strobe lights at us but we’ve gotten high beforehand so we just giggle our way through it like it’s a Pink Floyd concert.<br /><br />The pledging period, which spans three months, combines this kind of mistreatment with pleasantries, like being invited to private mixers with sororities or a brother’s bedroom for bong hits. The brothers go between yelling at us one moment to acting like we’re family the next, which feels oddly familiar to how many of us were raised.<br /><br />In fact Greek life mimics the same behaviors we knew before college, namely the idea of an exclusive club, same as the cliques we formed in high school or on the elementary school playground, the key difference being we added drugs and alcohol and girls.<br /><br />But from the frat house to the real world and corporate life it doesn’t change much. We clump together with those we want to be seen with, form loyalties to protect ourselves, assign secret names. We gravitate to places we’ll be accepted for a level of status we can’t attain on our own. Or make the mistake of thinking that will differentiate us, when in fact it just makes us the same. And that is the true mission of elite social clubs, to perpetuate the same.<br /><br />The irony is that when I’m done being a pledge in hindsight those memories are better than being a brother. There are nights at the frat house we are covered in cheap beer and slipping on the dance floor, and I think this must be what they mean by true religious ecstasy. Drunken teenaged boys and girls singing in unison in the dark. We are all growing up and figuring it out and this is how we do it, with songs by the B-52s and the Fine Young Cannibals. We don’t realize it’s the soundtrack of our lives.<br /><br />These times come back to me in my dreams, characters and scenes from the past. They are all still there, bottled and shelved in a dark basement of my mind. At night I maunder down the steps and sample one or two, and they commingle and mix like it’s an ad hoc party of ghosts. When it’s done I make my way to the kitchen, start the coffee, and there in the dark is my old fraternity brother JT. He just says so tell me Gibbard, what are your plans?",
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"content": "You can never quarantine the past\n\nJT has taken the glass chessboard from its place on the coffee table and moved it to the kitchen island, what feels like the beginning of a drug ritual. He looks like the actor Ron Howard, boyish and wholesome, but there’s an underlying malice too, the kind you see in the eyes of psychopaths. It could be the drugs because it’s rumored he’s into the hard stuff. He’s one of the few in our fraternity who’s of legal drinking age and lives in a condo at the top of the hill. It is a high quality chess board, the surface marred with razor cuts. So Gibbard, he says, what are your plans?\n\nMy plans are to avoid making plans, to react to opportunities rather than make them. But he doesn’t mean life plans, he wants to know about the fraternity. Do I want to move up, to hold office after I’m done being a pledge? JT is leading a faction against the current president, his rival James Esplen. In fact they are both named James and he is James Taylor, but apart from the drugs I don’t see any similarities between him and the singer.\n\nWhen you become a brother there’s a graduation ceremony where you get a jacket with your letters and a nickname, and that name gets stitched onto the jacket. The best nicknames are the ones people actually use, and everyone calls JT JT because it suits him. The best names also have a back story only known by the inner circle. JT’s roommate is nicknamed Captain Jack, a reference to a Billy Joel song (“Captain Jack will get you high tonight / and take you to your special island.”) In a sense we are all islands in the fraternity, a grouping of islands, an archipelago.\n\nI become a pledge not long after starting college to distract myself from missing my girlfriend and because the jackets are really cool, red and black with a laughing skull on the side. I’m not worried about getting hazed because they swear that no one uses paddles anymore even though the Hegemon (Greek for pledge master) grips one as he marches up and down the line, smacking it into his hand, swinging it through the air, making a dramatic “thwack.”\n\nInstead they put blindfolds on us in the basement of some shit rental and make us memorize things and shout back in unison. We lock arms at the elbows in a form of male bonding rooted in psychic abuse. One night they divide us into groups with half of us taken to the woods and the other half locked in a dark basement, forced to listen to a CD of animal distress sounds used by hunters, played on maximum volume and infinite repeat, everything from wounded coyotes and rabbits to bleating fawns. They tie us together and aim strobe lights at us but we’ve gotten high beforehand so we just giggle our way through it like it’s a Pink Floyd concert.\n\nThe pledging period, which spans three months, combines this kind of mistreatment with pleasantries, like being invited to private mixers with sororities or a brother’s bedroom for bong hits. The brothers go between yelling at us one moment to acting like we’re family the next, which feels oddly familiar to how many of us were raised.\n\nIn fact Greek life mimics the same behaviors we knew before college, namely the idea of an exclusive club, same as the cliques we formed in high school or on the elementary school playground, the key difference being we added drugs and alcohol and girls.\n\nBut from the frat house to the real world and corporate life it doesn’t change much. We clump together with those we want to be seen with, form loyalties to protect ourselves, assign secret names. We gravitate to places we’ll be accepted for a level of status we can’t attain on our own. Or make the mistake of thinking that will differentiate us, when in fact it just makes us the same. And that is the true mission of elite social clubs, to perpetuate the same.\n\nThe irony is that when I’m done being a pledge in hindsight those memories are better than being a brother. There are nights at the frat house we are covered in cheap beer and slipping on the dance floor, and I think this must be what they mean by true religious ecstasy. Drunken teenaged boys and girls singing in unison in the dark. We are all growing up and figuring it out and this is how we do it, with songs by the B-52s and the Fine Young Cannibals. We don’t realize it’s the soundtrack of our lives.\n\nThese times come back to me in my dreams, characters and scenes from the past. They are all still there, bottled and shelved in a dark basement of my mind. At night I maunder down the steps and sample one or two, and they commingle and mix like it’s an ad hoc party of ghosts. When it’s done I make my way to the kitchen, start the coffee, and there in the dark is my old fraternity brother JT. He just says so tell me Gibbard, what are your plans?",
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"content": "We were here<br /><br />This has happened before. I’m rereading the book White Noise by Don DeLillo, a copy I bought used that someone wrote in. That someone was a woman, you can tell by her lettering. Joyful and young, it’s as yet untouched by the cruelness of life, the sorrow of this world, the trembling that comes from years of hard drinking. In fact her handwriting is no longer hers, it’s mine: a composite of all the women who’ve ever written to me combined into one. All my hopes for love hidden in the twists of her words, the swoops and flourishes. My nostalgia for human touch, the memory of handmade print. What makes us real.<br /><br />I am reading the book at the same time as she: no, I am following her. I’m reading her reading him. She hasn’t signed her name in the book but there’s a receipt in the middle with the name of the store where she got it, the date. Tuesday 30 March 1999. Mother Kali’s Books, Eugene, OR. Register no. 2. At the bottom of the receipt she’s written Friday 5 pm. What could that mean? A date with the cashier? Did she need it for a class? And why did she sell it back? I am almost more interested in what she has to say than the author, though I love the book. Is her professor spoon-feeding her notes or is she coming up with them on her own?<br /><br />Books are one of the few things we can touch and handle in an intimate way and then share with strangers when we’re done. Unlike a used car or a painting in a thrift store or an old chest of drawers, with a book it’s different, someone has held it in their lap, carried it with them on the bus, fallen asleep with it on the couch. These physical things are charged with a human resonance digital spaces lack. There, we come and go like ghosts passing by unseen, footprints in the snow. Books with handwritten notes are evidence we were here.<br /><br />He is trying to say something about popular culture in this scene. It is about the most photographed barn in America but when you pull off the road there’s no barn, just people selling postcards, taking pictures of a barn that’s not even there. Here there is some commentary on consumerism I think. People follow what others do, the crowd, however absurd.<br /><br />She has written in the white space at the bottom of the page and it is in this moment I first see her through the swoops of her pencil, her thoughts. She is reading it at the same time as me and here is what she thinks. I am moved to write about it, to put my book down. I reach for the phone and stab out words with my thumbs, a new kind of typewriter just two inches wide. No one uses pencils anymore.<br /><br />The next chapter goes untouched until the very end, and I refrain from reading what she’s said until I get there. She’s underlined the closing text with a bold, definitive stroke beneath which it reads Identity. Her lettering is a blend of print and cursive, the T’s mirror each other like twins.<br /><br />I was just having lunch when I saw it from across the room, the book, and wanting something new to read I pulled it out. The spine is coming undone and the cover has a crease with a stain at 10 o’clock, a gold tacky substance from a glitter pen that’s coarse and pleasing to the touch like sand. And there at the bottom is the author’s photograph in black and white looking stern, unsmiling, a chin like Kirk Douglas. But at a different angle it could be a grin, a male Mona Lisa. I feel like I know this man from his book.<br /><br />By the end of the sixth chapter she has stopped making notes and I wonder if she’s tuned out, if I am alone in all this. Part of me wants to scan ahead for her notes but another part wants to not disrupt the order of things. It is a strange book, to read it cold might leave you feeling estranged, put off. It is a kind of comedy wholly anchored in itself like a burl on a tree, a queer-looking knot.<br /><br />By the eighth chapter she is back, but using a highlighter now. The ink is so old it’s made the words glow with a gold you can’t ignore. What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation. She’s forced me to pause and consider this.<br /><br />After some time and no further annotations I come to the first passage I feel I should mark, the first scene in the grocery store. It reads,<br /><br />There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The timeless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.<br /><br />This page I fold carefully at the bottom in my signature way of marking things. The story was heating up and my reader friend sensed it too. She’d shifted from notes to highlighting to underlining to a new system, check marks in purple ink. The check marks denoted something that drew me in, a Morse code. But it also made me wonder if more than one person was now on the line. And soon a new element appeared, handwritten stars. Wild arrows, exclamation points! One could get distracted by all this but I tried to embrace it. Perhaps out of loneliness, from being cut off from the rest of the world for so long.<br /><br />It is in our nature to pass things between us, to share and reuse. And we’re connected beyond things in ways we’ll never know, through shared places and experiences. Sometimes I’ll learn a friend was at the same concert as me well before we knew one another. We pass through the same towns and places sharing shopping carts and seats in the theater, friends of friends, surprise relatives.<br /><br />DeLillo has a lot to say in this book about American culture, consumerism, TV, the media, the American family. And it’s fractured and distorted by our fascination with screens, our need to be entertained, to gorge ourselves on it, our limitless choice. He suggests we’re all afraid of death and the only way we can overcome that fear is by losing ourselves in crowds. That by joining a crowd we shield ourselves from death, we become anonymous there. Through our reliance on TV and entertainment we’ve lost the ability to think for ourselves, we think in crowds based on what we’re told, will believe anything. Though published in 1985 it resonates on a different level today.<br /><br />I would like to find the woman who owned this book and talk to her. I would like to track her down on the street and say hey, I have this book you read. What did you think?<br /><br />I would like for her to not be anonymous or made up, for her to be known, to be real. I would like to believe I am the same. That we can stand out from the crowd and know for ourselves what’s real by using our senses, what we know by feel.",
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"content": "We were here\n\nThis has happened before. I’m rereading the book White Noise by Don DeLillo, a copy I bought used that someone wrote in. That someone was a woman, you can tell by her lettering. Joyful and young, it’s as yet untouched by the cruelness of life, the sorrow of this world, the trembling that comes from years of hard drinking. In fact her handwriting is no longer hers, it’s mine: a composite of all the women who’ve ever written to me combined into one. All my hopes for love hidden in the twists of her words, the swoops and flourishes. My nostalgia for human touch, the memory of handmade print. What makes us real.\n\nI am reading the book at the same time as she: no, I am following her. I’m reading her reading him. She hasn’t signed her name in the book but there’s a receipt in the middle with the name of the store where she got it, the date. Tuesday 30 March 1999. Mother Kali’s Books, Eugene, OR. Register no. 2. At the bottom of the receipt she’s written Friday 5 pm. What could that mean? A date with the cashier? Did she need it for a class? And why did she sell it back? I am almost more interested in what she has to say than the author, though I love the book. Is her professor spoon-feeding her notes or is she coming up with them on her own?\n\nBooks are one of the few things we can touch and handle in an intimate way and then share with strangers when we’re done. Unlike a used car or a painting in a thrift store or an old chest of drawers, with a book it’s different, someone has held it in their lap, carried it with them on the bus, fallen asleep with it on the couch. These physical things are charged with a human resonance digital spaces lack. There, we come and go like ghosts passing by unseen, footprints in the snow. Books with handwritten notes are evidence we were here.\n\nHe is trying to say something about popular culture in this scene. It is about the most photographed barn in America but when you pull off the road there’s no barn, just people selling postcards, taking pictures of a barn that’s not even there. Here there is some commentary on consumerism I think. People follow what others do, the crowd, however absurd.\n\nShe has written in the white space at the bottom of the page and it is in this moment I first see her through the swoops of her pencil, her thoughts. She is reading it at the same time as me and here is what she thinks. I am moved to write about it, to put my book down. I reach for the phone and stab out words with my thumbs, a new kind of typewriter just two inches wide. No one uses pencils anymore.\n\nThe next chapter goes untouched until the very end, and I refrain from reading what she’s said until I get there. She’s underlined the closing text with a bold, definitive stroke beneath which it reads Identity. Her lettering is a blend of print and cursive, the T’s mirror each other like twins.\n\nI was just having lunch when I saw it from across the room, the book, and wanting something new to read I pulled it out. The spine is coming undone and the cover has a crease with a stain at 10 o’clock, a gold tacky substance from a glitter pen that’s coarse and pleasing to the touch like sand. And there at the bottom is the author’s photograph in black and white looking stern, unsmiling, a chin like Kirk Douglas. But at a different angle it could be a grin, a male Mona Lisa. I feel like I know this man from his book.\n\nBy the end of the sixth chapter she has stopped making notes and I wonder if she’s tuned out, if I am alone in all this. Part of me wants to scan ahead for her notes but another part wants to not disrupt the order of things. It is a strange book, to read it cold might leave you feeling estranged, put off. It is a kind of comedy wholly anchored in itself like a burl on a tree, a queer-looking knot.\n\nBy the eighth chapter she is back, but using a highlighter now. The ink is so old it’s made the words glow with a gold you can’t ignore. What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation. She’s forced me to pause and consider this.\n\nAfter some time and no further annotations I come to the first passage I feel I should mark, the first scene in the grocery store. It reads,\n\nThere were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The timeless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.\n\nThis page I fold carefully at the bottom in my signature way of marking things. The story was heating up and my reader friend sensed it too. She’d shifted from notes to highlighting to underlining to a new system, check marks in purple ink. The check marks denoted something that drew me in, a Morse code. But it also made me wonder if more than one person was now on the line. And soon a new element appeared, handwritten stars. Wild arrows, exclamation points! One could get distracted by all this but I tried to embrace it. Perhaps out of loneliness, from being cut off from the rest of the world for so long.\n\nIt is in our nature to pass things between us, to share and reuse. And we’re connected beyond things in ways we’ll never know, through shared places and experiences. Sometimes I’ll learn a friend was at the same concert as me well before we knew one another. We pass through the same towns and places sharing shopping carts and seats in the theater, friends of friends, surprise relatives.\n\nDeLillo has a lot to say in this book about American culture, consumerism, TV, the media, the American family. And it’s fractured and distorted by our fascination with screens, our need to be entertained, to gorge ourselves on it, our limitless choice. He suggests we’re all afraid of death and the only way we can overcome that fear is by losing ourselves in crowds. That by joining a crowd we shield ourselves from death, we become anonymous there. Through our reliance on TV and entertainment we’ve lost the ability to think for ourselves, we think in crowds based on what we’re told, will believe anything. Though published in 1985 it resonates on a different level today.\n\nI would like to find the woman who owned this book and talk to her. I would like to track her down on the street and say hey, I have this book you read. What did you think?\n\nI would like for her to not be anonymous or made up, for her to be known, to be real. I would like to believe I am the same. That we can stand out from the crowd and know for ourselves what’s real by using our senses, what we know by feel.",
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"content": "From a distance<br /><br />At first the day had no discernible features to it, nothing to hold onto. A smooth rock face stretching up. I made my way through the dark to the coffee pot and back to the den with a blanket where I lit a candle, opened my phone and went back to the year 2016, to blog posts I’d published then. But it was hard listening to myself for too long, hard reading in the dark. The cat was there like some odd, furry spirit. And the caffeine slowly came on with the outdoor light, and I liked this time of day best for the quiet and for the dark, for the alone time and advancing light. It was during those times I made a practice to write, but for the past few months I’d slipped out, troubled by the thought I was wasting my time and should be doing more. Troubled worse by the winter funk we’d fallen into. And how depression is contagious, unavoidable, like a virus with its own brand of spikes. And the only way out was to get out, to trudge through the woods even when it rained, to pad my way through with my thumbs and my phone, putting down words, which is still writing even if it doesn’t feel that way. How we can slip into our own traps of such ingenious design. That my writing was good enough or not good enough, its own trap.<br /><br />If yoga means union then why do I feel better when my body recedes from itself? We are over-evolved, our brains swell like balloons. We float off to some no-man’s land of our own making and mistake that for enlightenment. Today I saw a girl from my childhood, one of my first crushes, Isabelle Wilson. I saw the features of her face, the brown in her eyes. I saw inside of her and she held me there, I looked inside, she let me. I woke from that and sat in the dark with the bistro lights from the back yard the only light. I closed my eyes and tried to bring it up again but it was like a photocopy, not the same. How was it I could access that, from all those years?<br /><br />I went back to the fields in Germany where we used to walk, retraced the way down to the lower road beneath the tunnel and past the school, by the pond where the frogs sing in spring, up to a path that runs by the river. And out onto the fields, I’ve been there through every season for the last 18 years. My memories run together to form a kind of painting of the mind, a short film.<br /><br />My heart pangs with the scene of me going by the swimming pool and looking through the fence at the spot on the grass where we used to sit that first summer when the kids were really small. You can only see it in the winter when the leaves are down and everything looks bare. It’s hard to remember much but I hang on to every last bit.<br /><br />And will they know how to wind the old clocks if I don’t show them? And what will they make of me from a distance? It is like sitting in a cave, making sketches on the wall. The days would have no discernible features if we didn’t, we mark them this way.",
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"content": "From a distance\n\nAt first the day had no discernible features to it, nothing to hold onto. A smooth rock face stretching up. I made my way through the dark to the coffee pot and back to the den with a blanket where I lit a candle, opened my phone and went back to the year 2016, to blog posts I’d published then. But it was hard listening to myself for too long, hard reading in the dark. The cat was there like some odd, furry spirit. And the caffeine slowly came on with the outdoor light, and I liked this time of day best for the quiet and for the dark, for the alone time and advancing light. It was during those times I made a practice to write, but for the past few months I’d slipped out, troubled by the thought I was wasting my time and should be doing more. Troubled worse by the winter funk we’d fallen into. And how depression is contagious, unavoidable, like a virus with its own brand of spikes. And the only way out was to get out, to trudge through the woods even when it rained, to pad my way through with my thumbs and my phone, putting down words, which is still writing even if it doesn’t feel that way. How we can slip into our own traps of such ingenious design. That my writing was good enough or not good enough, its own trap.\n\nIf yoga means union then why do I feel better when my body recedes from itself? We are over-evolved, our brains swell like balloons. We float off to some no-man’s land of our own making and mistake that for enlightenment. Today I saw a girl from my childhood, one of my first crushes, Isabelle Wilson. I saw the features of her face, the brown in her eyes. I saw inside of her and she held me there, I looked inside, she let me. I woke from that and sat in the dark with the bistro lights from the back yard the only light. I closed my eyes and tried to bring it up again but it was like a photocopy, not the same. How was it I could access that, from all those years?\n\nI went back to the fields in Germany where we used to walk, retraced the way down to the lower road beneath the tunnel and past the school, by the pond where the frogs sing in spring, up to a path that runs by the river. And out onto the fields, I’ve been there through every season for the last 18 years. My memories run together to form a kind of painting of the mind, a short film.\n\nMy heart pangs with the scene of me going by the swimming pool and looking through the fence at the spot on the grass where we used to sit that first summer when the kids were really small. You can only see it in the winter when the leaves are down and everything looks bare. It’s hard to remember much but I hang on to every last bit.\n\nAnd will they know how to wind the old clocks if I don’t show them? And what will they make of me from a distance? It is like sitting in a cave, making sketches on the wall. The days would have no discernible features if we didn’t, we mark them this way.",
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"content": "All the days<br /><br />They went in a pile beside the bed: the socks, the shirt, the pants and underwear. And in the morning, they came on in the opposite direction. The days were like that too, they got taken off at night and put back on in the morning. All the days were good. Of course they weren’t but you could make believe they were. Life was like that too, a summary of days. Alone it was marvelous and, in most ways, enough.<br /><br />I cleaned the raclette, the Swiss table-top grill we pull out at New Year's. The funky cheese goes on a paddle beneath the grill and warms while cooking the meat and vegetables up top. The speck doesn't produce enough fat, so we fry the bell pepper in bacon grease, and when the cheese is bubbling and brown we scrape it onto the potatoes and serve it with cornichons and pickled onions.<br /><br />We have snow outside like cake frosting and at night it's so quiet there's only the far-off thrum of the valley and freeway below. Everything is caked in white like marshmallow, a gingerbread house. We have mulled cider and wassail punch in ornate mugs from the German Christmas markets in Saarbrücken and Ludwigsburg. From the outside our house looks like the miniature light-up Victorian village we have inside—we could be the same as those happy figurines waving with our fingerless gloves, warming our hands by an electric fire.<br /><br />I get out my cranberry-colored balaclava for a walk to the lake, and my Gore-Tex snow suit from the 1970s that’s bright yellow and heavy as hell. And then I stand for longer than normal watching the snow fall on the water, debate taking selfies and texting to friends or just being with it alone. The white on the rooftops of the houses on the far shore, the slant of the tall trees fading into the clouds and snow, the slate color of the water. Frozen snot in my mustache that’s fun to rub off, like picking dried glue.<br /><br />I make a pot of Jamaican stew peas with the leftover ham, a bundle of fresh thyme, bay leaf, allspice berries and habanero wrapped in cheese cloth. After cooking the beans I add a can of coconut milk, remove the ham bones and dice the meat, then add it back in with chopped scallions and more thyme. Serve it with white rice and then stow the pot in the garage with the sleds and Himalayan mittens.<br /><br />You can get sentimental about things, especially at this time of year. Thinking about packing up the Victorian village, everything going back in their boxes, into the garage, the same process in reverse. On Sunday morning it's turned to rain and I put on the Blues music radio show, kick the tree to the curb, pack up the kids for a ride to the city, the old bookstore and brunch. We only get so many days like this when we’re all together and it's good to remember that.<br /><br />Dawn and I are getting to the end of the Beatles documentary, January of 1969. It’s gone on so long we feel like we’ve spent the whole month with the band. And we’re now at the end where they’re about to do the rooftop concert. Throughout the film they cross off each day when they’re done rehearsing so you can see how close they are to the deadline at the end of the month. It’s now just dawned on them that they only have six songs for the performance and wanted 14. George says if only we had six more weeks…<br /><br />And Charlotte needs to return a gift to the department store so we take my car, and the song Get Back comes on. And I mention the lyrics, I didn’t know it was about nationalism and point out the part about the trans person. And tell Charlotte can you believe this came out in 1969?<br /><br />There is almost no one at the department store. They have a place in the back where you can return stuff to Amazon and give you a coupon hoping you’ll spend money in the store. I tell Charlotte I knew the CEO of this place (Kohl’s); she worked at Starbucks and I arranged for her training when she started there in 1996. We didn’t have Outlook yet so everyone wrote their appointments in paper planners they carried from meeting to meeting. And some people (like me) saved those old planners for sentimental reasons because we believed there was a part of us in it and didn’t want to let that go.<br /><br />I imagine John and George if they were still alive and what they’d say about our times. They are a comfort when the days feel bleak and represent the very best of what we can be, both elevated and down to earth. Paul gestures to the piano, all the songs that were ever written came out of these keys.<br /><br />They come for the tree on Saturday and I put out last year’s calendar with the recycling. All the days were good and in most ways enough. You didn’t realize it as much at the time as you do when it’s nearly done.",
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"content": "All the days\n\nThey went in a pile beside the bed: the socks, the shirt, the pants and underwear. And in the morning, they came on in the opposite direction. The days were like that too, they got taken off at night and put back on in the morning. All the days were good. Of course they weren’t but you could make believe they were. Life was like that too, a summary of days. Alone it was marvelous and, in most ways, enough.\n\nI cleaned the raclette, the Swiss table-top grill we pull out at New Year's. The funky cheese goes on a paddle beneath the grill and warms while cooking the meat and vegetables up top. The speck doesn't produce enough fat, so we fry the bell pepper in bacon grease, and when the cheese is bubbling and brown we scrape it onto the potatoes and serve it with cornichons and pickled onions.\n\nWe have snow outside like cake frosting and at night it's so quiet there's only the far-off thrum of the valley and freeway below. Everything is caked in white like marshmallow, a gingerbread house. We have mulled cider and wassail punch in ornate mugs from the German Christmas markets in Saarbrücken and Ludwigsburg. From the outside our house looks like the miniature light-up Victorian village we have inside—we could be the same as those happy figurines waving with our fingerless gloves, warming our hands by an electric fire.\n\nI get out my cranberry-colored balaclava for a walk to the lake, and my Gore-Tex snow suit from the 1970s that’s bright yellow and heavy as hell. And then I stand for longer than normal watching the snow fall on the water, debate taking selfies and texting to friends or just being with it alone. The white on the rooftops of the houses on the far shore, the slant of the tall trees fading into the clouds and snow, the slate color of the water. Frozen snot in my mustache that’s fun to rub off, like picking dried glue.\n\nI make a pot of Jamaican stew peas with the leftover ham, a bundle of fresh thyme, bay leaf, allspice berries and habanero wrapped in cheese cloth. After cooking the beans I add a can of coconut milk, remove the ham bones and dice the meat, then add it back in with chopped scallions and more thyme. Serve it with white rice and then stow the pot in the garage with the sleds and Himalayan mittens.\n\nYou can get sentimental about things, especially at this time of year. Thinking about packing up the Victorian village, everything going back in their boxes, into the garage, the same process in reverse. On Sunday morning it's turned to rain and I put on the Blues music radio show, kick the tree to the curb, pack up the kids for a ride to the city, the old bookstore and brunch. We only get so many days like this when we’re all together and it's good to remember that.\n\nDawn and I are getting to the end of the Beatles documentary, January of 1969. It’s gone on so long we feel like we’ve spent the whole month with the band. And we’re now at the end where they’re about to do the rooftop concert. Throughout the film they cross off each day when they’re done rehearsing so you can see how close they are to the deadline at the end of the month. It’s now just dawned on them that they only have six songs for the performance and wanted 14. George says if only we had six more weeks…\n\nAnd Charlotte needs to return a gift to the department store so we take my car, and the song Get Back comes on. And I mention the lyrics, I didn’t know it was about nationalism and point out the part about the trans person. And tell Charlotte can you believe this came out in 1969?\n\nThere is almost no one at the department store. They have a place in the back where you can return stuff to Amazon and give you a coupon hoping you’ll spend money in the store. I tell Charlotte I knew the CEO of this place (Kohl’s); she worked at Starbucks and I arranged for her training when she started there in 1996. We didn’t have Outlook yet so everyone wrote their appointments in paper planners they carried from meeting to meeting. And some people (like me) saved those old planners for sentimental reasons because we believed there was a part of us in it and didn’t want to let that go.\n\nI imagine John and George if they were still alive and what they’d say about our times. They are a comfort when the days feel bleak and represent the very best of what we can be, both elevated and down to earth. Paul gestures to the piano, all the songs that were ever written came out of these keys.\n\nThey come for the tree on Saturday and I put out last year’s calendar with the recycling. All the days were good and in most ways enough. You didn’t realize it as much at the time as you do when it’s nearly done.",
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"content": "A Christmas bedtime story from pinklightsabre<br /><br />If you had just been there, you would know what I mean. The feeling of that day and why it was so special, why I was trying to hold onto the moment. We spent a year living with my mom in Germany but had to leave for a few months over the winter. We bought a used German car and drove to the UK, spent Christmas in a farmhouse I rented in the country outside of Cork. No internet. A sunroom where we sat around a small tree the owners put up for us and decorated. It was cold with thin windows, but they had a portable heater that hummed and glowed orange. And sometimes the light in the sky is the same as it was then, the look of it below the clouds when it clears in the distance and turns the color of abalone shell, turquoise and blue, some pink.<br /><br />I imagined I could relive the time in that little Irish town standing on the street outside the shops. A feeling of calm, of being very far away but feeling very grounded too, very much in the right place. I bought a wool Irish cap and wrote the name of the town on the inseam, but it disappeared after we returned to Germany. So I bought another wool cap in a small town in Pennsylvania called Jim Thorpe. And had a similar memory of standing on the street in the winter when it was cold, and the sun came out to warm a patch on the street so small it seemed like it was just for me. And the memories combined down into one and mixed over time.<br /><br />The sky today looks the same as it did in Skibbereen that day before Christmas, dark in the foreground but with a thin band of light at the bottom. How it’s symbolic this time of year, that there’s hope in a small ribbon of light however dark the rest of the day.<br /><br />I regifted Charlotte a family heirloom and wrote her an origin story about it. I took Lily to a screening of a Nirvana concert filmed at the same theater where they played thirty years ago. I got Dawn a rock with money my mom gave me. And prepared firewood for the next few days as we’re expecting snow. I gathered fallen pine branches from the yard and placed them around the sensitive plants which felt wholesome. I am doing my best to honor the past without overlooking the present.<br /><br />And now as if to mimic the falling down quality of my mom’s medieval house in Germany we have a bunch of crap jammed in the makeshift pantry area in our garage. Brussels sprouts and dates, radishes for the salad, oranges and nuts, blue cheese and chocolates.<br /><br />We recreate the homes from our youth and our memories there, and Christmas is the time many of us do that the most. Let me reach out to you now wherever you are for a hug and a smile…and for the next time we see the light.",
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"content": "A Christmas bedtime story from pinklightsabre\n\nIf you had just been there, you would know what I mean. The feeling of that day and why it was so special, why I was trying to hold onto the moment. We spent a year living with my mom in Germany but had to leave for a few months over the winter. We bought a used German car and drove to the UK, spent Christmas in a farmhouse I rented in the country outside of Cork. No internet. A sunroom where we sat around a small tree the owners put up for us and decorated. It was cold with thin windows, but they had a portable heater that hummed and glowed orange. And sometimes the light in the sky is the same as it was then, the look of it below the clouds when it clears in the distance and turns the color of abalone shell, turquoise and blue, some pink.\n\nI imagined I could relive the time in that little Irish town standing on the street outside the shops. A feeling of calm, of being very far away but feeling very grounded too, very much in the right place. I bought a wool Irish cap and wrote the name of the town on the inseam, but it disappeared after we returned to Germany. So I bought another wool cap in a small town in Pennsylvania called Jim Thorpe. And had a similar memory of standing on the street in the winter when it was cold, and the sun came out to warm a patch on the street so small it seemed like it was just for me. And the memories combined down into one and mixed over time.\n\nThe sky today looks the same as it did in Skibbereen that day before Christmas, dark in the foreground but with a thin band of light at the bottom. How it’s symbolic this time of year, that there’s hope in a small ribbon of light however dark the rest of the day.\n\nI regifted Charlotte a family heirloom and wrote her an origin story about it. I took Lily to a screening of a Nirvana concert filmed at the same theater where they played thirty years ago. I got Dawn a rock with money my mom gave me. And prepared firewood for the next few days as we’re expecting snow. I gathered fallen pine branches from the yard and placed them around the sensitive plants which felt wholesome. I am doing my best to honor the past without overlooking the present.\n\nAnd now as if to mimic the falling down quality of my mom’s medieval house in Germany we have a bunch of crap jammed in the makeshift pantry area in our garage. Brussels sprouts and dates, radishes for the salad, oranges and nuts, blue cheese and chocolates.\n\nWe recreate the homes from our youth and our memories there, and Christmas is the time many of us do that the most. Let me reach out to you now wherever you are for a hug and a smile…and for the next time we see the light.",
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"content": "The weight of all we felt<br /><br />This day could be drawn in pencil it’s so drab.<br />The roads are wet with rain<br />and the leaves are down,<br />the birch with their spindly arms<br />and dragon eyes,<br />a tangle of dead leaves,<br />a lone bird…<br />this feeling of the trees<br />stripped down to the underlying form,<br />the self’s like that too,<br />unadorned.<br /><br />Yet here in nature there is no wanting<br />for what we don’t have,<br />there only is.<br />The striations on the muddy path,<br />the tracks and ruts,<br />the ground is always like that,<br />always changing,<br />the same as us.<br /><br />And I have come back to the trail to lose or to find myself in this season of soft color and low light.<br /><br />I’ve come back to remember that I’m more than myself, I can let go of myself,<br />I can be a part of something bigger,<br />I never left.<br /><br />And the lopped off limbs,<br />the blown down leaves,<br />all this is a part of me.<br />The song of some awkward bird<br />the same as mine, off key.<br /><br />And when I’m on the trail I’m connected in a real way,<br />a way I can see and feel.<br />Not by wavelengths or wires<br />but by the smell of the ground,<br />the roots and leaves, and all that is real.<br /><br />I have come back to the trail to lose or to find myself but can’t decide, is the self something<br />to capture and to catch, or to set free?<br /><br />I am bound and released by the weight of this, with nowhere else to go but here, no one else to be but me.",
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"content": "The weight of all we felt\n\nThis day could be drawn in pencil it’s so drab.\nThe roads are wet with rain\nand the leaves are down,\nthe birch with their spindly arms\nand dragon eyes,\na tangle of dead leaves,\na lone bird…\nthis feeling of the trees\nstripped down to the underlying form,\nthe self’s like that too,\nunadorned.\n\nYet here in nature there is no wanting\nfor what we don’t have,\nthere only is.\nThe striations on the muddy path,\nthe tracks and ruts,\nthe ground is always like that,\nalways changing,\nthe same as us.\n\nAnd I have come back to the trail to lose or to find myself in this season of soft color and low light.\n\nI’ve come back to remember that I’m more than myself, I can let go of myself,\nI can be a part of something bigger,\nI never left.\n\nAnd the lopped off limbs,\nthe blown down leaves,\nall this is a part of me.\nThe song of some awkward bird\nthe same as mine, off key.\n\nAnd when I’m on the trail I’m connected in a real way,\na way I can see and feel.\nNot by wavelengths or wires\nbut by the smell of the ground,\nthe roots and leaves, and all that is real.\n\nI have come back to the trail to lose or to find myself but can’t decide, is the self something\nto capture and to catch, or to set free?\n\nI am bound and released by the weight of this, with nowhere else to go but here, no one else to be but me.",
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"content": "Letter never sent to my professor, ‘DHG’<br /><br />So I finally lost my mind Diana George. Just like you said I would. I went too long without writing and I went bananas. No one remembers that day in your classroom like I do. The lights down low, all those young writers gathered around you. One of them asked, has anyone ever lost their mind from writing? He was worried about that. And you just laughed and said I don't think so. But some probably lost their minds from not writing. Now that's me.<br /><br />Diana Hume George. Your name suited you, rhythmic and strong. The 80s were nearly over but you hadn't left the 60s yet, with your Stevie Nicks scarves and your peacock feather earrings. You with your olive skin and those tinted glasses that made your face look small. Hanging around campus with that philosophy professor with the eye patch who never smiled. He wore it to force his brain to think with the creative side. What planet were you from? You wrote that on one of my papers. We were all trying to be different, to find our voice. You helped us find ourselves.<br /><br />So here I sit at my screen the way we did back then. It still starts with a blank page. Some of us had word processors and others had to go to the library, to find a computer and write under fluorescent light. We sent it to the printer and tore the edges off; the paper came in reams and opened like an accordion. We made copies and handed them out. We were expected to write comments on each other's work, to be respectful. It mattered a lot to me what you said and I saved the notes you wrote on my drafts, I put them in boxes with my letters and pictures, and they followed me around the country wherever I moved. I imagined I could hear your voice like there was magic in your handwriting. What you said was an incantation, a prayer or a wish. It only takes a little to believe, and we all start as pretenders.<br /><br />It's been more than thirty years now and I'm still at it. I go to the woods to drum up ideas, to lose myself. But there's only so much actual writing you can do when you're not writing, when you're \"thinking about writing.\" And it's toxic, it will drive you nuts. There must be some energy or alchemy to it like what happens with storms. Guitarists don't get any better at playing the guitar by thinking about it. Why would it work that way for writers?<br /><br />I hit the trail in the early mornings and walk towards the sun. You only get an inch or two of light on the horizon but I like the way it looks. All the leaves are down so you can see clear across the forest. I've been out there picking around thinking of you, how much I can remember. Why I shouldn't joke about losing my mind when it's not true. How some things you can lose and find again (like your car keys) and other things (like your virginity) you only lose once. People lose their minds from time to time and sometimes, for real. Why was that kid so worried about losing his, from writing? Was he so controlled he couldn't look inside himself? Or is that my problem: I've been looking in places I shouldn't, realizing it's what I have to do. Like you said, \"You've exposed the raw, human nerve...now what will you do with it?\" That was your challenge, what will you do?<br /><br />All this is a ruse. I could look you up but I'm afraid of what I'd find. I did that with Archie Loss and he died several years ago. They whittle you down to 500 words with a few quotes from the family. You meant so much more to me than that. I'd love to talk with you about writing but I know what you'd say, I'd rather you just wrote.",
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"content": "Letter never sent to my professor, ‘DHG’\n\nSo I finally lost my mind Diana George. Just like you said I would. I went too long without writing and I went bananas. No one remembers that day in your classroom like I do. The lights down low, all those young writers gathered around you. One of them asked, has anyone ever lost their mind from writing? He was worried about that. And you just laughed and said I don't think so. But some probably lost their minds from not writing. Now that's me.\n\nDiana Hume George. Your name suited you, rhythmic and strong. The 80s were nearly over but you hadn't left the 60s yet, with your Stevie Nicks scarves and your peacock feather earrings. You with your olive skin and those tinted glasses that made your face look small. Hanging around campus with that philosophy professor with the eye patch who never smiled. He wore it to force his brain to think with the creative side. What planet were you from? You wrote that on one of my papers. We were all trying to be different, to find our voice. You helped us find ourselves.\n\nSo here I sit at my screen the way we did back then. It still starts with a blank page. Some of us had word processors and others had to go to the library, to find a computer and write under fluorescent light. We sent it to the printer and tore the edges off; the paper came in reams and opened like an accordion. We made copies and handed them out. We were expected to write comments on each other's work, to be respectful. It mattered a lot to me what you said and I saved the notes you wrote on my drafts, I put them in boxes with my letters and pictures, and they followed me around the country wherever I moved. I imagined I could hear your voice like there was magic in your handwriting. What you said was an incantation, a prayer or a wish. It only takes a little to believe, and we all start as pretenders.\n\nIt's been more than thirty years now and I'm still at it. I go to the woods to drum up ideas, to lose myself. But there's only so much actual writing you can do when you're not writing, when you're \"thinking about writing.\" And it's toxic, it will drive you nuts. There must be some energy or alchemy to it like what happens with storms. Guitarists don't get any better at playing the guitar by thinking about it. Why would it work that way for writers?\n\nI hit the trail in the early mornings and walk towards the sun. You only get an inch or two of light on the horizon but I like the way it looks. All the leaves are down so you can see clear across the forest. I've been out there picking around thinking of you, how much I can remember. Why I shouldn't joke about losing my mind when it's not true. How some things you can lose and find again (like your car keys) and other things (like your virginity) you only lose once. People lose their minds from time to time and sometimes, for real. Why was that kid so worried about losing his, from writing? Was he so controlled he couldn't look inside himself? Or is that my problem: I've been looking in places I shouldn't, realizing it's what I have to do. Like you said, \"You've exposed the raw, human nerve...now what will you do with it?\" That was your challenge, what will you do?\n\nAll this is a ruse. I could look you up but I'm afraid of what I'd find. I did that with Archie Loss and he died several years ago. They whittle you down to 500 words with a few quotes from the family. You meant so much more to me than that. I'd love to talk with you about writing but I know what you'd say, I'd rather you just wrote.",
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"content": "How to drink Scotch<br /><br />If Scotland is the shape of a catcher's mitt then they entered through the thumb, ferrying from Holland to Newcastle, the A68 to Edinburgh, a right at Dundee. Scotland didn't look any different than England. Drab and colorless, what you'd expect for November. They had their used car with German plates loaded with toys and clothes, kids in the back, an acoustic guitar (kid sized). And plans for the next 90 days to road trip through the UK.<br /><br />His wife worried about his newfound interest in Scotch though, would it become a problem? But he waved it away knowing it would, it always was, like any good secret it became more powerful the longer it stayed hidden. It started with the first stop in Arbroath, the first bottle. Blended and cheap but real Scotch, real in that it came from Scotland. He'd get into it and then follow with beer or wine to be more sociable. The kids would be off entertaining themselves with mom while he was off doing his thing.<br /><br />And it made sense if you spent a month in Scotland to do that, especially in November, the most melancholy of months. Whatever strain came from driving in a foreign country with two kids, he used that to sooth himself at dusk, which started early in November, in Scotland. And later his psychiatrist said that made him a maintenance drunk, meaning he drank to maintain his drunkenness (as drunks do) but his problem was less obvious as he worked hard to conceal it.<br /><br />And so he did, for all of November and December until it was suggested he take the month of January off. January they'd be in England, and their rate of travel would slow to a few dedicated stays. First Stratford, then London, ending with a week in a small village outside of Bath called Combe Down. Even the sound of it seemed apt, 'calm down.'<br /><br />The month started optimistic as new years do, with hints of spring and long muddy walks through the English countryside. The clarity from not drinking combined with a daily writing practice made him feel renewed. He substituted his afternoon drinks with hot baths, the closest he could get to that same comfort. But as the month wound down he started to count the days and imagine his reentry. Not to mainland Europe, but to drinking. And crossing from Dover into France he bought mini-bottles of Scotch he imagined sharing with his German friends. And so the cycle resumed.<br /><br />November was a shit month weather-wise back home, which made it a good month to commemorate their time in Scotland by featuring Scotch as his go-to drink each November. The Scots had been pretty clear about how to drink it, starting with the fact that you never add ice. The ice destroys the flavor (and the hard labor that went into it). Next if you add water, be sparing. Bartenders used eye droppers to administer water in cautious drops, insisting \"once you put it in, you can't take it out!\"<br /><br />And there was something to that, the addition and subtraction. You could even apply the four basic operations of math to drinking. The more you added and multiplied the behavior, the more it subtracted and divided you from others, from yourself. Like any good addiction it came as a paradox, the more you put in the more it emptied you out.<br /><br />But none of this mattered on their first November in Scotland. If they'd entered through the thumb then they'd exit beneath the pinky on the other side, a remote place called Stranraer. They'd celebrate Thanksgiving in a refurbished Victorian castle, the private home of an earl and countess, in the chauffeur's flat. And he'd find a turkey or Cornish hens to roast, potatoes smothered in duck fat, a good bottle of Port or brandy. A dram of the best Scotch.<br /><br />The layering of these behaviors was something to unravel when it came time to quit. Because the neural networks in his head, whatever wiring existed there, were largely drawn and defined by alcohol. The pathways to pleasure were like motorways on a map. Either he had to stop visiting those towns or find a new route.<br /><br />He didn’t wrap the glasses, he fit them in a box and moved them to the garage with haste. Now that he'd removed the glassware it was surprising how much of the kitchen cabinet was empty, how much real estate was devoted to drinking. The tasting glasses from that distillery tour in the Orkneys. The wine glasses, champagne flutes, brandy snifters, it went on and on. He hoped it would feel that way in his life now too, more room.<br /><br />But there was only so much space in his heart for others. Drinking was a selfish act, and the over-indulgence paradoxically reduced oneself. Did drunks start as selfish people or end that way? He had to learn to give more of himself, for that feeling of fullness that comes through giving. There was a Christian love to that, but he wasn’t Christian and didn’t believe in recovery programs of that sort. Instead he quit cold turkey. But those new, empty spaces didn’t feel like they gave any more room. They just felt empty.<br /><br />The kids were now old enough you could imagine them moving out one day. He had that now, evenings he could spend time with them before bed. The youngest interrupted him talking to her older sister, something about her new shoes being too small. They weren't, she just didn't know how to use the shoe horn, hadn't loosened the laces right. So they went downstairs and he knelt to demonstrate, narrating the proper technique in a gentle tone. They did fit after all. She went back to her room humming and closed the door. That's all it took sometimes.<br /><br />He didn't have any regrets, or was too stubborn to allow any. You had to be careful with how much you let in, the self critic. If they could go back in time he'd do it all over again. Would maybe start with a better bottle in Arbroath.",
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"published": "2021-11-24T03:38:09+00:00",
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"content": "How to drink Scotch\n\nIf Scotland is the shape of a catcher's mitt then they entered through the thumb, ferrying from Holland to Newcastle, the A68 to Edinburgh, a right at Dundee. Scotland didn't look any different than England. Drab and colorless, what you'd expect for November. They had their used car with German plates loaded with toys and clothes, kids in the back, an acoustic guitar (kid sized). And plans for the next 90 days to road trip through the UK.\n\nHis wife worried about his newfound interest in Scotch though, would it become a problem? But he waved it away knowing it would, it always was, like any good secret it became more powerful the longer it stayed hidden. It started with the first stop in Arbroath, the first bottle. Blended and cheap but real Scotch, real in that it came from Scotland. He'd get into it and then follow with beer or wine to be more sociable. The kids would be off entertaining themselves with mom while he was off doing his thing.\n\nAnd it made sense if you spent a month in Scotland to do that, especially in November, the most melancholy of months. Whatever strain came from driving in a foreign country with two kids, he used that to sooth himself at dusk, which started early in November, in Scotland. And later his psychiatrist said that made him a maintenance drunk, meaning he drank to maintain his drunkenness (as drunks do) but his problem was less obvious as he worked hard to conceal it.\n\nAnd so he did, for all of November and December until it was suggested he take the month of January off. January they'd be in England, and their rate of travel would slow to a few dedicated stays. First Stratford, then London, ending with a week in a small village outside of Bath called Combe Down. Even the sound of it seemed apt, 'calm down.'\n\nThe month started optimistic as new years do, with hints of spring and long muddy walks through the English countryside. The clarity from not drinking combined with a daily writing practice made him feel renewed. He substituted his afternoon drinks with hot baths, the closest he could get to that same comfort. But as the month wound down he started to count the days and imagine his reentry. Not to mainland Europe, but to drinking. And crossing from Dover into France he bought mini-bottles of Scotch he imagined sharing with his German friends. And so the cycle resumed.\n\nNovember was a shit month weather-wise back home, which made it a good month to commemorate their time in Scotland by featuring Scotch as his go-to drink each November. The Scots had been pretty clear about how to drink it, starting with the fact that you never add ice. The ice destroys the flavor (and the hard labor that went into it). Next if you add water, be sparing. Bartenders used eye droppers to administer water in cautious drops, insisting \"once you put it in, you can't take it out!\"\n\nAnd there was something to that, the addition and subtraction. You could even apply the four basic operations of math to drinking. The more you added and multiplied the behavior, the more it subtracted and divided you from others, from yourself. Like any good addiction it came as a paradox, the more you put in the more it emptied you out.\n\nBut none of this mattered on their first November in Scotland. If they'd entered through the thumb then they'd exit beneath the pinky on the other side, a remote place called Stranraer. They'd celebrate Thanksgiving in a refurbished Victorian castle, the private home of an earl and countess, in the chauffeur's flat. And he'd find a turkey or Cornish hens to roast, potatoes smothered in duck fat, a good bottle of Port or brandy. A dram of the best Scotch.\n\nThe layering of these behaviors was something to unravel when it came time to quit. Because the neural networks in his head, whatever wiring existed there, were largely drawn and defined by alcohol. The pathways to pleasure were like motorways on a map. Either he had to stop visiting those towns or find a new route.\n\nHe didn’t wrap the glasses, he fit them in a box and moved them to the garage with haste. Now that he'd removed the glassware it was surprising how much of the kitchen cabinet was empty, how much real estate was devoted to drinking. The tasting glasses from that distillery tour in the Orkneys. The wine glasses, champagne flutes, brandy snifters, it went on and on. He hoped it would feel that way in his life now too, more room.\n\nBut there was only so much space in his heart for others. Drinking was a selfish act, and the over-indulgence paradoxically reduced oneself. Did drunks start as selfish people or end that way? He had to learn to give more of himself, for that feeling of fullness that comes through giving. There was a Christian love to that, but he wasn’t Christian and didn’t believe in recovery programs of that sort. Instead he quit cold turkey. But those new, empty spaces didn’t feel like they gave any more room. They just felt empty.\n\nThe kids were now old enough you could imagine them moving out one day. He had that now, evenings he could spend time with them before bed. The youngest interrupted him talking to her older sister, something about her new shoes being too small. They weren't, she just didn't know how to use the shoe horn, hadn't loosened the laces right. So they went downstairs and he knelt to demonstrate, narrating the proper technique in a gentle tone. They did fit after all. She went back to her room humming and closed the door. That's all it took sometimes.\n\nHe didn't have any regrets, or was too stubborn to allow any. You had to be careful with how much you let in, the self critic. If they could go back in time he'd do it all over again. Would maybe start with a better bottle in Arbroath.",
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