A Reason for the Screaming

“Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; in this love, you are like a knife with which I explore myself.”

― Letters to Milena, Kafka

My favorite people are the broken ones, the messy ones, those who speak before they think, who seem to breathe in experience and breathe out emotion, who make glaring mistakes, who embarrass themselves and still manage to be kind. I especially love those who have the presence of mind to be otherwise, but who affirmatively choose a way of being that accentuates their flaws and uncertainties, because they seem to have discovered other, more valuable things on which to spend their energy. Such people are beautiful and far too rare. They also seem to suffer more than most people, as they explore themselves, not with a flashlight, but with a scalpel.

I don’t mean to imply online performative awkwardness, which is a deliberate style (almost a form of marketing) that ultimately comes across as studied, cynical, and inauthentic. I’m not talking about anything created in a book publicist’s brainstorming session or by an agency trying to associate social justice with light beer. Nor am I talking about those who suffer from the sort of social anxiety, shyness, or autism that painfully prevents them from experiencing a full range of human experience.

Rather, I mean to point out the sort of person who calls herself “Ursula the Bear Shaman” and stands up among scientists at an ecological conference to give George Monbiot a stern talking to (as actually happened); the eccentric professor who’s willing to be laughed at by his students in order to induce suspension of disbelief and thereby dramatize his subject matter; the daughter of a poet friend who can’t speak to men without first criticizing them up front (bizarre and off-putting but actually very amusing when you come to expect it); or an amateur stand up comedian I know, who isn’t funny but who keeps trying. I’d never discourage him because it’s the trying that interests me, not the flat jokes. It’s the decision to try, the choice one makes to discard certain social mores, that I find compelling.

We shake our heads. Such people are trying—trying our patience. We want to say, “Boundaries are good. Boundaries are important. Close your mouth. Open your eyes and ears. Learn what’s appropriate. And please do not stand on that part of the carpet. You’re messing it up.” But I think that’s shortsighted. People are generally lovely, creative, and endearing. But, like flowers, they need the right conditions to demonstrate this. Deep breath. Sometimes, you can smell them at a distance, for better or worse.

Even when they’re being petty, resentful, cruel, egotistical, or otherwise ugly, there can be an aesthetic to it, a shape to their behavior that causes you to say (or maybe just to think), “Yes, you are a repugnant, perhaps loutish, perhaps unnecessarily hysterical, perhaps wrongly jealous, perhaps hypocritical, perhaps exhausting individual, but you’re doing it so well. Bravo!” And, of course, when they (and we) get tired of playing those roles, we can play others. The script is endless. The cast is as big as the world. At some point, we think everyone will choose to play the holy fool. It’s a favorite role of mine.

Certainly there are creeps and degenerates, those whose brokenness has rendered them toxic or harmful. We don’t want them hurting people because they lack self control. We don’t want their tiresome problems always within our field of vision unless we’re being paid by the social panopticon to supervise them in some way. As a friend once said about a strict Zen temple that seemed packed with angry obsessive-compulsives deeply concerned that their arm hairs and the fibers on their trousers all pointed the same way, “Some people just need a prison cell to feel right.” If one is not provided for them, maybe they’ll create one by virtue of their actions or in their existing groups. That’s not the sort I’m talking about, either.

My favorite people aren’t trying to consume or enslave others. They’re not abusers or parasites. It’s hard to love a parasite, which is one of the fundamental messages of the traditional vampire myth. The vampire might look young and beautiful, but it’s actually a corpse that wants to drink your blood to perpetuate its wretched antisocial existence. And so, like all folk myths, it presents the audience with a cautionary choice: go for the pretty, superficial thing that will undo you or accept the harsh truth.

Sadly, harsh-truth-accepting can also become reified into a self-defeating, self-righteous personal style, where we don latex Oliver Cromwell masks and get off on shutting down the theaters. If we can’t have our own fun, maybe we can ruin everyone else’s as a kind of anti-fun and that will be almost as satisfying as the genuine article, like drinking someone’s blood just to keep shambling along to the next victim. Accepting reality (or a reality) is a good thing, but performing the Person Who Faces Hard Truths is back to selling light beer for equity and inclusion while auditioning for The Witch.

I’m trying to describe the sort of person who has dispensed with many, if not most, social filters, but who has done so in a conscious way. This makes me think of the Egyptian deity, Set, who was the god of foreigners and some say an ancient symbol for the conscious mind. Being conscious is more than just being deliberate. In a Viktor Frankl will-to-meaning sense, it’s accepting the deep existential responsibility of investing life with depth and purpose. In Man’s Search for Meaning (one of my favorite books), Frankl provides what might be the most useful (if existentialist) definitions of consciousness ever formulated:

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

That’s more than mere deliberation. That’s a one-pointed engagement with experience. It’s the heart of mindfulness. It’s “be here now” taken to an inevitable, ontological extreme. It’s a rejection of social vampirism and an acceptance of a type of transpersonal imperative focused on the individual. When I see this image of Horus and Set advising Ramesses III, I see the tension of social appropriateness versus individual consciousness, like the superego versus the id, resonant in the mind.

On the left, Horus, the ultimate pharaoh, the embodiment of the State (the state of affairs) and its collective moral, social, even municipal will. And on the right, Set, whose therianthropic form has never been conclusively defined because consciousness is protean and ultimately beyond type.

Here, one thinks Ramesses III must be faced with the core Frankl-ian problem: “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” There’s what the group (the State, the state of affairs in one’s life) dictates. Then there’s what the individual’s conscious mind has deemed important.

In this essay, I’m celebrating those who lean a little away from Horus and a little more towards Set, a little away from what they think they should be thinking and doing and a little more towards meaning. So even if, as the Smashing Pumpkins sang in 1997, “The world is a vampire/ sent to drain,” transforming us into angry rats in cages, let’s be quality angry rats.

I was going to send Andrew Marvell’s brilliant “To His Coy Mistress,” another favorite, to a literary friend of mine today because I have no doubt this person—being the good sort I’m talking about here—would read it and appreciate it. Instead, I’ll excerpt the last few lines for everyone who reads this essay—because it applies to all of us leaning away from the Horus of propriety towards the Set of conscious meaning, saying, doing, and appreciating what matters most instead of what merely passes.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

On Going to Parties

Don’t.

Hear me out. I know: parties are an opportunity to hook up and possibly get drunk or high in a situation where you can feel less alone. In some cases, going also fulfills a social duty. At least one person wants or needs you to be there. Or you feel obligated to make an appearance because if you don’t there will be social or professional consequences. Maybe that’s where the deals are being made. Or you go because all your friends (the people you see regularly when you’re not at parties) will be there and you’re afraid you will seem alien and awkward and will become a target for gossip if you stay home. Or you go because you’re secretly bored or depressed, which worries you and makes you think a party will be good medicine. Note: it never is.

There are other reasons, of course. But these seem to be the most common ones. And sometimes these reasons are good, which is to say, not anxiety-provoking or depressing or otherwise liable to leave you with an emotional scar and a bad memory. But think about the parties you’ve attended. I mean, the ones you can remember. How many of them can you look back on and say “That was a good time” without certain regrets, without a flash of pain, like running your tongue over a sore tooth?

Maybe you’re an extrovert and you don’t agree with this at all. Maybe you like to say “I love parties!” the way you say “I love shopping!” or “I love parades!” or “I love concerts and riding the big roller coaster and telling jokes to the whole room!” Sure. You have an amazing life, oh thou Paragon of Well-Adjusted Exuberance and Charm. But even extroverts get the blues and, for the rest of us, it’s not that simple.

Even if you rate on the manic end of the social spectrum and regard filling the air with words as one of the best things in life, you’re not immune to darkness. In fact, I suspect the loudest, most visible attention magnets are sometimes the most sensitive. They feel, somewhere, perhaps inexpressibly, that there are things slithering down there in the dark. They’ll do anything to remain on the surface where life is bright and cheerful. And who can blame them, even if a certain obnoxiousness and studied insensitivity is part of their armor? As an unfortunate ex-girlfriend of mine used to say, “I like to keep it easy and breezy.” Still, just because you turn up the television when you’re by yourself doesn’t make the madness disappear. It will be there no matter what you do. But, by all means, turn it up to eleven and pour yourself a stiff one.

On the technique of avoiding parties, there is ultimately little to be said. Just stay home and read a book. A book won’t stab you in the back at 2:00 AM by seducing your best friend. A book won’t demand you perform the Esoteric Rites of the Porcelain God in someone’s weird guest bathroom while people continuously pound on the door. A book won’t have you riding a bicycle for a month until your arraignment. A book won’t gift you with questions you can ask yourself for the next 20 years.

Why?

Why did I go?

Why did I drink?

Why did I say or not say that?

Why couldn’t I have foreseen what would happen?

Why the aftermath, the fallout, the inability to ever speak with so-and-so again?

Why the difficult conversation the next day? We were drunk. It’s not you. I’m just not looking for a relationship or anything at the moment. It was just . . . a party. You know?

Chapters 14 – 17 would have treated you better. There are no repercussions that follow reading, having a cup of tea, and going to bed. You’ll wake up the next day feeling better. You will be blissfully unaware of the catty gossip, the betrayals, the bad decisions, the inside of the drunk tank. You will have all your teeth. Your brain cell count will hold relatively steady.

This is not to say you should become Fernando Pessoa and spend all your time staring at raindrops and probing the dark vicissitudes of your soul—though that wouldn’t necessarily be a waste of time. Surely, it would be better than listening to Bob tell a joke about his cousin’s lawnmower. Drink! Or nodding while someone bitches about a politician. Drink! Or smiling at a not-unattractive person who might, after a certain amount of tequila, decide you are also not-unattractive. Drink!

Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink! So you don’t have to see. So you don’t have to know. So you don’t have to feel. Because otherwise, even if you suspect your brain cell count may be in precipitous decline, you will understand that parties are a fool’s game.

“I was in a uniform, a costume, pretending to be the boyfriend, taking a year’s worth of classes I had no interest in, disguising myself: I was an actor and none of this was real.” — Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards

Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety

A colleague of mine, a self-employed commercial artist and science fiction writer I will call “Jim,” recently declared, “If you’re a man getting close to your 50s and you haven’t done something yet, don’t say you’re doing to do it someday because you probably won’t.” Jim was criticizing another guy in the same industry, who he doesn’t like and who seems to be loudly and visibly struggling in his career.

Strangely, Jim is also getting close to his 50s, hasn’t done all the things he wants to do, and is also existing paycheck to paycheck, trying to live off his self-published work (which is quite good, in my opinion). The difference between them is the other guy whines loudly and constantly plugs his GoFundMe, while Jim works harder and (mostly) swallows his frustration.

Jim’s comments on social media are usually criticisms of people who complain about their difficult lives instead of working hard like him. I can accept that attitude. If anyone has earned the right to be scornful of the weak, it’s someone who started off in a weak position and made themselves strong or, in Jim’s case, perhaps marginally stronger. Still, it doesn’t feel good when his angst rises and he starts punching down.

His pronouncement above sounds like flinty entrepreneurial wisdom—Yoda in a self-made, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vein: do or do not (in your career, in your life); there is no try. But I know his criticism and anger are rooted in his own insecurities, not in some external source. We’re always the most critical of our own family, our own friends, our own professional colleagues, members of our own communities and cultures because, when they fail, it makes us feel like we’re next.

Jim was, to use a trendy term, “triggered,” and he had to release the vapors. We all have that friend who tries to speak like a philosopher or social critic as a way of purging anxiety and legitimating his concerns. Sometimes, I do that, too. So I’m not trying to be inordinately critical of Jim or except myself from a behavior that seems common among sensitive people, particularly artists and writers. If you’re not bothered by something, you usually have little motivation to write or speak about it publicly, especially on a blog or in a magazine op-ed or on social media. But in order to understand the criticism Jim’s making, we also have to know something about arts communities and social timing.

A creative community, whether physical (like a writer’s colony, a brick-and-mortar magazine, or a college art program) or on social media, is a perpetual knife fight in a submarine. It goes without saying that in every creative field, money is always tight, careers are always precarious, hyper-competitiveness is the rule, commercialism undercuts everything, and exploitation is a fact of life.

These hardships and uncertainties naturally produce immense anxiety, since survival is always at issue on some level, even when you ostensibly “make it” and get famous. As the actress, Jewel Staite, drolly notes on her Twitter profile, “I like routine, predictability, and living a non-stressful existence, which is why I’ve chosen the film industry.” That’s darkly funny. But it’s also true: life as an artist isn’t simple or calm. You don’t get job security, even when people know who you are. You’re always on the make.

Keeping this in mind makes it easier to see how tearing down other creatives can become a Malthusian side hustle. If they’re wounded, the instinct may be to kick them where it hurts. If they’re down, put your foot on their back. Do unto others before they can do unto you. More table scraps for you that way. You’ll feel less vulnerable, less likely to die in poverty and obscurity, less hopeless, lost, and ashamed that you ever considered yourself worthy to live a creative life.

If publicly criticizing others relieves your constant, grinding dread, even if only for a moment, it will be tempting. But there’s a problem with that way of being, apart from its meanness and craven pettiness: it makes you less able to do your own imaginative work. Competitiveness and the anxiety that stimulates it erodes creativity. It demands your emotional energy, the power you should be channeling into your creative process. And it makes you feel like you have to court public visibility at all costs to protect yourself from others like you. It brings to mind Putin parading around his nukes, saying don’t mess with me. I’m serious business. That’s exhausting. Artists should not have nukes.

This is why I have generally avoided arts communities; though, social media has put most writers like me in a perpetual online detention camp with my peers (and the current surge of AI art paranoia isn’t helping one bit). The pandemic only exacerbated the tensions and forced online interactions that would not have been advisable in any other era. Add the wave of self-conscious, humorless, social-activist writing still moving through pop-culture and the creative life seems nothing but an exercise in misery.

Western, middle-class, social timing says that by certain decades of life, one should have certain things and be certain things. But very few people will admit that they fall short of those ideals. One cannot log onto Twitter or Facebook without seeing some financial marketing come-on that goes, “How many millions will you need to retire?” In other words, how much money will you need to avert an ugly humiliating end after you retire? Millions? Most artists and writers have thousands (or hundreds) in the bank. Some, who are actually very gifted and good at what they do, live below the poverty line.

So I think I understand Jim when he says if you haven’t done a thing by 50, you aren’t going to. He’s not talking to you or me. He’s talking to himself. Because he’s thinking about social timing and emoting like a neurotic artist in a creative community, wondering if he’s destined to die in the gutter.

While I don’t accept the assumptions that go into the success / failure binary encouraged by middle-class social timing—I think it’s a little more complicated and there’s more room to live how you want to live, if you’re willing to make compromises—I also think it’s better to work hard than pump your GoFundMe for sympathy change. But I feel sad when I see a talented colleague desperately cutting down some other poor sap who’s just trying to make the rent any way he can.

We get one life. It isn’t over ’till it’s over. And ultimately we get to do what we want as long as we’re willing to accept the consequences. That means, if you really love being an artist, you’ll choose art. The hard part is making that choice in a relaxed, generous way.

The Inner Work of Being a Writer

The transition from dilettante to serious artist is always indistinct. As with any art form, one becomes what one does. One becomes a writer by saying, “I’m a writer” and then writing. I suppose one becomes “serious” after demonstrating or announcing one’s seriousness at some later date. But isn’t it a little absurd to say, “I’m a serious writer”? It immediately raises the question, “How serious?”

To which one may respond: I’m dead serious, more serious than a heart attack. So serious I got two degrees in it. So horrifically, agonizingly, putridly serious that I’ve kept doing it through poverty, flood, plague, and famine. More serious than a white sale in June. More serious than the fine print. Hell, I am the fine print. I’m a serious dude. It’s my thing. I might as well put it on my business card: Serious Writer Since 1997. That’s over two decades of seriousness, okay?

Maybe that is the required declaration, the necessary attestation of commitment at the necessary volume to prove you’re the real deal. Because you have to prove it, right? Because no one can assume how serious you are by just looking at you the way they might if you were some other sort of professional. No one’s a part-time brain surgeon. No one does constitutional law as a hobby. No one flies for Lufthansa as a side gig. No one asks how serious a nuclear engineer is. When Red October is about to go under the ice, no one says, “Sure, but how serious is the captain?”

In the arts, however, people always wonder. Some journalist, critic, competitor, or professor is always ready to say, “You Don’t Deserve to Live was an entertaining novel, but it’s not serious.” And then everyone must nod as if that makes sense. This is probably because no one will ever truly agree on how to define a serious writer producing serious writing. No one has a clue.

Does money show it (James Patterson)? Do numerous film adaptations of your work show it (Stephen King)? How about literary and cultural iconicity (Alice Munro, Bret Easton Ellis)? What about your books frequently showing up on university syllabi (Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose)? What about your writing having been convincingly marketed as a “modern classic” such that it will one day be hermetically sealed in the basement of Cheops for post-apocalyptic archaeologists to dig up (Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt)? Where’s the benchmark for quality? Who can say? I can say I like some of these writers and dislike others. But I like a lot of things and people, many of which will no doubt be adjudged “not serious” as soon as we can determine what that is.

Maybe no one asks Alice Munro whether she’s a serious writer anymore because she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. Maybe that’s the only reliable standard. No one argues with the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel committee called her a “master of the short story” and said she revolutionized modern literature. Of course, three years later they said as much about Bob Dylan. Three years between literary revolutions can make one’s head spin, but these are interesting times. Next, the Nobel committee may award Munro a prize for her influence on folk music. Then we can all relax. They know what they’re doing.

Of course, there’s still the inner, subjective, impressionistic option. At various stressful moments in my childhood, my mom would quote a line from “Duration,” my birth hexagram in the I-Ching: “[T]he dedicated man embodies an enduring meaning in his way of life, and thereby the world is formed. In that which gives things their duration, we can come to understand the nature of all beings in heaven and on earth.” She said this often enough that I had it memorized by age 12. An enduring meaning in his way of life. Maybe that’s it. “Enduring meaning” has a nice sound. It’s certainly a better formulation and standard than any of the others given above.

But Nobel doesn’t award prizes for embodying an enduring meaning in one’s way of life. It happens quietly, without parades and gold medals and book tours and exhausting four-hour dinners in New York and swarms of desperate grad students. The only revolution it can incite is an inner revolution, an inner revelation. The New York Times Book Review won’t be covering it. Alice will remain in Canada. Bob will stare at a tree outside the window and hum a little tune.

So how do you know if you’re a serious writer, if you have talent, if you aren’t wasting your time? You can never know these things relative to what people say or how much money you’re making off your work or whether the gatekeepers and critics deem you worthy. You can know whether the act of writing sometimes makes you feel good. And in that feeling, there may be a quiet, personal meaning. And if you write regularly, you may embody that meaning such that it becomes part of your life, a way of life. And then you can stop asking questions that originate in commercial and social status anxiety instead of in the metaphysics of the creative process.

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.

The Patronage of Dragonflies

A short story in B-flat minor.

To wake to the sound of dragonfly wings is a rare pleasure usually enjoyed only by dragonflies. The insects were moving in. Great powdery moths like slivers of cake stuck upside down on the lights. Caravans of black ants. A cricket under the dresser. Creamy brown roaches dazed on the carpet, crawling slowly toward the wall. I saw a millipede slither down the bathtub drain, its legs as thin as hairs. The humidity had come and, with it, all manner of flyers and crawlers, web-spinners, egg-layers. I expected nothing less; the house had been built in the middle of an old riverbed at the bottom of a canyon.

Eventually, it would rain. A tide of thick, greasy mud would swallow the front steps and climb a few feet up the sides of the house, leaving curlicue hieroglyphics flaked over the chipped white slats when it dried. With every rain, the hieroglyphs changed. If only I could have read them, I might have finally learned something. But I didn’t know a thing.

Thankfully, dragonflies do not change like the weather. Waking to the sound of one perched by my head was a sudden moment of grace. I watched it fly to the ceiling and land upside down as my Swedish girlfriend, Elli, blew into the living room.

“I told you not to open the fucking screens,” she said.

“Hi.”

She looked at me and dropped her purse on the carpet. “How do we live like this? We don’t. That’s how.” She began to blast the corners of the room with the palm-sized can of bug-spray she took with her everywhere, guaranteed to kill anything smaller than a mouse.

“Hard day at the office?”

She didn’t dignify that with a response, leaving me there on the couch under a cloud of pesticide while all the lesser carnivera rolled on their backs in agony.

I looked up, but the dragonfly had disappeared.

When she finished purifying the room, Elli did what she did every day when she got home from work. After long hours having sex in front of a webcam for money, she had to scrub every inch of herself under smoking hot water. She’d emerge from the bathroom with a vehement look on her face, her fair skin poached red and steaming, the burgundy streaks in her swept-up black hair like dim veins of fire in an ash cloud.

The emeralds of the world take flight and, with them, horseflies, fruit beetles, the slow flap of a pigeon’s wings, jeweled eyes with legs hanging down in the buzz of the early evening. I went outside, stood in front of the house, and looked across the canyon at a cloud of pale gnats churning over a burned-out car wreck so old it had no color beyond its rust—a sedan someone crashed years ago and left to cook on the canyon floor—and I wondered what died in it this time.

Having cleaned herself, Elli sat in the front window in her white bathrobe. She lit up and blew smoke at the back of my head through the screen. “Talk to me,” she said. “I hate it when you don’t talk to me.”

“In the Mississippi Delta, a dragonfly in the house is good luck. We had one today. I hope you didn’t kill it.”

“You’ve never been there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a hoodoo thing I read about.”

“Hoodoo? You don’t know fucking hoodoo. This is Oregon.”

I nodded, looked at the sky, and thought, once again, about leaving.

Above the thorn bushes and poisoned fir trees, above the cracked stones at the canyon’s lip like bad broken teeth that should never be seen, pigeons and ravens fought over the air. Behind them, gray sky and nothing but. There’s no outside world when you’re living at the bottom of a canyon in a house from 1910, quarter-sunk in the mud of an old riverbed.

A friend of mine once wrote a haiku and gave it to me as a going-away present:

Murmuring traffic’s so far from the sea,

Still, you go farther, friend.

I thought of that poem and of the sea—not here near the Oregon coast, but in the southern California of my childhood—deserted Huntington Beach on a workday, yellow-white sand combed smooth by the wind, not a footprint, just the folding and refolding of the surf, the water’s blue-green shimmer, a seagull hanging still on the air like a kite. I was 11 or 12. If I left now, that’s where I’d want to go—to that time, not just that place.

But the beach had changed. California had changed. My family, dead. My fortune, lost. Years, wasted. The moment I left Elli, I’d be a genuine bum—no place of residence, no legal tender. I had no job, no bank account to speak of, a suitcase full of clothes, and a $15,000 violin made by Sebastian Klotz of Mittenwald in 1743.

I played it for 5 hours a day—for free. I played to the canyon and to the wrecked car and the gnats. I played for the patronage of dragonflies and the largesse of cockroaches. The broken rocks looked down from the balcony and the poisoned firs in the third row suffered a little bit less, I imagined, with LeClair in the air, a little curative Handel, Mozart after a rain. Actually, the Klotz wasn’t worth a cent because I would never sell it. So come, dear gnats, a little later, and we’ll have a nice Passacaglia in G-minor for your digestion.

Elli walked up next to me and squinted at the old wreck. She’d put on a pair of cargo shorts and one of her tight T-shirts that had sassy, hep expressions across the tits. This one said, ROCKSTAR, with a big gold star underneath.

“You going to come inside or stand here all night?” She lit another cigarette off the remains of the previous one. She smoked long, thin cigarettes and never packed the tobacco down. A few unruly strands would sometimes stick out the tip. I hated watching her light a cigarette when it was like that, seeing the strands of tobacco turn orange and curl. I imagined them screaming in pain.

“You smoke like an old man in the park.”

“You think you’re funny,” she smirked, “but you’re not. Come inside.”

Elli was only half-right. I wasn’t funny. But I knew I wasn’t.

The night unfolded the way it wanted to unfold, with Elli as the sexy, affected, Swedish center of the universe, and me as a half-bystander who knows he is not funny.

We played our game of cutthroat Monopoly, in which she insisted, as always, that I double-mortgage every one of my properties. When I couldn’t make the rents, she offered me a one-time loan at 500% interest—and laughed. When my hand accidentally brushed hers, she recoiled. Tonight there would be no touching. I was unclean. Do not pass GO. Advance token to nearest utility, but do not touch the owner thereof.

Later, I went outside and played to the rocks in the heat of our portable floodlight. It immediately brought out the music lovers among the local moths and gnats, an occasional cultured mosquito.

Elli fell asleep in bed over her 2000-page fantasy novel, in which dragons with psychic powers take on human shape to save the world. I came in and sat at the kitchen table in the dark. Having opened every window screen, I felt things fly past my face, a sudden brush against the skin of my neck, the back of my hand. I stayed there, drinking beer until I fell asleep with my forehead on my arms. Sometime in the night, a coyote howled and I wished him well, one musician to another. But it might have been a dream.

Elli was gone before I woke up—gone to have sex with another woman in front of a webcam for the gratification of adolescents all across the internet. My friend Moe came by. We smoked a very large joint, and I listened to him bitch about his English comp. students, but I knew he came around just to catch a glimpse of Elli. Too late, Moe.

“I’m like, hello,this is not rocket science, you know? Fucking junior college students, man, all they want to do is smoke out and get laid.” Moe, with baseball cap on backwards, T-shirt, and beer belly, looked like the frat brother with the one-syllable nickname in all the college party movies.

“I should go back to school.” I held in the smoke.

“All my students work at Taco Bell. All of them. You want one of these kids making your tacos? That’s some crazy shit, man. They can’t even set their margins right. Too STONED.”

The trouble with Moe was that he had two masters degrees, a 3-page vita of academic honors and publications, and enough drugs in his body at any given moment to make him sublime—a pharmaceutical bodhisattva. I couldn’t do anything for him. I didn’t know what to say.

All that enlightenment couldn’t keep him from falling in love with Elli. And so the basis of our friendship had shifted from “we’re-two-losers” to “we’re-two-losers-but-you-don’t-appreciate-your-girlfriend-like-I-would-if-only-I-could-figure-out-how-to-let-her-know.” When Moe wasn’t around, she referred to him as “den smutsiga svin,” the dirty swine. When he was around, she didn’t refer to him at all.

“You know what we need? We need a road trip. When was the last time you took a road trip?”

“I think I was 19.”

“Exactly. Why don’t grownups take road trips anymore?”

“Maybe they do. I don’t know what grownups do.” I smiled at Moe to calm him. He was getting agitated, talking with his hands.

“You get married, right? Your wife pumps out a kid or three. You quit drinking and going to parties, lose all your friends, start clipping coupons. It’s sad. It sucks. You get a fat ass. You have to fight it.”

“Right.” I picked up his tweezers and used it to hold the last smoldering bit of joint to my lips.

“Yeah, just the 3 of us, just get in the car some weekend, say fuck it, drive to Vegas. What’s Vegas? 17 hours? 17 hours is child’s play.”

I nodded. “Just the 3 of us.”

Moe stopped gesturing, his hands in his lap, palms up, like two pale crabs that had died at the bottom of a tank. He looked down at them and blushed.

“You got any chips?”

“Let’s get a taco,” I said.

Parlance means a way of speaking, but nobody in Parlance, OR, seemed to talk much. Locals drifted the main street like old reeds traveling vertically on the wind. Fog in the mornings. Overcast with drizzle in the afternoons. Christmas lights on a combine harvester blinking a mile out every night.

Drive 28 miles east from The Dalles off the 84 and you hit Parlance. Actually, you don’t hit it. You miss it. It’s too small to hit. But, if you’re trying for it, if, for example, you’ve got good aim and a reason and a car that won’t get stuck in the mud, then you might succeed where so many lack the presence of mind to even fail: our town of Parlance. It seemed more like the collection box at church than a town, a few sad-looking bills crumpled on green felt, a destination that, one feels, won’t do the bills or the box any good.

Still, the town is there. Somebody went ahead and put it on the map. And, sitting in the Dixie Diner, contemplating the Russian sandwich I didn’t really want, I knew that Moe and I were two of those somebodys—two random fools supporting the local economy in cheap beer and Russian sandwiches, toilet paper, and sometimes a tank of gas.

Moe looked like he fit in, but he didn’t. Once you got past his belly, his Harley T-shirt, the Orioles ball cap with the curve he’d put in the brim, all the drug talk, and the lewd comments about assorted women, you started to see the edges of his personality. You started to see that all this stuff was only a smokescreen he threw up so people wouldn’t realize how angry he was with just about everything.

He should have been sitting in the faculty lounge at NYU in a half-buttoned Brooks Brothers with a world-weary expression on his face, listening to some over-privileged student pitch a line of bullshit. I should have been back in southern California, 10 years old in my uncle’s little pink stucco house with a tree outside my window and the Klotz singing in my hands. But I didn’t have the Klotz back then.

Moe was saying something about how happy he was that we forewent Taco Bell this time so he didn’t have to see his students, and I was nodding, but I was thinking about how life could have turned out differently if I’d owned the Klotz when I was young. Would I have been sitting in the Dixie Diner? Would I have ever polluted myself with a Russian sandwich?

Moe said something inconsequential, yet another thing. I looked at the watery depth of his eyes, at his own inner-self—which was also far away, thinking about something else—and tried to forgive him for all his anger and horniness and desperation. I thought about Elli, wondered if she was home yet, killing insects and scalding herself back to goodness, then picked up the Russian sandwich and examined it from various angles.

The question, posed: how does one live at the bottom of a canyon in Oregon?

The answer: an access road.

It wound down the side of the canyon and had enough boulders in it to support Elli’s Jeep even after a rain. The trouble was that after a rain—like the one that had just swooped down two hours ago, disappearing as suddenly as it came—thick, greasy mud formed instantly. Elli had to drive slowly. There was no other way. Her Jeep had to creep down the rocky slope like the water beetle currently vacationing in our sink. Maybe that was what frustrated her so much: she had to drive like an insect.

“Ha-ha,” I said to the large white cat that had come to clean its fur while I tuned up for the day’s practice. It wore a sky-blue collar that had a metal tag underneath shaped like a heart. The cat scratched itself and the heart jingled.

“Don’t you see the irony?” I asked no one in particular—maybe the air or the cat. I decided either the whole insect-killer-becoming-an-insect-metamorphosis-thing was lost on the cat or it had no sense of the absurd. It looked up at me and blinked, then went back to its grooming. It kept itself pure white while everything else, including my shoes and the cuffs of my jeans, was covered in dark mud. How did it accomplish this? Practice, I thought.

I drew out the opening to Spohr’s Duo Concertante in D-major as a warm-up, violating the phrasing but enjoying it. I’d learned both parts; though, the prospects of getting a second violinist down through the mud were no doubt very slim. Elli drove too far to her left and the left rear wheel of the Jeep spun, fanning ropes of mud into the air. The cat looked at her, then at me, and blinked. Elli needed more practice.

I nodded: “My thoughts exactly.”

The cat and I had an understanding. If it had had opposable thumbs, I’d have taught it the violin.

It took Elli a shower and a comprehensive house-purification before she was ready to speak in non-cusswords. Later, I sat on the couch and smirked as she strafed the corners of the room and stomped whatever tried to reach the cover of the hassock or the old floor-heater. There was something enticing about motherfucker said in a Swedish accent that I couldn’t explain. Occassionally, she’d shoot me a dark look.

“I saw the swine at the market and had to talk to him. It pissed me off.”

The white cat stopped in front of the screen door and stared in at us with a wary look on its face. Elli had scared it earlier when she’d gotten out of the Jeep, cursing, half-covered in mud, and tried to give it a kick.

“There’s something wrong with him,” she said. “I don’t know—he’s weird or something. I hate him.”

“Let’s not talk about him, okay? He is who he is.” If there were a composer named Scales, he would have been the most famous musician who ever lived. “Know who wrote this piece?”

“You’re playing a scale, you idiot.”

“Ha ha ha, I make joke,” I said, letting B-flat-minor roll up two octaves and back down, playing legato, making sure each note caressed the one after it like perfect little cushions all in a row.

“But can you say what do you get being friends with him?”

I looked over at her. “What does anybody get? What could anybody ever get? What do you get hanging out with me?”

Elli raised an eyebrow, looked away. “That’s a good question. Somebody asked me that a few days ago and I didn’t know what to tell him.”

“Is this where I get sad and withdrawn?” I felt myself smile and I turned my attention to the scale.

“I’m moving out if you don’t get a job.”

“You say that every week.”

“You have to be a man. I mean it.”

I shrugged and stood up, still working B-flat-minor. “It’s your house.”

She did mean it. But the thing that kept me from getting a job was the same thing that kept her from leaving. It was a thing, an invisible force, a blanket of inertia. It wasn’t the house.

“You’re the worst part of my life,” she said.

“Worse than your job?”

“Fuck you, asshole.”

I opened the screen door with my foot, having transitioned to D-major. The white cat gave me room, blinked, looked away.

I went for days without seeing another dragonfly.

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.