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.

Allow Yourself to be Hurt

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy. Therefore, because it’s not by mastery that they make poems or say many lovely things about their subjects (as you do about Homer)—but because it’s by a divine gift—each poet is able to compose beautifully only that for which the Muse has aroused him. . . .

That’s why God takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us.

Ion, Plato

I’ve taught fiction writing at multiple universities since 1998. And, if I taught it now, I would seem prescient to a group of beginning writing students. I’ve heard their complaints, witnessed their anxieties, seen their mistakes, and helped them through these things hundreds of times. It can seem like ESP.

Just as a karate instructor can predict what you’ll do in sparring (because the human body can only move a set number of ways), I can usually predict what my students will do in their first stories. There are only so many dramatic moves and so many ways to convey those moves in a kumite of eight pages.

I say: “Write a five-to-eight-page story from a single point of view in a human or human-like protagonist, who struggles and changes before the end.” Sometimes, I add, “Alternately, write the story so that he, she, or it misses the last chance to change and, in the process, reveals something, which is, believe it or not, tantamount to another mode of change.” I tell them all dramatic perspectives flow into each other and that all voices and moods are ultimately one voice and mood. I tell them that singularity is what they’re here to discover.

These ideas don’t completely make sense. They don’t need to. They only need to sit in the class notes, radioactive, nagging, hopefully prodding the students into exploring for themselves because I believe that’s the only way to learn. There are no canned answers. We might talk about principles and realizations, which is what I do when I teach, but the paths to those principles and realizations must be idiosyncratic. In art, especially in the art of writing, there is only that aforesaid singularity. There are only individual discoveries. There’s only going out of your mind.

In the first workshop critique meeting, some students won’t show. Others will come ready for a fight. Others, will drag themselves in, ready to weep. A few will arrive looking for validation. I’ll say nothing and let the workshop do most of the critiquing, which will inevitably frustrate everyone.

Where’s the teaching? What are we paying you for? They’ll come to me after class and may be too polite to ask those exact questions, but they’ll want to know if their story was successful (which usually means marketable, because marketing is all they know at that point). They’ll want to know if they’ve “got it.”

“I don’t know,” I’ll say. “Have you got it? Where is it? Where’s it hiding? Your back pocket? Let me check. It’s not in mine . . . “

Davis is an asshole, I’ll read on their faces. Just give me the answer. Give me the formula, the template, the winning structure, the marketable, unobjectionable subject matter that will make people love and accept me as a creative person.

I’ll ask them what their creative project is. What emotional experience are they trying to create inside the limits I already proposed? Because good short fiction is prose that moves you in some way, on some level, within certain constraints. Moving the reader means moving yourself. Moving yourself means attaining the inspiration that Plato talks about in Ion. It means feeling those emotions. It means getting your criticizing mind out of the way. But I don’t say, “Plato” or “Ion” because they haven’t read it and generally wouldn’t if I recommended it.

To the complete beginners, I say, “Try this exercise and tell me what you discover.” To the ones a little more advanced, I talk about losing one’s mind. But I don’t say it like that. I always have to make sure to speak in language they can understand and accept. I recommend that they read according to their interests. I stress the library. I don’t say, “Make yourself vulnerable. You gain nothing by playing it safe except more of the same.” I don’t say, “The secret of powerful fiction writing is that the fiction writer must change.”

Most beginning fiction writers can’t tell me what their creative project is, which is the problem at the root of all their other complaints, anxieties, false starts, and mistakes. I learned this in a workshop run by Amy Bloom, who said I needed to write enough to know what I was writing about. If I didn’t have a sense of that emotion, my reader wouldn’t, either. She was a great teacher. Many of the things she said in the critiques of my writing helped me develop a writing and teaching style, which is mine, not hers, which is the point. There is no winning formula. There is only you, the page, and that thing coming through you.

So how do my students typically discover this—I mean, the brave ones who stick around? The cowards rest on the Davis is an asshole realization and put their paperwork in before the semester drop date, which is also very good. Maybe they go add a course in leisure studies or social ecology. May they be happy and multiply. This isn’t for them.

The ones who want to know give themselves permission to experience this pain. They allow themselves to be hurt, to become vulnerable, to suffer such that the emotion has its way with them. That’s their project. Good actors do this. Writers do this. Other artists can work this way, too, but we mostly imagine actors and writers, people wrapped up in a dramatic process. Because this is drama, the essence of it. This is not intellectual scholarship. This is becoming possessed.

Allow yourself to be hurt. Drop all your boundaries, shields, rationalizations, barriers, and evasions. Drop your training, conformity, and desire for approval. Drop your fucking achievements. Drop what you think should be. Make yourself vulnerable if you want to feel something. Then you become powerful in proportion to that. It’s one of the core paradoxes of art—the more blood you offer on the Muse’s altar, the more she returns to you. The greatest artists offer nearly all of themselves. The easier and more pleasant you try to make it, the more numb you’ll feel, the more you’ll start to think about marketability, the worse writer you’ll become, the more frustrated, rigid, and bewrayed by what you’ve given and the choices you’ve made.

The ones who find this truth on their own always want to talk with me about it, usually towards the end of a semester. They come with a certain look on their faces—I found this true thing, but it’s been hard, and I’m a little shaky. And I tell them yes, that’s it. Then I ask them what their project is and they can answer. I used to talk with them about it over drinks, which seemed to make it a little easier.

In the best creative writing class I ever taught (Western Michigan University, 2009), one of the most gifted students I’ve ever had explained the whole thing spontaneously to me in her own language, because she found it on her own. Then she said, “It seems to me that this vulnerability applies to other parts of life, too.”

“Interesting observation,” I said.

Love

I’ve got a lot on my mind these days. New concerns. New friends. The world ticking down like a schizophrenic clock to redemption and armageddon, grief and mania all at once. The possibility of love. The verity of hate. Truth and consequences, the “or” taken out of everything.

I watched Charlie Kirk’s murder over and over. I watched Iryna Zarutska’s murder over and over. An ex-Marine said, “If you’re taking public transit, just don’t sit down.” I repeated this to a co-worker and he nodded at the wisdom of it. But you can acknowledge wisdom and affirm that you’re never, in any minute of all the days between this moment and the cessation of your pulse, going to practice it.

My co-worker will sit because he’s tired at the end of the day; there’s no parking downtown; and, like all of us, he often takes the bus. I like him very much and I hope he never has to regret sitting in front of an insane man with a folding knife. I would have hoped that for Iryna Zarutska, too. I’d hope that for anyone.

My drama is far less compelling, thankfully. Last night I had a sore throat and sinus cold. Every time I lay down in bed, I felt like I was suffocating. I finally said, “Fine. There’s reading I can be doing. There’s tea I can be drinking. There’s the novel draft like digging a tunnel through the center of the earth with a spoon. There’s morning Zazen. There’s the sun coming up while I sit and wonder about the ratio of cups of coffee to workday hours.” And as I said, so it came to pass.

Neem Karoli Baba (aka, “Maharaji”), Ram Dass’ guru is famous for saying, “Love everyone and always tell the truth.” As much as I’ve enjoyed reading Ram Dass’ books and listening to his lectures, I’ve mostly been a student of the “Paying back is a virtue” school of ethical compensation with a little “It’s impossible to love everyone and you shouldn’t try” thrown in for flavor. But lately, I’ve been rethinking this.

Given the high weirdness and unpleasantness of the news, I’ve begun to think that one either loves everyone or no one. There’s no halfsies possible, since there is no objective basis for who we choose to love. We’re actually not in fine control of that—no “or,” no meaningful choice there, either. We love who we love. We like who we like. And our greatest deepest loves, like our greatest deepest hatreds, must always be ever-unfolding mysteries. But is there a way to love more, to reach the ideal such that, at least for now, we’re a bit less hypocritical in our preferences?

Sometimes, the hardest person to love is ourselves, since the enigma of the self is the deepest puzzle of all. Like a tide pool, it has layers that stretch down into our being. Like a bottomless pit, it can be terrifying. And yet we have to go exploring down there. At some point, we have to look in the mirror and say, “I love you” or “I hate you” and stick to that. We can’t say, “I love you now, but I’ll hate you later” because, as Maharaji says, we also have to tell the truth.

In Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass writes about being angry:

I said to [Maharaji], “Well, you told me to tell the truth, and the truth is I don’t love everyone.” He leaned close to me—like nose to nose and eye to eye—and very fiercely he said, “Love everyone and tell the truth.”

I started to say, “But …” and at that point the whole rest of that sentence became self-evident to me. He was saying, “When you finish being who you think you are, this is who you will be.” I was thinking I was somebody who couldn’t love everyone and tell the truth. He was saying, “Well, when you give that one up, I am still here, and the game is very simple. Love everyone and tell the truth.” . . . I saw that the only reason I got angry was because I was holding on to how I thought it was supposed to be.

I am not as wise as Ram Dass. I can say I don’t believe I’m somebody who can love everyone. But the only non-hypocritical alternative—to hate everyone—is perhaps even more impossible for me. Maybe I haven’t traveled down into the layers of my inner tide pool far enough. Maybe admitting this is the only way to at least tell the truth as I understand it right now.

Lately, I have been hanging out with a group of librarians, some of the kindest, sweetest well-meaning people I’ve known in a long time. They’re setting a powerful example for me. But, around them, I often feel like a Russian in the synagogue, like my inner darkness could never make it possible for me to be like that and still express my truth.

This morning, I practiced Zazen at sunrise. I quietly chanted the Heart Sutra, which I have not done in a long time, for Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, not because of who they were or who they weren’t, but because a Zen master once said to me, “Maybe, in another life, I am you and you are me.”

It’s entirely possible. Maybe, when I finish being who I think I am, I’ll be able to say whether I believe that or not. Who will I be then? Maybe I will be Iryna Zarutska or Charlie Kirk or you.

Words and the Reunification of Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can’t do this to me,” he said.

“I want to return it.”

“You can’t return it. It’s used.”

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

“No, you can’t. That’s not right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’re speaking Saxon,” I said.

“What in the hell is that?”

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

“It’s a dialect.”

“Herr Davis?” said Herr Steiner.

And I whispered, “Sorry.”

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

What if?

My fellow fiction writers, I’m not asking you to accept this, just to entertain it: what if you engaged in less self-promotion and diverted a little more energy to the substance of your writing?

What if you read more of what you love and also made sure to read some poetry? What if you stepped out from behind your shield of irony, self-consciousness, sarcasm, and cute internet lingo? What if you did something sensuous or dangerous, preferably outside your living space? What if you stopped numbing yourself and voluntarily felt some pain—perhaps only to see how far you could go?

You would slow down. You would be less monetized and your momentary publicity would decrease. Yes, the rat race of cynical, always-online, self-promoting content regurgitation would pass by for a time.

You probably wouldn’t die. You might live.

Perforce, the Library

Jorge Luis Borges—whose writing can often appear so geometrically perfect that it seems more like girih or to have emanated from a non-human, maybe angelic, source—said, in his 1977 lecture, “Blindness,” that he had “always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.” He discussed the grand irony of being placed in charge of the National Library of Argentina the same year he lost most of his sight.

“There I was,” Borges noted with his usual introspective humor, “the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines.”

Of course, he composed a poem about it, the “Poem of the Gifts,” the beginning of which he quoted in the lecture: “No one should read self-pity or reproach/ into this statement of the majesty/ of God; who with such splendid irony/ granted me books and blindness at one touch.”

For Borges, the two “gifts” contradicted each other and therefore seemed to present a threshold or a crossroads, evoking his “Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the garden functions as a nexus of shifting realities: “It seemed to me that the dew damp garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated with invisible people.” And what is that if not a library to a blind man?

In “Blindness,” he added that this ironic crossroads brought intellectual as well as physical uncertainties to his life:

There were the books, but I had to ask my friends the titles of them. I remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthroposophy, which was the name he gave to his theosophy. He said that when something ends, we must think that something begins. His advice is salutary, but the execution is difficult, for we only know what we have lost, not what we will gain. We have a very precise image—an image at times shameless—of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

Much like the Death card in the tarot, which isn’t so much about death as transformation, Steiner’s anthroposophical ending-beginning is only possible if one assumes an a priori mover, an ur-cause from which all paths may fork, terminate, and fork again. Borges was a Christian and so this wasn’t an issue for him. Still, nobody likes getting the Death card. The querent would always rather make something of the other cards on the table, “for we only know what we have lost” and, even for the devout, tomorrow is only a vision, usually an unpleasant one.

With these thoughts in mind, I (with fairly good vision and being unworthy of any sort of comparison with Borges) recently entered a position at a prestigious library. Or maybe it is only prestigious to me, given the reductive materialism which seems to have become more viral than ever with the rise of artificial intelligence.

These days, people are less likely to see a garden of forking potentials, filled with invisible people, and would probably shake their heads at what seems like an unhygienic warehouse for carbon-based data storage. As an elderly gentleman said to me yesterday without a hint of sarcasm, “Books are obsolete, you know.” I told him I know. Or, at least, I know that’s what a lot of people believe. But I added that I don’t believe it.

“Some of the best things in life are obsolete,” I said.

Then he grinned. “Like me!”

He’d just turned 80. I wished him a happy birthday and he whistled out the door. Maybe, in that moment, he felt there was something to libraries after all. But I’m not sure yet what it means to work in a library eight hours a day, five days a week. In an abstract way, I also feel a bit blind.

Borges reached the end of his lecture by characterizing his threshold of blindness, his crossroads of forking changes, as an opportunity to know himself in a new way, to adopt a new way of life, and “think that something begins.”

He observed that “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it.”

This feels true. But the truth of what “it” entails, the nature of “everything that happens,” remains as mysterious as an unread, even an unreadable, book. Now I find myself surrounded by books I haven’t opened and invisible people I mostly haven’t met. What has ended in my life? What has just begun? And who will I meet next?

Government Cheese: There’s Only One Way to Write a Novel

Writing a novel is a sustained evocation of mental energy, of shifting energetic states, and you have to acknowledge that on some level if you want to do it. This isn’t me pulling out the crystals. I’m saying that the state of mind involved in writing a novel is very different than that of a short story or a screenplay. It’s sometimes compared to an endurance run, but that doesn’t fully encapsulate how it feels when you’re actually writing. Maybe nothing can truly convey the feeling. You have to experience it for yourself.

The act of producing creative writing (maybe of producing any writing) seems subjective in the extreme. But look at the multitude of writing programs out there. There must be something about the practice that’s objective and teachable. I think, maybe: grammar, spelling, punctuation, awareness of voice, economy of language, paragraphing, dramatic tension, plot structure, metaphor, concrete detail, chapter dynamics, dialogue, symbolism, mood, perspective, cliché avoidance, implicit characterization, theme, and narrative summary.

Those are probably the things that can be taught. But they can’t really be taught. They can only be presented and absorbed. You get them or you don’t. You get them by reading, by being quiet and listening, by discarding the methods, formulas, and nostrums that purport to teach you about doing them so that you can experience the actual, unmediated thing. You have to get writing at the soul level, if you’ll excuse me for shouting from all the way back at the crystal counter.

Yes, I’m being romantic. Making art is a romantic thing. It’s not replacing irrigation systems or baking pies or doing basement plumbing; though, I should note that if you treated basement plumbing like an art, like something you have to essentially intuit through doing, through long observation, through cultivating appreciation, even through love, it would be pretty damn romantic, too. Basement plumbing can be an adventure like novel writing. Ready? Bring me the PVC Charlotte pipe and some Oatey. This draft isn’t going to write itself.

In my first university creative writing workshop, the instructor said to the class, “I know a lot of you want to be writers. If there’s anything else you can do with your lives, do it. Because this is no way to live”—said the associate professor on the tenure track with his third book being turned into a screenplay for Miramax. Oh, I know, I thought, hard times.

What he was really saying was, “I’m special. None of you are special like me. So don’t try to be.” That ditty gets sung in every creative field (maybe in all fields) by those trying to reconcile crushing impostor syndrome and sunk costs with the countervailing sense that they’ve had to make deep violating sacrifices to get where they are and now they’re due for some cheddar. Bring on the cheddar, the sugar, the cash, the dancing girls. You owe me. “You” being the entire world in general and certain key individuals who haven’t yet come across with the goods. I want it and I want it now. See this contract? It’s a two-book deal. Look at it. LOOK AT IT.

Sure. So while he was saying this to us, I was thinking that I didn’t know if I was a writer, but I did know that I never wanted to be the sort of person who tells a room full of young, optimistic people to quit while they’re ahead. To my credit, as a writing instructor, I have never done that. Because you never know what somebody can do and talent is mostly hype.

You (yes, you, my little cabbage) can write a short story today. You can write a good short story maybe next year (if you write most of the days between now and then and read a lot). If you lay enough pipe, maybe you can write a novel, too. And my message to you is not that you need to be special. No one is special. My message is simple: time is short. So get to it. Don’t quit while you’re ahead. Don’t quit while you’re behind. Don’t quit.

But I’m starting to sound like a motivational speaker, which is not my intention. Yesterday, in one of those weird end-of-day office conversations that only make sense after a gallon of coffee and a greasy cafeteria lunch have brought one around again to a deep appreciation of the plumbing arts, someone said that nobody wants a conservative artist the way nobody wants a hippie CEO.

Artists need to be liberal and romantic. CEOs need to be stapled down and pragmatic. Otherwise, the great chain of being will snap into the abyss. Apples will fly up. Sad clowns will laugh again. And all the stained glass in all the cathedrals of the world will shatter at once. If I’m not up at 3:00 AM with Lord Byron, drinking Albariño Do Ferreiro out of a human skull and speculating about beauty, am I even human?

It’s the mental shifts that get you. Your life is a river of thought, of energy. You cannot change the course of the river—even if the uncertainty and lack of agency implicit in that realization cause so much anxiety that you run to the methods, formulas, and nostrums for at least some semblance of control. In this work, there is no control other than revision, which comes as an afterthought.

First and foremost, there’s the river, which twists and turns, shifting through the landscape of your weeks and months. You have to let it carry you. And the only way to do that is to trust it’s heading somewhere. That sort of trust doesn’t come from the world telling you you’re special. It comes from being afraid and doing it anyhow.

Don’t all rivers flow to the sea? If you don’t believe me, listen to the King:

Like a river flows

Surely to the sea,

Darling, so it goes

Some things are meant to be.

Which is to say, you need to let it happen and get out of the way. Let it flow, holmes. What will be, will be. There is nothing more authentically human than experiencing something with that degree of inscrutable inevitability. And being afraid.

My various writing instructors (assiduously not teaching novel writing, ever) over the years must have had the facility with language to express these things. I suspect they didn’t because novels are what sell. Novels are, as the abovementioned instructor put it on a different occasion, where it’s at. Novels bring the cheddar, the government cheese (in his case, the state college cheese).

Why teach 15-20 youngsters every semester how to become your competition when you could derail them into decades of story writing and frustration? Instead, be sure to impart a short-form aesthetic that, while certainly beautiful, will also certainly not help them into an associate professorship and a novel optioned by Miramax. Teach them scrimshaw instead of casting in bronze. You’re the bronze guy, after all.

We may not be special. And the world may not need another novel (or another plumber, though, if I had to choose, the latter always seems like the better option), but when we get down to it, the world really doesn’t need anything. It doesn’t need another accountant, another inflatable beach ball, another green-eyed cat with a striped tail.

Like the cat, you’re here because that river of energy coalesced into the shape of a person. You want to write a novel because that same energy put some mysterious sacred geometry in your head that makes you see in the dark with a writer’s eyes. And that means even if there’s something else you can do with your life, you don’t have to. You can do what you want.

Ang Lee wrote:

At one point, my in-laws gave their daughter (my wife) a sum of money, intended as start-up capital for me to open a Chinese restaurant – hoping that a business would help support my family. But my wife refused the money. When I found out about this exchange, I stayed up several nights and finally decided: This dream of mine is not meant to be. I must face reality.

Afterward (and with a heavy heart), I enrolled in a computer course at a nearby community college. At a time when employment trumped all other considerations, it seemed that only a knowledge of computers could quickly make me employable. For the days that followed, I descended into malaise. My wife, noticing my unusual demeanor, discovered a schedule of classes tucked in my bag. She made no comment that night.

The next morning, right before she got in her car to head off to work, my wife turned back and – standing there on our front steps – said, “Ang, don’t forget your dream.”

And that dream of mine – drowned by demands of reality – came back to life. As my wife drove off, I took the class schedule out of my bag and slowly, deliberately tore it to pieces. And tossed it in the trash.

Sometime after, I obtained funding for my screenplay, and began to shoot my own films. And after that, a few of my films started to win international awards. Recalling earlier times, my wife confessed, “I’ve always believed that you only need one gift. Your gift is making films. There are so many people studying computers already, they don’t need an Ang Lee to do that. If you want that golden statue, you have to commit to the dream.”

But back to drinking wine from human skulls: do it, mon petit chou, and have no regrets. Many people have uttered words over Albariño Do Ferreiro at 3:00 AM with Lord Byron regarding the subject of beauty. Why not you?

Ensō

I wanted to know the truth about life. So I studied history, philosophy, art, and literature. I learned what seemed like many true things. But I could not get a job with all that hard-earned knowledge. I realized that history, philosophy, art, and literature were nothing if I couldn’t feed myself or my family. I felt condemned and betrayed by life. I told younger people about it and urged them to go into a technical field to avoid making my mistakes.

I wanted to know the truth about life. So I studied science and engineering. I learned what I seemed like many true things. And I felt proud when I got a well-paying job. But the job demanded long hours and all of my energy. I got laid off and found another job, but it turned out to be no different. I forgot myself, what I loved, why I had started down this path. I only felt tired, used up. Neglected, my wife found someone else. I became a stranger to my children. I felt condemned and betrayed by life. I told younger people about it and urged them to go into business to avoid making my mistakes.

I wanted to know the truth about life. But I looked at people going into debt for degrees that would never make them happy. So I went into business, working for others and then for myself. I learned one true thing, which seemed like the only true thing in the world: everything is always about money and money is always about love. By recognizing this pain and desire in others, I knew how to make them dance to my tune. I became wealthy, feared, adored. But I craved to be understood without the mediation of my wealth. I wanted to be loved for who I was, not merely as a resource for others. I wanted people to see the real me. But no one was interested. They only wanted to do business, to acquire money, so that they could be loved. Disillusioned, I no longer cared about making them dance. I felt condemned and betrayed by life. I told younger people about it and urged them to study history, philosophy, art, and literature to avoid making my mistakes.

The Atlantic’s Survivalist Problem

Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails.

The survivalist problem is the US Marine Corps Scout Sniper School problem. You’ve expended an immense amount of time, energy, and resources to be prepared. You’ve made personal sacrifices to become engaged and proficient in a wide range of highly practical, exclusive, hard-to-acquire skills. And you’ve done this in response to something that seems more or less inevitable.

You’ve been taught that there’ll be a cataclysm, a collapse, a threat, a danger to life, to loved ones, to the social order, even to the political abstraction that raised you and put a gun in your hand. And you’re convinced that you’ll be called on, possibly by superiors, but certainly by circumstances, to begin pulling the trigger.

Maybe so. But what the trigger will feel like before, during, and after you pull it remains to be seen. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You just have a sense. There’s a vague blur, somewhere in the indeterminate future, hiding exactly how it’ll all play out. But you know something’s bound to happen. You feel the weight of it bearing down, emerging from the fog of cultural spite, social tension, and violence you read about every day in the news. Something’s got to give. We can’t go on like this.

And maybe, though in the light of day you’d hesitate to openly admit it, you want hell to break loose. Otherwise, what was all that planning for? Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails. Train someone up to do a thing and it becomes their raison d’être. Place a gun in someone’s hand and the fingers will close.

As Mendes’ Jarhead puts it, “If you are lucky, in that window will one day emerge . . . the figure of the enemy. The JFK shot. The pink mist.” If you’re lucky, fate will one day conspire to fulfill what has become your reason for being. The unlucky ones are sometimes called “preppers” in the sense that they are always preparing, always in a state of frustrated training and unfulfilled belief. But you—one day luck may smile on you in a moment of satisfaction: the pink mist, the apocalyptic moment, redemption, validation.

Apocalypticism has a long history in the United States, closely associated with exotic forms of Protestantism, then skewing into UFO abduction cults and transdimensional disembodied reptile prophecies from ancient Lemuria. But it’s all of a piece. Mythologies and reasons can be goofy, can emerge from a Star Trek cargo cult as easily as from an established religious body, because the survivalist problem isn’t about reason.

It pretends cause and effect, but it’s really just emotion, often with an opportunistic subtext. Interestingly enough, the highly trained 22-year-old with a Mk22 Mod 0 Advanced is also fairly low on syllogisms. His trigger’s greased. 7.62mm. He doesn’t have to think about it. He’s just having certain feelings while he waits for the word.

The survivalist problem is also the media problem. The first USMC Scout Snipers go back to 1943, but the media problem goes back to at least 16^th-century Venice with the first avvisi. The survivalist problem likely began as early as the rise of agriculture and got markedly worse with the Industrial Revolution. But the DNA is always the same: the existing order is corrupt, immoral, lost, and there must be a purification—messiahs, flagellants, fire-and-brimstone preachers, broadsheets, social activists, op-eds, Atlantian ghost masters, and angels of vengeance notwithstanding. The Big One’s coming. We brought it on ourselves. See page B-5.

So it’s not surprising that The Atlantic, a publication named after the lost city as much as the ocean, is trying hard to regain some of that sweet Trumpian dread that goosed up their readership back in 2017. They seem to have resumed publishing unapologetic apocalypse pornography in spite of the Biden Administration sedation. Now that Trump has returned and is performing electroshock on the federal bureaucracy, The Atlantic’s back to prepping with a quickness, the only thing left being some sort of culmination, some apotheosis of all that frustrated desire.

Aziz Huq’s “America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State” (originally “A Warning Out of Time” in the print edition) is a fair example. Huq is a solid writer, a law professor at the University of Chicago, something he mentions in his second paragraph, and his op-ed exudes a kind of spectral reasonableness in spite of the fact that it’s built on a thin historical parallel with the rise of Nazi Germany.

When he declares that Trump is trying “to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules,” he’s too canny not to immediately follow with “By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis.” Ah. Good. I was worried for a moment that we’d descended into Man in the High Castle.

Still, he continues, “it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism.” Maybe or maybe not, depending on how transparent Professor Huq wants to be about the inevitable legal firestorms at the state level contesting the validity of these executive orders.

For example, Washington state is currently trying to prevent the implementation of an executive order to end federal research and education grants focusing on gender affirming care. For the time being, the Western District of Washington has enjoined the enforcement of the order and thereby prevented the federal government from acting on it in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and Colorado. The court system isn’t asleep. The legal system is designed to prevent executive overreach and is, in fact, doing that. The courts have received a certain amount of voltage. And there is no sign that this is going to subside anytime soon.

Huq’s facade of reason collapses when he overstresses his historical parallel: “it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s lawyers—despite running roughshod over Congress, the states, the press, and the civil service—were somewhat slower to defy the federal courts, and have fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court, seeking a judicial imprimatur for novel presidential powers. The courts, unlike the legislature, remain useful to an autocrat in a dual state.” Now we really are in Man in the High Castle.

How we got there in two paragraphs after “but this is no Weimar collapse” is a bit mysterious, but here we are—along with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s “Americans Are Buying an Escape Plan: Is it time for a second passport?”, Russell Berman’s “Musk Comes for the Third Rail of American Politics,” and Timothy W. Ryback’s, “What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler: Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a ‘Little Man’ whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter.”

At first glance, we might conclude that the magazine has a Hitler fetish. But it’s just the survivalist problem in an SS uniform. The Atlantic is yearning for the pink mist. The trigger’s greased. The figure of the enemy has emerged. They’ve been prepping for so long. Now they’re just having some feelings and waiting for the word.

No Such Thing as a Free Basket

Every morning on the way to my office, I walk past the business school, which is built like a hilltop crusader fortress, replete with battlements, a machicolated inner wall, turrets, crenelations, and arrow-slit windows. Somewhere inside, between accounting and management, there must be a dragon and a mountain of gold.

Headshots of rich and influential graduates flutter around the outside. They’re all smiling. Day in and day out, this becomes unsettling. Sure, it’s part of the business school’s self-promotion (you, too, can be this smug if you study here and make a load of money), necessary marketing perhaps because an MBA typically offers less concrete knowledge than a BS in peace and conflict studies or a semester at sea and because there is not, nor has there ever been, an education requirement for entering most business careers.

To make money, you have to be good at what you do. You do not need a certification saying that you are. You can get that peace and conflict degree, study basket weaving for 15 weeks in Spain, and still join the firm. But no disrespect: management courses surely have things to teach (I took some and learned a thing or two) and to become a certified professional or para-professional in the business world, like a CPA or a project manager or a contracts specialist, you do need the piece of paper. Ergo, the fortress, the pictures, the smiles.

Lots of smiles. They haunt me. One woman in particular has a grin that radiates a kind of dark energy. By any estimation, she seems attractive and smart, but that grin says, I’m clever and, not only that, I’m crooked. More importantly, I’m richer than you. Richer than thou. Richer than god. Study here, my young apprentice, and together we will discover many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

By the time I reach my office, I often find I have to cleanse my aura if I’ve allowed myself to notice that woman’s picture. Bring on the crystals and the sage. I also think about the sullen post-adolescents sitting in their cars along the street—not the shitbox deathtraps my friends and I drove in college, but SUVs, Teslas, Audis, high-end Accords with factory tint, and occasionally a Beemer or a Benz paying homage to the classics—cars that have been bought for the children because no 20-year-old can afford a $43k Tesla 3 in freshman year. Maybe their parents studied crusader management in the fortress.

What are these sleepy, sour-faced kids thinking as they stare at me through their windshields? At least some of them have to be considering the cost of things. How could they not? The cost of their education (having been lectured many times by dad that money is found in crusader castles, not growing on trees), the cost of their sweet ride, the cost of messing around the way they did two years ago in senior year, opportunity cost (when I was your age, I was in the Army and look at me now—what you need is self-discipline, son, not a cruise to Costa del Sol), maybe the lab fee for Basket Weaving 210. Everything costs money. Even money costs money. No such thing as a free basket.

I have no doubt that more than a few of them are picturing their own faces up on the battlements, smirking down at hapless students with all the condescension of success. And even more than the implications that flow from our illustrious school of business, that’s what gives me pause. What does a post-adolescent undergraduate know about what she wants for the next 20 years? For that matter, what do any of us know? We know what mom and dad have drummed into our heads (if we’re even that lucky) and we often fail to understand that they know about as much as we do, which is to say, nothing.

At some point, if they’re solvent enough to buy that new Tesla 3, they did what they were told and got rewarded for it. But what is the nature of such a reward? What does it mean? We know what we’ve assumed along the way. Sometimes, we know or think we know which educated guesses have worked out and which ones haven’t. Usually, we’re blind, expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and hopefully doing our best.

When I was as young as these kids, I had a friend named Chris, who came from a family of classically trained musicians. He, too, had a gift for music and was getting ready for the long uncertain life of the creative artist with an all-consuming vocation that might not earn him enough to buy lunch at Taco Bell. He also had a wisdom that, compared with the insight of most college kids, seemed far beyond his years. Once, he said to me, “Some people get exactly what they want. The rest of us become philosophers.”

I’ve been smiling at that for almost three decades. It’s funny and absurd, especially in the exasperated, road-weary way he said it. Now I’d laugh and say, shit, kid, last year you were a teenager. Try to have a little fun before you say something like that. But I wouldn’t deny the evident truth of it. Though, I might modify it a little after all my years of philosophizing: some people get what they want; some people don’t get what they want; everybody becomes a philosopher. Because I got everything I wanted in my 20s and I’m still asking what it all means.

Just don’t make me go to business school in a fortress. By the time I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop, I am, once again, infused with the immortal wisdom of Guitar Slim: “The things that I used to do/ Lord, I won’t do no more.” Preach, brother. For me, it’s not about what I wanted back then. It’s not even what I want right now. Because I acknowledge that I have no actionable grasp of what the world is.

I only have subjectivities and assumptions. I see through the filter of my memories, beliefs, and preferences, many of which are subtly irrational. I try to do the best with what I think I know and keep in mind that, because my knowledge of the world amounts to existential spit and bailing wire, anything other than humility is a failure state.

So you have to be good at what you do. But how do you know you are? Are you making money? Is that the metric? Maybe. Maybe not. When you look in the mirror, who looks back? Do you have any idea? Maybe. Maybe not. Do you even know what you don’t know? The ghost of Donald Rumsfeld was here just a moment ago and said there are unknown unknowns. I believe him. I’m taking it on faith.