On Being American

I am the sort of man who will try not to fart while standing at a urinal.

I'm traveling abroad for the third time in my life. First time was honeymoon, then came an international baby-making cavort, and now it's work. Three trips over a decade, and every time I have gone shod in self-consciousness about one fact: I am an American.

I feel like people see me coming, and it turns out they do. I wear logo-free, unassuming clothing, but everyone speaks English the moment they lay eyes on me. One guy mistook me for an Englishman. He was, appropriately enough, a fellow American.

Over here, everything is something I'm likely to trip over. Partly this is because I'm a bumbler, and I have in fact run smack into people twice in the last week, but it's at least as much to do with my nationality. It's worrying about associations with this guy:

Morans!

I'm no less American, mind. I made my own lurching flumpdraggle from isolated Midwestern kid to young man desperate to look worldly in international forums. Watched others throw my own assumptions and biases at my feet. Stumbled around, bumped into shit. Brayed like a jackass, which we're sort of known for.

Now, exceptionalism aside, I'm proud of my home. We invented John Lee Hooker and the Internet and moonwalking and 501s. We thought up Batman and Huck Finn and both Homers Simpson. We split infinitives in space. America is, in short, pretty great, if you're not one of the least of these.

If you are, America's heart often beats with the winter dead-leaf rattle of the Ozark countryside I grew up in. Unyielding, unsubtle, and downright Darwinian when it gets cold. But it is also porches and peach pie and funeral potlucks. A place of scarred and self-admiring beauty, unconcerned with what it does not know but pleased to make your acquaintance.

I tow that legacy off the plane. I do my damnedest to choke down the boorishness. I say "excuse me" more than is probably warranted. I overcompensate. I try to conjure a hex of unobtrusiveness. I've seen our tourists.

My country is my skin. I can't hide it and don't want to. But I barely contain the urge to blurt out that we're more than our foreign policy and YouTube comments and loud complaints at the Marriott Starbucks. Most of us have too much self-respect to don a fanny pack.

Well. A lot of us do.

But then, maybe this:

You get on the 61 tram from the hotel, northbound to Széll Kálmán Tér. From there it'll be the 4, eastbound to the bridge over the Danube. You're in running shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of FiveFingers, about which everyone can keep their judgy fucking chuckles to themselves. Phone strapped to your arm, Welcome to Night Vale in your ears. You're going to run around an island.

You there, on the tram in your Under Armour and toe shoes. You get looks. You wonder how soggy your tram ticket's going to get in that tiny pocket at the small of your back. You fumble for the right way across the bridge because you screwed up and got off a stop too early. You pretend your podcast is drowning out the kids in the park giggling at you as you go down the stairs, out, look around, back up the stairs.

But you find your way, and now you're with your people, the Jognerds. Armbands, tech fabrics, hideous shoes. Running tracks transcend borders and embarrassment. You can probably even fart, just check your six first.

Your feet and lower back are already tired from days of touristing, but they insist that no, no, we're good, let's do this. You have your doubts but start your loop.

It's longer than you thought. You're in worse shape than you thought. But then you do finish, and you stretch your calves, bracing against a lightpole. Easily six people in your vicinity are doing likewise. Your breath's a torn bedsheet, your quadriceps bags of hot gumbo. And then you look up.

There's Budapest. There's the Danube. You smell of questionable parentage.

A middle-aged woman is sunning herself on the rocks below. A kindergartner who looks like the pride of Norway pushes a pedal-less bicycle and hollers LALALALA. Your groin muscles are bowstrings. It hits you: where you are, how you got there, how improbable it all is.

You want to cry, pathetic damnable fucking soggy cliché or not. You want to cry because it's...well, Jesus, look at you. Look at this. And you're alone. There's no one you can turn to and show your dogpaddling eyeballs to and say my God, look at what we got to do, because it's not we right now. The only one who understands and would give you room to do that is having lunch a lifetime away.

You really are foreign here. Displaced in time, not space. Surrounded by people who know exactly what you know, and yet there's not a one of them you can let the dam burst over.

To hell with what I'm wearing, you think. To hell with apologies. You dread the day when you'll lose sight of this moment and start whining about inconveniences. Please let this last just a little while longer. Please.

There's grit in your shoes from last summer's trip to the lake. You take one off and shake out a milligram of home on the ground.

Teleology

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true.

Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until, say, twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing. The war's over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what's the point?

—Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

I'm in a hotel room in Munich. The room's clock tells me it is 1:00 am. My biological clock tells me it is pi past eleventy, and so I am wide awake and emailing my wife about mayonnaise.

There's a couple in the street below. The woman is singing in a beer-thickened alto, the man responding in a low baritone that stumbles toward silence. He sounds like he's trying not to sound eager. I can't make out the words, and I speak only a tiny bit of German, but I'm fluent in lust. He's hoping. She decided hours ago.

I am here to write web applications. This is my life, and I often feel guilty for my good fortune. Sometimes it feels like my life and sometimes it doesn't, and I have no idea what to make of that. I find myself measuring it against and ineffable and undefined idea of "destiny" that's been banging around in the back of my brain. Which is a not-at-all-insane thing to do.

I claim not to be a fatalist, but I am a liar. I think about things in terms of their purpose, their function. I don't think about other people in that way, but I know of no other way to think of myself. What function am I supposed to serve? What is my place?

The fallacy of this kind of thinking is the assumption that the world has a static design, that it is a finite state machine. But life has taught me that even if there is a machine, and even if that machine has a designer, he's committed to a fairly hands-off, emergent approach.

That's a fancy way of saying that people ain't tidy, and I know that that's true, and I suspect that the machine isn't real, but still I reach for it. Rands tells me that such an instinct is, if silly, common to my kind.

But here's the thing, if we want to talk about function: Things are often defined by what they do. If I am something other than a software developer, I would be doing that, or at least working my way towards a state of doing that. I would write more or learn the guitar or go back to school or start reading to blind kids or something. But I don't.

So I'm sure Aristotle would give me a slap, if he were more than dust in my nostrils. I don't give a good goddamn about the inside of your head, he would say. I don't care about your heart. I care about what you do. Show me what you do with your time, and I'll tell you who you are.

On the other hand, it is well past one in the morning here. I have to be in the shower in just over five hours and down to breakfast in less than six, where I have made a personal vow that I will brave the white sausages for breakfast. Yet I'm still up, at a table in my underwear, listening to the slurred alto down below tease her companion along, and I am writing and thinking it through. Maybe that's my thing, who I am.

Thinking it through puts a handle on the world. Sure, the handle's probably a fiction. The world of people has no structure or sense beyond that The Heart Wants What It Wants, and Sometimes It Wants Stupid Things. Trying to find meaning in human interaction is like trying to find math in a taco. What little moments of clarity we find are so easily derailed by sleep or hunger or south-bound blood flow.

There is emotion. There is the need to burn. Those are our constants. That is who we are. But it makes sense to me that I roll this rock up this hill. It makes sense that I pursue the sense of it.

Programming is all about defining a problem and grasping its handle, but most programmers I know fantasize about other, less rational pursuits. I know one who left to become a musician and bought a chain of coffee shops. One is opening his own Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu studio, hoping that he can turn it into a business but never daring to admit that hope out loud. Another confessed to me that she'd like to take people alligator hunting.

Me, I'd like to enchant people. I am an easily enchanted man. I owe much of my childhood to Dahl and Tolkein and Daniel Pinkwater and George Lucas, and I figure being the conjurer would be a pretty spectacular thing. My motives here are not entirely selfless.

The newness and the foreignness of everything here in Germany does a fair bit of enchanting, keeps me stimulated, makes me hungry. So does being out of the heat of the southern US. So does being in a culture considerably less boorish and simultaneously know-it-all and know-nothing as the one I hail from. But that would all wear off in a few months and then life would be life, as it always is.

So you do what you can and you go where you must, but you can always sneak in some thunderbolts under your coat. When I do, it's a hell of a thrill, second only to letting them out. I had to leave three of mine on the other side of an ocean but managed to smuggle the rest through customs, and they didn't give me a second look. Now I'm working on making room to take them all for walkies every day.

I'm repeating myself, I know. I don't know what else to do but prod these little problems with a stick and make notes in my book. Each time I do, it takes me a little less time to remember that there is little here beyond desire to understand. There's no map to this particular territory. There is no compass but hope and need.

Right now that man downstairs needs that woman to wrap herself around him, and I think she needs that too, but first she needs him to squirm and dance a little. I need a blanket, the smell of my children, fewer midnights listening to other people outside and more swapping warmth with my wife. I need those things more than the map.

And, hell, I'd gladly give up on the map altogether if I could hold you in my thrall for just a few minutes here and there. Not for applause or money, just to know that the magic is real and that I can wield it, however clumsily. To know that if there is to be no order, no sense, no plan, that there is yet thunder and that I can, from time to time, call it down. It's selfish, and I'm beyond fucking okay with that.

Now it's off to bed.

Look. Up in the Sky.

That's what I remember: Hot summer nights, sweltering in my bedroom, reading comics and dreaming and drawing, while life went on outside the window.

Imagine a jail cell, yeah? A fallout shelter, where the walls are covered with so many drawings you can't tell it's a prison anymore. It's so bright and colorful: sexy girls, handsome musclemen, adventure.

You start to forget it's not real. You don't realize the world's ended for you....

The world DID end. Something happened to me, something worse than the bomb, and it all died. It's just taken me this long to catch up.

Alone in the world. Alone in my room.

Now the superheroes are as fucked-up as the fucking rejects who write about them and draw them and read about them. All the heroes are in therapy and there's no one left to care about us.

No one at all.

— Grant Morrison, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery

I had this goofy-ass theory about the whole Edward Snowden thing. Well, not really.

The idea was this: if you were president and wanted to make good on a promise of a more open and accountable government after years of it consolidating power and rat-holing secrets, legislative haggling would get you nowhere. This would have to be a ground-up thing. The people would have to scream for it.

So one way to really get their attention? Wag the dog, orchestrate a live-action drama.

Snowden's right out of central casting for this, right? Young, good-looking kid, not highly educated, sort of an everyman. He looks like a young Gordon Freeman. His name's even a sort of slantwise portmanteau of Eddard Stark (nobleman killed by his candor and desire to find the truth) and Jon Snow (Stark's literal bastard son, exiled and trying to exist beyond the reach of civilization). Nice Easter eggs for the Nerd Century.

Then potboiler potboiler, Hong Kong China Russia Germany South America (Nazis!) Central America Russia Russia intrigue black hole Bolivia planes Spain France...Russia? Russia! Major players nearly all current or former authoritarian states famed for monitoring and controlling their own people.

So you concoct this whole thing, wait for people to get angry, let yourself take the fall as the bad guy, and grass-roots change begins. You successfully shove your nation off the path to becoming a police state. Talk about legacy.

Hell, even a spy novelist said he wished he'd written it.

Yeah, dumb. It's a wish, a fantasy. I don't believe it's real, not because I've all but abandoned hope in our government or the possibility that we can actually restore the sanctity of the rule of law, but for one simple reason: It would never work.

It's a great story, but people would have to care. That's the hard part. They'd have to care. Most've spent the last dozen or so years throwing up their hands and sighing, or worse, nodding in fervent agreement with whoever waves his flag the hardest or holds his cross the highest.

Age hardens in me the conviction that we are all of us broken in some way.

If reading about heroes doesn't inspire us to action, then why do we dream up stories about them? Is it just a balm, a way of enduring one more day under fluorescent tubes? Is it just a dream of a world we don't live in and don't know how to make? That can't be all there is to it, can it?

I love Grant Morrison because Grant Morrison believes in heroes. Not tough guys dressed in drab tones, but old-school heroes. Bright colors. Spandex. Kittens from trees. Men of Muscle Mystery. And the best part: he believes that that kind of heroism is, in its way, real.

I wrote last time of optimism. Life responded by tossing me headlong into a test of my commitment to that ideal, and I became an insufferable bastard.

None of which invalidates what I wrote before. I still believe in optimism. I still believe that it is a choice. But for me, it's a hard one.

Morrison will tell you that we are on the cusp of a new birth, that we will evolve into something more. He says it with the certainty of a man who has flipped ahead and read the last chapter.

I believe in that future too, but it's just a belief, not his certainty. To me it is only a possibility, the hope of which I sometimes cling to.

And I see that we are broken. And I wonder if we'll break that possibility too.

A young boy I love very much is being bullied. Some other boys who call themselves Christians are picking on him for being an atheist.

This boy I love has had suicidal thoughts. He recently admitted them to his parents. I think about it, and I pity his parents for the rage they have to swallow. Mine's only a fraction of theirs, and I caught myself fantasizing about terrorizing these children to get even.

Children.

I believe in modern-day gods and titans too, but I think they only exist if we choose to make them exist, and I can't see one here any more clearly than I can in the news. I see only that boy's fear and depression, the pathetic and damnable smugness of his tormentors, and my even more contemptible desire to heap his sufferings on their heads a hundredfold.

Professing a belief in something means doodly-shit if you abandon it in the worst case. My president believed in accountability until he saw the hard costs of it. Those kids believed in the teachings of Christ until they were confronted with someone who thought Jesus just another hero that someone made up. Me? I'm trying to remember that I don't believe in revenge or giving up.

Perhaps it's because so many things have come so easily to me that I find that last instinct as natural as breathing. It got hard; I'm going to bed.

I'm shamed by that boy, the one that I love, who has kept going in the face of torment, who had the guts to tell his parents he was thinking of ending his life. He's more of a man than I.

I'm shamed by the one Christian friend of his who has the sand to stand by him when the others threaten the same treatment. Give that boy a cape and some heat vision. Better yet, give him a church or a shelter to run.

I've never been anywhere near the brink of killing myself, but I do know what it's like to enumerate it as a possibility, to know that it's easier to be dead than you. You carry that possibility around in your back pocket, occasionally running your fingers over the bulge just to confirm that it's still there. Its presence isn't scary or sad, only a fact, reassuring in its way. An off-switch, break glass in case of emergency. Everything bad will stop. You don't need it yet, you just need to know that it's there.

It seems so reasonable to keep it there in your pocket, and it's only in your more lucid moments that you realize how alone that reasonableness is.

This boy that I love got knocked on his ass by that much loneliness, and he stood back up. While I was grumping about my bank account and my busted-ass car and compiling my list of petty grievances, while a dear friend's daughter finally and understandably grew weary of a lifetime of defeat and broke the glass, he stood up. This boy that I love.

I hope he keeps standing up. I hope life lets him keep his legs. Because if so, god damn, the hero he will become.

You Know How I Feel

Just listen to this.

You probably have already. Somebody covered it on some TV talent show and it went kerflooey everywhere. I think you'll agree that it's pretty damn wonderful.

I was painting my daughter's room just now while listening to it and that thing in my chest went twang and I welled up a bit and I started thinking about why it does that to me, other than Ms. Simone's turpentine-syrup voice. There's something raging in the scaffolding of that song, and I think it's this: She's singing about how happy she is, but she's doing it in a minor key, not the most obvious choice for the subject.

Her voice casts a solitary declaration out into the dusk. Then comes the BUH BUHBUH BUHBUH artillery of the horns. She follows along but doubles down against their descent, her voice rising up with a threadbare and gritty shade draped over it. The contrast between what she's singing and how she's singing it exposes the raw nerve of that joy, reveals it to be the act of defiance that it is.

It's just goddamn hard to be whole.

Now, I've got nearly every advantage in the world. I was raised middle class by the world's best parents, was labeled "gifted" at the age of three, got two college educations, am able-bodied, look faintly nosferat-ish but not unattractive, and I have no major mental illnesses or behavioral disorders. I have spent my life splashing in an endless puddle of love and opportunity. So if it's this hard for me sometimes, I cannot imagine how it must have been for her, a mid-century African-American woman who came up from poverty and got slapped around by schizophrenia.

"Talent is a burden, not a joy," she once told a crowd. "I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you." But she was us. She was us magnified. I wish she had known that.

Out of that loneliness comes the loudest line: "Freedom is mine, and I know how I feel." The words and notes demand to be belted, but she makes them a threat. Freedom, motherfucker, do you speak it.

We sometimes dismiss optimists as naïve, but I'm calling bullshit on that. If my own well-stocked larder is any proof, pessimism is cheap. Optimism, like joy, starts with a hard choice.

Optimism is belief in the possibility of joy. Joy needs freedom. Freedom means not being owned. It means casting off bonds and ballast. It means choosing defiance. Optimists have sand.

It is hard to be whole. It is an impossible chore, and it is the nature of our predicament that, if we are to have any hope at all, we must choose it.

Sleep in peace when day is done. That's what I mean.

Memento Mori

I talk to myself. A lot. I don't feel like I've actually lived a day unless I got to spend at least 20 minutes of it talking to myself. Because I am a goddamn crazy person.

It started when I was a kid, I think mostly because I had trouble holding a coherent thought in my head unless I wrote it down or said it out loud. There was a semester or two there when I would study for philosophy exams by breaking into lecture halls and pretending to teach the course material to the empty room.

Yep, that's nuts. It's embarrassing. Doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a normal, healthy person does, right? But it's been over three decades now, and I'm not sure I know how to stop. Plus, confession time: I like doing it. Maybe it's narcissism, maybe it's my weird and contradictory relationship with quiet, I don't know. But I love talking to myself. It comforts me, grounds me.

So I'm in my car the other day and I've decided to spend my lunch break driving around and talking to myself. I'm driving around and I'm talking to myself about, I don't know, JavaScript or an ISO formatting issue or my kids or Neil Gaiman or whatever. I don't know. But it was nothing of import, just me thinking out loud. Like a crazy person.

And then a thought popped into my head, a derpily-obvious but nonetheless-there-it-is thought:

You are going to die.

It hit me as though it were going to happen sometime in the next ten minutes.

Earth-shattering, I know. But I had a french fry in my hand and form validation on my lips, and it broadsided me. I recoiled and gathered myself and said it out loud: "You are going to die." Then I said "Fuck." Then I asked myself a question.

Say you're going to die in three hours. You've already said goodbye and thanks and I love you to your friends and family. You even got to shake Grant Morrison's hand, to hug Brooks Hansen for writing The Chess Garden, to tell Tom Waits a dirty joke and join him in a round of "Goodnight, Irene". They've all been pulled away, and now you have three hours to do what you want with your time. What would you do?

You'd want to leave a marker behind, however temporary, right? I'd want to make something, and I'm better and faster with words than anything else, so: I would write.

What would I write? That's where it gets hard. But I think I would once and for all completely untether myself. Not a confession of sins, but one last stab at reaching for your hand and talking about the things we have in common and hide from one another.

Maybe it would be an essay, maybe a story. Maybe I'd do something clever and address my children while really talking to adults. Lord knows that's never been done before.

But I would write, and I would write something that mattered, if I had it in me to do so. I'd go deep purple on that motherfucker, too.

Which raises the obvious question of why I'm not doing more than dabbling infrequently with that now. Good question.

No, this isn't the typical "I'm going to quit my job and find my way as a writerly writer" revelation. I'm too smart to just shitcan what I've spent years building to pursue a life of poverty and frustration and predatory contracts. I like my job, I do, I just don't care about it all that much.

I think that has to mean that I'm going to start doing this more, so I have built myself a system that allows me to take writing breaks from my coding. Right now I'm typing blind on a covered iPad while staring at a monitor that says this:

{
    xtype: 'hiddenfield',
    flex: 1,
    fieldLabel: 'Label',
    name: 'documentationIndicator'
}

I'm writing this while I stare at that and the whiteboard at the other end of the table, just as Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club while pretending to take notes in meetings. I'm going to write blind, every day, and when things come out that are post-worthy, I'm going to post them. No promises on frequency.

I'm going to do this because I've learned this about myself in the last year: My brain does not have a stable state. It's growing or dying, and only learning makes it grow.

Every day I fertilize it or poison it. I can fertilize it with a technical challenge even if the work I'm supporting is boring and mundane, but that all goes Agent Orange when I'm pushing 200 fields around a form or debugging a validation routine.

So I must fertilize, and if I cannot find a way to make my living doing something I truly love, then I will bring my love into my work, and I will do it in secret. Don't tell anyone.

I'll do it because I may be dead in three hours, and I want my children to open my Dropbox (kids: look in the "notesy" folder after Dad croaks) and find something sublime in there when I'm gone.

I was cleaning up that folder and found this in an unnamed textfile the other day:

It should have fun
It should be funny
It should have adventure
Heroes should fall
Heroes should rise
Things should go boom
No boobs, unfortunately
Han Solo should science a mammal

Yeah, I don't know either, but any ground where I can lose and find stupid shit like that needs to be tended.

Look: None of what I'm saying here is particularly profound or daring, I know. But it's hard. It's hard not to hide from it. When I was young, I used to sleep to hide from my anxieties and fears, and though I threw away that pacifier long ago, I found other, subtler ones. Now I'm trying to rid myself of them. Only in the last year or two have I felt like I'm waking up. And wow, the stuff I missed.

So the new plan is I'm going to spend the back half of my life writing my obituary, though I'll be damned if I know what form it will take. I'll try like hell to make it an honest one and a good one. There will be overwrought and overwritten weepy time stuff, and there will be dongs. Just you wait. But it will be my obituary, my testimony.

So I'll write the opening now, and then we'll start figuring out the backstory together.

Matt Reed was born on the 110th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and died on its bicentennial because stories are tidy like that. He died, appropriately enough, in a theater, though he was not murdered.

He was watching a stage production of Daniel Pinkwater's seminal novel The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death when the nanobots in his bloodstream malfunctioned, swarmed to his brain, and over-stimulated the neurons that housed the combination to his brother's first bicycle lock. Experts are still trying to determine why this caused him to combust.

Onlookers reported that Mr. Reed had shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" in the manner of Marcus Junius Brutus and John Wilkes Booth, but a scan of the nanobot logs indicates that he had instead shouted a slurred "six two three two", which analysis suggests was the bike lock's combination.

Mr. Reed leaves behind his beloved if overly-sassed wife Jennifer; his son Jack, inventor of tiger invisible robot technology; and his daughter Georgia, Roving Warlady Empress of the Fourth Obfuscation.

Mr. Reed died as he lived: terrified, confused, and on fire.

Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five

Just realized the other day that this year is a silver anniversary. 25 years ago this summer, I got to go to Hawaii and stay with my aunt for about a month. I rode a boogie board almost every day. I ate my very first pizza with pineapple and ham.

I got to do this because my parents needed me and my brother out from underfoot for a few weeks. This was because a doctor looked at some scans of my dad's body and said he'd be dead of renal cancer in two years.

When a doctor tells you that, if you're my mom, you find a very polite way to tell him to either change his attitude or else go fuck himself, and then you start Making Plans, plans that involve sending your kids to your sister's and curb-stomping some cancer. And that is what she, what they did.

Dad had a tumor in one of his kidneys and another one metastasized on his hip. The word "grapefruit" came up, as I'm sure it has in your life. It usually means that it's time to start sourcing caskets and marble.

But my dad, you see.

My dad.

My dad fights.

This is my dad. Right here, this is my dad.

My dad was drafted. My dad was sent to war. My dad made a good friend over there.

My dad's friend blew up. Trip wire. He made a mistake, came back to camp the same way he left. You're not supposed to do that. Boom, there went my dad's friend. I don't think my dad ever got over it, not really.

This is my dad.

Right here.

He picked up...I want you to listen to me right now.

He picked up what pieces of his friend he could find.

My dad picked them up.

And he carried them with him. Through the heat of a Vietnamese jungle. He carried them so the family would have something to bury.

I have no idea how he did that. When I think of that story, I literally — literally — pray to God that I never find out.

That is my dad, right there. That is a hyperbolic story that perfectly encapsulates my dad. Except that it doesn't, it's not enough, because I'm a dad and I know that for that one big story, there are a million little sacrifices he made before and after that no one noticed.

My dad was Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five. That was his Army callsign.

Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five. Fight that.

I hate cancer. I know you do too, but I don't know if you hate cancer the way I do. I think of cancer as a person, I really do, and sometimes I wish it had a house so I could drive there and, I don't know, slash its tires? Throw biscuit dough at its house, challenge it to a fight?

It killed my other mom, my wife's mom, on New Year's Eve. It robbed my wife of her mother, my children of a grandmother they will strain to remember.

It murders people. It strips them of their dignity, leaves them bald and hollowed out and impotent and incontinent. It steals their balls and breasts and wombs and we pretty much invented it and there is not enough hate in the world for it.

So 25 years ago this summer, my parents sent me off to one of the best vacations I ever had. And I, selfish 13-year-old little shit that I was, thought more about my own adventures on Oahu than I did about my dad trying not to die. I'm okay with that, really, because I know teenagers are narcissistic and I know my parents sent me away primarily to make me forget, and I still have my dad.

My dad.

Grenade went off behind my dad. Blew him into a tree. Mortar round went off by him, spat shrapnel into his leg, some of which is still there. Orders for one of his medals included the phrases "complete disregard for his own personal safety" and "selfless concern for others". It included the phrase "devastating barrage".

And then my dad came home. My dad always comes home.

Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five.

My dad can beat up your dad, if your dad is war or cancer. My dad is tougher than war and cancer. Beat that.

This summer is the 25th anniversary of the last time my dad didn't die.

25 years.

My dad.

Happy anniversary.

Co-evolution, Worms, Poop, and Computer Stuff

There's this story about John D. Rockefeller trying to tap into the U.S.'s southern labor force, which was notorious for being slow and unproductive in some parts. Prevailing wisdom was that southerners are lazy.

Rockefeller didn't buy it, so he launched a study and found that southerners were getting hookworm infections because they often went barefoot (as sensible people do) but lacked modern urban conveniences and, therefore, shat on the ground. Hence hookworms, hence anemia, hence the lack of energy.

So Rockefeller created a workforce, made a boatload of cash, and obliterated a couple of diseases by selling outhouses and educating customers to dig the waste holes six feet deep.

But he may have done something far more profound even than all of that. His outhouses may have disrupted a process of co-evolution before it could finish.

You see, people with hookworm infections don't have a problem with allergies or asthma. Those are first-world diseases caused by an overreaction of the immune system, and these particular parasites dump a bunch of wormian immuno-quaaludes (pardon the medical Latin) on the situation. It's like they put on some Barry White and give your immune system a good toe-suckin'.

The anemia is the cost, if you don't keep your iron levels up, but we and these worms were well on our way to co-evolving into a nice little arrangement: we give the worms room and board, they help us breathe easier. But then Rockefeller started selling shitters, and now I can't have a cat.

I think about this sometimes when I look at my phone.

Just over half an hour ago, my phone told me to make a smoothie for tomorrow's breakfast. Which I did.

Before that, it reminded me that I needed to make bread. Which I did.

Before that, it asked me if I wanted to clean the attic or the garage. Which I didn't.

Before that, it told me to take my thinkum pill. Which, duh.

I have a recently-deceased bracelet that told me when to wake up and when I'd been sitting too much. I've got OmniFocus for a memory, Due and Google Calendar for my own Mrs. Landingham. I take prescribed amphetamines for focus and drive.

I am building a Palace of Awesome out of all of these things, brick by brick. They improve my life in ways even I don't fully comprehend. Still, my dependence on something so fragile, with so many points of failure, is...well.

I'm not going to get all Ray Kurzweil/Robert Scoble boner slash on you, nor am I going to throw my shoes into a loom. I'm hesitant to write about this at all, as smarter people than I have covered it, but it's true and it's life now: we are in the midst of a kind of co-evolution that no species has never seen before. I have no idea what to make of it, other than its inevitability.

It's not all bad news, or else it wouldn't be symbiosis. My reliance upon data and ubiquitous computing allows me to worry less about remembering the nuts-and-bolts minutiae of my life. My children go to school fully outfitted every morning, I never forget to take a pill or clean out the coffee maker, and my mind is freed up to think about the things I want to think about. It's all good. It just feels tenuous, breakable. Also, I spend less time looking at three-dimensional surfaces.

Banana plants can't reproduce any more. They must be cloned by human farmers. They die off without us, and will eventually die off anyway when their predators evolve past them. I think about that too.

And then there's the noise. Canceling my cable subscription years ago heightened my sensitivity to TV's braying and gibbering, and likewise the Ritalin has made me more sensitive to the sheer volume of sites and services yammering for my attention online. All these man-made parasites are fighting it out just like the worms, only for mindshare instead of gutshare. It's almost as if they have their own intention and agency, and of course they do: money. Money is a hive mind.

From my medicated remove, it becomes clear that there are few places in technology for reflection. Even reading and writing have gotten louder. Writing on paper is like being in a cabin with no electricity: you can sense the stillness in the walls. You write with letters, not characters. Unadorned, flat, irregular letters.

I'm writing this in the quietest computing environment I can muster, a fullscreen iPad editor with the brightness turned down and a dark color theme and notifications turned off. I can still hear the wires hum.

Much as I love them, I think I'm becoming mildly allergic to computers. Only just mildly.

And that, dear readers, is why the long lag since the last post. When I get home, half the time the last thing I want to do is focus really hard on an editing window. I do it all day now, with objects and methods instead of nouns and verbs, properties for adjectives and scope for setting. Writing is contemplative, but writing on a computer isn't contemplative enough, not with the humming. Cutting glass, by contrast, is dead quiet and data-free.

Plus there's this. Ouch.

Write on paper, you say, and maybe I will, but my need to be heard is at least as strong as that of any blogger or tooter, and there ain't no way to publish online without the hum.

Some pointing arrows have cropped up since I started writing this. There's this great piece from James A. Pearson that invokes the idea of hum-as-parasite, and Zach Weiner artfully nails the evolution angle in a single panel.

And then there's Paul Miller's deservedly-linked-everywhere piece about spending a year offline, which I find encouraging. I can live without the 24-hour news cycle, and I go hours at a stretch without Twitter or App.Net these days, much to my own surprise. But my heart can't bear the thought of breaking all the connections I've forged with my friends around the world. My ego won't let go of the idea that I have something to say and so won't let me abandon a place to be heard. So yes, I'll embrace the idea of the Internet as "something we do with each other".

I'm hopeful that the problem of noise will work itself out. Just as the corporate internet has given rise to small, low-tech entrepreneurs, maybe we'll see the hum give rise to quiet tech too. Dedicated e-ink writers would be a nice start.

Or maybe it's just that we need to hold up our end of the co-evolution bargain and finally recognize the necessity of learning how to filter and limit inputs as a life skill. But that will be unprecedented too: Our adaptation and evolution will have to be intentional, planned.

But the interdependence of it all? The fact that it all feels like a giant game of Jenga played with lives instead of blocks? I hope it's just the usual existential dread or my natural tendency to wait for the other shoe to drop. Because if I'm honest with myself, my mind's more fragile than the Internet. My body has no failover system and a hell of a lot less than 99.9% uptime.

Besides, adapting is what we do. We didn't become a dominant and destructive species by being strong or fast or armored. We got here through sheer brains and endurance. The only species that come close have too many legs and live mostly in the dark.

I Am the Night (Light)

Let's talk stories.

So when Batman's mind was under attack by The Black Hand, did Batman give up?

No. No, he did not.

He sought the ritual of Thögal, a dress rehearsal for death itself. He created a sort of backup mind, a Batman without Bruce Wayne. A man who would do what it takes.

He dressed himself in bright colors. Even his imaginary Bat-Mite thought him mad, yet there was a nonlinear logic in his insanity.

So when you see this thing that I made for my daughter:

You will be tempted to say it is a "Batgirl night light".

And I say you can shove your gender-normative bullshit up your peehole.

Because, though Barbara Gordon is a complete and total badass who got shot in the spine by the Joker and was wheelchair bound and yet fought through all of that to become effective enough to be worthy of the Justice League and saved superheroes' lives with computers, she is not yet on my daughter's radar.

Yet. A three-year-old can't appreciate a story like this.

So when my daughter says "I want a pink Batman night wight", then that is what that is. It will be Batgirl when she's old enough to learn Barbara's story, maybe, but for now it's...

(God bless you, Grant Morrison.)

Blackest Night, My Ass

So your kids are about to be pretty goddamn disappointed that I'm not their dad.

​Superman Night Light

Solder lines are lumpy, the edges are uneven, and I've got about two dozen gripes with it overall, but hey, it's only the third stained glass piece I've ever made.

And? I made it.

And? This will light up my son's room.

Little Pea Pod sister's got her order in for a Wonder Woman.

Cost/Benefit Analysis 101

About a month back, I stopped taking my attention pills out of concern that they were staking what optimism I had to an anthill and breaking out the sorghum. I was in what you might call a bad way. So I talked to a doctor friend, put the pills down, and set an appointment to talk to my psychiatrist about it. I went nine days without taking my thinkum.

Now lacking its lubricant, my brain settled right back into the fog of the previous 35 years. Meetings turned into high school jazz band concerts. Things I love started to bore me again. And hey, what's on TV?

But here's the problem: I immediately got happier. The fog was a struggle, but man did my general dissatisfaction evaporate.

The psychiatrist cautioned that likely the pills didn't create that unhappiness, but dug it up. And he was right; starting a new medication brought much of it back. Blowing back the fog uncovered some stuff I hadn't wanted to see.

So this has me thinking about costs, which is to say that I'm thinking about scarcity. Finding drive and ambition at mid-life presented itself as a choose-your-own-adventure version of Flowers for Algernon: If you want to slip back into the fog of contentment, turn to page 39 and let's look at some pretty mice. If you want to be prodded by a nebulous cocktail of passion and terror that disrupts every corner of your world but so far exists beyond your capacity to understand or channel it, turn to page 67 and let's punch us some goddamn Martians.

Yes, there's Martian punching in Flowers for Algernon. Having fun ain't hard if you have a library card.

Even so, the fog still beckons. The epicurean ideal of retreating to the garden to reflect and create has its allure. I imagine sitting at a desk writing for my dinner or plunked down at a workbench making something with my hands, and yeah, I'm not a little bit in love with the romantic ideal there, if not the reality I know that would come with it. But: quiet, contemplation, refuge. Manna.

Thing is, I also know that I'm not necessarily here to be happy. The point of being is to get to work, to make things better, or else who gives a damn. Change is made by people who grab a used snorkel and wade into the sewer. It comes from those who cut themselves and bleed into boring, thankless, necessary work. They don't allow themselves the luxury of retreat, if it's even available to them. They know that if you're not helping, you're in the way.

So I guess I'm asking; Do we have to choose between being happy and using our lives to the extent that we should? Do we even have a say in the matter? How much satisfaction can a man claim for himself and still sleep the sleep of the just?

Maybe it wasn't a revelation. Maybe this is just the by-product of what happens when you give my brain a stimulant. Maybe I'm in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Maybe I'm just bored.

I have not a clue, but no way I'm going back. I begged to be made to burn and it happened and it turns out that that hurts a lot. There's zero that's romantic about it, I don't give a tinker's damn what the poets told you. Like love, burning is hard, especially when you're a middle-aged man with no idea where or how he's supposed to combust. It demands payment.

This business of dissatisfaction is a slog, and I'll be honest, sometimes it borders on despair. But I'm finally beginning to feel like I'm in the world. And I don't have a clue what I can do with that, but it's going to be something.

Also, I got a new job.

Ogle My Rack

First I was all:

Then I was all:

Pin that, motherfuckers.

Almost Certainly Unrelated Links

Fake George Lazenby: "The more sophisticated your interactions with the world become, the less worthwhile doing anything for its own sake begins to seem. Until play ceases to be the point of being awake and becomes instead the anesthetic that makes awareness bearable."

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Eddie Smith: "And so when someone, even early in life, gets an itch to do something that doesn't conform to social stereotypes, it's met with a paralyzing mental dissonance. If America was a polytheist society, Risk would surely play a Satanic role." [Note: QUIT! is an excellent show. Highly recommended.]

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Neil Gaiman: "'Kids are so much braver than adults, sometimes, and so much less easily disturbed,' he says. 'Kids will make their nightmares up out of anything, and the important thing in fiction, if you're giving them nightmares, is to demonstrate that nightmares are beatable.'" (via Merlin)

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Li'l Ol' Me: "And, in that moment, it is 1977 and you are in your jammies waving a stick and going VOOM VOOM CSHHHH VOOM and you think holy shit, I never thought I'd get to feel this again and then, you know what? Let him freak out about nothing later. Because stuff like this is why."

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Zack Weiner: "When they realized they were in the desert, they built a religion to worship thirstiness."

Exit Stage Left

So this essay by Wallace Shawn made the rounds almost exactly a year ago. It's one perspective on why so many artists, actors particularly, tend to skew toward economic liberalism or, in his case, socialism.

But economics isn't why I linked it. I linked it because of this part:

We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he’s playing himself in his daily life, he’s playing a part, he’s performing, just as he’s performing when he plays a part on stage. He knows that when he’s on stage performing, he’s in a sense deceiving his friends in the audience less than he does in daily life, not more, because on stage he’s disclosing the parts of himself that in daily life he struggles to hide. He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him....

And as I walk out onto the street on a sunny day, dressed in my fortunate bohemian costume, I pass...the grim-faced domestic worker who’s slipped out from her employer’s house and now races into a shop to do an errand, and I see nothing, I think nothing, I have no reaction to what I’m seeing, because I believe it all.

I simply believe it. I believe the costumes. I believe the characters. And then for one instant, as the woman runs into the shop, I suddenly see what’s happening, the way a drowning man might have one last vivid glimpse of the glittering shore, and I feel like screaming out, “Stop! Stop! This isn’t real! It’s all a fantasy! It’s all a play! The people in these costumes are not what you think! The accents are fake, the expressions are fake -- Don’t you see? It’s all --”

Boom.

Every now and then I'll be walking to the office I choose to work at from the car I chose to drive, wearing the jacket and shoes and pocket hanky I bought for myself, and for just an instant, I wonder where I am and what the hell happened. Whose life is this, whose jacket? Who cast me in this? Why do people expect me to walk into this office and sit down and do this job, don't they understand that we're only reciting this script we've never read because we've all (insanely) agreed that it's real?

Shawn's mob of characters abides in me too. Sometimes they won't shut up. There's an athlete, a doctor, a salesman. A preacher, a murderer, a philanderer. A politician. A musician. A homeless addict. A writer, ker-chortle ye not, and dozens where each of them came from. They're in there, these men, waiting only for circumstance to let them out.

The really loony thing is that I don't want any of them to solidify and become permanent, not even the one that I let out every day for everyone to see. I want to contain them all, give each the fullest range of expression I can allow without hurting anyone. I don't think it's fair that any of them should be favored over the others, not even this one that's worked out pretty well for me so far, because I love all of them, even the scary ones and the bastards.

George Saunders was in a plane he knew was going to crash. And he caught the eye of the woman sitting across the aisle, and they held hands as the plane went down. They held hands because they knew each other, though they had never spoken before.

You see things for what they are when they're about to end. You see the costumes, and you think maybe you could change them just as easily as putting on a new jacket. Or, hey, maybe try nudity for a change, if that's even possible.

It doesn't take tragedy or crisis to show us this. Anything that jabs at the center of us is enough.

Usually it's a new thing. A song you never heard before that sounded as if it were plucked from the sky. Someone farting in the middle of a eulogy. Your son swimming nude across your freshly-shellacked hardwood floor. The cat leaping onto your ass mid-thrust. Or, maybe, the wind catching you just right as you're crossing your office parking lot.

Every now and then I'll hear a guitarist bend a string a certain way or a harp blower curl his tongue back and suck hard or, shit, something like Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre, and I know that at the center of me is a factory that forges that exact sound from my liver and my terror and my semen and my shit and my joy. Stories do it to me too.

I know that sound is in there, I can hear it echoing off my spleen, and I need to let it out of me now now now or I'll burst. But it passes. It's like finishing sex without getting to come, but it passes.

Then comes a welcome quiet, and I forget for a while. As Shawn points out, to live with this conscious knowledge every moment of your life would be unbearable, would paralyze you, would make even the daily chores that sustain your life seem absurd. It would lead any sane person to think themselves mad. I sure as shit feel crazy admitting all of this to all of you. But I've got to figure a way to let that sound out, don't you?

To understand it is to understand that so much of what transpires, so much of what we think of as The Way Things Are is what it is because we agree that it is, and therefore there's little that can't be piped to /dev/null and replaced with something new. You just have to get enough people to agree to change their clothes, that's all.

It's not quite that simple, of course. There's work to be done first, a new set to be built, new costumes to be sewn and fit. But I suspect it begins with a conviction: I'm not going to play this part any more.

Resolutions

Let us resolve.

Let us resolve not to make bullshit resolutions we know we will not keep.

Let us resolve to know in our bones that change is hard and painful, that it must sneak up on us.

Let us resolve to accept that each of us is, in some way, kind of fucked.

Let us resolve to remember that not just of ourselves, but of others.

Let us resolve to sleep more.

Let us resolve to honor the people and things that we love in their time.

Let us resolve to find a way to spend at least part of our day doing more than just reacting.

Let us resolve to suck at it, but suck at it a bit less every time we try.

Let us resolve to put some skin in the game, any game.

Let us resolve not to parrot television douchebags or buy their "books".

Let us resolve not to treat our neighbors with suspicion.

Let us resolve not to turn our schools into prisons.

Let us resolve to fuck each other, to the extent that we are allowed.

Let us resolve to be optimistic about the new Star Wars movies.

Let us resolve to remember that God is in our kitchens and bedrooms more than in most churches.

Let us resolve to treat that last resolution metaphorically, if we cannot do so literally.

Let us resolve to be frivolous.

Let us resolve to go outside.

Let us resolve to wallow in filth, just for a little bit, if it's fun filth.

Let us resolve to leave shock and outrage to the falsely pious and the ninnies.

Let us resolve to act like goddamn grownups.

Let us resolve to talk about the stuff we're afraid to talk about.

Let us resolve to make something. Anything. Even just a letter to someone.

Let us resolve to embrace silliness as a means of solving problems.

Let us resolve to allow others to scream at us with impunity.

Let us resolve to remember that we are not alone.

Let us resolve to remember that they can't eat us.

Let us resolve to really celebrate that next poop. If it's a good one.

Let us resolve to admit that nipples are kind of weird, even if they've got nothing on pubes.

Let us resolve not to let being wounded destroy our trust.

Let us resolve not to be a bunch of god damned joiners.

Let us resolve not to trust people with answers.

Let us resolve to trust people with questions.

Let us resolve to trust (clean) data.

Let us resolve to pet something.

Let us resolve to let go.

Let us resolve to figure out what we care about, and then really care about that.

Let us resolve not to fuck each other up.

Let us resolve to weep.

Let us resolve that we will no longer refer to any drink that does not contain gin and vermouth and only gin and vermouth as a "martini".

Let us resolve to remember that cheap things are expensive, especially when they're people.

Let us resolve to never forget that this shit is supposed to be hard.

Let us resolve to say no.

Let us resolve to care fuck all about the expectations of others.

Let us resolve to care very much about their needs.

Let us resolve to climb.

Let us resolve to hold.

Let us resolve to sing. When we are weeping, let us resolve to sing.

Let us resolve to dare to hope.

Let us resolve to say yes.

Let us resolve to agree that Daniel Craig is the best James Bond, yes, including Connery, go fuck yourself.

Let us resolve to go fuck ourselves.

Let us resolve to get better socks and shoes.

Let us resolve to stand up straight.

Let us resolve to hunger.

Let us resolve to chase.

Let us resolve to bask.

Let us resolve to fill ourselves.

Let us resolve to punch 2013 in the taint, but not in a mean way.

Let us resolve to tear it the hell up.

Let us resolve.

Derelicts

I've been drooling over the ICON Derelict line for well over a year now, seems like.

There's not much in the way of stuff that I really hunger for. A lifetime of accumulation and five years of children have, if anything, made me itchy to offload as much of my stuff as I can get away with. I'm toying with the idea of doing the 100 Thing Challenge, though I'm not convinced I could pull it off. Still, it rattles about in my brain pretty much every time I look around my house and sigh.

Someone once asked: if your house caught fire, and everyone was safely out of it, would you secretly be relieved? I think I would. But cookware and tools alone, even keeping to the needed basics, I'd get most of the way to 100 in no time.

Beyond that, beyond some nice clothes and occasionally updating my woefully-old tech, there's not really that much stuff that gives me the pants lust. Most of it seems like it's in the way. If I had a high-speed scanner, I'd even unbind most of my books and digitize them.

But then there are those Derelicts. Classic cars showing their years and miles, given new guts for their old bodies.

I've watched that video 20 times if I've seen it once. I once kept that open in a tab in my brower for a solid month.

I keep sending the link to people. I bring it up on Twitter in the hope that some rich person will see it and decide that I am morally deserving of such a gift. I scan the sides of the road when driving through one-stoplight towns, looking for the perfect one to send to California and restore. It is my kind of beautiful.

And if I ever do get rich? Hoo boy. This. This will be my mid-life crisismobile. I'm prepared to start quoting Ayn Rand to my kids when it's time to pay for college, if that's what it takes.

Jason and George

Every now and then I go back and re-read this comment on the generational divide between James Bond and Jason Bourne. A snippet, if you're not up to the arduous task of reading an internet comment (in which case, why you're here for my overwritten bumf I don't know):

Who is our generations [sic] James Bond? Jason Bourne. He can't trust his employer, who demanded ultimate loyalty and gave nothing in return. In fact, his employer is outsourcing his work to a bunch of foreign contractors who presumably work for less and ask fewer questions.... What about work tools? Bourne is on is own there too. Sure, work initially issued him a weapon, but after that he's got to scrounge up whatever discount stuff he can find, even when it's an antique. He has to do more with less. And finally, Bourne survives as a result of his high priced, specialized education.... Oh, and like the modern, (sub)urban professional, Bourne had to mortgage his entire future to get that education. They took everything he had, and promised that if he gave himself up to the System, in return the System would take care of him.

And, indeed, that's our reality these days. Cross reference this one from Eddie Smith about the current professional's mindset, less that of an employee and more that of an independent contractor:

I don't care who you work for, stop thinking of them as a boss or a company. Think of them as a client. Think of yourself as a business. And start thinking like that right now.

Now, I'm guessing you're like me, and when you think of Jason Bourne, you think of "It's a Wonderful Life".

It's pretty much everyone's favorite dramatic holiday movie, right? Pull ten people off the street, six or more will gush. They'll use terms like "uplifting" and "inspiring" and "hopeful". It's that magical Capra touch.

Let's recap, shall we?

Hometown boy wants one thing in life: a little adventure. He wants to see the world. He wants to build things. And it never happens. Ever.

What holds him back? Obligation, mostly. His sense of duty to his family, to his town, to his neighbors. He greets even falling for the woman who would be his wife, what should be one of the most joyful moments of the film, with frustration, anger, then resignation.

His honeymoon, his last great shot at adventure, sold away to keep his family's business afloat. Then it's a mortgage on a drafty old house in need of constant repair, then it's children. And more children. And sick children.

And then? His business again put at risk and now a looming felony conviction, all because of one doddering, drunk uncle and a rich asshole George once pissed off.

He's toast, his dream ground to powder and thrown to the wind, his future ruined, entirely because of other people. The real bitch? Nearly all of them are people he loves. People who need him.

So he does the only sane thing in the world left to him. He gets stinking drunk and wrecks his car. And then? He tries to throw himself off a bridge.

I won't waste words running down the rest of it in too much detail. You all know how it goes down. But let's flash-forward to the end. What's our hero's reward?

He doesn't go to jail. All those people he helped out return the favor and bail him out. Still broke, still never see his dream fulfilled, but not going to jail and slightly-less-screwed financially.

This is a joyous fucking movie.

Yes, yes, I know. His real reward is learning that he made a difference in other people's lives. He discovers that he'd been an important man all along, important in a sense that wrinkly scrotum facsimile Potter would never be. But other than the house full of singing people at the end, this is a black tale of the woe-est woe. If it weren't for Clarence's ruffly Mormon undergarments and rum punch, it'd be nigh-unwatchable. Hell, it only needs someone shooting John Turturro in the face.

Is it too much to give the poor bastard a plane ticket?

Just as Bond and Bourne are hyperbolic analogues of businessmen past and present, so is George of the modern family man. Just as the Bourne movies are about navigating the modern realities of employment, "It's a Wonderful Life" is about navigating a mid-life crisis.

Now, that's a phrase we all like to use as a punchline: hair plugs, convertibles, secretaries. And certainly those men who abandon their posts are worthy of criticism, if not contempt. But look at George Bailey, slumped over Martini's bar and rubbing his face. I love my family, he thinks. I need my wife, my children. But I also need just one thing that is for me. Just one dream fulfilled. Just one break.

A friend once said that inside of every man in his fifties is a man in his twenties wondering what the fuck happened.

I wrote before of my fear that I'd never leave a lasting mark on this world. A number of men who read that came forward to confide that same fear. Not a need for fame or riches or a Wikipedia entry, but to die with the knowledge that we did something that mattered, that outlived us. That we will not disappear with those who remember us. Maybe, along the way, the ability to live a life without caring too much about the expectations of others.

Facing the possibility that it might not happen, that in fact for most of us it will not happen, stinks going down. Those of us who have read our Thoreau remember being young and coming upon that phrase "quiet desperation" and thinking, not me. Never. And now, in our thirties and forties, we re-evaluate, and we wonder if there is still time. We are not ready for resignation yet. And yes, some of us panic.

The thing about men who accomplish big things is that a shocking number of them are complete pricks. Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, all reputed dickholes. You wonder if that's the secret, not giving a damn what others want. You wonder if you have to choose between being a good man or a great one.

If you do, the costs of greatness are obvious and on display in a million movies. Just look at old man Potter. But no one warned us of the costs of goodness. Nor perhaps should they have. Like any important thing, goodness is hard, and it is hard because it means choosing obligation, cleaving unto others. Goodness, like love, is a choice you make every day of your life.

God rains plagues on George Bailey because of his goodness, again and again, until he's begging. I have done as you commanded. Please, just one dream. Just one thing to go the easy way. Just one thing that is mine.

God's reply: No. But here, I'll show you what it was all for.

We cry over Zu Zu's petals and atta-boy-Clarence because we are George Bailey. Nearly no one escapes their youth with their dreams intact, because life is what goes on while you're dreaming, and it has its own ideas. We cry because George got to see that he had built something all along, while the rest of us can only hope that we did.

Jason Bourne survives by being the baddest of the bad, fulfilling every corporate stooge's dream of shooting his boss. But that's a power fantasy, not a reality we can or should relate to.

George? George survives because those other people who broke his dreams pull him from that wreckage and tend to his wounds and tell him that his sacrifice made their lives possible. Nothing badass about that. No plane ticket. But it matters.

Lot's Wife and Vinegar Chips

Terry Pratchett is not well. Hasn't been for some time. He has Alzheimer's.

My grandmother had it too. She spent years watching her mind leave her inch by inch before she died. Before she was too far gone to know what was happening to her, I imagine it was a private, bitter hell. My relief at the news that she'd passed was likewise bitter, but it was relief.

She met her illness with humor. It's a family trait, one that I don't possess as strong a measure of as I would like. My dad will tell you funny stories about the Vietnam war. My mom will tell you about sitting by his side at the Mayo Clinic, trying like hell not to lose him to renal cancer, and howling with laughter.

As for Grammy, there's the story of her adult daycare. On winter mornings my aunt would usually dress her in a sweater that she had knitted for herself back when she could still do that. Then she'd take her to daycare, where they would be greeted by a woman who was so far gone that she introduced herself every time.

At some point this woman would point to Grammy's sweater and ask where she got such a beautiful thing. Grammy would puff up her chest and answer that she'd made it. Her new friend would express astonishment. They did this every single day. Grammy indulged it. She was kind.

One day Grammy showed up and her "new" friend came up to introduce herself. They chatted, and then the subject of her sweater came up. "Where on earth did you get that?" she asked. "It's beautiful."

"I made it," Grammy said.

"How on earth do you do something like that?"

My grandmother thought on this, and thought. And thought.

"Well," she said. "There was a time I could've told you, but right now I'm about as goofy as you."

That's how she faced losing the knowledge of one of her great loves. She cracked wise. I cannot fathom this.

Yes, I'm glad it's over for her. Grammy was sweet and loving and one motherfucker of a seamstress, and I miss her, but I wouldn't wish what she endured on even the most monstrous of men. Certainly not on Pratchett, a man who has given me laughter and delight.

He nearly died last month. I haven't made up my mind about how I feel about that. I want him around, but I don't want him to endure this any longer than he must. I hate it more than I hate cancer.

The gospels declare that storing up treasures on this earth is an evil worthy of eternal damnation. I get where Jesus is coming from on that, but if the Almighty will permit a little criticism, I much prefer the Buddhist view: evil maybe, but certainly it's futile, even ridiculous. Because here's the thing: you don't own a goddamn thing of this earth. Until you know that in your bones, you'll never stop hurting yourself.

That's a harder pill to swallow when the treasures are our minds and bodies, but it's no less true. Regard them as being on loan. Regard them as a heartbeat from gone. They don't belong to you. Maybe that's how Grammy could laugh. Maybe she knew that. God, I hope so.

Last Wednesday was a right good pigfucker of a day. The last shreds of hope I held for Big Scary Job Opportunity evaporated with one speech from a member of the senior management team. So it goes.

So it goes, but I had trouble letting go of a thing I never had. I ditched the office potluck, went home and scarfed some leftover Hoppin' John, made an iced coffee, and hightailed it out to the UAMS biostatistics computer lab to finish up some work and chafe.

Chafe I did. I was sour with the two young women behind me who chatted when I wanted peace. I was sour with my coworkers who stood in the boss's office doorway chatting about nothing right outside my cube. I was sour with my own children.

I didn't want to go for a run that evening, but I knew I had to. I took my headphones but kept the podcast off, ran with nothing but my thoughts and the occasional speed and distance report to keep me company. My toes went numb on the 40° pavement. I told them to piss off and pushed harder. I hit my nine-minute mile.

It was on the cool-down walk that I turned my eyes up toward Jupiter and remembered that there are other things than my troubles. It was in the shower that I, returning feeling to my feet and worrying over my left Achilles' tendon, realized the gift I had been given in that meeting. I was given possibility.

Granted, right now those possibilities seem like a buffet of greater and lesser evils. Sit in a greybeige cube cranking out assembly-line code for somebody else's bottom line? As unlikely as it is unpalatable; I haven't written a line of object-oriented code in five years. Sit in a greybeige cube doing something something health IT something? Seems more plausible and less unpalatable. Chuck everything, learn the harmonica and hit the road with a blues band? The inevitable divorce would be pretty good fodder for blues songs.

Something else? Something else would be nice. But something. That's a gift.

I don't want to wrap this up with anything as trite and trodden as "gather ye rosebuds", but in an entirely self-centered way, last Wednesday left me envious of Pratchett. Not of what he's going through now, of course, but of what he did with his time before and is doing with it now. He always knew what he wanted, and he pursued it with all his strength. He used what time he had to develop his gifts and create delight. Just read this comment, for God's sake.

A friend of mine once said that he'd choose a life that ended with a shotgun in his mouth if it meant leaving behind a legacy like The Old Man and the Sea. I don't know if I'd go that far, but if you told me the price of leaving behind something like Terry Pratchett's work and touching millions of lives would be one day watching your beloved brain degrade in front of you, I'd take it. I'd take it in a heartbeat. And I fear it more than death.

So. I don't know where I'm going from here, beyond keeping my eyes open for opportunities. I will, for a change, allow myself to be just a teensy bit optimistic about what may come. The hard part will always be letting go of what was, but that's because it's the important part. Nobody ever made tomorrow come by giving a damn about the past.

Grammy and Mr. Pratchett never belonged to me. I got them on loan, same as my legs, same as my dreams, same as my mutinous hair. I hope the day will come when I can digest that truth without it choking me on the way down. But I think it will. It gets easier the more you lose the things you love.

Incidentally, if you're one of the poor sad sacks who hasn't heard of or read Terry Pratchett, I recommend Good Omens, still my favorite of his. If you're not familiar with my grandmother, well, here she is as a young woman, singing with a gospel group:

I still have her voice. With a trumpet! Neat, huh?

The Devil's in the Details

On election day, a little boy approached my wife in the park and informed her that he had voted for Governor Romney to be president because he had learned that President Obama wanted all the boys to marry boys and the girls to marry girls. He regretted his vote however, having subsequently learned that Governor Romney wants us all to be slaves and pick cotton 24 hours a day and never sleep ever.

Truly, it was a contentious election. Not quite the photo finish everyone was predicting though, huh?

Well, not quite everyone. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight had pegged the president's chances of winning at nearly 91% on election day, taking 313 electoral votes. That was up from 86% just a day before. He wasn't the only one to predict a big lead, but he's the lightning rod right now.

Turns out he was right again. As of this writing, the president has 303 electoral votes in the bag, and there's still counting to be done, but it's all over but the shoutin'.

The fawning and frothing surrounding Silver is worthy of more than an eyeroll, but then there's isnatesilverawitch.com, the best belly laugh I had of the entire campaign.

As of this writing, he is up to "probably" from "maybe" last night, but it's the struck-out first paragraph on that site that bears being tattooed on the forehead of every fifth American:

His unusually accurate predictions are, thus far, explained by his use of validated statistical methods. His disregard of momentum, gut feelings, and the interpretations of people paid to promote certain viewpoints is not the result of supernatural assistance.

Oversimplified? Sure. His models and methods are a matter of debate, and he has in fact been wrong, as he'll tell you himself. But — and I'm talking to you, right now, America — read that paragraph again. And again. And again. Because the rest of us need to get on board with that idea.

It's time to give up our proud tradition of ignorance. Please, in the name of Christ, I beseech you.

Much is being made right now about how Republican electoral strategies are going to change. Nixon's Southern strategy, which built decades of success on the backs of racists, misogynists, and homophobes has been declared dead. America appears to be admitting that it's not entirely white, straight, male, and evangelical.

And, you know, thank God for that, because it's long past time, but that victory is just a touch tarnished for me. It's tarnished by the certainty that educated voters across the nation will still tune in to the bespectacled pro-wrestling shartstorm that is cable news for the post-mortem. They will care what Joe Scarborough thinks. They will listen to men who base their predictions on nothing more than what they think sounds right, and they will call these men "analysts".

Pundits will continue to sell books. Politicians will continue to disparage scientific research and strangle its funding. They will continue to cut funds for education as well, a quite literal investment in our country's future, every time there's a budget problem. They will appoint people who call their grandkids for tech support to craft laws affecting the Internet. They will use terms like "Ivy League" and "intellectual" as insults. They will value their guts over their brains.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver studies the numbers and ignores the know-nothings and continues to shame them with his record of success. The know-nothings respond with claims of "bias", which is crybaby for "he said a thing I didn't like" or "she asked a hard question".

Charlie Pierce offers greetings from Idiot America. Seven years ago, by the way, and he's no less right today. Here's a chunk:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

I said above that education is a literal investment in our country's future, but of course it's not the only one. So is research. Research leads to discovery leads to advances leads to New Useful Things leads to...wait for it...new markets (and also helping people, but let's ignore that). That's how you continue to lead. That's how you embrace the future.

Considerable investments in CERN, for instance, have resulted in new technologies with a big return on investment. Why didn't that happen here, the alleged world leader? Why do we wait for China to invite us to join in an effort to ensure that our west coast isn't obliterated by an asteroid strike? Indeed, how is it a vice presidential candidate can call for more research of congenital diseases like Down's Syndrome and in the same speech disparage that research, with zippo effect on her credibility with her base?

At bottom, it's because we (including, ironically, those who claim to hew to an absolutist view of truth) have embraced consensus as fact and ignorance as plain sense. It's because we want reinforcement, not knowledge. Easy answers and clear enemies, not nuance or understanding. We want to participate in the drama.

We stopped dreaming, and we stopped exploring, and we started sneering at those who didn't stop. We replaced our thinkers with talkers and our rigor with rhetoric. If we don't turn that around soon, say hello to our decline.

Plato hated the concept of democracy. He said it was a terrible idea because you're putting people who don't value learning and wisdom in charge of choosing the wise ones who will lead. That, he said, will ultimately lead to a populace governed by lies and manipulation and engaged in a diarrhea sandwich of public discourse (I'm paraphrasing here) that caters to the lowest common denominator. Sound familiar?

Though I have my problems with the man, I'm glad we re-elected President Obama. If you care why, and I don't expect that you do, this essay by John Scalzi approximates my own view closely enough. But to me, who gets elected matters far less than how (and why) they are elected, just as what you think is far less important than how you think.

Yes, I'm grateful for last night's results. I'm happy for the 32 million people who get to see a doctor and the tens of millions of LGBT citizens being recognized as Americans. I'm certainly happy that I don't have to pick cotton and never sleep. But there is a worm at the heart of the tower, a deeply-rooted cultural rot, and until we address it, until we as a country venture out of the cuddly Slanket of willful ignorance, we prove the ancients right and make our neighbors nervous.

If nothing else, it'll prevent this from ever happening.

Squarespace Is Made of Sasquatch Poems, It's That Valuable

So the hurricane hit the east coast. My web host, Squarespace, is in NYC. They put out a notice saying sorry, we're pretty much going offline because of this, and we'll be back up in no time, pinky swear.

I checked in on Halloween to schedule my last post, and lo and behold, they were up. Already?

In fact, they haven't gone down. They haven't gone down because they're running a generator to keep their servers going. They don't have a solution to pump fuel in, because their basement flooded. So how are they fueling the generator?

They're hauling in fuel in buckets.

By hand.

Up 17 flights of stairs.

While pumping water out of their basement.

All night long.

This, people, is a company that wants your business. If you need web hosting and don't give them your money, you are literally torturing puppies. It's that bad.

I have rarely been as happy to be doing business with anyone as I am with Squarespace, especially after hearing how they've faced the storm and its aftermath. Guys, my money is yours to lose. No one will lure me away.

This is not a sponsored post, just to clarify. I am waaaaaaay too small to attract sponsors. Squarespace is just that good to me, and I want to pass on the love.

Go to Squarespace for your hosting needs, or I will never stop punching you.

Why I Run

I'm closing in on a nine-minute mile. It's only over 5k distance, so no big whoop. I'm going to have to push harder to comfortably maintain that pace for anything longer than a 10k, but still, I'm a few steps down the road toward a sub-four-hour marathon. Woo hoo.

Had a good one last Friday. Beat my 5k record of the previous week, which beat my record of two days before, which beat my record of a week prior to that. I'm on a good one right now. Feet: Gently Chewed.

Thing is, I don't often enjoy running. I hate it, sometimes. Sometimes it's everything I can do to drag myself out there, sometimes I get a mile or two out and think "screw it, there's popcorn at home" and turn back. So why do it?

Shortest and most obvious answer is vanity. I'll cop to that. There's also a smörgåsbord of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in my family, and I'll be damned if I'm going out like that. But I think there's something else in there too, something that may not be exactly venerable but at least on the up-and-up, morally speaking.

Terry Pratchett, may the Nezperdian Hive Mind of Chaos smile upon him with one its six mouths, once wrote that "Too many people want to have written," and that's pretty much how I view going out for a jog. I don't want to run. I want to have run.

Specifically, I want to be on that cool-down walk that starts at Steve's white Chevy pickup and goes down the slope and around the curve and finishes at my driveway. That walk, even after a bad run, tells me I have given my due and earned my rest.

I've left at least some of my cares on the pavement. I've sweated, I've pushed myself, I've produced a frankly disturbing amount of mucus. I've made my down-belows smell like my left-behinds. My feet are mildly to moderately raw. There's a good round of stretching and a shower in my near future. Best of all, my muscles are slack, my shoulders are back, and my head's surrounded by cartoon bluebirds.

I loved hallucinating when I was young and stupid. A mental experience that's nearly impossible to describe? For a guy like me, that's its own advertising. I loved watching my brain unfurl. I remember lying in the middle of a country road with three good friends, looking up at the stars and talking about exactly the kind of shroomed-up pseudo-profundity you'd expect we were talking about. But it was Technicolor, and to us children it sure sounded profound. For a few hours, it took away so much grey.

I heard a thing once about a study conducted of those rare musicians who can start composing songs on the spot. No planning, no backup band, no nothing, just pick up their instrument and out comes a song nobody ever played before. They did neurological scans of these guys as they played (yeah, I know, the old Radiolab brainscan plot point, but still), and they found that the part of the brain associated with censoring ourselves wasn't firing for them. Their creation sprung at least partly from a complete lack of self-consciousness.

Indeed, I've found myself circling the boundaries of sleep with a hyperactive imagination, dreaming up images and landscapes and movement and shapes and colors that were captivating, wishing to Christ I could somehow record it all and play it back later. But then the sleep came, the moment went, and all I have left is the longing.

The drugs let you do that while you're fully awake. That's the hook. A heightened facility for letting go of yourself and chasing the weird shit out the basement of your brain. I was hooked on that. I wanted it all the time. That's why so many artists are addicts. Booze and drugs are lubricants. They make it easier. But it never lasts, and that's the cost.

Sometimes running does a bit of that to you. Sometimes pushing yourself to your physical limits makes your mind more fluid, more curious, more starved to imagine. Sometimes merely being worn out is enough to keep you from censoring yourself. Sometimes, as after last Friday's run, I hear grasshoppers from a block away and smell barbecue from last week and wrap myself in the conversation that is outside, and I dream while walking.

When you get to distance, sometimes you reach a state like auto-hypnosis. Mile...I dunno, ten? Twelve? Fifteen? You seem to both delve within yourself and yet lose your sense of self. The padding of your feet on asphalt. The rhythmic breathing on the brink of entropy. The twisting of your abdomen and spine. You are abstracted.

In the middle of you is an empty thing. It is dark. Not evil or foreboding or devoid of life, but like what I imagine outerspace to be: quiet, patient, spinning, waiting to be discovered.

Nietzsche looked into it and saw nothing. Kierkegaard saw what he believed was the gulf separating humankind from God. I don't know what I see, but I hear silence. I can lose myself in that silence. I can get out of my way, for at least a little while. When I emerge, things are a bit different. I don't know how. But I feel cleansed.

Soon after my son was born, my mother-in-law came over for a visit, and I excused myself to go do eight miles on our treadmill and get my head right. She shook her own head when I was done and marveled that I, the parent of a newborn, could have the energy to do that.

The answer, of course, was that spending an hour throwing myself onto the ground was my survival strategy. Find that center, lose myself in it, come back. Energy? I was a new father. I was a tangle of bedsprings. When his little sister was born and I was no longer doing distance? That was harder to endure.

And then there is that fix. Endorphins swabbing the decks of my brain. A quiver in my leg. The groaning of my iliotibial bands when I grab a knee and its associated ankle afterward and pull. The water. The water. The water.

I make it to Steve's truck, and I wipe my head with my shirt and start to walk. I dream of the apocalypse. I dream of my children and the world they will inherit, which is to say that I dream of the apocalypse. I dream of being president and harp blower and algorithmist and blacksmith and writer and volunteer, and my quadriceps shake and for a second I take my eyes off of the pointy things in the street and I look up at the moon. Sanya Richards-Ross congratulates me through my earbuds and I realize that this is the wake of an acid orgasm, only more painful.

Which makes it more interesting. And more real.

Pushing myself to that center makes me malleable, moldable. If the pain and tiredness aren't too much (and at this distance, they never are unless it's hot), I am ready to see things. I am ready to work.

I'm addicted again to a thing I don't often care for, but this one's going to give me more time with my family, and it won't lie to me or pick my pocket.

Could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I just quit drinking.