καπνός μαντεία

That’s the thing with bucket lists. They end. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether I had one, I’d have said I thought they were stupid. I’d have called them products of an increasingly enshitified media-internet convergence, self-help waffle, and that one bad movie. The bucket list concept has always seemed like life-coach hype. But I did have one. I didn’t write it down or post it or engrave it on a thin sheet of marble to hang over my desk, but it was there, implicit, a coil of smoke always turning in my field of vision, a divination only I could read. And it said one thing: hurry up.

So I did. I wanted to publish a book of stories. I published two with a third complete manuscript still out there, tumbling through the maybe-someday abyss. I wanted to learn martial arts. I studied multiple styles. I wanted to teach university writing and wound up teaching it for over two decades, travel the world and live abroad for substantial periods (at least 13 countries to date), and get a PhD (2010, English). For these things, I feel only gratitude—mostly to myself for having had the courage to attempt them, but none of it was accomplished in a vacuum. What did the millennials say twenty years ago? Something, something, the friends we made along the way? I made a few.

But I’m Generation X, where the “X” evokes the old cartoon “wingding eyes,” which are supposed to indicate being “dead or asleep without dreaming. Comical depictions of corpses or ghosts will have their tongues sticking out as well as this. Sometimes, both eyes will combine into a single, longways X. May also be a feature in depictions of clowns.” Sounds about right for Gen-X. Dead. Asleep without dreaming. Corpses, ghosts, clowns. I’m all that, depending on which day of the week you encounter me. Come over on a Sunday afternoon and you get a trifecta. But one of them always has to be “clown.” And the friends I made along the way turned out just the same. Now they’re mostly ghosts.

In classical antiquity, sorcerers would burn sacrifices to gods and spirits of the dead, then practice capnomancy with the smoke, reading it like divine script. Καπνός (kapnos) means “smoke” and μαντεία (manteia) means “seeing,” as in divination or second sight. The bucket list I had was capnomantic in that sense. I was my own burning sacrifice, my own smoke, my own divine message from myself to myself. And the smoke always said time was short. So I needed to do what I needed to do. And it worked out, more or less. It wasn’t much of a list, unless I thought about it for a while and scared myself. But the bucket part ran deep.

And now? Now I peer into my bucket like a child afraid to dive in. Because it seems like I’ve come around, made a perfect circle to where I began. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.” A brighter flame for more powerful μαντεία, of course, but in the end it’s all the same. The smoke blows away. After mountains, more mountains. And if you don’t die a hero, you live to carry other people’s ashes, too. So many. A million metric tons of ashes, the remains of the dead that are now your responsibility, their memories, their ghosts. Quite a burden to carry up a mountain trail.

The rim of the bucket makes a perfect circle. Wobbling on the edge, I try to grip with my toes. The mountains are watching. Smoke twists above my head like a thin snake. You ask me what the gods and spirits said in its coils. And I tell you to be patient. Just wait a little longer. I’m still burning.

Words and the Reunification of Words

College. I won an award from the German Department: “Most Improved Student of German,” oder Der Deutschlerner mit den Größten Fortschritten. Or something like that. It was an award for good character and endurance rather than achievement, a participation trophy given to students like me.

Students like me: generally those whose families didn’t have villas in Bavaria. My family had a villa in east San Diego on Cherokee Avenue and we had German Shepherds, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe I couldn’t afford to go on any of the sponsored international trips. Maybe I couldn’t manage to learn the language in any functional sense. But I had a pulse and was willing to sign up, course after course. Hence, “Most Improved Student of German.”

The German Department at UC Irvine needed students to keep taking German. So the Department sought to develop a novel pedagogical strategy: encouragement. Deployed effectively, it was intended to keep those of us at the bottom of every class ranking (the German Department wanted to be encouraging, but it would not give up its internal student ranking system) from becoming too hopeless and depressed.

But I soon understood that if your father was a diplomat and you spent your summers in Berlin, you wouldn’t need such help. Sandra von Hayden’s father, for example, really was a diplomat. She liked to ask me what in the world I thought I was doing in German. She sat next to me, quarter after quarter, from German I up through Post-WWII Literature B, asking versions of that question, until I realized that her constant rudeness was a mode of flirtation. Unfortunately or fortunately, the realization came too late. I mostly pretended she didn’t exist. But later I’d ask myself, “What in the world do you think you’re doing here?”

There was the aristocratic Belgian kid, Benji, who knew Jerry Garcia and a bunch of other celebrities and politicians, sad black-dress-wearing Lena, and cheerful Day-Glo anime lunchbox Cindy Chang, who was quite possibly the only German student worse than me. I recall some Swiss kid, living in Huntington Beach, who was trying to be a surfer dude for a year, and a gorgeous Italian exchange student who seemed to already know ten languages and was now studying Russian and German at the same time. I also have a vague memory of an older Canadian guy, who kept asking people to call him “Grumpy Bear” (Mürrischer Bär); though, the reason for that is lost to time.

The teacher, Herr Steiner, called me “Herr Davis” because of my constant comical seriousness and constant comical mistakes. He called Cindy, “Immer-spät Cindy” because of her constant comical lateness. Together, Cindy Chang and I were the two comical North Americans studying German in North America. I don’t remember the other students. When I think about those years, many things are blurry because I was trying to write a science fiction novel and I believed that required industrial-sized bales of marijuana and a comparable amount of alcohol.

Still, I got As in nearly all of my classes, including the ones in German. I studied hard during the week. On the weekends, I worked on my novel about a scientist who develops a process for communicating with an alien intelligence inherent in metals and then applies it to the iron in human blood. He becomes a kind of prescient vampire, someone who knows things that should not be known. I never finished the first draft, but I worked on it for a long time. On certain blurry evenings, I allowed myself to think it was brilliant.

But back to Bavaria. Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Munich. Shopping in Bonn. Hiking in the Black Forest. Concerts in gowns and tuxedos with Vati und Mutti. Such things were closed to me and, now that I think back on it, I’m pretty sure that was good. I wouldn’t be the questionable character that I am today if I’d been that respectable at age 19.

I should have taken Spanish and eventually I did. But I felt obsessed with German. And I am constitutionally incapable of stopping once I develop an obsession. The world gave me subtle hints—sometimes not-so-subtle hints—that I should quit while I was behind. But I am stubborn and prone to saying, “No, fuck that. I’ll do what I want,” even if I have to say it in a language I don’t fully understand.

Lean days. I didn’t own a computer. The UCI humanities library still had a glass room full of typewriters and one could see students in there, applying correction tape to their term papers every November. I had an IBM Selectric that my pot friend, Kyle, stole for me out of a car, and a Brother word processor with a LED screen half as big as your phone. I couldn’t afford the ink cartridges for the Brother. More often than not, it was the Selectric, which overheated every two hours. So that was my weekend work method: write for two hours, smoke, read, write for two more hours.

But the German Department award came with two interesting prizes. One was Wörter und die Wiedervereinigung der Wörter, a book of poems by Hans-Jost Frey, and $500. I should have bought a better Selectric at a yard sale and saved the rest of the money, but I believe I’ve established the sort of decisions I was making at that point in my life. Instead, I went to Sears because they were having a sale on used Packard Bell computers.

Little did I know that Packard Bells are historically regarded as some of the worst computers ever made. I didn’t know a thing about computers. I just thought, this is what I need to finish the novel. And, of course, once I completed my novel, everything would change. I had big dreams. All it would take was a little more perseverance, a little more fuck that.

I also didn’t know that the cleared-out area next to the garden section where they had the used computers on display was staffed by two guys getting paid on commission. I hadn’t yet explored the world of retail sales and had no idea what brutal exigencies of fate could cause a 30-year-old man named Ted to have to work in Sears, next to a wall of lawnmowers, selling the worst computers ever made.

He had supernaturally bad dandruff. I’ll never forget it. At first, I thought it was a white speckled design on the shoulders of his blazer. This was, after all, 1993, and you could still see styles like that from the the 80s.

Ted said, “Hey dude,” and we shook hands in front of a shelf of assembled Packard Bell systems. They were being offered as packages: computer, printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and I think some kind of plastic desktop organizer for pens and paperclips. $400 for each bundle.

We stood in the green garden show area, breathing the fertilizer from one aisle over, and nodded in mutual appreciation. This was it. I was going to be one of those people who owned a computer. I was a serious man now. I felt like I was one step away from having a cream business card with WRITER embossed on it.

Ted rattled off a number of technical details and I nodded like I understood. In fact, I’d expected nothing less. It had a modem inside it, you see, so you didn’t have to buy that idiotic phone receiver cradle that everybody knew about because we’d seen pictures of them in magazines. No, this was a Packard Bell. And that meant you could use this program called “Mosaic” to get on this other thing called the “Internet,” where everything was free. And, Ted grinned, you could see titties. So many titties. “Am I right?”

I felt over-stimulated. I grinned back and said, “Right!” not really understanding what he meant. I knew generally about titties but had no idea about the internet or how the two might work together. I was a babe in the woods, a foal in the meadow, a kitten of the universe taking his very first steps onto the windowsill of consequence. Titties, you say? Internal modem? Why this is precisely the reason I came to patronize your fine establishment, my good sir.

Ted and I had obviously become the best of friends, which is why, in the process of ringing me up, he felt he needed to mention that the system clock didn’t “work perfect” and there was “something up” with the floppy drive. But, really, I’d chosen the best model there. Really. I was gonna love it. He knew I would.

When I got to the parking lot, where Kyle was waiting in my ancient Chevy Blazer, I realized I was an idiot. He stepped out, coughed 100 times, waved smoke out of the car, and squinted. “You just bought that with the money?” he said to the giant cardboard box that had once held an orange ceramic planter. He said it as if “that” were something incomprehensible and yet horribly depressing. And in that moment, I realized he was right. It was both of those things. I turned on my heel and went back to the garden center.

Ted wasn’t as happy to see me when I walked back in. When I told him I wanted to return it, he looked even less happy.

“You can’t do this to me,” he said.

“I want to return it.”

“You can’t return it. It’s used.”

“I’ve got the receipt you just gave me. It says I can return it within 30 days.”

“No, you can’t. That’s not right.”

At that moment, Ted’s colleague, a very thin man with hard eyes, who looked like he should have been manning the desk of a motel with hourly rates, shot Ted a glance and said, “Yes, actually, he can.”

Ted looked at him and seemed like he was about to cry. Then he looked back at me from behind the sales counter and said, “My mother’s in the hospital. I need this.”

And I said something like, “Why don’t you buy her a Packard Bell?” At which point, he gave me a look like he wanted to stab me with one of the garden section’s hedge clippers and processed my return.

I dropped Kyle off and gave him $20 for coming with me to Sears—because unless he was stealing something for you out of the goodness of his heart, Kyle never did anything for free—and went home feeling twitchy and strange. I’d never had that much money at one time in my life and I felt like I’d almost given it away to a pathological liar with dandruff.

On Monday, I was back in Deutschstunde, watching Sandra von Hayden field strip and meticulously clean the inside of her mechanical pencil with a Q-tip. She noticed me watching and mouthed, “What the fuck?” I gave her an empty stare and turned back to the documentary Herr Steiner was showing on the development of the Saxon dialect. Unfortunately, the documentary was in Saxon and even the Italian exchange student was having a rough go of it.

Immer-spät Cindy was, unsurprisingly, spät. When she sat down on the other side of me, she whispered, “What’d I miss, huh?” and Sandra glared at her.

“They’re speaking Saxon,” I said.

“What in the hell is that?”

I’d noticed that Cindy had recently started to wear fewer florescent items and pepper her language with profanity, which vaguely saddened me.

“It’s a dialect.”

“Herr Davis?” said Herr Steiner.

And I whispered, “Sorry.”

That night or maybe the night after, I would attempt to read some poems from Hans-Jost Frey’s book about words and how they get reunified and how this was like the reunification of Germany. I’d succeed enough to understand how far I still had to go. I still had the Selectric. I planned to buy 10 Brother ink cartridges. Maybe that weekend, I’d give Kyle a $20 to keep me company on a trip to a print shop where I could get some business cards made. Cream. Embossed.

I’m the Greatest Writer of my Generation

Bukowski wrote a scene in which Henry Chinaski attends a test screening of what would become the film, Barfly. He’s drunk and, fed up, starts shouting that he’s the greatest writer of his generation and don’t they realize this. I read it in my early 20s on a bus from San Diego to Iowa City because I’d gotten into the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and thought I might go to school there. Ultimately, I didn’t. But the week-long bus trip turned out to be an epic voyage unlike anything I’d experienced thus far in my life.

Large parts of it were also boring and gave me time to read Hollywood, Borges’ Labyrinths, a Dean Koontz horror novel, Midnight, and The Sun Also Rises. I didn’t know then that I was a writer; though, I’d already fallen into the habit of writing every day and had begun to form a sense of the literature I liked and that which I wanted to avoid. Years later, as a writing instructor, I’d come to see these two things as common traits in beginning writers—the need to write and strong preferences about reading. Interestingly, these qualities are not always present in students and scholars of literature, which is what I thought I wanted to be at that point.

And before you say, Really? Dean Koontz? with that look on your face, I’ll add that it’s good to explore what everyone has been bullied into agreeing is unworthy. I’ve read far more Stephen King than Dean Koontz. I think the former is a better pulp writer than the latter. But, even back then, I wasn’t going to allow myself to be shamed out of reading anything. Read everything. It’s not healthy to restrict yourself to the current, politically unassailable conversation-piece novels being extruded by the Big Six. That said, yes, Koontz is mostly a shit writer. But sometimes you have to excavate the shit to get to the good stuff beneath it.

I wanted to study English lit in the Midwest because it was far away from southern California, where I grew up and which I regarded as the locus of my teenage suffering. I hadn’t learned that the locus of one’s suffering is more ubiquitous and less tangible than merely the place where you did time in high school. Unfortunately, the early 20s are like that. You think there must be answers and that others must have them. How else could the world function? That’s one reason I still read fiction even though I know better. The search for nonexistent answers is a hard habit to kick.

So there’s Henry Chinaski, doing his enfant terrible routine in the back of a screening room in Hollywood, shouting with as much self-conscious irony as possible, Don’t you know who I am? Maybe Bukowski believed, at the time Barfly was being made, that more people should know about him and acknowledge his talent. But I suspect it was just the opposite: he felt that fewer smarmy media people should be kissing his ass while he nonetheless obsessively courted that attention.

In Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction, Robert Anton Wilson describes this personality type:

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress. These characteristics are denounced by religious leaders everywhere, by most philosophers, and by many famous psychologists. I refer to such qualities as vanity, pride, even conceit; to raw egotism and grandiosity; to the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Wilson exaggerates to make a point about the necessity of getting past writerly impostor syndrome, which seems more prevalent in young writers now than ever before. Being a good, sanitary, moral citizen may be at odds with producing fiction that isn’t flaccid. Unfortunately, mannered writing is often rewarded by businessmen who think of books in terms of “units” and scholars who’ve exchanged their libidos for analytical abilities and an academic nihil obstat.

Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to say we’d like to write what we’d like to write. And we’d like to feel less like impostors while we do it. We might not need to indulge in Wilson’s “raw egotism and grandiosity” or, as Chuck put it in a 1964 letter to Ann Bauman, “New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski?” We would like the thought context, at least, to remain stable.

A few years after my fateful interstate bus odyssey to Iowa, I found myself standing in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a Turk named Marat, both of us holding electric guitars plugged into enormous Marshall amps, which, if dialed up one or two more notches, would have disintegrated us at an atomic level.

Nobody cared. People played loud music all the time in that neighborhood, mostly rap, which Marat hated. Hence, his daily hour of deafening scales and perfect renditions of every song off his favorite practice albums, And Justice for All, Surfing with the Alien, and Seasons in the Abyss. We could sometimes hear people outside on the street yell, “Turn that shit off!” or just “Fuck you, white boy!” Those were more innocent times.

Marat was a fellow student at UC Irvine (my B-choice after realizing that Iowa wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be) and he had a record executive uncle back in Istanbul. He’d supposedly gotten guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and Eddie Van Halen. Now, having established my worthiness, he’d decided to pass on the electric guitar darshan to me. But I was hopeless.

He gave me lessons for about a month on equipment and instruments that probably three-fourths of Los Angeles couldn’t afford. And I struggled to follow him through songs like “Always with Me, Always with You” and “Dead Skin Mask,” which Marat thought should be relaxing and teachable. One thing he did tell me, though, which seemed extremely weird at the time but which made sense to me years later in a Bukowskian way, was “You’re holding it like a classical guitar. That’s bullshit. You have to hold it like your cock.”

Granted, he was as macho as he was romantic and he thought real artists should be willing to destroy themselves. So, having listened to Marat’s aesthetic philosophies for almost a year, him saying I should hold the guitar like my cock wasn’t that outrageous. He could have just as easily said, “First, you have to dive off the roof and land on your face. Only then will you be ready for the arpeggios in ‘Eye of the Beholder.’” Maybe so. Maybe so.

I often think about this advice, something that could not be uttered publicly—if only due to its forbidden machismo, much less the fact that it wasn’t said by Lizzo, any post-1980s rapper, or a tranced-out John Fetterman. As such, it qualifies as an esoteric teaching on par with Wilson’s claim, in that same article, that society probably hates writers and wants them to fail if they dare believe in themselves:

The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence—a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do everything in their power to destroy you.

Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself.

Hold the guitar like it’s your cock. Wave it over the crowd like a benediction. People will hate you. Live, laugh, love. So goes the creative process, the harmonium of the spheres. You have the further option of staying up all night, drinking cheap wine, and listening to classical music on the radio, but that may be too much Henry Chinaski for comfort.

I don’t know what happened to Marat after he went back to Istanbul. I like to imagine he became a rich music executive like his uncle before the record industry disappeared. I still can’t play “Blackened” and I haven’t felt the urge to stand up and scream at groups of people that they should know who I am. The sheer audacity of sitting down to write anything is enough for me. It’s probably enough for people to hate me, as I discovered last year when a literary magazine nervously un-accepted a story of mine because I was openly critical of certain political figures on social media.

You are, however, encouraged to secretly regard me as the greatest writer of my generation. I’ll do my best to hold the guitar properly and send you forth with writerly blessings. Or perhaps with this thought from the opening of Bukowski’s “My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage”:

for those of you interested in madness, yours or mine, I can tell you a little about mine. I stayed at the poet’s cottage at the University of Arizona, not because I am established but because nobody but a damn fool or a poor man ever visits or stays in Tucson in the summer months. it averaged around 106 degrees during my whole stay. nothing to do but drink beer. I am a poet who has made it known that I do not give readings. I am also a person who becomes quite a jackass when drunk. and when sober I don’t have anything to say, so there weren’t many knocks at the poet’s cottage.

There’s never anything to say when you’re staying in the poet’s cottage. Nothing. No one knows you’re the greatest writer of your generation. You don’t even know. It’s unclear how you got there and, goddamit, someone keeps tapping on the ceiling when you’re trying to work. There are no answers and you feel confused about the questions. Turn up the amp. Land on your face. If you live, Rimbaud. If not, well, the thought context probably wasn’t right. Too bad for you. You’re in the poet’s cottage now, bucko.

Eating

Everything eats. That’s not the problem. The problem starts with what lies beyond that fact. And there’s no solution: what we don’t consume has no value. What has no value does not exist. Consider the cafeteria. I’m sitting in it with my friend, Hector, facing the conundrum of life over mashed potatoes and meatloaf for him, a boxed ham sandwich for me. Who are we to complain? It’s not horrible food. It’s edible. Kind of stiff. A little stale. Somewhat undercooked. But don’t cry for me, Argentina, it’s a campus lunch. If it goes down and stays put, I’ll bow in gratitude to the bounty of celestial providence.

“That’s a dry sandwich,” says Hector.

Yes. I know. I’m eating it. “Those potatoes look runny.”

He nods slowly, regarding his mashed potatoes the way one views an autopsy subject. Damn shame, such violence. But at least it’s not a dry sandwich out of a plastic box. He got his meatloaf and potatoes from the food line, ladled out of a metal tray like in every prison movie right before the commissary riot. Greasy steam rises from the food-line entrées and they never smell good. Runny potatoes. Feral carrots. Dubious peas. Condemned meatloaf. Overcooked bok choy in a forlorn soy sauce. Bricks of peaked mac and cheese so dense they have to be chipped off with the tip of the spatula. I’ll suffer the dry sandwich, thanks.

Hector and I meet in the campus cafeteria about once a month, ostensibly to discuss the renovations being done to the building where I work, but in reality just to insult each other’s food choices and make disparaging comments about the students.

“Look at them snakes,” he says as two undergrads dressed like ice cream cones float by. Not actual ice cream cones; though, I’ve seen that and many comparable absurdities on this campus, but looking like they just went nuts at a discount white sale in June. Something out of the director’s cut of Zardoz—new age Egyptizoid background extras in a dystopian shopping mall, while Sean Connery runs around in a red diaper shooting people. The one wearing a huge amethyst pendant glares at us.

The gun is good, I think to myself, but I don’t say it because Hector won’t get the reference and anyway he’s still going on about them snakes.

“We didn’t see snakes like that when we were in college, am I right?”

Hector’s a large man, completely bald, and, as far as I know, has been faithful to his wife for 25 years. But he talks like he’s still working on gen ed requirements and an internship. College females are “snakes.” College guys are invisible. The university is “this shit,” as in, “This shit wants me to supervise over Christmas to make sure the HVAC gets in. Can you believe it?”

I can believe this shit.

“Snakes like that—it’s the social media, okay? The TikTok.”

“Chinese spyware.”

“China don’t care,” he says. “Look at them robes. They look like Stargate. Leisure studies majors. You think China cares about leisure studies majors? That ham’s killing you by inches, brother.”

“China wants me to eat this ham.”

He frowns at my sandwich, cuts into the meatloaf slab with his plastic fork. “That’s not even ham.”

I came to this job over two years ago because I was starving. Let’s not say, “starving.” Let’s say facing the prospect, such that boxed cafeteria lunches came to seem like mana from on high. My old life got invalidated by a bat virus doing what it was engineered to do—eat. The freefall unreality of the pandemic, where going to the grocery store felt like dicing with death, ate my finances. I didn’t like how broke I got, how politicized everything got, didn’t feel like the virus cared much about feelings, opinions, theories, or rent.

All I knew was that, when I got Covid, it was the worst flu of my life. I hallucinated conversations with dead people, ancestors, goddesses, spent a few weeks in a delirium where I thought I was probably going to die, then managed not to. After it cleared up, I found a job on campus—not the university teaching job I’d always wanted, but still. Still.

“That meatloaf looks more loaf than meat.”

“Cute. This fantastic repast is straight from heaven.”

“Send it back. Make god eat it.”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

And now, a new life of blasphemy and snakes. As Dante wrote in La Vita Nuova, “If I bethought myself to seek out some point at the which all these paths might be found to meet, I discerned but one way, and that irked me; to wit, to call upon Pity, and to commend myself unto her.” Those of us who lived through the pandemic will never know why we did while others didn’t. All we know is that chance or fate took pity on us so that we could sit on college campuses and watch self-conscious children glare and parade around in costumes.

“If I tabulate all the money I’ve spent on bad campus food, it’s like I’m giving back my paychecks.”

“That’s what you do,” he says. “They give you money. You give it back. They give you things. You eat them.”

On that note, we do. Perhaps, as we consume our vital sustenance, we ask ourselves what we’re feeling. Perhaps, as we are sensitive individuals, in touch with our emotions, we turn inward as we eat, content to probe the range of personal meaning inherent in the act. Or maybe we just shovel it down as quickly as possible. I set the last quarter of my ham sandwich aside. It is truly dry and I didn’t get anything to drink.

“Linda says she thinks she might be a lesbian.” Hector stares across the cafeteria, through the beige wall, over the landscape, beyond at least one ocean, at an image in a distant land that holds the truth of that statement. Maybe a better meatloaf. He puts the last chunk in his mouth and chews.

“You getting a divorce?’

“Maybe. She said don’t worry, though. Right now, it’s just a thought she’s having.”

Two boys with skateboards sit at the table in front of us. They don’t have any food. And I wonder why they’re here, why, of all places they could go, they’ve chosen a space that smells like rancid creamed corn and burned toast.

“Thoughts are just thoughts.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly.”

I look at the scar that runs up his right forearm, perfectly dividing the sun tarot card tattoo surrounded by cherry blossoms. I look at the red-and-white Aloha shirt and the heavy gold chain he wears on the outside of his black undershirt so it will stand out in the “V.” And I think sometimes I must not be the loneliest person on campus.

Hector and I are both 30 years older than these students. We’re in the gray area, marked “staff.” We’re not on the academic food chain. We don’t consume. We are not consumed. We merely facilitate the consumption. And that which is not consumed cannot exist. We’re ghosts.

A couple dressed in skin-tight gym wear starts to make out at one of the central tables and everyone in the cafeteria stares, but only for a moment. It’s a new life, I think, a new world. It intersects my old, dead middle-aged life that barely sustains, that nobody wants, that tastes like something from a cafeteria food line. Hector stares a little longer then looks over at the last of my sandwich.

“You gonna eat that?”

I tell him no and he picks it up with two fingers, puts it in his mouth.

“Peace,” he says, still chewing. “Stay healthy.”

I wave and watch him move toward the door, a foot taller and two wider than everyone present. No one looks at him. He’s not an entrée.

I sit there for the remainder of my lunch, empty plates in front of me, watching young love in action. The outer part of me wants to feel contempt for them doing that in public, but when I ask myself what I’m feeling, I have to remember to be grateful. I’m alive. I’m still here, for what it’s worth. I still get a boxed sandwich, a little more time, and a table off to the side.

2010

First, a Sincere Declaration of Thanks

I’ve spent most of my life running in circles looking for something authentic, then waiting for permission to explore it, and harshly criticizing myself when I didn’t get that permission. Maybe other people have different experiences, but this has been mine, my personal through-line from childhood to the present. So I try to be as sincere as possible when I write about my frustrations and failures. Because what else can I do? While it’s true that sincerity doesn’t make you friends, at least it makes you the right sort of enemies. I imagine this blog post will do more of that.

Still, I try to avoid self-pity and, because of this, I usually take a long time to form opinions about what I’ve done or failed to do and how others have reacted. I ruminate. I turn things over, trying to see past faulty assumptions, convenient rationalizations, and other self-serving anodynes. Most people probably do this to some extent, but I think I do it more. Sometimes, it works. Other times, what I took for a true perception, for reality, eventually dissolves into just another subjective field, just another corridor of the maze that I have come to think of as my life. In a maze, you never know what the next twist will bring. Usually, it brings another twist.

With this in mind, I should begin by saying that in 2010 I came very close to ending my life. This essay is about that time, but it’s not just about depression and not really about suicide. It’s not a success narrative where I write about how I overcame great difficulties and am now nearing perfectibility. It’s not about taking revenge on others through a misguided petty hit piece. And it’s certainly not about castigating myself for the many imaginary errors I’ve regretted and then dismissed over the last eight years in order to keep getting up in the morning. It’s a slice of life—a big, fat, ugly slice that tries to embrace the broadest range of experience in order to get closer to the truth. In this, it’s a lot like an advanced non-fiction exercise.

“Advanced” because it is not easy and not something you would assign to a 17-year-old English major in an introductory writing workshop. “Non-fiction” because it’s a mode of creative expression that pretends a certain degree of inviolable objectivity, even though we know that’s impossible. Every memoir, no matter how fabulous, must begin implicitly or explicitly with an assertion of truth or at least with a sincere declaration of authorial good faith: “I did this. I saw this. This happened. At least, I think it happened.” Rousseau’s Confessions does it with style:

Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood.

This is my favorite passage from the first part of the book because literary historians have proven that the Confessions contains many misstatements if not deliberate falsehoods. Such graceful bald-faced prevarication is a rare and beautiful thing. But I am not so talented. And I have no plans to weigh my heart against a feather on the last day.

Instead, I will put it this way: I suspect I am not a horrible person. I have faith that I’m not even tactless. I believe my greatest defect is that I lack the imagination necessary to see several moves ahead. I lack interpersonal foresight, which has made me a poor manager of nervous egomaniacs and a terrible chess player. But I love chess. And that is a serious problem, even if I hate the high-strung pampered egomania of academic writing programs, because everything toward the end of my PhD program was just a version of that game.

Robert Greene, in the acknowledgements of The 48 Laws of Power—a book loved equally by goateed 25-year-olds with a Libertarian Bitcoin fetish and the morose IT professionals you see combing the self-help section for books on how to become an alpha male—has a similar protestation of sincerity:

I must also thank my dear friend Michiel Schwarz who was responsible for involving me in the art school Fabrika in Italy and introducing me there to Joost Elffers, my partner and producer of The 48 Laws of Power. It was in the scheming world of Fabrika that Joost and I saw the timelessness of Machiavelli and from our discussions in Venice, Italy, this book was born. . . . Finally, to those people in my life who have so skillfully used the game of power to manipulate, torture, and cause me pain over the years, I bear you no grudges and I thank you for supplying me with inspiration for The 48 Laws of Power.

If we read this carefully, we have to smile. Greene is doing what we might call an “inverted Rousseau,” making the same assertion in a backwards way: this is a book about real things; therefore, I thank all those who have manipulated and tortured me for providing good material and, in the process, I declare my sincerity.

Greene puts us on notice that his book is based on subjective material that emanates from his and Elffers’ lived experience, creating a Rousseau-esque escape hatch. As The 48 Laws of Power is all highly subjective (essentially a kind of implicit portrait of Greene stitched together in historical anecdotes), the value of whatever he writes defaults to his apparent sincerity (“I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood”). It’s not about an objective truth process. It’s about rhetorical ethos.

That is wonderful because ethos might be the only sincere rhetorical mode. After logos topples from an unstable foundation of assumption, appeal to authority, and generalization; after pathos is unmasked as merely a screen of emotion recollected in tranquility; the persuasive credibility of the speaker is all that remains. In a world where absolute truth does not exist, everything is ethos. And so I construct my own ethical escape hatch.

2010 was the worst year of my life, the year after my mother died of lung cancer; the year after my first book was published; the year I got my PhD in English; the year I attended my last AWP Conference; the year I traveled to the deep South for an excruciating week-long job interview and realized the English department clichés also obtain south of the Mason-Dixon Line; the year I got very ill; the year I was admonished by my mentor for questioning the value of my degree and told to be grateful for indefinite unemployment; the year my father began another surly adolescence; the year I began to think that there was no place for me in this world. There are many years I’d relive if I could. 2010 is not one of them. But I have been told to be thankful for these experiences because they have supplied me with a lot of inspiration. As such, this writing is my sincere declaration of thanks.

Prelude

You never know what the next twist in the maze will bring but, in 2009, I think I was doing as well as could be expected when I stood in front of the department graduate adviser’s desk and said I needed a leave of absence to visit my mother in hospice. For some reason, that moment stands out as a prelude for the upcoming year.

The adviser, the department’s resident medievalist, seemed to exist in an acid vapor of contempt for all creative writing students and their keepers. She disliked me in particular because I’d dropped her Old English seminar the previous semester and she’d taken it personally. Since I was doing a PhD with a creative dissertation (the final product would become Gravity, my first story collection), I didn’t need to be in her class. But she needed me there. Or, at least, she needed to feel loved by as many students as possible.

This was the woman who would thereafter try to prevent me from graduating so that my funding would run out. This was the woman—whether due to old workplace feuds or out of resentment that there were more creative writing events on campus than dramatizations of Piers Plowman and undergraduate maypole dances—perpetually tried to block funding to the creative writing program and force out the graduate students depending on tuition waivers. Her style of chess was to kill the pawns first. Attack the supply lines, starve the more dangerous units in their fortifications, and wait for winter. Classic medieval siege tactics.

However, standing before her desk, I was barely aware of the billowing acid cloud. I was half-blind with grief. All I thought about was my mom and how I had to get back to California to see her. Looking back, I’m surprised I even had the wherewithal to stand up straight, much less ask for a leave of absence. But I was very responsible. I took everything seriously. I thought a lot about my future in academia, especially in creative writing instruction. And I felt my future depended on me contentiously following up on every detail. I was, essentially, as sincere as I have ever been in my life. I shouldn’t have been that sincere.

Given my emotional state, what the adviser said to me didn’t register until I’d left the building. The conversation went something like this:

“I need a leave of absence to go to California because my mother is dying of cancer.”

She rolled her eyes, looked out the window as if she were considering it, sighed, then shook her head. “No can do. You only have so much funding. Your funding will not cover you for another semester.”

“My mother is dying. She doesn’t have long. I’ve completed my course work. My dissertation only needs to be approved. I don’t even need any more credits.”

Another sigh. More contemplating the clouds. “Well, that’s really too bad. You have to be in residence or your funding will run out while you’re gone. Good luck.”

I stood there, trying unsuccessfully to process this. Then she rolled her eyes and asked me if there was anything else.

The grief robot turned and left her office, got on the elevator, rode it down to the bottom floor, walked out to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, and stared at the water for a long time. Only then, did he think of the graduate adviser rolling her eyes. Over the ensuing 9 years, the moment of her eye roll would be impressed in his memory as a perfect metaphor, a perfect image foreshadowing all the inspiration and gratitude to come.

The Tragedy of Not Dying

A hospice is a horrible place. It’s like being given a lollipop for a bullet wound. You’re bleeding out and everyone tells you to enjoy your lolly. It’s cherry. It’s got a smiley face. Why aren’t you happy? Visiting my mother with my father there added another layer to the experience. In spite of the pain and horror of the place, in spite of watching my mother waste away in her bed, hallucinating and suffering and being afraid, I came to understand that my father’s grief was different from mine. I was feeling bad for my mother. He was feeling bad for himself.

This was still 2009. My only course, aside from empty dissertation credits, was a German reading and literature seminar. The professor, a kind old man about to retire in his late 60s, loved his students the way he loved his trees—which is to say, far more than he loved the university. I asked him for advice because he was the only person I could ask. And he made it possible for me to exist in two places at once. I gave my own writing students two weeks of work and held online course meetings via Skype and I emailed my German professor my work, which made it seem like I was present. This is what allowed me to fly to California and see my mom for the last time.

In those first awful trips to the hospice, I’d naïvely hoped that my father and I could come together in our grief and support each other. Of course, this was pure fantasy since he’d always enjoyed being a father but had rarely done any fatherly things. I could count the number of times we’d gone to movies, the one thing we could do together because it involved no conversation. And there were a few other misadventures over the years where my mother badgered him into going to some school play (he stood by the door to be the first person out) or taking me fishing (we did a U-turn at the access road to the lake and went home) or camping (it rained and so we packed up in the middle of the night and left). He never beat me and he brought home a paycheck. To the best of my knowledge, he never stepped out on my mother. But he was never involved more than that; though, he lived with us in the same house—somewhat more than a housemate, somewhat less than a relative.

So my hope that he would be able, somehow, if in a manly way, to share this painful experience with me, was not based on reality. After a certain amount of talk about how sad he was, it became noticeable that he never talked about my mom. He sat by her bed, lost in his own self-pity, as the cancer ate its way through her brain and wasted her body. As she died by inches, he proceeded as usual, focusing on his own needs above all else.

I witnessed this. My wife witnessed this. But I was so aggrieved I could barely speak. Sometimes, my wife had to help me walk from the car to my mother’s room. Have you ever been so upset that you can barely walk? Until you have, you won’t know the feeling. When you have, you’ll never forget it. It transcends description.

I focused completely on my mom. I waited for her moments of clarity. I told her I loved her. I told her the good things about my PhD program. I made jokes and she tried to laugh. One day, my great aunt—a stately old Italian woman who sounded like my late grandmother and seemed covered in the old-world charm that vanished with her generation—showed up with a peach and a kitchen knife. She cut slices and fed them to my mom with a smile on her face. Even now, as I write this, I cry a little because it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. That kind of goodness doesn’t exist much in this world.

It was a very difficult time. Two weeks later, I returned to finish my program. In one of her last moments of clarity, my mom had ordered me to go back. She didn’t want me to see her die and me being in the PhD program meant a lot to her. I think she felt ashamed that she wasn’t going to be around to take care of my father and me the way she always had. And knowing that I was going to get a doctorate was a relief, as if it would be the next best thing. She also had a lot of pride in her appearance and the cancer had been unkind. So when I offered to stay, she insisted that I not. About two weeks after that, my father called and said to say good-bye to her. I told her I loved her. And I think she died shortly thereafter.

I miss her every day. But this isn’t about that, either. It’s about the aftermath, how everything changed as a result of her death. Some people are the linchpins of their families. When they go, everything goes. That was what happened. I flew back again for her funeral. She was buried holding a photo of my father and me. It was a closed casket and I don’t remember much else, just bits and pieces. I was out of my mind.

As we moved toward the Fall semester of 2010, I felt melted down and recast as a different person. I’d lost my happy thoughts. I didn’t go out or talk to many people other than my wife and my program mentor. I stopped writing fiction. Most of what I did was perfunctory. But I knew I had to get my degree. Even if I collapsed afterward, I would complete the PhD.

The Reading Series

The year before, I’d allowed myself to be persuaded that working as the assistant coordinator for the university literary reading series would “look good on my resume.” And I did my best as the monthly, sometimes bi-monthly, flier maker, venue securer, introducer-to-the-introducer, complaint taker, fielder-of-calls from mentally unstable bookstore proprietors, irradiated scapegoat, and general handler of said low-rung celebrity infants terribles.

Sometime before I left town for good, one of the faculty members admitted to me that the assistant coordinator position was really only supposed to entail flier making and that the professor who was getting paid to be to be doing the other things had dumped the rest on me. But by then I was so depressed that I couldn’t summon the necessary outrage.

One writer wanted a per diem that wasn’t in his agreement. Another wanted intel on, in his exact words, “the most fuckable students who might be around.” The butch lesbian poet would only communicate with me through an intermediary because I was straight and male. The playwright was supernaturally high throughout his entire visit and had to be physically guided to the stage. The “local writer,” penciled in because there was a vacancy in the schedule that month, struggled to contain her spiritual darkness through the entire event such that when I handed her the honorarium (significantly less than what the other, slightly more famous writers had received), she snatched it out of my hand, hissed a “Go fuck yourself,” and then smiled broadly at an approaching faculty member. These were some of the more endearing ones.

Needless to say, it was not the greatest collection of individuals. They generally came across as worn out, mediocre, vain, full of fear, full of resentment, and perpetually on the hustle for any crumb of recognition. Calling them fools wouldn’t be accurate because they were all reasonably intelligent. They simply knew the score too well, knew they should have received more for their dedication and efforts. You could see that loathsome awareness stamped on their faces. Now they were privileged to read their work to the smirking tenured faculty who hadn’t hired them, a menagerie of twitchy English students, and whichever townies may have wandered in looking for free wine. It wouldn’t get much better than that.

I disliked the visiting readers even though I saw myself and my fellow grad students reflected in them. Most of the people featured in the series that year hadn’t been picked for life’s cheer squad. They were the leftovers, the understudies, the adjuncts with slim books from presses you’ve never heard of. Many, it seemed, faced depression so considerable that they were pharmaceutically enhanced 100% of the time. I wondered more than once how they could continue to produce writing. The greatest irony was that most of them had already gone further in their careers than anyone currently in my PhD program stood to go.

There were a few exceptions, a few graceful and brilliant souls who’d agreed to come as personal favors to various faculty members. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them as well as the moments of hilarity you find in every English department. 2010 wasn’t all doom and gloom, just most of it.

The second time I was told to go fuck myself was around 3 AM on a Sunday morning toward the end of Fall semester. My insomnia had become pretty dependable at that point and I was already awake when the phone rang. I got out of bed, told my wife I had no idea who it was, and shuffled into our tiny living room, where I sat on the couch and listened to the breather on the line. He was panting hard. I thought it was quaint that in this day and age people still gave breather-masturbator calls. The caller ID came up with nothing.

When he realized I’d said hello and was listening, he rumbled out a “Go fuck yourself” and hung up. I sat in the dark for a while, thinking about the human condition. Then he called back. It was F, one of the few grad students who’d been asked to read in the series. He mumbled some things and then shouted that he thought I had a problem and should get help. He was drunk off his ass.

I asked him why he felt that way and he broke it down for me. F had read with his wife, you see, and I’d made the mistake of introducing him before her. Neither of them were ever going to get over it. Plus, she was a Navajo princess and I’d introduced them as husband and wife. You don’t do that to a Navajo princess. Didn’t I fucking know that? What was wrong with my head?

“Princess? Really? I thought you guys were from Pittsburgh.”

He hung up again and didn’t speak to me until I ran into him at the AWP Conference a few months later—where he was keyed up and sweaty, slapping me on the back, telling me how he’d been featured in a very cool spontaneous reading held on one of the convention center’s escalators that drew an enormous crowd. Now he had a pocket of phone numbers to network. Amazing. He didn’t remember a thing about calling me in the dark and telling me what I could go do with myself.

Or maybe he’d repressed that memory along with his courtship of the Navajo princess, that hard winter living as tribe’s writer, the majestic swish of his khakis as he hunted buffalo, armed only with an unpublished manuscript. I haven’t seen him or heard a thing about him since the conference, but I suspect he’s either got tenure by now or he’s back in Pennsylvania selling pre-loved automobiles like it’s a poetry slam.

The End, My Friend

Depression is a very idiosyncratic and personalized illness. But those who have it tend to have a few things in common, one of which is that depression can be cumulative in its gravity and magnitude. Today, you’re not feeling good. Tomorrow, you can’t get out of bed. The day after that, you’re standing on a chair with a vacuum cleaner cord around your neck and you think you’re the only one in the history of the world who’s endured such a linear degeneration. Feeling alone is a big part of it.

I felt alone until I discovered Darkness Visible by William Styron and recognized a lot of what I’d been going through. I don’t know how I found the book, whether it was in the fiction section of the library where I sometimes studied or whether I encountered it in a used bookstore or somewhere else. While it wouldn’t be true to claim that the book “saved” me, I can say it helped enough to get me down off the chair, multiple chairs, actually.

Reading it was an emergency measure, but it was something I could depend on. I didn’t talk about my feelings. I’ve never been very good at that, not even with my loved ones. But I could read someone else talking about his. And since I loved Styron’s fiction, I felt like I could trust him. If he said it, I could accept it enough to be able to think about it. And that was usually all it took for me to keep going.

By Spring break, I was prepared to submit my dissertation. I missed my mom horribly and my wife and I returned to California to take care of the empty house where all my mother’s things sat gathering dust. My father wouldn’t go near the place. When he wasn’t drunk, he was hard at work rediscovering his hormones in erratic, awkward, and desperate ways. Our relationship, never substantial to begin with, began to splinter irreparably when, out of guilt, he started to regularly criticize my mom.

He was a self-righteous Catholic for most of my life, who often amused himself by telling me to get my ass to church and that since I’d been baptized I could never not be a Catholic. But after a year of drinking, trash talking, and a pissed-drunk rape attempt on my cousin in front of me, he was ready to start up a relationship with an equally neurotic married woman who’d run after him at an event.

He confessed this to me one afternoon because I guess he couldn’t confess it to his priest. Then he added that it was like a DH Lawrence love story. Then he said she was going to get a divorce from her despicable husband and they’d marry each other. Lovely. I didn’t want to hear about it. I especially didn’t want to hear him ask me to be his best man. I could hardly speak. It shows how detached and self-involved he was that he thought it was something he could ask me.

“What about all that Catholicism?” I remember asking. I don’t remember if he answered.

Around that time, because he wouldn’t help me clean out my mother’s things, I’d been over at the house, crying, putting her clothes in Goodwill boxes, packing up old photo albums, doing all the things we could have done as a family. Instead, my wife helped and we did the best we could in a few days. Much was overlooked, things from my childhood, things in the garage that I really do wish I could have kept. But we only had so much time. Now I imagine my father and his new wife paid at some point to have it all carted to the dump. But I have no way of knowing, since I haven’t been back in years.

I do recall taking to the gardener, who revealed that he’d had my mother making food for him right up to the point where she went into the hospital for the last time. She couldn’t lie down straight in bed. So she was sleeping sitting up in a chair in order to breathe, then walking around on crutches, cooking and cleaning. According to the gardener, he screamed at her frequently. She was fucking dying and this is how he treated her. That’s abuse. It’s horrible fucking abuse. And my mother, who was just about a saint in every way, did her best.

My mother was a talented painter and sculptor, but he’d left her art in a shed that had a broken roof. It rained a lot that year and most of her work was ruined. I’d been standing in the backyard, looking at the shed, unable to get in because he neglected to give me the key to the deadbolt (probably because he didn’t want me to see what had happened) when he called with a task for me. It was something small, something to do with getting a TV boxed up for him and cancelling the TV service that my mom had in her hospice room. I’d already taken care of it, but he spoke to me with contempt, as if I were very lazy. He said, “After all I’ve done for you, couldn’t you take care of this one thing?”

I thought of my mother on crutches, making him breakfast. I thought of her art destroyed through neglect. I thought of my father drinking a case of my cousin’s high-end champagne and then trying to fuck her in front of me. I thought of all the nasty things he said about my mother when she was gone, after he’d cried his eyes out for himself, after he blamed me for not being there when she died, after the sizeable amount of heirloom gold from old Italy that my mom wanted to come to me but that disappeared right around the time my father and his new cadaverous lady friend got a second condo in San Antonio. I thought about all these things and saw that no matter what his paycheck had been worth, no matter how much I may have cost as a child, no matter what my mom and he may have given me as a teen or a confused 20-year-old, I owed him nothing.

I felt something snap and a certain coldness overtook me. My depression had come to be replaced with something more useful: calm, thoughtful anger. We had it out. He told my wife and I we had to be out of the house. Within 48 hours, we were. I’ve never looked back.

Gone for Good

I got my PhD without fanfare. My wife and I went out to dinner and it was nice, just the two of us. I knew I’d miss my mentor in the program and her brilliant husband. I’d miss certain things about the university town and my own writing students, several of whom had become more like friends. But I was glad to be done—done with the degree, done with my father, done with trying to hump the dream of being an academic creative writer.

In the eight years since the day we drove south, blasting M. Ward’s “Helicopter” with the windows rolled down, I’ve thought about 2010 quite a lot. I still get depressed. But I can cope. I’ve learned that it is possible and, for me, even preferable to have a life outside academia. And I’ve come to accept that family isn’t really who raises you when you don’t have a say in the matter. It’s who you choose when you do.

I miss my mom every day and I write fiction every day. As of this writing, I’m working on my third collection of stories with a novel draft mostly written. I’ve published over 30 items in magazines, worked as a freelance writer and journalist, and lived in 9 countries. I’m healthy. I really don’t have anything to complain about right now. And sometimes I even give myself permission to think I’m happy. Somewhere, there’s a Navajo princess riding through the clouds over Pittsburgh, but I doubt our paths will cross again.

Where is my mind?

For the last 27 years, I’ve kept a diary in which I’ve made entries three to five times a week in a ritualistic obsession to document my life. To be honest, I’ve also kept the diary to have someone to whom I can talk. No one but a blank page would ever care to listen to all my complaints and worries (given their number and variety) and no one should have to. When I was a child, it was my mother who listened. Now Microsoft Word is my mother.

Many of the entries are short. Some go on like essays. But no matter how voluble or terse, joyful or upset I was when I wrote, I’ve been able to use the entries to bend time—essentially to bring my past more vividly into my present. As a result, I believe that who I am now is more meaningfully informed by who I have been at various other points in my history, affecting the way I view my present place in the world and my sense of momentum through life.

Bending time is one of the most outstanding benefits to keeping a diary, maybe the only real benefit. It may sound like a kind of hell, endlessly ruminating over people, places, events, and feelings long gone. And one does pay a price. I’d be lying if I said my diaristic habit hadn’t aged me in certain ways while keeping me young in others.

In one sense, I carry a unique emotional weight. Some things that happened decades ago may seem like they went down yesterday. And what is happening right now may resonate in idiosyncratic ways, causing me to react unpredictably. Why am I so angry? Why did I find that so funny? Well, you see, back in 1997 . . . I don’t heal very well from past wounds. Some things I just can’t let go or forgive. I wouldn’t even say I hold grudges because that would imply an unnatural or inappropriate degree of ill will or resentment over time. My ill will and resentment are perfectly natural and appropriate, given my perspective.

I’ve also seen personal themes emerge, but I can’t say whether it’s because of character, destiny, or maybe just selective attention. I only know that I’ve noticed cycles, repetitions, even echoes across the years. Situations will happen over and over. Similar personality types will appear and be magnetized to me or repulsed by me or both in their seasons. People will say the same things. Headlines will look the same. I’ll often (though thankfully not always) make the same stupid mistakes.

I’ll even have dreamlike moments of déjà vu in which I won’t be sure whether I imagined something, saw it in my sleep, or actually experienced it. But I think I’ve reached the point where I care a lot less about the distinction between daydreams, actual dreams, misremembered dreams, and lived dreams. Life really is but a dream and, if I experienced something, it was undeniably an experience.

Ironically, my compulsive documentarianism has made everything seem a bit relative. I celebrate many anniversaries, births, deaths, resurrections, departures, (not so) sudden arrivals, accomplishments, magical epiphanies, failures, desperate heartaches, humiliations, dignities, and small quiet moments. I remember a red leaf from a chestnut tree that I picked up while standing in the German WWII graveyard outside Tallinn; walking behind an NYU undergrad through old town in Prague, how his T-shirt had male and female restroom icons made to look like they were at a wedding and the words GAME OVER underneath; dancing with a girl who’d driven down that night from the Flathead Indian Reservation at a bar called the Iron Horse in Missoula, Montana, the same night a friend of mine got high and chased two fraternity brothers through the frozen streets with a razor sharp hunting knife.

I remember the night I met the woman who’d become my wife; the moment I learned that my father had been abusing my mother right up to the day she went into cancer hospice; holding my first book of stories when it finally arrived; the day I spent acting in a TV commercial; standing in the ruins of the Hell Fire Club on Montpelier Hill overlooking Dublin on a rainy day; lying down on a grave in Savannah, Georgia, and staring up at the night sky through the branches of a willow tree.

I’ve already lived multiple lives, died and been reborn multiple times. And I feel this has modified the way I see everything, the way I write, how I speak, probably even the structures in my brain. In a moment of absolute strangeness and synchronicity—not to be believed but true nonetheless—my neighbor is playing the Pixies’ Where is my mind? (poorly) on the piano. Good question.