Everywhere Under Your Feet

“[Bilbo] used often to say there was only one Road; and that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

No one, not even the healthiest person, is immune to the vicissitudes of life and death. Or, as the T-shirt says, “Eat right. Stay fit. Die anyway.” There’s always the runaway bus, the surprising terminal illness, the stray bullet, the jet engine falling through the roof, the unanticipated venomous snake, the sudden vertigo on the bridge, perhaps even the rational consideration that you should go out while you can still pronounce your own name.

We laugh at the absurdity of such things—what are the chances!—until the Road sweeps us off our feet. And we learn firsthand how all attempts to insulate ourselves against death are futile, given that death is an indispensable complement to life. Get one, you get the other, and no amount of wheat germ and sit-ups will save you.

How will you die? Do you ever seriously ask yourself that question? Or do you, with such middle-class arrogance as to tempt a corrective bolt from the heavens, ask, How do I want to die? As if it will ever truly be in your power to decide. We immediately think of suicide as the supposedly ultimate act of self-control over life. But is it? When Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out because he could no longer write, was in great physical pain from an experimental surgery, and was depressed, what actually killed him?

If those things had not been operative in his life, would he have pulled the trigger? If my high school friend, Michael G., hadn’t been angry at his philandering plastic surgeon father, would Michael have dropped a ton of acid and fried himself on some power lines? We’ll never get a chance to find out. But we all ask questions like this about somebody we used to know. Are their suicides really voluntary acts or did the gods just decide, in their boredom and perfection, to flip the switch this time?

Is Putin executing families on the streets of Bucha or are there deep historical and psychological forces working through him and the war criminals under him, like primordial daemons written into human DNA, like the Balrog awakened when the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep? Can one man understand anything, do anything, by himself, of himself, without the proper aesthetic, sonic, kinetic, temporal, and existential keys being invoked? Do you seriously think you have a valid answer to this?

Answerless, I’ve been asking impossible questions. I’ve been thinking about the protean nature of death, pointless literary conceits, stupid war, initiatory dread, insufferable hubris, prescient science fiction, and the Lovecraftian titans shaping our world, which we commonly name deregulation, tribalism, debt, pandemic, climate change, populism, structural violence, siloed thinking, and imperialism—all alive and well in various daemonic and mundane forms, visible and invisible, physical and metaphysical, and actively determining our lives this very minute. As a result, I’ve been, understandably, a bit more gloomy and mordent than usual. (Ah, c’est la vie. It’s my blog and I can cry if I want to.)

But it’s an interesting conundrum, choosing to presume that one has or can someday have control over one’s life up against the Old Gods, Lovecraft’s very alien titans from beyond the pale. We’re inclined to cite the aforesaid “corrective bolt” and call it fate, but it seems a bit ill-advised to anthropomorphize what we don’t understand, which evidently includes most things in life. British art-scene tantric, Phil Hine, puts it like this in his Pseudonomicon:

The Cthulhu Mythos displays a recurrent mythic theme; that the “titanic” forces of creation and destruction—the Great Old Ones—have been cast forth from the earth and “forgotten” by civilised humanity and its narrow, materialistic vision. However, whilst they may be forgotten, they are at the same time ever-present, lurking at the frontiers of order, in places where the wild power of nature can be felt. They are chaotic, in the same way that Nature is chaotic, and they retain their primal power since they cannot be “explained” (i.e. bound) or anthropomorphized. They exist outside linear, sequential time, at the border of “Newton’s sleep.”

We can (and, to a certain extent, we must) impose a rational false consciousness on our perceived experiences to stave off insanity. But the world, as we’ve known from our earliest years, is not rational. And we suspect we’ve always been unfortunately (or fortunately) out of control. It seems like a cop-out at first but, the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that the whole point of this circus is to buy the ticket and take the ride, as Dr. Thompson famously said—to bear witness to how the alien machinery of life does its work.

The non-linear, non-sequential, non-Euclidean, inhuman angles underlying our reassuringly tidy Potemkin assumptions seem fairly determinative if we can only catch a glimpse of them in the Malthusian depredations of capitalism or in the eyes of a dying loved one. Maybe we don’t need to get better, get clean, get saved, and get ourselves together, since we’re always-already coming apart. Instead, as Luc Sante’s anonymous speaker pleads at the end of “The Unknown Soldier,” maybe we need to think of ourselves as verbs, not nouns:

[G]ive my eyes to the eye bank, give my blood to the blood bank. Make my hair into switches, put my teeth into rattles, sell my heart to the junkman. Give my spleen to the mayor. Hook my lungs to an engine. Stretch my guts down the avenue. Stick my head on a pike, plug my spine to the third rail, throw my liver and lights to the winner. Grind my nails up with sage and camphor and sell it under the counter. Set my hands in the window as a reminder. Take my name from me and make it a verb. Think of me when you run out of money. Remember me when you fall on the sidewalk. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.

The Good Hustle

Today, I was advised to get an editing and proofreading certification from one of the many professional associations available to show potential clients that I am all business and not, as one would otherwise assume, a crank. Three decades of professional writing, editing-for-hire, and proofreading won’t do it. The representative who cold-emailed me on social media made it very clear that no matter how good I think I am, no one will take me seriously unless I’m professionally certified. Luckily, she discovered me in time.

When I asked her if board certification exists for copy editors and proofers, she didn’t respond. I’m still waiting, but I know the answer. With a website, a PayPal account, and a fictious business name, you can establish a certification program for anything obscure and unregulated, say, antelope sign language. You can then offer membership in a professional society based on your courses and the money flows in like sweet milk from heaven when people called to interpret for deaf antelopes feel insecure and go looking for a stamp of approval.

You’ll pitch your service to the rubes with a great convincer: “Since there are no objective, widely accepted standards for professionalism in antelope sign language, you need our very formal, suitable-for-framing certificate to set you apart from all the dilettante competitors and desperate poseurs trying to steal your business. You need this.” I recognized the come-on immediately. It’s how you sell a diet supplement, a tinfoil orgone collection helmet, a Learn Fluent Inuit in 20 Minutes-a-Day DVD set, or a religion. You define the subject matter, identify the anxiety it produces, and offer a solution.

New religions always do this, since their subject matter is and must always be vague. At a science fiction convention in 1948, L. Ron Hubbard is supposed to have said, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.” Like most of Hubbard’s material, it seems to have been cribbed from other sources—in this case from a letter written by George Orwell in his multivolume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters. But the principle is sound. Give people something in which they can believe and posit yourself as its source or sole mouthpiece.

Interestingly, the Orwell-Hubbard dates may not match up. Multiple volumes of Orwell’s collected works were released in the 1960s and, though it’s obvious earlier collections existed, it’s unclear which Orwell resources would have been available to Hubbard in the late 1940s while he was busy doing ceremonial magic in the desert with Jack Parsons and seducing Parsons’ girlfriend. But we do know that, by 1948, Hubbard had left Parsons and overt occultism behind, well on his way to following through on his million-dollar scheme.

No matter how many conventions Hubbard attended, boats he owned, and storefront e-meter salons he opened, the comment about starting one’s own religion would follow him for the rest of his life and hang over his grave like a feculent mist. Orwellian cynicism has always seemed perfect for the Church of Scientology. The organization has appeared, at least since the early ’70s, much more interested in abusive litigation with a side of organized crime than in any sort of enlightenment or spirituality.

Still, America loves a new religion, the sillier and more coercive the better. Americans will love it twice as much if the guru requires lavish compensation for his wisdom. It’s one of the perennial obsessions at the heart of the culture: we’re all looking for Jesus the Businessman, whether he comes as a computer inventor, an online bookseller, or an electric-car spaceship fetishist. The more he up-sells us and demands to be loved for it, the more we’ll celebrate him. If he can do this and offer us certificated in-group status, we’ll make him a fixture in our lives.

We want to be saved by someone who shares our values: money, cleverness, exclusivity, salesmanship, and the sado-masochism of the workplace as spiritual praxis. It’s the reason why, at one point, Oprah commanded the reasoning and libido of 51% of the population, why Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket looks like a giant dildo, and why graffiti near 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, used to read “Steve Died for Your Sins.” He unquestionably did.

But there’s an even deeper reason Hubbard and comparable messiah figures are able to operate until they go out of fashion and either become despised by the crowd that once adored them or go insane: no one has any stable concept of what’s real, including the gurus themselves. They’re making up the landmarks and mapping the terrain as they go along.

In fact, the fluidity of unreality, virtual reality, meta-reality, fandom, curated identity, and the floating demimonde of the so-called “knowledge marketplace” underlying these things is so popular and ubiquitous that it has become more convincing than religion ever was. We’re looking for the next lifehack, supplement, or belief system to stave off our perpetual nervous breakdown because we have no idea what’s going on. Sign me up. Get my Level 1 Proofreader’s Certificate and Associate Membership Card.

Black Mirror, Ready Player One, and The Matrix are horrifying mostly due to what they imply about this desperate capacity to turn anything into religion, even down to the most banal and mechanistic corporate sensibilities. And pandemic lockdown culture has not helped. When Covid spread across Asia, I was living in Bangkok and noticed a line of herbal supplements being marketed in the malls by a popular Indian guru as protection against the disease. The layout was very glossy. There were life-sized cardboard standups of the smiling guru presenting his product at pharmacy endcaps. People were buying it because they didn’t know what was real. The guru was defining the problem and offering a solution. L. Ron Hubbard would have loved Covid-19.

As Mencken put it, “There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.” But what they offer is certitude and certification in an uncertain, uncertificated world.

On Hustling in the Wrong Profession

Why hustle culture is toxic (and how you can escape it) | Hustle, Culture, Toxic

This morning, I read an essay by a fellow freelancer-ghostwriter on how depressing the paid writing hustle is and how editors can screw your work up after you’ve exhausted yourself querying and pitching articles. I sympathize. It’s rough. At the same time, if you’re doing it right, you shouldn’t feel exhausted and demoralized all the time.

Freelancing is a hard way to make a living—at least as hard as any other job people do. But it’s harder for some than for others, which is important to bear in mind. Living this life means accepting constant rejection, dealing with assholes, getting cheated at least some of the time, being prudent with your money months in advance (in case you hit a dry spell), writing for hours every day, and being willing to produce what other people say they want you to write (writing to spec) instead of what you may want. The reason I rarely complain about all this is because, deep down, I like doing it. The aggravations don’t get me down.

I would not be a good concert pianist, race car driver, or nuclear physicist. I can accept that. But people tend to think being a freelance writer is some kind of stage magic that anybody can learn if they just apply themselves to the grind. Not true, if you don’t want to be a miserable wreck. All jobs are hard, no matter what they are. The trick is to know yourself well enough to find the good kind of hard as opposed to the horrible rat-race kind.

Charles Bukowski famously said, “Don’t try.” It’s on his gravestone. He meant that there is too much of everything in the world. You don’t have to do something you’re not good at. Don’t try to be what you’re not. Let who you really are guide you and you won’t have to hate your life. This is so true, especially for freelancers and writers. It doesn’t mean “Don’t work hard.” It means work hard in the area that resonates most powerfully with who you are. Then take it as far as you can. When you do something for its own sake, without obsessing about getting ahead, you don’t have to hustle and scheme. It’s a joy in itself. And the drawbacks become, if not negligible, then at least less important.

What takes an enormous amount of hustling and self-contortion for you—networking, pitching, worrying, querying, dealing with rejection, dealing with horrible people—takes less for someone else, who may be better connected or generally better suited for that particular profession or venture. Luck also matters. And fate. Every auditioning actor will tell you this. Every magazine writer will, too.

The opportunity cost of having to spend your energy on breaking through obstacle after obstacle can be avoided with a bit of self knowledge. You don’t have to (actually, you shouldn’t) spend your days feeling like the world is handing you a raw deal. Instead, find the thing that seems fluid, open, and easy, then do it as intensely and diligently as you can. Someone else will try to hustle for that, but you will leave him or her behind because, at least for you, it’s as natural as breathing.

Hustle culture comes from people being in the wrong place, not realizing it, and stubbornly grinding forward, demanding that things work without acknowledging the truth: not everyone is meant to be good at everything. But you’re good at something. Do that.

One Cat at a Time

A story about volunteers.

Of all the things I’d hoped to accomplish that fall, digging a six-foot-deep moat around the family house wasn’t one of them. But the governor decided to end all Covid restrictions in the middle of the pandemic, causing the state’s heavily armed population to take it as a sign and go berserk. When that happens, you dig a moat. So I couldn’t argue with Uncle Red’s decision to fortify the premises. Nevertheless, there were problems.

My own troubles started a week before I moved in. Hauberk College cancelled its spring semester in the interests of social distancing and good hygiene. So instead of moving into the dorms the second half of my freshman year like I’d planned, I found myself staying at the house my mother once described as “a ramshackle pit” and trying to spend as little money as possible. I was supposed to have received a dining hall meal plan along with my freshman year scholarship. Given my Aunt Phoebe’s cooking, I think losing that meal plan depressed me the most.

“Put your back into it,” Uncle Red said, “or I’ll make you mask up!”

I nodded and tried to approximate what “putting your back into it” looked like, but I was tired. I’d been shoveling my assigned section of moat since morning, my back hurt, and I’d gotten blisters on my hands. This, I thought, is no way to start an adult life. If I’d wanted to dig moats for a living, I could have joined the Peace Corps like my brother.

In my uncle’s view, masking up was the ultimate dunce cap, fit only for democrats, Marxists, social justice activists, and professors. In this branch of my family, wearing a mask to protect against Covid was a sign of weakness, wrong thinking, unworthiness, and shame. I had a pack of five N95 masks in my suitcase, but I hadn’t taken them out.

It was enough that everyone knew I was attempting college. Anything more and I felt the generosity of my relatives would become strained beyond the bounds of credulity. As Uncle Marty liked to say, I’d be just another “freak peckerhead.” And nobody wants that. More importantly, I’d also be out on the street.

“That’s hardpan you’re digging!” yelled Aunt Phoebe from the porch. “Too hard for you!”

“No doubt about it!” yelled Uncle Marty.

“You got that right!” yelled Uncle Red.

I said nothing and kept trying to look like I was putting my back into it.

Uncle Red was called “Red” because his first name was “Redding.” There was a story behind it that no one ever talked about. He was short, had a beer belly, small eyes, and a round face. He was also completely bald and never had anything close to red hair. Uncle Marty looked completely different: tall, muscled, with blue eyes and a thick blond goatee that made you think of King Arthur.

Aunt Phoebe, on the other hand, was completely gray and starting to develop a stoop from osteoporosis. She liked to say her bones were getting smaller along with her brain. None of them looked like each other. And none of them looked like me. I sometimes wondered whether any of us were actually related.

The moat was wide enough for two grown men to stand on the bottom shoulder to shoulder. We knew this because that’s exactly what my uncles did. They checked the depth with a wooden yardstick as we progressed. We dug our way clockwise around the house; past the corner of the porch; past the enormous red-brick chimney that started at the base of the foundation and went up six feet above the roof; past the completely rusted propane tank, which everyone agreed would someday explode; past the back porch and the far corner of the house, gray and disintegrating like the old barns you saw from the highway; and back around to the front. It didn’t dig like hardpan. The ground was relatively soft. Still, it was an enormous project to attempt in one day.

When we found our way back to the front yard, the ouroboros could almost bite its tail. So we broke for dinner. It was ham and cheese sandwiches, brought out by Aunt Phoebe on her Franklin Mint 2016 commemorative platter, featuring Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln healing the sick of Bombay. Above them, the good Lord smiled down from his golden throne in the clouds. Aunt Phoebe liked to joke about it, but I also noticed she kept the platter on a decorative stand by her boom box over the sink.

My uncles and I sat on the edge of the moat, our feet dangling down like kids at swim class taking a break. There was a festive air, a certain delight that Uncle Red and Uncle Marty never seemed to show. But when they looked at what we accomplished they smiled and high-fived each other.

Back on the porch, Aunt Phoebe turned and yelled, “Eat up, boys, but don’t take too long!”

“Not a chance!” yelled Uncle Red.

“We’re on it!” yelled Uncle Marty.

Then the three of them looked at me. I raised my fist in solidarity and took another bite.

Uncle Red, Aunt Phoebe, and Uncle Marty, lived together in the house about 40 miles northeast of Hauberk, Missouri. It was a two-story Coronado foursquare build by the Louis Company for my great-grandfather in 1912. He moved there from Kansas City with the expectation that the town of Hauberk would eventually grow along the railroad in his direction, raising the value of the land. That proved, however, to be a precipitous assumption. The property was the last bit of an unproductive patch, which before the Great Depression had been optimistically designated as farmland, but which was now just a flat plain of grass and birch trees with dry creeks and too many crows.

The house had been going to seed for the last 80 years, just like our family, and was known to be an area where you might get threatened with a .410 for trespassing. Still, Uncle Red, Aunt Phoebe, and Uncle Marty, having survived their respective spouses, retired together to the old house in the late 1990s. Since then, they seemed to have given themselves over to the kind of melancholy one feels when the good old days are unquestionably gone forever.

When they weren’t digging moats, they were a fairly morose bunch and they were avoided at all costs by the rest of the family. I’d learned that the feeling was generally mutual; though, the three of them maintained a reverence for our grandfather and his property that bordered on religion.

They did not keep the place up, but they did admire it greatly, if only in the abstract and usually in the evenings after a certain amount of alcohol. The house signified the last good, common, family thing in their lives. They were not well off, but they treated the old homestead not unlike one of the great estates of a lost European nobility, a sad reminder of a grander, more glorious age.

“You’re never gonna get it done!” Aunt Phoebe yelled.

“I know!” yelled Uncle Marty.

“Damn shame!” yelled Uncle Red, pitching his crumpled can of Bud into the open leaf bag in the center of the front lawn.

I looked at the remaining distance we had to cover, maybe about 15 feet, and realized that Aunt Phoebe would have said that even if we’d only had one shovelful left. That was just her style, the same way that my uncles agreed with her no matter what she said. I was a guest in the house, yes, but I was also a spectator.

When the George Floyd protests came to Hauberk and someone tried to burn down the Walmart Megastore a block west of the college, Uncle Red, Aunt Phoebe, and Uncle Marty defaulted to the fatalistic, medieval siege mentality that had been lurking in their DNA all their lives. They ran up their credit cards at the gun shop and patronized whichever local box stores were still open in order to prepare for the worst. They figured the End Times had finally arrived. It cheered them immensely.

All Hauberk was on edge. Everyone was talking about what had recently happened in Nirvana, just over the Arkansas line, where an anti-police brutality protest turned brutal and an entire strip mall went up in flames, including a bank, a nail salon, a Mongolian restaurant, and a storefront sculpture gallery featuring Remington reproductions and assorted objects of rodeo art.

Though the editors of the Hauberk Gazette condemned the violence in the strongest possible terms, stressing the need for dialogue and down-home midwestern tolerance, there was an abiding sense that anything could happen. One worried that the civil unrest, which had so recently and shockingly boiled through the country on the coattails of the pandemic, might rush inward from the coasts once again, burning everything in its path, until it all coagulated in the center of Hauberk’s main drag.

“Knees! Dig from the knees!” yelled Aunt Phoebe.

“That’s what I keep telling him!” yelled Uncle Marty.

“Absolutely!” yelled Uncle Red as he tossed another can of Bud into the bag.

Unfortunately, the moat had not been dug from the knees and it was decidedly not watertight. The 50 gallons of bituminous tar specified for that purpose in Uncle Marty’s Medieval Siegecraft for the Modern Home was not obtainable from Amazon Prime in less than a month, the local Home Depot having sold out of it two weeks earlier. We weren’t the only ones digging moats.

Things got more difficult when Aunt Phoebe strained her back boiling crab apples in an enormous cast iron cauldron behind the house. This took most of the joie de vivre out of the moat digging experience, seeing that she then parked herself on the front porch swing with a Mason jar full of ice water so she could critique Uncle Red’s and Uncle Marty’s shovel technique.

“The knees!” she yelled. “It’s all in the knees! If you don’t hurry it up, you won’t get finished before sundown! And then what?”

“I know!” yelled Uncle Marty.

“Dig like you got a pair!” yelled Uncle Red—I think to me, since he had his back to Marty and it wouldn’t have made sense had he been addressing Aunt Phoebe. But I’d learned to take nothing for granted while staying at the house. And though we hadn’t talked about it, I think we’d all seen enough zombie movies to know what happens after dark when moats are only half-dug.

Mercifully, Aunt Phoebe left me alone. Yes, I had bad shovel form. I knew it. At 19, I’d already developed what some might call “rickety knees,” which ended all career paths involving well digging, trench maintenance, basement retrofitting, pool resurfacing, and freelance latrine management well before I could investigate those brochures at the Hauberk Job Center.

Sometimes, Uncle Red called me, “boy” or “the kid,” not in a condescending way but because, to the three of them, that’s what I was and probably what I’d always be. Uncle Red often said, “A man busts his ass.” By that calculus, I was just a kid with an unbusted ass and weak knees, who’d therefore gone to college to study Marxism and smoke dope.

“You’re hopeless!” yelled Aunt Phoebe.

“Truth!” yelled Uncle Marty.

“No kidding!” yelled Uncle Red.

I did my best to put my back into it and dig like I had a pair. I shoveled as fast as I could, thinking we’d have to engineer some sort of pit trap or at least a deadfall with broken rocks and shards of glass at the bottom to stop the house-invading hordes of liberals my aunt and uncles expected any time now. In case we didn’t get the tar, my Uncle Red said they had a backup plan; though, none of them felt inclined to share it with me just yet. And I knew better than to attempt to pry it out of them. They had their secrets, jointly and severally, to be sure.

Still, in spite of the fact that none of us pleased Aunt Phoebe with our shovelry and my uncles took regular piss breaks, constantly bringing more Bud Light out from the pantry, we completed the moat by nightfall. They completely filled the plastic yard bag with their empty cans. By the end, they were, as Aunt Phoebe put it, “drunk as two otters.” Nevertheless, it was a magnificent moat, yawning, black and ominous as a skull in the dark.

I felt we would all sleep well that night—my uncles from an abundance of beer, me from physical exhaustion, Aunt Phoebe from her nightly Halcion crushed up and taken with warm milk. In the upstairs hallway, she grabbed me by the arm as we passed each other on the way to our rooms. It was dark, but we paused in a slant of light from the circular window over the stairs. Fingers digging into my arm, she warned me not to go outside if I woke up before dawn.

“Why?”

“Cause you don’t know what’s out here,” she whispered. “You never know.”

I thought Aunt Phoebe was going to caution me against falling into the moat, but I couldn’t imagine what caused her to think I might be wandering out there in the middle of the night.

“Bears?”

“Ain’t no bears in Missouri,” she said. “Leastways not around here.”

“Democrats?”

She sighed, frowned at me, then let go of my arm and shuffled down to her room at the end of the hall. One day, Aunt Phoebe would tire of my sarcasm. Then there would be hell to pay. Until then, it would be either liberals or bears or perhaps liberal bears, and hell could wait.

It was a big house, two stories up on a high footprint. The wood and flagstone front porch was painted dull clay red on a gray concrete foundation about six feet off the ground. The top floor—four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a solarium full of cardboard boxes and miscellaneous dusty junk—felt more like a third story.

I opened the bedroom window and felt the night air on my face. The window was more like a set of narrow doors with yellow glass panels. It had little French handles made of pewter and, when it was fully open, it framed my body from mid-shin. No screen. You turned both handles at once, swung both sides inward, and then it was just you and the night sky. No one, to my knowledge, had ever fallen out and broken his neck, but it was the first thing I thought of as I stood there listening to Uncle Red snoring two rooms away.

The flat blue-gray plain of dead farmland stretched out under the moon. Here and there a black copse of birch broke the monotony. Uncle Red called them “volunteers,” because the birds had dropped the seeds. The saplings grew tall and thin together like groups of people mingling at a party. My uncles were too superstitious to cut them down. When I asked, Uncle Marty just said, “You don’t fuck with the land.” And that was that.

I looked for the moat, but I could only see the edge of it if I leaned way out, which scared me when I did it. I’m not afraid of heights and old creaky houses, but there was something about how the stands of trees cast long shadows in the moonlight that made me think no one would ever notice me out there if I fell and broke something.

The room smelled like they hadn’t vacuumed since the Kennedy Administration and I wondered how many people had slept in the lumpy queen bed over the years, what their lives had been like, and how many of them might have stood at the window on a moonlit night and watched those dark stands of trees sway in the wind.

In the morning, I came down to the kitchen, feeling groggy and sore from the previous day’s agricultural labor, all that putting of my back into it and digging like I had a pair. Aunt Phoebe set out a bowl of Cream of Wheat for me with a slab of butter in the middle like a tiny radiant sun. She was in a good mood, doing the dishes, whistling, had the local conservative radio show going full blast from her ancient boom box over the sink.

I noticed she’d washed and replaced the Franklin Mint platter beside the radio. After I’d been sitting at the table for a minute, Aunt Phoebe fell back into her unconscious habit of answering the show under her breath—“Right” or “Not a chance” or “That’s for damn sure” as she moved around the kitchen. I thought it was a holy roller radio service at first. But it was just an agitated republican.

“We’re pretty much stocked up,” she said. “Nothing can touch us now!”

“What about the crab apples, though?”

Aunt Phoebe gave me a sour look. “I dumped ’em. Too much work. And I was short on jars. The squirrels’ll get ’em all before the end of the week anyhow. You’ll see.”

The speaker on the radio had a feverish, almost breathless way of spitting out his words, as if each one were a bullet. The question under debate was what the violent liberal rioters were going to do when Trump won again. A group of illiberal Marxist dissidents was supposed to be holding a sit in that evening in downtown Saint Joseph and the local militia was set to come out and prevent various statues from getting beheaded. The speaker paused, then asked with great intensity: “Will they burn YOUR town next?”

“Not this damn town,” muttered Aunt Phoebe; though it was unclear which town she meant. It was all a bit hard to take with a bowl of greasy porridge after a day of engaging in medieval siegecraft.

The moat, as I have already mentioned, was lacking a sealant, at least one appropriate for a crusader stronghold. But the backup plan was sound and had already been put in motion. My uncles returned in Marty’s Dodge Ram just as I was forcing myself to swallow the last spoonful of breakfast. Roped steady in the truck bed was a 50-gallon drum of self-hardening fiberglass resin they’d bought that morning at Complete Building Materials over in Columbia.

Uncle Red explained the plan as we looked down into the moat. “This turns to stone and it’s watertight. When we have to, you know, pour Greek fire in there and light it up, it won’t burn extra hot like with the tar, but it’ll keep it going.”

“Greek fire?”

Uncle Red lit a cigarette, squinted, gestured at the moat with his smoking hand. “An incendiary weapon first used in Byzantine warfare in the seventh century, Anno Domini. What’d they teach you at school?”

“Napalm,” Uncle Marty said and grinned. “They never expect napalm.”

“Isn’t that against the Geneva Convention?”

They laughed.

Later, we sloshed the self-hardening resin around the entire inside of the moat, got harangued from the porch by Aunt Phoebe for sloshing it wastefully and not bending our knees (“I know!” yelled Uncle Red. “Yeah! Exactly!” yelled Uncle Marty.), and got dizzy from the fumes. Then Uncle Marty took me out to see his cattery.

Two things are always true in this existence of toil and servitude, no matter who you are and no matter what you do for a living: one never expects napalm and visiting a cattery will change you. The former is true because napalm, like moats, is something out of myth and legend, something we only see on TV. No one says, “It’s looking like rain tomorrow, Bob. We better roll out the napalm.” It just doesn’t happen.

The latter is true because feral cats are sons and daughters of the goddess, Bastet, and therefore inherently divine. And 38 furry divine beings peering at you from the roof and through the slats of an ancient collapsing barn will deliver such pagan grace as to make you rethink certain fundamental assumptions and generally reconsider your life. Uncle Marty explained this to me when we got there, which also made me reconsider Uncle Marty.

He had a large black cat statue, which he’d positioned at the edge of the roof overlooking the broken side door. “Soon as I put the statue up,” he said, “they started coming. They told their friends. I’m well known.”

“You’re a cat celebrity.”

“Don’t joke.” He nodded at the Bast statue, which had been carved so artfully that the black cat sitting next to it looked identical. “She’s a goddess. She’s kind. But she’s got her dignity. You know?”

I didn’t. I also didn’t know whether he meant the black cat sitting next to the statue or Bastet herself. When we got out of the truck, the cats started meowing.

“Ancient Egypt’s always called to me. I got a ton of books on it. Started having these dreams. Then one day, I came out here to shoot some cans and I saw a cat sitting right over there.”

He pointed to a cement block sticking up about a hundred feet away, part of an old house’s foundation, what they used to call a “ghost basement.” The house got torn down and all that was left were concrete basement walls sunk into the earth. But the barn had remained, slowly listing until a tornado or maybe just age and termites caused it to definitively collapse sideways. From the look of it, one more bit of harsh weather might do it in completely.

Uncle Marty opened up five large tins of cat food and positioned them around the doorway. He talked as he washed out and refilled two aluminium water dishes of the sort the local farmers used for goats and alpacas. “I followed the cat inside here but it was gone. Then, about a week after that, I had a dream of cats in a golden temple and I knew.” He straightened up and gave me his King Arthur smile as if the rest of the story should have been self-evident.

A large crowd of cats had now formed around my uncle, some taking sips of water, some rubbing against his jeans, or nibbling at the food. A row of them looked down from the edge of the roof like vultures. Pairs of eyes stared at us from spaces in the wood. The meowing was prodigious and incessant. I’d never seen feral cats act like this. Then again, I’d never seen an ancient Egyptian cattery barn dedicated to a goddess before, either.

“You knew what?”

“I knew I touched on the infinite.”

In the evening, Uncle Red got drunk up in the attic, watching C-SPAN on the house computer. Uncle Marty disappeared to his room. And Aunt Phoebe put on the AM ballroom station, twirling around the kitchen like an ingénue of the early cinema. Contrary to what one might initially think, this was their usual routine.

It was also why I hadn’t asked Uncle Marty to explain what touching the infinite meant. After many nights of watching my aunt bow to an invisible dance partner, whom she referred to as “Mr. Godfrey,” and listening to Uncle Red have heated drunken arguments in the attic with his dead wife (Aunt Paula—I met her once when I was very young), an Egyptian cat shrine in backwoods Missouri didn’t seem unreasonable.

Aunt Phoebe and my uncles weren’t stupid. They weren’t insane. They were simply ingrown, weird, haunted by people or things long gone, by memories or regrets or fantasies. And to watch them in their evening pursuits, to pass judgement on them, even silently, seemed indecent, made me feel as though their loneliness could add to mine. So I gave them as much room as I could in that dusty old house, retreating to my bedroom after dinner to read.

My great-grandfather’s bookcases were still in the basement, preserved under dusty drop cloths and I liberated the complete Dickens in hardback, the stories of Guy de Maupassant, an illustrated Moby Dick. I kept a diary on my laptop; though, I was often uninspired and only tapped out a few lines. And that was the circumference of my nights when I wasn’t recovering from digging like I had a pair. I’d hoped to study English at Hauberk College, since reading was the only thing I ever truly enjoyed, but given a long enough timeline in that house, I felt I, too, would be holding seances, talking to ancient cat goddesses, and sharing a Coke with Mr. Godfrey.

I’d never been normal, if normal meant barbeques and baseball games. I wasn’t fond of team sports, wasn’t voted most likely to succeed at anything. Toward the end of my senior year, as I was getting ready to go away for college, after noting loudly and critically that I didn’t have a girlfriend, my mother pronounced me too smart to be normal and cast her own form of divination, part curse, part prophecy.

I would, she said, be lonely and miserable in the years to come. But there would be a time when the tables would turn and all those kids who seemed to be having fun now would despise themselves and their lives. Then it would be my turn as long as I studied very, very hard. She had that angry righteous light in her eyes when she said it. But she never foretold that a virus would sweep the world or that I’d wind up living in “the ramshackle pit” instead of taking British Literature at Hauberk College. My parents hadn’t returned my last three calls. I could only assume that they didn’t want me coming home so soon. Maybe they thought some moat digging would be good for me.

We were about ten miles out from the house on a dirt road without a name. I asked Uncle Marty if the barn was part of the family property, but he just smiled and shook his head.

“Somebody owns it,” he said. “Or nobody does.”

“Maybe the cats.”

Uncle Marty laughed, nodded. Maybe so.

How to be Good

A rhetoric professor of mine used to amuse himself by saying, “The truth is always simple.” By this, he usually meant that accurate-seeming propositions are built from small assumptions, arrayed around a central premise easy to accept as common sense. The central premise is simple. The rest is usually a complex rhetorical exoskeleton designed to protect it. He didn’t believe in a single monolithic truth. A genuine sophist, he looked for the validity of persuasive discourse.

It took a while to understand that his “simple” was shorthand for this idea. But that’s how some people communicate, by elision, ellipses, implication. It gives them room to persuade, to demonstrate, to marshal sources and mould arguments without being hampered by culturally prescribed truth narratives, attestations of belief, professions of faith, declarations of what is real, what all respectable people of good character are expected to think.

I find I’ve increasingly come to resemble my teacher in this way—not in his preference for indirect expression, but in his distrust of the “true” and the “correct.” There seems to be no shortage of sacred truths and respectable opinions in the United States right now. Everyone is suddenly in church.

Maybe it’s the Coronavirus. Maybe it’s the emotional fallout from the recent protests and riots. Maybe it’s because I’m turning 47 this year—not yet old, but no longer young—that I feel like I’ve had enough. Enough newsfeed. Enough hypocrisy. Enough banal evil. Enough stupid authoritarianism and reflexive outrage. Enough identity politics. Enough lip service and moralizing. Enough monetized nostalgia. Enough sadomasochism, dread, and consequences. Enough fake performative virtue. R. Crumb was fond of asking in his underground comics, how much can one man take? I’m at a point where I feel I can answer that, at least for myself.

I’m sick of being told what’s true and false, right and wrong—as if anyone actually knows. I think I’ll need to find a mountaintop soon, or a subterranean cavern, someplace quiet, away from all the respectable people telling me what to do, what to think, and how to feel. America is obsessed with propriety but unwilling to admit it. And it’s only getting worse.

I just read about the Arctic explorer, Augustine Courtauld, who, in 1931, was trapped in a polar weather station for months. The biography made it seem like a dreadful ordeal, and I suppose it was. But the idea of that much solitude is very appealing right now. I suppose I might feel differently after months of it. Then again, maybe not. At least, in that deep isolation, I wouldn’t be waiting in line at the confessional.

For the last few days, I’ve been thinking about Mark and Patricia McCloskey, now immured forever in the pages of the New York Post, which is where I first read about them, along with every other newspaper and social media platform in existence. They are the suburban St. Louis couple who recently brandished their guns at a crowd of George Floyd protesters.

Since first seeing the McCloskeys’ terrified vacuous expressions, I’ve felt that the fact pattern in their dumb predicament is all rhetorical exoskeleton. What really happened? Two mousy attorneys thought their house was going to be burned down by a mob and overreacted. They also happened to be white, irritating to look at, and apparently prone to making terrible decisions—just like four cops in Minneapolis not too long ago. And they could have killed someone. It seems like sheer luck they didn’t.

They said they were defending their property. They said they’d only touched their weapons twice since moving in. They said they were afraid of a “storming of the Bastille” situation (they thought of their home as an 18^th century French prison?). They said they were afraid of terrorism. They said they had guns in order to keep mobsters away (The Untouchables in suburban St. Louis?). And they said they support Black Lives Matter. Of course they do.

I imagine them saying all these things in a single exhalation, without pauses, then dabbing their faces with perfumed handkerchiefs. Honestly, Valmont, it sounds like an ordeal. Howsoever did you survive it? Well, dearest, they’re called the underclass for a reason. You have to be fair with them but stern. Violence is all they truly understand. Oh, Valmont! You ravish me!

The central premise, on the other hand, is something easy to accept: white people are afraid. It dovetails nicely with the abundance of twitchy columns and articles steaming out of the New York Times, The Atlantic and, to a slightly lesser extent, The Washington Post, which often seem more like professions of faith instead of reportage: this is what good people everywhere now believe. Rich white people are dangerous. Proof positive of what we’ve been saying all along right here in St. Louis. The truth is always simple, isn’t it?

As a white moderate liberal who believes in the marketplace of ideas, humanistic inquiry, literacy programs, diversity, the possibility of equal opportunity through non-violent reform, and the continued applicability of certain quaint democratic ideals, I’ve been accused by those to my left of willingly perpetuating a racist system (as if I were something more than a nobody with a laptop). Those to my right have called me a snowflake, among other unpleasant things, and accused me of writing thoughtless garbage. I’ve even gotten a few death threats in the post-apocalyptic hellscape of Twitter, which now just seems par for the course, especially on social media.

What I haven’t found is anyone willing to agree with me that the riots made perfect sense but the fanaticism of critical race theory does not. Kill people and their friends, families, and communities will respond in kind. They should protest. Everyone should when the police have gone feral. It’s understandable that when people feel oppressed, they’ll act out their frustration until they see changes. At least, they’ll destroy some monuments, burn some cop cars, throw the butt urn down the courthouse steps, and spray “ACAB” on the windows of the local network affiliate. Well, it’s something.

But the current woke gamesmanship being played by our corporate, managerial elite willing to indulge in the worst excesses of critical race theory in order to be on the right side of profitability is repugnant. As a fellow writer at Splice Today put it: “lots of white guilt and centering individualistic narratives of change,” a venting mechanism meant to preserve the status quo: “Class and socioeconomic privilege are preserved and movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too can only exist to support class status.” Put the right slogan on your T-shirt and you can have your BLM cake and eat it, too.

Maybe it’s better to say that, while I don’t know what’s true, I have a sense of what isn’t. It’s a sense that tells me certain perspectives are more profitable than others right now for celebrities, politicians, and brands. It tells me the only way positive changes come about is when people stop trying to leverage the trends, set aside their differences, and work together in the spirit of common humanity and good will. And it adds that such changes are never going to happen if you’re preoccupied trying to storm the Bastille or if you’re out on your front lawn with an AR-15, trying to defend it against the mob.

Mostly, I’m just as tired as anyone in this pathological country. Every government is somewhat horrible and evil. But I’m not interested in pulpits and commandments. I’m not trying to be virtuous or right. I’m not interested in today’s purity test. I didn’t even plan to be in the United States for more than two weeks. It’s been almost four months. I’ve had enough American exceptionalism and respectability to last me at least until our brave new police-free utopia hits its stride sometime in November.

Disappear Here

I lead a mostly inward existence. The part that isn’t, my small public-facing side, is bound up with my art, with what I write and submit for publication. In this way, I’m constantly reinforcing and reiterating my identity, performing it. I have to do this. We all do if we expect to survive, immersed in the strange demimonde of the writing life.

Since you never know if you’re any good and there is always someone saying you aren’t—including your own inner sadist—you have to affirmatively decide that you’re a writer and reject all arguments and criticisms to the contrary. When you can do that and put words on the page, you are one. If you can’t do that and you’re still waiting for permission, you’re not. Not yet, at least.

A big part of making that decision and then constructing your identity publicly involves not letting respectability get in the way. In 2013, feeling like I’d discovered this and that it was true, I wrote “The Discipline: In Your Head, Off the Street, and Away From the Club.” At the time, I thought I was articulating a set of beliefs and practices that could make it possible for creative people to continue in spite of the ubiquitous, overwhelming pressure to stop.

Here is the concluding paragraph. My sentences tend to get long and loopy when I’m writing Something Very Serious:

People enmeshed / immobilized in a fugue of “respectability” (in my opinion, a parasitic set of social mores and strictures that slowly consume the time and energy–life–of innocents whose only mistake was doing what they were told from an early age) will say you are crazy, unambitious, stupid, a loser. They will do this because you haven’t had the time and wouldn’t spend the effort to become a stakeholder in their hierarchy of values. I have experienced this first-hand and still do from time to time when the ripples of life-decisions I made in my late 20s come back to me. But I do not have regrets. I have largely overcome my personal demons, the emotional, familial, social fallout associated with owning my life. That’s why this is a discipline. You have to practice it. It’s not something you do once. It’s a way of life. And I want that for you if you want it for yourself.

Seven years later, I feel less certain about this. I think I was shoring up my identity for myself, talking to myself in the mirror, convincing myself. While I’ve had a considerable amount of positive feedback from writers about that essay, it now seems more like a lacuna than a manifesto—a place where the reader can deposit her anxieties and, if only for a little while, dismiss them. But the question remains: was I talking myself into or out of something in that piece? What was the real opportunity cost of deciding to set foot on this odd, widely misunderstood, extremely demanding path?

Over the years, I’ve stayed faithful to the discipline, mythologizing my life in the way of a writer trying to buffer himself against the world. A lot of creative people do this, using their imaginations not only to produce work, but also to perform their identities as artists in order to keep the cynical, draining importunities of late-stage capitalism at bay. Unfortunately, just as an actor can get lost in a role, forget himself, and believe he is the character, it’s easy to mistake self-construct for reality, map for territory.

I’ve often lost myself, performing a writerly persona. And I’ve had to return to the great voice-driven modernists I’ve always loved—Celine, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Melanie Rae Thon, Brett Easton Ellis, John Fante, Denis Johnson, Isaac Babel, Osamu Dazai, Ryu Murakami—as a corrective. In their fiction, the “constructedness” (“artificiality” isn’t quite right) of idiosyncratic first person always reminds me of the distinction between map and territory, between the “author brand,” or as Foucault says, “the author function” in discourse, and the unknowable human beings who’ve disappeared behind their texts.

As the constructed persona, I’m perfectly fine with the discipline “in my head and away from the club,” living on the edge, by my wits, freelancing and being a ghostwriter in a plague year. I’m even writing a novel based on it. I maintain a fierce, self-aggrandizing positivity and narrate myself as the protagonist of the story, on my hero’s journey, making the raw material of my life into text I hope people will find interesting.

But this is a plague year. Millions are out of work. The economy is flatlining. Although it may seem like that would have less of an effect on someone leading the introspective writing life, I’ve realized that without society, there’s nothing for me to eschew, no place get away from. Self-isolation means something different when everyone’s doing it.

The pandemic has changed everything in the course of a few months and we have changed, are changing, along with it. As Guitar Slim liked to say, “The things that I used to do, lord I won’t do no more”—not as a matter of preference, but as a matter of survival. Like most people, I want to live past next month. Yet, in order to do that, I need society to play along. And right now, society just isn’t up to it.

In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins, published a very dark, pessimistic appraisal of our future with COVID-19, observing that “After weeks in which it made sense to hope that something would happen to end this nightmare, the prospects for deliverance are more remote than ever.” He might be right. If he is, what then?

I read about drug cartels, poachers, and conmen taking advantage of the lockdown hysteria. I get into online discussions with fellow writers about whether Andrew Cuomo is doing the right thing and whether Bret Stephens knows what he’s talking about. And I ask the question everyone’s asking: if it all goes dark, what will become of us, of me?

It’s necessary to offer something to the world and receive things from it if you intend to function outside a monastery or an ashram. But, practicing my creative discipline, I’ve always felt I could be happy sitting in a small room, surrounded by books, with a narrow-ruled steno pad, a laptop, and a small refrigerator. I have a lot of memories and thoughts to explore. I have the voices of other writers always drifting around in my head and a very small circle of friends in the world who write to me. I’ve never wanted much more than that.

But these days I feel transparent and weightless, untethered. In one sense, it’s fine. I’m not afraid to die. I’ve accomplished most of the things I set out to accomplish in my life. But I would like to finish this novel. I’d like to see my third book of stories find a publisher. And even teach story writing to a few more people before I go. Those things would be nice, but they’re contingent on systems that are undergoing radical changes. I fear the old world is slipping away. I fear I am, too.

“Everything was all right for a while. You were kind.” She looks down and then goes on. “But it was like you weren’t there. Oh shit, this isn’t going to make any sense.” She stops.

I look at her, waiting for her to go on, looking up at the billboard. Disappear Here.

— Brett Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Writing the Hard Thing

If I could tell you the number of stories and novels I’ve begun writing and not finished, we’d be here too long. But “not finished” doesn’t mean “discarded.” It means what it says.

The difficulty comes when I’ve convinced myself that I’m one sort of writer (the consistent, cheerfully productive kind) as opposed the other, less glamorous (or, at least, less visible) sort—a slave to the vicissitudes of the moon or some shit, the guy with 25 ongoing projects and an inability to stop working on any of them.

I know this about myself. I tell myself that it’s all part of the bigger creative process. I imagine all these incomplete pieces fermenting, cross-pollinating, mutating. Nothing lost. Everything in motion. And I take refuge in those ideas and metaphors so I can keep working. Being a writer, I tell myself a story. But it might be bullshit self-deceit.

The Romantics smoked opium to get closer to the moon and further from the Victorian head trauma of “productivity.” And when my genre writer pals do highly Victorian social media posts that go, “Sigh. Only 10 pages today,” I wonder whether they’re writing from inspiration or simply turning a lathe in some Dickensian word factory. Productivity equals commercial success, while moonbeams are their own reward. Still, I have word count envy no matter what I do.

The problems of productivity and self-deceit are at the center of trying to write the hard thing. They are the essential obstacles in making the fiction I came here to make instead of clocking in and lathing out a bunch of words to satisfy something or someone else. I don’t want to produce that which has been assigned to me by industry, necessity, or convention. I hate obeying. But am I achieving anything in my disobedience? For that matter, is achievement even the point?

When yet another publishing industry blog post comes out sounding like the vehement Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, I feel repulsed. I don’t want to spend time creating a fucking audience platform. Being an artist is not about “closing.” Just doing the actual writing takes up all my energy. I don’t want to frame pieces of my fiction as marketable units. I want to sit in a moonbeam and make something that arises from my own unique imperatives and disposition. I want the serendipity of inspiration. I live for it. And I resist the overtures of commercialism dedicated to consumption and to bullying artists into seeing themselves as part of a service industry.

Unfortunately, I also can’t avoid wanting the world to read my work and maybe give me some money so I can feed and clothe myself. It’s terrifying sometimes. Years ago, at an AWP conference, talking with a publisher after I put out Gravity, my first collection of stories, I felt like Nunez in “The Country of the Blind”—faced with the choice of getting what I loved if I voluntarily blinded myself or seeing clearly and climbing out of the hidden valley forever. In the end, I chose to keep my eyes.

“If you want to get a second book out using the momentum of your first,” he said, “you need to complete the manuscript in less than a year. More than that and people forget who you are. You won’t be able to position it. You’ll be starting over.” Six years later, my second book was done. And he was correct: from the marketing, word factory standpoint, I was starting over. From a creative-process standpoint, those six years were predicated on the six that came before. I wasn’t starting over. I was writing something hard that had emerged from my ongoing creative process, something I couldn’t have written in under a year.

Finishing writing in one’s own time instead of in service to the word factory is difficult. Discovering one’s limitations as an artist and then transcending them is very difficult. Putting in the years is difficult. Doing this up to and beyond age 30 is not only difficult but scary. Nevertheless, all can be accomplished if one is willing to believe in something greater than the word count. One says, it’s all part of my creative process and tries to calm down. One decides not to read (or write) certain self-aggrandising Facebook posts.

Of course, there might not be a bigger process. Maybe there is only Random House, Amazon, AWP conference ugliness, building a platform, positioning and branding, and Best American Monotony. Maybe. Maybe we exist in a world full of cynical anti-creative money-making ventures, cautious art, and nothing else. It’s always possible. The thought of it sometimes keeps me up at night, especially in those blocked periods of worrying and not writing.

It’s like reading about nuclear war or the earth dying from climate change: you have no agency, no option to mitigate the damage, soulless politicians are making horrible decisions, and there is only one way this can end. Apocalypse. Tragedy. No one at the wheel. Inhuman corporations controlling everything. And death, ignominious and unnoticed, unless you get with the program and start churning out formulaic units.

Capitalism wins. It usually does. But if there is a bigger process at work in your struggle to be an artist, it can’t have anything to do with metaphors of productivity on a factory timeline. That is a reality you must not accept.

How does a writer know what’s real? Is it moonbeam or production line? Is it both? Can it be both? Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway, and David Bowie say yes. For the rest of us, maybe not. For every Warhol, Hemingway, and Bowie, there are multitudes who weren’t lucky enough to have their unique artistry coincide with commercial demand.

Hugh Howey likes to write about Wool the way Elon Musk talks about launching a roadster into space: let me tell you about my unique genius and the origin of my success. But self-publishing fame and running a car company have one thing in common that never gets discussed: they exist because they are timely. So it is with any highly lucrative creative effort. And that intersection has to do with luck. Meanwhile, someone out there is no doubt making Peking opera, but they are unlikely to be buying villas on the Riviera anytime soon. Nobody cares. Their units don’t ship. And yet they also have the favor of the moon.

Writers are especially predisposed to misunderstand what is real—what is objective versus just a moonbeam. They spend a lot of time deliberately thinking in metaphors, some more useful than others. And if they’re not paying attention to their minds, they can mistake such metaphors for objective reality (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with capitalist realism). Over-absorption in a world of imaginative metaphors can become a source of anxiety when the non-make-believe world reaches out and reminds us that we can’t live totally in our imaginations. Make your Peking opera, sure, but also accept that the six years you put into it mean nothing in terms of branding and positioning.

A writer will see something and begin to imagine things about it—everyone does this, but writers seem to do it with particular intensity—and before long the writer starts to feel like he or she knows it or, even worse, is it. Then something from the world of physics and money communicates: no, you are not that. You can’t imagine yourself to fame and fortune if you’re doing original work. You might get lucky, yes, and I hope you (I hope I) do. But commerce and true creativity exist in different spaces.

So I look at my 25 open projects with a bit of trepidation as the days go by. I’m turning 46 this month. I’ve published a lot of stories in magazines and two books. These have been hard things. Are they enough? Will they ever be enough?

Don’t worry, I tell myself. There’s bigger process at work. There must be.

Maybe being a success-bot isn’t the way after all?

Surpassing Meritocracy: the Artist’s Way

There are many different paths to greatness, not just the ones most commonly identified by conformist culture. As long as your basic needs are met, where you put your energy—how you pursue excellence—is completely your business. Realizing this can be difficult and gradual.

It seems true, even if we admit that discourses (value systems) will always compete with each other for dominance. And one of the most ruthless and rapacious, at least in the West, is that of “meritocracy.” A meritocracy is inherently based on an assumed set of cultural values. But you need to realize that you are free to opt out of those assumed values. What the masses consider to be good doesn’t have to define your life.

If you don’t accept meritocratic cultural values, merit-based judgments by those who do are irrelevant. In other words, it is a mistake to impose the rules of a game on someone who refuses to play; though, because discourses will compete with each other, people will usually try to impose their personal values-discourse on you. Often, they will do so because they’re not aware of alternatives. They may not even remember the moment they chose to buy in. And they may not understand that imposing values on someone else is an act of violence.

Remove the question of merit (and its various implications) and the locus of meaning in life shifts (possibly returns) from an external authority to the individual. One arrives squarely within Viktor Frankl’s “Will to Meaning“—not seeking meaning / value relative to others, but exploring what is already resonant / resident in the self. “Thy Will be Done” becomes “My Will be Done,” with all the freedoms and responsibilities arising from that shift.

It makes no difference if your private world is idiosyncratic to the point at which it would seem very strange to more common sensibilities. As long as you’re not behaving like a hypocrite by harming or otherwise curtailing the autonomy of others, your interiority (including the way you choose to perceive the world outside your self) is completely yours. And it doesn’t seem outrageous to conclude that this is how it should be. If you don’t own your thoughts, can you ever own anything else? In fact, it seems that the more you personalize your unique way of seeing and acting in the world, the stronger and more persuasive that uniqueness becomes.

Because discourse is grounded in conflict and competition, this self-originating, self-describing narrative you are spinning can have a destabilizing effect on others, who may accuse you of being a delusional, a dreamer, someone out of touch with (what the dominant culture considers) reality. But if it works for you, isn’t it the right thing? Isn’t that choosing inner freedom instead of pledging fealty to ideas and to a lifestyle that was designed (or emerged) without you particularly in mind?

Walking away from a meritocracy takes a lot of courage and effort. Because you are a social being, it can involve a certain amount of suffering, alienation, and lonesomeness. You risk being called a deviant, being labeled as a disaffected undesirable. Even if you don’t agree with those judgments, they will still hurt. Hopefully, your growing curiosity about your own sui generis greatness and freedom will mitigate that pain.

You might call this the “inward path,” the “artist’s way,” or “the path beyond the campfire” which leads into dark unmapped places, where all new things wait to be discovered.

The Heat Death of a Wandering Star

A fortune teller in Northern California looked at my palm and said, “You’re going to lead an unnaturally long life.” Then she slid my money back across the table and added, “I feel bad for you.” This was in 2008 or 2009. My memory of the year is less distinct than the mournful expression on her face, how she pulled off her chintzy Madame Sofia veil, leaned back, and lit a cigarette as if to say, sorry, kid, that’s how it is.

I was supposed to pay her $30 for 30 minutes, but we sat there for almost two hours while she read my tarot cards. By the time she got around to looking at my hands, she’d already told me three important things about my future. I was going to travel across an ocean. I was going to do things no one in my family had ever done. And I was going to outlive everybody I knew. As of 2018, two of those three predictions have come true.

It’s amazing how quickly life can change. You leave the house every day and say, this is the job I do. This is the market where I shop. This is the person I live with. These are the faces I see as I walk down my street. This is the field with daisies nodding in the wind. This is me. For the moment, at least, this is me.

And if you succeed, if you’re healthy and disciplined and dedicated and proficient, if you don’t weaken and get that regular colonoscopy and save your money, you might last long enough to see all your variables change. Then you’ll say, this is me—isn’t it? But you won’t know how to answer. You’ll remember the fortune teller saying, “I feel bad for you,” and you’ll understand what she meant. You won’t know how to recognize yourself. You’ll be a survivor. And nobody actually ever wants that. The last man standing is, by definition, all alone.

Some of us die and are reborn in a single lifetime. In my four-and-a-half decades, I’ve already lived several full lives, played roles that had perfectly formed inciting incidents, climaxes, and denouements, which in earlier times or in other places could have described the total breadth and depth of a person’s lived experience. I’m 44 years old, not too old but not that young, either. Most days, I look 10 – 15 years younger than that. Is that good?

I spend a lot of time lost in my own head, reading, walking around and looking at things. And I’ve managed to orchestrate a life where I can do that. I can become fascinated by very simple experiences, the wind in different kinds of trees, for example, or the way sound echoes on the canal beneath my bedroom window. There’s a lot going on everywhere you look. Sometimes, it’s hypnotic. Sometimes, it’s beautiful. Sometimes, it makes me want to scream for a real long time. The world is too much. It isn’t interested in making sense or being rational. We’re the ones who make it matter. But do we really?

I don’t recommend going to fortune tellers very often. If they’re good, you’ll know too much. If they’re bad, you’ll be wasting your money. If they’re stupid, you’ll feel stupid. And if they’re clever, you’ll feel even more stupid. A fortune teller is like a bad pizza. You paid for it. So you’re going to eat it. You might feel disgusted afterwards. You might not want to talk about the experience. You might want to put it away in the file labeled Decisions About Which I Will Feel Forever Ashamed and vow never again. But you’ll probably be back.

It’s how magical things work. It’s how art works. You go see the performance piece at the museum and it has some guy drenched in urine and suspended upside-down by fish hooks from the ceiling for hours over plaster of Paris horses having sex. And you think, wow, that is neither pleasing to the eye nor conceptually interesting. It’s pretentious and it’s trying way to hard to be something that isn’t boring. You write scathing things about it on your blog. You try to put it out of your mind because you know that every minute you spend thinking about it is a minute you’ll never get back. But six months later, you go, I wonder what’s showing at the museum. So do you want anchovies on your plaster horsefucking pizza this time? Of course you do. Want to know the future? Just let me shuffle these cards.

I took piano lessons as a kid. I was very serious about them. My teacher was a professor in the music department at the university. He was a lot like Mr. Rogers. He radiated that improbable blend of whipsmart intelligence shrouded in simplicity and humor. He was a remarkable man, a truly gifted person who knew how to appreciate life. And one of the things he really appreciated was teaching children classical piano. I learned an immense amount about how to be a decent human being just by spending time with him.

I remember us sitting in a room with about 50 grand pianos. He played a single note and we listened to it until it passed away. Then we discussed its shape, its color, its temperature. There was an entire life in that sound, a whole universe from the big bang to the last chapter of the Book of Revelation with dinosaurs and empires and prophets and an Industrial Revolution and fiber optics and climate change and insane politicians and Mad Max and the heat death of a wandering star. All we had to do was listen. And, like gods, we knew we could always play another note—that, in fact, we or someone of our great pantheon would play another one and would inevitably bring another cosmos into being.

Years later, far away at a different university, I’d study the Metaphysical Poets and I’d encounter Thomas Traherne’s poem, “Shadows in the Water.” It contains these lines:

I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seeméd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.

And I’d write a half-baked undergraduate essay on the metaphysics of sound as expressed through the semiotics of Traherne’s mirror imagery. Fabulous. The only important thing about it was that I remembered listening to my piano teacher play that note when I read “Thus did I by the water’s brink/ Another world beneath me think” and thought: exactly. Our second selves these shadows be. The gods look down from Olympus and see their reflections in us as we, in turn, look and listen to our own universes encapsulated in the breadth of a single note—as above, so below. Quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius. I’ve lived many lives, been reborn into many universes. Godlike, I’ve brought universes into being.

All being depends on context, which is to say, on the existence (meaning) of a universe. One of the many reasons I love Carl Sagan is that he said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” This is as true for the pie as it is for the pie maker—they both depend on the existence of a universe to contain them and give them meaning. By extension, if the pie maker is the last man standing in his universe, all meaningful correlation between the existential condition of the pie and that of the universe eventually breaks down.

In short, one can only eat one’s own apple pies in solitude for so long before one goes insane. The existence of a pie implies both future and past in space: in the future, someone will sit in a landscape and eat the pie which the pie maker made in the past. Because of this, if you succeed at the game of life, I will feel bad for you.

You will outlast your universe; your apple pies will no longer be meaningful. You will survive and will have no one for whom you can make an apple pie or anything else. You will see the sky fall, the stars burn out, the destruction of the world. You will be haunted by memories of times long past and people you loved and wars that no one remembers. That is a truly horrible fate. Do you want to win this game? For your sake, I sincerely hope not.