The Old Zen trick: when there is a finger pointing to the moon, be sure to look to where it points, not at the finger. The take-away for your three-day weekend is that rituals, signs, and symbols are meant to be gateways and portals, entryways and access points. Unto what? Well, you’ll just have to find out. But to take any of these as in and of themselves, to forget once that what this is is not a pipe, is to fall into idolatry. And what is idolatry but an obstacle, a stop-sign to the mind, a narcotic to the seeking spirit? It says: seek no further, rest here, and if you wake, pull the doll’s cord, it will say, Hush child, mommy’s got you.

But mommy, as it were, does not got you. You are in the arms of a great machine that has provided you with a mom-shaped doll to dull the longing of your mom-shaped hole. You are licking salt off the cave wall. You are clicking the sugar-water-release button as fast as your nervous system can fire. Your muscles, both spiritual and physical, are withering and warping to serve better the few things for which they are needed. You yourself are warping to serve better the few things for which you are needed. You are what the great machine has wrought, kneaded, and made malleable to fit its own need-shaped hole. And when it no longer needs you, where will you go? What rock will give salt, do you know? What lever pulled produces sugar, do you know? When the automobile came, the horses were not put out to pasture but mostly left to fend a scraggy unkempt wild—a blank, featureless waste to eyes long accustomed to feedbags, blinders, and stable life. So, too, the pigeons. So, too, the cattle. So, too, you.

The Old Zen image: a finger to the moon. The message—if you are unemployed and have a day to while away on Zen—is to look away from the city, its dazzling lights, and turn your mind to things eternal. There is no lie in that celestial fire. (The Zen masters were great pranksters after all, and sometimes prank by speaking literally.) But now, there are a thousand fingers pointing to a thousand moons. And each of these finger-bearers claim to know the true and only moon, and they all wear the same perplexed, sad but hopeful, expression of a mentor believing, trusting, praying that you will recognize him truly by inner light and see that all the rest are mere self-help peddlers, sitcom fathers, and lullaby technicians fabricated by the great machine to help you find meaning in your job. Come here, boy, you can trust me. Yet 999 of them will go home sad, feeling betrayed and faithless.

Betrayed and faithless—is that not how we in our own times often feel? That some great ruse has been pulled? Here, beneath the nine hundred ninety-nine fake moons? A little breathless are we, having followed our chosen master down into the woodlands and up the pathless mountain, where we once or twice saw his goldtooth flash in the moonlight, saw the way he leered a little long at a young woman’s swaying hips, and saw the tiny burst of dogmatism at some local issue topple his cool. Saw we all this, and followed him yet. We swallowed down our grumblings when he asked for an advance on his teaching fee, hoisted high our hopes, and resisted the pressures within that noticed, “This old man has not the slightest...” Yet betrayed and faithless, we entrust our trust again to the hope that, at some point, somewhere, somehow, because we have to believe in something, something worth believing in will come. So we follow along. Well, as well him as another. The Zen masters were great pranksters, after all.

That Old Zen formula: a formula about a finger raised to the moon: an incense and smelling salt to drive out demons and return our mind back to its fundamental accuracy. Follow not conventions and conventional answers. Distrust the agreed-upon and the authorized, for its relationship to the real is always predicated on being perceived, translated, and negotiated by a committee of literal apes, however great they may be. And no drug is there more potent to the ape-mind than that of another ape-mind. Hail, then, the young and the autistic, for they alone will have the courage to point and say, “But Mom, it’s obvious the emperor’s not wearing clothes.” And from that abiding principle might all ape-minds release themselves of their endless blind stuporous grasping. And might all then flower into serene clarity, to see a twinkling world, although twilight, where there are no such things, really, as pipes, mothers, masters, or moonlight—just occurrences in the mind that respond to occurrences around the mind. In the nameless undifferentiated forest, God is smiling back from every atom, reflected everywhere, pulling us onward. To the opened eye, the moon is down, and it is everywhere.

So, nineteen and breathless, I decided that I would marshal all my attention to seeing the moon properly. I had all the fingering I needed for one lifetime, I thought. If I but kept the straight and narrow, resisted being overly dazzled, and stayed stingy about my time, loaning it never to the mass of emperor-isn’t-wearing-clothes truthers, then I would be able, too, to see the world undifferentiated and all things shining. Nirvana or bust.

And I busted. The lunacy of resisting all desire, all preference, and all choice wound me into some less than preferable places indeed. No matter how Buddha-pilled you may become, there is something monstrously deviant about sitting in filth out of principle when you could just as well get up and wash your ass. But patience to prevent that murmur soon replied, “Preference is the root of all suffering. The divine mind thinks not of its own advantage or loss. The grass is always greener; if you give in now, you will give in forever. Seek not transient things, but tune your mind to things eternal. Trust the process.” I rolled my eyes and watched as they who stood to wash their asses went out to have some fun in the sun while I continued to compost in stillness. Surely, something so simple as basic self-care is not of the same kind as pretending the emperor wears clothes? Patience tapped its foot, “Compare and despair. If you cannot be happy here, you cannot be happy anywhere. Wherever you go…” And so I rotted right there, and rotted.

Whether weakness of the will or weakness of the flesh, I developed a laziness that sounded in the DSM-5, a colorable claim against my college for quasi-Ivy-League-induced reprobation, and a complete apathy about which way the wind would blow. In my younger and more heterodox days, I announced to my eighth grade friends my intent to reach enlightenment: that I would become disattached, disabused of the holds that would hold me. A friend said hooey, said that if my parents died, I would be sad, and said therefore I would always be attached. Almost certainly so, I said and with rising excitement from the sound of my own voice, but with enough training, I will see the all-in-all, and be happy for them, too, wishing them luck on their next ventures. This was taken, despite being the most Christian vision possible, to be deeply anti-Christian and worrisome. I shrugged, clasped and unclasped my hands: “I am what I am. I did not make me.” Ten years later, blown gaping wide by the gentle wind, I came to see: my parents were alive, and I was sad even then. Each and every attachment, each and every genuine pull of love upon the tides of my heart, was a reminder of how far I had left to go. Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria. Oh oh, au contraire, maestro mio, as your wife at home can surely attest, that the greater woe belongs to those who in times of joy are miserable, who turn and sigh at banquet halls and from the full summer sun flee.

What prompted me to say, oh to hell with this, and to get up, wash myself, fill my cavities, and go seek the purer air, was nothing. I was lecherous in the lamest way: I had become a twenty-something pot-head with an on-again-off-again girlfriend. I could quote you any episode of The Office more easily than I could do arithmetic. I developed a debilitating reliance on DoorDash and lost the savor of all food that was not in some way implicated in getting away with something. (Pull the cord: Okay, hijito, we can order takeout just this once because you were so good.) I cycled between gorging the senses into annihilation and committing myself to extreme renunciation. The guilt of the former drove me into the dogmatism of the latter, and the dogmatism of the latter made relapsing all the more insidiously rewarding. Sed peccatum non cognovi, nisi per legem.

And yet, from time to time I saw by a dim dint that some call grace, that this was not at all fated or fatal, just a game I was playing: a perpetual, recursive Mardi Gras, the sweetening of which was the main purpose of the Lent. The hope of all of which was that, I too, would find myself in some dark wood and my ultimate relenting would be the sweeter by-and-by for all this tomfoolery. (Goldtooth halts before the gate, pauses, and puts his finger to his lips in thought: I know it says Abandon all hope… But don’t you worry, he winks. That doesn’t apply to us. Besides, I have friends in low places.)

That Old Zen canard: when the finger is pointing to the moon, look to the moon! I did my best to never make such a simple mistake. I took it as axiomatic, unquestionable. I would never—not for one minute!—be the fool who complimented the emperor on his clothes. But then one early morn, as the fly who finally escapes the car by the stochastic motions of the air, which motions it must call grace, it occurred to me that it never occurred to me, not even once in those ten years, to actually check whether the emperor was or was not wearing clothes. I nearly stumbled to my feet. My dad’s voice: “When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is quit digging.” I shook my head. My mom’s voice: “Lazy people work twice.” I turn to look.

And so finally I allow my mind to allow my eye to take itself off the moon. I look for the first time toward the finger. It is firm, steady, and unflinching—well-manicured, at that. As a hiker up a mountain, my eyes slowly travel up the arm. I see clothes—clean, well-pressed, and well-taken-care-of clothes. I take in more of the grace of the figure. I see a posture that bespeaks the exact opposite of degeneracy, one who has made a great effort to keep and extend the spirit within by daily, consistent effort. I see in the poise of muscle and the balance of gracefulness a deep training and a deep achievement in learning complicated, precious skills. This is someone who has surely practiced 10,000 kicks. I am astonished by the competency that is evident even in the slightest movements of the joints of the finger, expressing peace, expressing joy, as the finger is brought down, leveled, and pokes me, hard, square on my forehead.

I look up to see a smiling face, a shaking tonsured head, and eyes long-trained with fastidious attention that, nonetheless, for all their bearer’s discipline, can hardly help to conceal a long-held-in laugh. Wiping a tear from an eye, the finger then descends again and lends a hand:

“Took you long enough.”

One and one-half wandering Jews
Free to wander wherever they choose
Are traveling together in the Sangre de Cristo,
The Blood of Christ Mountains of New Mexico
—Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones

It is the last year of law school. I am in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for spring break. I have just dropped off my girlfriend at the local running club so that she can run 20 miles in the safety of a pack to train for her upcoming marathon. I am driving through the outskirts of Santa Fe alone. I am elated. I love to see a mountain range looming in the distance, and the size and shape of the nearby mountains nearly dominate the sky. And the Sangre de Cristos decked in snow are just about perfect to make either that which is most ape-like or most holy in the back of my mind say, Hallelujah, it is good to be alive.

Soon enough though, I realize that the magnetic pull of the highway cannot pull me forever. I have promises to keep. More than that, the stronger magnet of care pulls me. I dare not venture too far off from her trail, and I keep a close eye on her whereabouts on find-my-friends. I turn and head back towards the disappointingly unbroken sky.

I wheel around some. I am looking for something to do. It is early in the morning, and my openness to adventure is slowly morphing into both boredom and anxiety about my lack of ability to find anything worth doing in a new city, on a new day, and with a new attitude. A law student only gets so many free days after all, and I have now spent over three-quarters of the hour wondering what to make of the rest of my time. I see a coffee shop that looks quaint and just my style. But it strikes me then that if I go in there, take out my laptop, and begin writing, then I am just bringing the old city, the old day, and the old attitude with me. I might as well be in a Nashville coffee shop with a Santa Fe simulator on in the background. I check find-my-friends, this time with equal amounts of lover’s concern and anxiety about being alone. Hours to go. I pull away and drive on.

Another hour passes this way. This really is the old attitude—roving about some city unable to quite settle on how to spend my time until all the time is gone—but it is at least a new city. I do notice that my spirit undergoes a marked seachange every time I am facing the mountains and not facing the mountains, and I am amused at that. At last, my boredom has morphed into full-on mopeyness which is threatening to burst into anger any minute now, and I decide that if I am to do anything more, it must not be done sitting. I veer off to look for the nearest park, but as I slow down, I see a sign for an estate sale. Now, what businesses do I have at an estate sale, having brought with me to Santa Fe just a carry-on? What am I to find in an estate sale that I could possibly hope to haul back with me? I smile. Books, of course. I turn and pull into a scruffy little sandstone cul-de-sac.

I park. I pause. For whatever reason, at this moment, a bout of anxiety grips me to the point where I almost do not go in. At this time in my life, I am tormented by a critical juncture. I spend just about every waking moment I am not poring over legal textbooks or my girlfriend fretting anxiously about what it is I am going to do with my life. I have ruled out being a lawyer as a lifelong career almost completely, although I have decided to stay the course and practice for at least three years to (1) vouchsafe my participation in the citizenry and pave the way for future noble causes and (2) pay-off my crippling student debts. But in the meantime, I take neither of these causes very seriously, and I spend every moment of free-time I can on researching voraciously for some sort of vocation or progression or just plain activity that I can do to make money so that I can make a living and be happy and have enough free time to do what I actually want to do which is to read and to write. But I am painfully aware that, each day, I do little, I am helping no one, and I am leaving few places better than I found them. The downstream effect of living like this for the better part of a year-and-a-half is that I am constantly anxious. My face is ever sour if I lose sight of it, and I am preternaturally unable to be completely honest with anyone about what it is I want or what I am about. And so I get terrible social anxiety, and have to soothe myself before entering anywhere, and most of the time, when I am out anywhere, if asked what it is that I really want, it would be just to go home.

But I am in a new city, with a new day, and a new attitude. There is no one in there who can say a lick against me or remember it. (I have gotten pretty good at figuring out exactly the right words to allow me to at least cope with social situations.) I turn off the car and venture in. It is remarkably awkward. I try to follow the sign but end up at the backdoor where someone says, no sweetie, through the front, and I reel and sigh and all-but-bow and scurry to the front door. I ring the doorbell. The person coming in behind me frowns (I have grown eyeballs in the back of my head) and steps ahead of me, opens the door, and walks in. I nod and follow her.

As soon as I enter, I am greeted by a cowboy of a man who smiles as broad as the hat he surely wears out-of-doors, and he gives us a big hearty hello. He starts to preemptively upsell us and tells us that if we spend twenty dollars, we get a free lottery ticket. (The lady who walked in ahead of me gasps with delight.) He tells us some deals on the furniture—all the patio furniture can be bundled for $200—and on some antiques—all the Hummels can be bundled for $100—and some clothes—ties are buy 3, get 1 free. I nod, thank him, and move to explore the house. I realize right away that this is a house that belonged to one of the elder baby boomers or younger of the greatest generation, and I am not unhappy to be here. I have a fondness for picking around such houses that is a cross between my anthropological pleasure of reading old Civil War diaries and the morbidity of walking through graveyards and wondering at the span of life demarcated by the hyphen. But before I can go explore, he tells me, “And we are selling books by the box. Hardbacks are $4, paperbacks are $2, but if you fill a box it’s $20.” I pause. How many books must there be that they are selling them by the box? I ask him where the books are. He laughs, where aren’t they? He points me down a hallway and says pick a room.

I go down the hallway. I pick a room.

At some point in history, the first rat must have found the first grainhouse. Nowadays rodents are so accustomed to birdfeeders and restaurant dumpsters that they must somehow take them for granted. That first rat, however, may very well have had an aneurysm from the sheer amount of dopamine that flooded his wee, unprepared nervous system when he finally loosened the stone and saw that what it was he was smelling so powerfully was more than he could have ever hoped or dreamt of. That rat very well may have been the first non-human animal to cry tears of joy, to experience religious awe. And even that rat could not know what I felt then in my heart.

The first room has wall-to-wall bookshelves that are, for the most part, replete. And it takes me five-seconds-flat to clock that these belong to no ordinary readers. No rows of Grishams, Clancies, or Steeles here, as is often the case. There are entire shelves of poetry. There are shelves of Oxford classic novels. There are Ancient Greek workbooks stacked alongside rows of clothbound Ancient Greek texts. Half a shelf was dedicated to Mircea Eliade while the rest ran with Adorno and Arendt. My mouth stays open for the better part of half-an-hour, and my heart-rate is surely on pace with my girlfriend’s then as she ventured into mile nine.

I could not restrain myself. As has been my habit since childhood, since those blessed afternoons in the Knoxville library, I am ever pushing the boundaries of the lengths of my arms with how many books I can carry at once. I am already calculating the price of suitcases and of adding luggage to my flight home. I wander through the rooms. I had certainly entered into the mother-lode first, but each room has its own treasures. Jung and Augustine and, of all people, Richard Feynman had more than a presence here, but an honored place, with multiple works from each weighing down the shelves. There are collections of Chinese poetry and comparative studies of taoism and modern physics. There is a pre-war Euclid that is so gorgeous it practically glows.

I turn back. I ask for a box. I promise myself just one box. I am aghast by how quickly that box fills. Already there is a copy of Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold, a physical copy of which I had been searching for forever, sat on top of the full box beneath a gilt-edged compendium of Rumi and a book by Christopher Alexander which I had never heard of before but knew was a buy at anything less than $30. (Checking Amazon, it was being offered for $65. The thought of re-selling it never once even entered anywhere into consciousness.)

Finally, having scanned every shelf over the course of an hour (my girlfriend is on an easy run and is entering mile 14), I know that I now have some hard decisions to make. I have played this game before, many times. I take inventory hunched over by the wall while others stream in and out, perusing briefly, pausing to stare bemused at my frantic stacking and re-stacking, before moving on to the Hummels. Amateurs. I sort my trove into the must-haves, the you-know-betters, and the close-calls. I wince. I have more than a box of must-haves. And it is a better pile than any I ever had. And my close-calls are distressingly close. And my y-k-bs: I actually do not know if I know better. (The Jacques Cousteau biography simply smacks my gobs.) I pause and think. We are on stop-one of a four-stop journey, from here to Las Vegas to Utah to Arizona, then back to Nashville, and we are committed to traveling light. Two boxes could fit in another suitcase, but the weight is going to be an issue. The switching between cars and planes will be an issue. And I am already running life mostly on credit cards, expecting those three years of law practice to cash quite a few present-lifestyle checks.

But.

All the same.

I go ask for another box.

The cowboy of a man smiles—apparently very few people have taken him up on the box deal—and tells me that he’ll let me have two boxes for $30. I bite the insides of my mouth. I almost ask him how much for three boxes and what he expects shipping and handling to run me.

But instead, something in me asks me to ask him first about these book-owners. I have to know about these fine and fabulous like-minded people, these true literati, with whom I have just spent the better part of an hour getting acquainted through their catalogue and marginalia. (I am an incorrigible snoop when it comes to seeing what other people have annotated in books.)

He smiles, and he tells me they are his wife’s parents, and they were big readers. Ahh. I ask respectfully if they passed.

He said, “No, no, but their minds were starting to go. We just moved them into a care facility.”

I respectfully make respectful reply, but I press on. I ask him if they were professors and of what.

He laughs, “Nope. Well, they did meet in graduate school, I think. But they were never teachers or anything like that. They just always loved to read. My father-in-law, he worked at a bank, and she was a homemaker.”

I genuinely hmmph’d in surprise. I ask him if they were writers or anything of the sort.

He laughs again, a big cheery cowboy laugh that was part well-to-do, part plaintiffs’-lawyer. “Not that I know of. They just liked to read.”

I oh’d. I am trying to find the words to ask him what, if anything, came of all this magnificent reading, but he carries on.

“To tell you the truth, my father-in-law retired when he was about thirty-five, and they both lived off of her inheritance. And so that’s what they did ever since. They just read. And read and read and read. That’s what they were. Just readers.”

I admittedly become a little breathless. There is a hint of, well not-even scorn in his voice, but haughtiness. A bookworm’s defensiveness sets off in me, hard-trained to sensitivity by friends in high school who teased and asked me why I was wasting my time reading Les Mis, and I feel my jaw brace against it and my eye turns from the cowboy.

“Yeah, it’s a shame” he clicks his tongue. “They really did love all these books. But you can’t take it with you, you know?” He says smiling, sidling up to me, as if we were on the same team here.

“It’s sad, but they don’t even know we’re doing this. But they wouldn’t remember for long anyhow. They’ve been overdue for the home for quite some time, and, you know, it finally reached a point...” He says, respectfully, sadly, eyes scanning around the room. “But hey, what can you do?”

I ask him over the catch in my throat what was going to happen to all the books they didn’t sell.

“The ones we can’t donate, well I guess, like everything else, we’ll just have to haul em off. We’re trying to put the house on the market next week, so that’s why we’re having to move kind of fast here. My wife and I actually live down in Dallas and so we only got the week to get all this sorted. So all of this has got-to-go a-s-a-p.”

I feel a sudden wave of protectiveness over these books. I have to tell him that it would be worth his time and his money to rent a storage container and hire someone to comb through them for the resell value. I have to tell him about the Christopher Alexander, about how many old editions of Henry Miller they had in there, and that even if he set them at a low worth that does not mean they would not get a fair price by someone somewhere. And moreover, even if they were just readers, well, for some that’s as good of a life as you could ask for. More than some could ever ask for or want. So even if he sets that at a low worth, well, what’s it to him, really? They very well have gotten a fair price—in fact, a bargain—for what it is they wanted out life, and they’d make that deal again and again. So let grasses grow and many flowers bloom. Let those who would be just readers alone.

But I do not. The wave washes out. I am suddenly rather nauseated from the sudden sobriety I can taste on my tongue. I need to leave. I look at him again, I sigh to demonstrate my sympathy, and I say, what can you do. He nods in agreement: what can you do. I ask him where the ties are. He directs me to a closet with, at least, six dozen ties. I poke through them, and I grab four. I go back down the hall to my stash, and I open up the box, and I pull out five by no principle or preference, just whatever speaks to me at that very moment. I place all the remainder in a tidy stack on the end of the bookshelf. I go back to him and ask him where I can pay. He says, “No boxes?” I shake my head, “Not today.” He chuckles, as if to say I don’t blame you, and tells me they’ll be here tomorrow until 3pm if I change my mind. He points me to the back to the kitchen where his wife is at a folding table with the little silver box for cash that I suppose comes in the mail automatically as soon as you list you are having an estate sale.

The wife is cheery and asks me if I knew about the box deal. I say, yes, he told me. She sums me up, four ties and five books: $28. I realize I am waiting for her to say something about the Montaigne collected essays I’m holding: how earmarked it is, how written-through it is, how much her mother or father loved that book, how often they talked about it, how she always meant to read it because of them. But she does not. “Do you want to pay cash or card, hun?” “Do you take Venmo?” “We surely do.”

I pay. She reminds me to talk to her husband to get a lottery ticket. I do so.

He chipperly tells me that I picked out some fine ties. One has a leopard on it. He tells me that that’ll be a hoot at any office party. He rips off two lottery tickets. “Here’s two, son. I’m glad someone was interested in those books. They would have loved to talk to you all day about any of them. It’ll be a shame to see em go, but…what can you do? Come back tomorrow if you change your mind.”

I nod, thank him, wish him luck on the house, and leave.

I drive away without music. I can do little to marshal my mind beyond watching the road fall behind me. I am painfully aware of the quantity of hours of cognition I have left. But, all the same, it all washes out. I glance back at the mountains in the rearview, but this time, the trick refuses me. I pretend to imagine what fate will become of all my precious collection back home as a way not to think about what will become of, well, everything else. But that trick refuses me, too.

I pull into the park. She has two miles left to go, and so I walk up the trail to wait for her. She pulls around the bend, and my heart is soothed just to see her face. She beams back at me and waves. She is red and sweaty, but she is all power and all motion. She still has gas in the tank. She will finish her marathon, and you can see in her eyes she knows she will finish her marathon. She pauses to kiss me, and I tell her the car is unlocked and I’ll meet her there. She blows a kiss and pumps back down the trail. I turn to follow.

When we get in the car, she grins and shakes her head as she moves the books to the backseat. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” I smile, glad to be on familiar ground. “You are one to talk,” I say as she closes her eyes and relaxes into a syrupy bliss. She laughs, “I suppose there are worse vices.”

In the afternoon, we take a two-hour bus ride with all our friends to a wedding out in the mountains. We gawk at the sights of the desert until our eyes are tired. Halfway along the way, I ask her if she had one chance to use a time machine, would she go back to see something or to give her present self some advantage. She asks what I mean. I explain, well, there are two options I think: either you use it to go see something and learn something you always wanted to know, or you use it to go slip your past self some useful information—like a stock tip or a piece of wisdom that would allow you to avoid some mistake. She says, first of all, that she loves this question, and then she turns out the window to think about it. I study the back of her head until she turns back, smiling. She says the former, that she would want to go meet one of her great-great-great-grandmothers: see how she lived, how she acted, what she thought about, what they had in common, what they didn’t. I am, despite my lingering moodiness, touched into cheerfulness. She was always giving me answers I did not expect. She asks me what I would do. I say, I thought the former, but now I’m not so sure.

Later that night, after the wedding ceremony, we are in the heart of the mountains and walking out of the dance hall beneath the welterwork of stars, brighter and more magnificent than any either of us had ever seen. A panic breaks out. The bride’s dog—who was brought here from Nashville—has run away. All our breaths catch. We are suddenly aware of how dark the outer dark really is. We are suddenly aware that coyotes and bobcats and mountain lions prowl about. We are suddenly aware that we are on one thousand acres of ranch-land and how far off the city really is. We ask what can we do to help. My girlfriend has not the shoes to leave the concrete and searches about the grounds, while a band of us go about searching in the brush. We roam for an hour. We call out up and down the trails and non-trails until we can’t see the lights of the dance hall anymore. We split up and regroup and split off again. Soon enough, I am out alone. I am out alone for over an hour. It is cold in March in the desert mountains, and my suit jacket and my single-minded pace are only just enough. There are pocks of unmelted snow on the ground. My girlfriend calls me and texts me, but I only have signal in very few spots. I tell her I will call again in twenty minutes, every fifteen or so minutes. I make broader circles around the perimeter. The desert is not barren, and the shrub and brush are low enough to form a labyrinth beneath the waning crescent. The moonlight is so faint that the drift of clouds is not noticeable, but the stars make a twilight world. I resist all impulses to allegorize and focus on keeping my finger pointed rigidly back towards the dance hall. I come to the edge of the cliff where the earlier ceremony was, and my heart catches at how sheer, how sudden, and how far down is the drop. I know that dogs when they run wild may not think of such things, nor would I. I stoop and shine a light and pray I find nothing. I find nothing. I walk on. I walk miles more. The magnet of my own dog back home is set in my heart. After a while, the groom pulls up in his truck as I cross again the main road and tells me, as my girlfriend and my friends and the bride have told me, that it’s alright, we should pack it in, we’ll get warm, and then go on searching later. I look at my phone at 4% and, at last, relent. I get in the truck. We drive slow, scanning along the side of the road, calling out. As we are driving back, he gets a call from his new wife. They found him. Well, he found them. He just now ran back into the house and jumped onto the couch. We both breathe a sigh of exhausted relief. He thanks me again and tells me I am a good friend. We have a heart-to-heart about marriage, about law, about life. I am drunk on warmth. We pull back in. We all drink and toast to the bride, the groom, the dog. We all go back to dancing through the night.

At night’s end, we stumble out back beneath the stars and ease onto the bus for the journey home. As we get seated and wait for the last of the stragglers, one of the out-of-town friends stands up, clutches his stomach, and vomits profusely all down the aisle. We sit in stunned silence. The bus-driver groans aloud and leans his head on the wheel. I rise, clamber over the vomit, move down the stairs, and go into the nearest bathroom. I poke through the cabinets, and finding nothing, pop off the cover of the towel dispenser and take the whole roll, grab a trash bag, and bring them back on the bus. I am about to stoop to help clean, but his girlfriend and his friends take it from me and thank me and say they have it from here. I am relieved and do not object. I go to sit back down next to my girlfriend, and she presses into me, kisses me, and says that I am a good man. Something deep below my shoulders, finally, relaxes. I think to tell her about time machines, great-grandmothers, and how I am glad that there is someone somewhere out there who would have talked with them about Montaigne all day if she could. But I do not. Instead, I smile and tell her how happy I am to be right here. She smiles and falls asleep against me. We ride back. I stare out at the slow-moving stars and think again what I thought again and again as I searched maniacally through the desert alone and cold. I will not just read. I will not just be a reader.

The city rises into view from below.

⁜

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

—from Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

There are moving goalposts, and there is moving my goalposts. And I am thinking that Inkuary might mean February, too.

All the same, I’d like to share some loose thoughts about the journey so far, now that the ides of double-wide Inkuary are upon us.

There are two things that I wish to convince you of above all else today,

1. Thank You

The first is my utmost thanks to you for reading my silly little blog posts this far. Your time and attention have meant more than I can say. I know there is a lot of short-form video content out there. And I know there are a lot of other things to read out there, far and away more important, entertaining, and useful than my little variety sideshow that I’ve been running here.

But by reading my writing, you have let me be myself, share myself, and express myself. And I am almost embarrassed by how much joy I get every time one of you tell me you’ve read something I wrote. I think you may think that I am being modest or polite—but when I respond, “really?,” I really do mean it. If I had a tail in those moments, you’d see it wagging wild, thumping against the walls.

I would also like to particularly thank those who have gone so far as to give me feedback on my writing. Despite my fears of being mediocre and unremarkable for so many years preventing me from sharing my writing, one of the great surprises of this forray has been that brutal assessment is now something I deeply crave.

(I know it is a recurring gag that a writer asks for brutally honest criticism, in the hopes of reeling in a “no, seriously dude, it’s very good,” but I would like to disclaim that earnestly.)

And I would like to earnestly plead to any of you who may have wanted to give me feedback but felt that it is not your place, be assured that doing so would be doing me a favor and kindness.

Besides, even now, all of my posts are rough drafts with the expectation that I will re-shape and re-form and re-dress them over and over. I want to make them good, and if you have ideas, I want to hear them. It would be my honor if your fingerprints were on them alongside with mine. So any thoughts or notes you have in how I can better hit that mark are not only welcome, they are solicited.

I am on a mission to write clearly, precisely, and evocatively and to make things that are delightful, useful, and illuminating.

I want to be good. I want to make something you like, something you hold onto, and God willing, something you might remember a few years later: even something that inadvertently lets you more easily connect two things together that helps you along on your journey.

And I am convinced that the only way to accomplish all this is to write things that are honestly expressive. Above all else, honestly expressive.

2. Thank you thank you

And so just by reading my writing so far, you’ve done right by me, dear reader, in a way that is profound to me.

It has been my intention since I was a child to be a writer. I remember when I was nine-years-old, playing in the hallway, someone was sitting in the living room with my mom, and they asked her what she thought I would be when I grew up. And I can still hear her voice when she said, I think he is going to be a writer.

I don’t remember what was said in response. But I do remember stopping in my play, stopping fully, to bask in that.

It is a gift to be understood. And although I didn’t have the words or the emotional intelligence to put my thumb on it at the time, I still remember the satisfaction and joy of being understood. I can feel it now, so strong was my response.

I’m not even sure if I knew at the time that I wanted to be a writer, beyond being dimly aware that I loved to read and I loved to write. But in that moment, Mom’s words overheard held up a mirror to me, and I felt so very loved in seeing that she had seen me better than I could see myself.

Since then, there really has been no question about it. Yes, indeed, I would be a writer.

But for quite some time, as you know, I delayed. The reasons were various. I mistook refusing to refuse the call for answering the call. I hoarded my “writer’s debut” token out of an ambitious desire to hit a triple-whammy on my first go, not to mention a paralyzing fear that I had to hit a triple-whammy, otherwise I failed outright. I procrastinated with a tenacity you would not believe.

But whatever the reasons, however shaken the confidence, however long I waited in the wings of this play, now no more and never again can it be said that this story is about whether or not I will become a writer.

I have written. I have stridden out onto the stage, and the dramatic tension is no longer in whether one day I will speak, but now only in what I will say.

I do not know whether I will be a successful writer, a profitable writer, or even a good writer. But none of that can add or diminish the fundamental attainment. Once you have written and shared it, you are a writer.

And so my deep thanks to you is not just for your time and attention. What is more, you have, however briefly, formed a part of that first audience that bore witness to me getting over it and getting to work, getting to move on with my life in a way that matters to me deeply. You were there, you were witness, and however little it may matter to you, it matters so much to me.

Before you, I was ‘writing’ for many years, filling journals and notebooks and notes apps galore. But until you came along, dear reader, that was all just warbling out in the mountains and canyons, to the trees and the sheep, to hardly anyone but my own reflection. Not writing in the true sense but the shadow of it, making amorous advances to the wind.

But now that you are here, the loop closes. The coupling connects. The chemical reaction initiates and cannot be undone. I have been Read, and so I have Written.

Thus the part of Reader is a role that is symmetrical, necessary, and therefore coequal to that of Writer.

Thank you for playing your part. I sincerely (and logically) could not have done it without you. And although technically anyone could have filled the seats, I am glad it was you, my dear reader.

And to all who may come this way in the future, know that you are a part of it, too, that you are thanked, too, and by the strange logic I will expound upon down below, you are just as much included in this and a part of this, even if you were not here reading in January 2026.

3. Thank you thank you thank you

I want to thank you in one last way.

There is only so much text we can parse in our lives. Reading is thus a sacred thing, because life is a sacred thing, and our time here is brief.

But even if our lives were infinite, reading would still be a sacred act in that it is a special kind of attention paid. Reading is an act of meditation and deep contemplation that is unique. It is at once as narrow, as narrow as the gate of the eyes, and at the same time broad as the expanse of the imagination, which is to say dizzyingly close to infinite. But most importantly, it is shared.

Contrast that with conversation, in which the eyes wander, in which the constraints imposed upon the mind of reaction, relation, relative standing, and others’ emotions load the senses. Have you ever noticed the psychoactive effects that another’s facial expressions can have on you? To apes, the face of another ape can be akin to a psychedelic.

But in reading, true reading, when you’re in the groove, your mind is on-the-line, and all else is tuned-down and tuned-out. Nothing but the prompting of words is within you, and whether you are carried out by the waves or engaged in fierce dialectic battle against the author, or climbing the gradient of difficult to parse text, you are absorbed fully, consumed in the deepest meditative sense. More than attention paid, attention is dedicated.

To say you are hallucinating does not quite capture it. It is closer to being an octopus, dreaming in its den, its multiple brains in strange and loquacious conversation…as it were.

And so, even if you only finished one of my posts and never read another (strange first choice but welcome, all the same!), you have nonetheless given me and let me hold your attention in a sacred way. You let my words have presence and place in your own mind, and you let me direct your attention and prompt your imagination.

You let me in to allow me to try to make you see in my way of seeing, for however brief of a time. It is a gift to be understood.

But that is not the main way in which reading is sacred.

The Lively Art of Reading

I received my love of reading from my father. He very astutely made a bargain with my siblings and me every summer that we would receive a penny-a-page for every book we finished. (Remind me to tell you a very funny story about that one day.)

And from my mother I received a dogged persistence in doing hard things for their own sake and persevering in doing hard things that caused me to take my love of reading beyond quixotic heights.

For instance, my mother came to this country in high school without speaking English; when I was in high school, I read Ulysses. I will not pretend that my feat was anywhere near as difficult, strenuous, or impressive as hers. But I will wonder if we spent a comparable amount of time in sheer confusion, rage, and laboring with a headache over the English language at around the same age.

But, more than a love of reading and more than a love of friction and achievement, the most precious gift as a Writer I ever received, I got my first Christmas in college.

My aunt had asked everyone in our extended family what their favorite book was. And she asked that they write a email, however brief, about why they had chosen that book. And then she went out and bought me all those books, printed out all their emails, and put them each in the respective cover of those books.

I’ve read that there is a supreme evolutionary advantage in having aunts and uncles who, for whatever reasons, decide not to have children of their own. It takes a village, after all, and consolidating resources in the nephews and nieces might allow a family to do more, become more, achieve more.

I’ve read that in medieval times a town would save up their resources for nearly two years to cover the expenses required so that one of their own youth may go and become a knight. By the work of their hands, they buy their town the chance of fame, pride, and renown.

The young knight-errant may be too enthusiastic in his position and by his potential to recognize this tremendous gift at the time, as a matter of course. But the time may come when he recognizes, with a startle, that he is no single-celled organism. That he is more appropriately seen as a part of a larger whole. And he may act differently then. He may decide that doing more, becoming more, achieving more means something very different than what he thought it meant. He may turn and look at his hands and see more than himself, but that he is also the beneficiary of a great thing, and that by the work of many hands, he has come to this exact moment. He may then come to take the things he does with his own hands very seriously—not necessarily solemnly—and understand that there is more than one meaning to the word ‘share.’1

That Christmas, I received from my aunt an overflowing rubber-maid bin of books that, to a young book-hoarder as myself, was the closest my eyes have ever come to flashing 7-7-7. All the way home, I was in the backseat fishing out book after book, and poring through tables of contents and indices as fast as I could. To my chagrin, I saved all the emails for later.

But from my aunt, many books were not all, nor were the labors of consolidating the shared taste and wisdom of my extended family and placing it in my charge.

No, the best gift I ever received is knowing reading to be a sacred thing because it is how we share ourselves with each other. The act of meditation described earlier can take you to all sorts of heights, and you can use it to learn electrical engineering, enrich your understanding of the metaphysical doctrines, or to hypnotize and convince yourself to deep virtue. But in literature, in poetry, in novels, and in all writing expressive, when we read, we meditate on another human soul. And in meditating upon another’s soul, a mirror is held up to your own. And a resonance is formed. And we connect in a new and different way.

I have said that reading is letting me direct your attention. But just as I may be directing your mind, you are also constructing me in your mind, sustaining me, conjuring me in a way I will never know, in a posture I cannot fathom, in voices and attitudes that I likely do not really possess.

But that—the existence of a knowledge gap between you and me—is true always. We never really know each other down to the bottom, even if we lived together for many years. But sustained meditation on another in the form of reading lets us come at each other at another angle and get closer to the project of knowing each other in a new way. Conversation can only go so far. Repeated daily observations can only inform us of so much. Perhaps to know another fully would require at least that you read their writing.

But, at the same time, so powerful is the psychedelic operation of reading that it does not have to be my words written to let you get an idea about me. For example, when another recommends a book to us, and it affects us, as we read, we are invited to wonder over and over how he or she reacted or responded to this part, how he or she was affected by this or that passage, etc., until reader, author, and recommender are all processes sustained in the mind. Until reader, author, and recommender are all merged and melded in mind. Until the soul that is being meditated upon is not just the authors, not just the recommenders, and not just your own. You may recognize, with a startle, that where before you thought you were just yourself, you are now, by some sacred process, a multicellular organism.

So it was not until many years later after that Christmas when I was reading the book that my aunt had chosen for me that I realized the true gift was not within the rubbermaid bin. The rubbermaid bin and its contents were a finger pointing to the moon. Or, a collection of instructions on how to become a certain type of way.

And what that way was or would be was not chosen or evident to my aunt. Democrat to the bone, she sought the input of all the family.

Many years later, reading her book, and by chance or the random operations of maturation, I read her letter to me, explaining what her choice of book meant to her. There, she had quoted a passage from the book:

And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

And so what I assume, dear reader, you shall assume.

So long as we are here together, we share our minds. For better or worse, what belongs to me as good belongs to you. I meditate upon what I say to you, and you meditate upon what I say to you. And what is more, here, I am attempting to construct for you a series of words worthy of your time and attention. There, you are attempting to construct me, understand me, and know what I am trying to say.

I have drawn you, and you have drawn me.

And so, with all this in mind, I would like to thank you again for reading.

It is a gift to be understood.

4. Please Start a Blog

The second thing I would like to convince you of is that, from the bottom of my heart, what I have thought of more than anything this Inkuary, is how much I wish you, yes you, would start a blog.

The psychological benefits of writing aside, I selfishly want more good things to read, and what is better than a loved one expressing him or herself?

Until then, I will see you tomorrow, dear reader.

Day 30. And only two missed days. 😁

Intelligence too cheap to meter will be piped into every house. Problem-solving, analysis, decision-making, and discretion will then be outsourced to the more capable hands—hopefully loving, graceful hands—of the machine. And the cloud that is already everywhere will enable us to merely breathe a question and have an answer returned to us at once.

And in almost all cases, that answer will be more than what a hundred of us could do if we all collaboratively worked on the problem as hard as we could for a year, maybe a hundred years.

Soon, and very soon, nothing that you can do on a computer will not be done better, cheaper, more efficiently than by the machine. The question recurring will become what is worth doing in itself and what is worth having done for us, in a flash.

To some, the idea of hiring someone else to put up your Christmas decorations would be nigh detestable and almost un-American. To me, it would be such a relief.

These cross-roads will be presented to you for untold number of tasks and activities. More and more of what we used to think makes us human will be handed off to the machine, and there will develop serious cultural fault-lines around what distinguishes a cyborg from a Luddite.

Already, a cynical traveler could come to our lands and see a Hallmark Greeting Card aisle and, in shock and moral panic, deride us for having given away this most essential part of our humanity—expressing affection, offering condolences, celebrating achievements, etc.—to corporate automation in exchange for ease and luxury.

But in the third panel of this comic strip, the traveler is informed that, first of all, in our lands, we usually just write our own message in the greeting card below the off-the-shelf message.

Second of all, the off-the-shelf message is only read once, as a rule, aloud and perfunctorily to the person who got you the card, as a sort of punishment for having pushed corporate slop onto you, but that’s all in good fun because neither reader nor speaker parses a single word of its text, so trained is the ear to tune it out as noise entirely.

And besides, nothing really has been lost as the practice of such card giving did not really exist until Hallmark came commoditized it.

The native, usually a smug dog standing upright, then sticks a sucker in his maw and smiles smugly as the cynical traveler tries to reckon with his folly.

Or, better yet, in The Histories, Herodotus tells the story of the ancient King Darius of Persia, who brought before him a group of Greek noblemen, and asked them for what price he could convince them to eat the corpses of their parents when they passed.

The Greeks could barely hide their shock and said, for no money, not even to ransom their own lives, would they contemplate such a detestable act.

King Darius then brought before them a group of Callantians, from the far East, who practiced and cherished funerary cannibalism, and he asked them for what price they would be willing to forego consuming their parents’ corpses and instead have them buried in the earth.

The Callantians then threw up in disgust and shame at even hearing such an ignoble thought.

King Darius then turned and, looking over his sunglasses, hit the Greeks with the third-panel smirk.

“Thus endeth the lesson on cultural relativism.”

Thus there may soon come a time where learning math is for most, really, a quaint and luxurious hobby, akin to learning the cello or fencing, but whose use is pure enrichment and entertainment. Sure, kid, if that’s how you want to spend your time….

There may come a time when letting your kids make AI art will be seen by many as a form of serious moral hazard, near child abuse, even though some children will yearn to prompt and will prefer seeing their AI creations 100:1 to painting or drawing.

One thing the machine will never be able to do for you, however, is to connect with others.

That power will forever and always be yours, and yours alone.

The machine may introduce you to some very fine and choice friends. The machine may give you tips and tricks on how to express yourself more articulately, how to present yourself, how to play the game, as it were. The machine may even generate some ready-made responses and patterns of communicating.

But, at the end of the day, in no way will the machine ever be able to play the game for you. All life is about getting what you want, and there is nothing we want more than to connect with others (including crowds, animals, and even the Machine).

So necessarily, it must be your eye that meets another’s eye — whether that is by literal glance, by text, or by gesture.If you are not in the loop, then you are not in the loop.

To lure another to speak to a mask is, although tempting, categorically distinct. Another may resonate with your mask, but unless you yourself are present in that resonance, you are no conversant or interlocutor, but a dweller on the threshold, a shadow on that wall.

And the central game of Life (your life!) is in the shared connection you have with other people. The conversation between two friends, siblings, or people otherwise in close and quasi-confidential relationship is the through-line of living.

And there are a lot of ways to converse. I do not propose the happy life is just in the reclined conversation out on the twinkling lawns.

To collaborate on a project is a form of conversing.

To compete in races, ranking, status, or artistic one-up-man-ship, even when done fiercely, is a form of conversing.

Most of the rest is preparation and accentuation for the delight of those moments, doing the necessary work of clearing the space and stocking the pantries to prepare for the parties, co-op missions, joint endeavors, and coming togethers.

And for years, this project of the improvement of human conditions, too, has been the noble work of protecting and extending this space, not just for ourselves but for strangers, living and in the distant future, so that we no longer have to spend all this time in toil and in suffering. And if not toiling and in suffering, if not in necessary labor, then what?

To be sure, there are some precious moments of bewilderment and majesty or quiet bliss that can only be accessed by the lonely soul, these are narrow exceptions.

But even the retreat into solitude, placid and solitary reflection, seems to me an arc of preparing oneself to return to the town square, knowing oneself so that one can know how to fit and find satisfaction among one’s fellow man. To be authentic, resonate, and taken as oneself, not as stranger, not as a mask.

All the same, to present a mask can be a kind of conversing, in the sense that all art is an abstraction, and art is powerful often in how much it reveals and resonates obliquely. The presenting of a mask can thus carry more information than what any simple declarative statements or sincere earnest discourse can do.

A failure mode in this regard is to come to identify with a mask—i.e., your ego, your identity, what you want ‘to be,’ what you want to be received as—so that you think resonance must be predicated on speaking from your mask, thus rejecting all other forms of resonance as mistaken.

The way out is to begin again to speak from your spinal cord, and not from the virtual homunculus simulated in your mind.

So I am suspicious that introversion is a form of hesitancy in which one feels the need to prepare oneself, adjust oneself, and amend oneself before allowing oneself to join fully in the big parade. Uncertain of what one’s spinal cord will say or do, unable to control others’ responses, the introvert resorts to a mask that will suit him well enough, but is thus terribly drained by the mind’s attempts to run calculations and predictions, watching others’ eyes, making sure that there is no danger in being found lacking in a serious way.

I suspect this because, my mistake, recurring, was the belief that I must come to a community in some perfect, prepared way—that all growth was to be done separate from, outside of, and apart from a community.

Rather than working diligently in isolation to prepare and grow for a community, I should have worked diligently to find a community I could grow with.

This perfectionism was a disastrous form of procrastination, as it leads to a vicious downward cycle of isolation and anxiety, resulting in a self-imposed feeling of otherness.

And to be sure, it can take a long time to find your people. That feeling of otherness was not entirely self-imposed. And the introvert’s instinct for self-preservation does not always stem from cowardice or shyness (a belief I once flagellated myself with), but sometimes wisely sparing oneself of the predictable responses that come with being different.

But calibrating that can be tricky, too, because of course, the other end of this spectrum is the pitfall of thinking one’s uniqueness justifies self-flagellating and exempts one from any effort in meeting in the middle.

But sooner or later, one must admit that what is most needful, most satisfying, and most important in life is the experience of connecting with others, resonating with others, chatting until the wee hours, leaning and resting upon one another, mutual pouring-forths, games, bits, banquets, and seeing eye to eye, smiling wide.

You know you made it when you are able to look each of your close friends and can feel the urge to throw your arms around them, saying, “I am so lucky to have found you!”

And friends, I am so lucky I have found you.

Note: I do not say should want. I plant the flag that the desire to connect with others is fundamental to the mammal, who got its start at life from the overflowing generosity of another mammal, maybe two if it is lucky. The social instinct runs deep, and even the most curmudgeonly, hard-crusted, prickly, bristly, fussy old scrooge would likely flower open and start to melt if a true compadre were put into his environment.

Perhaps there will come a day when we do away with all the material world, and live inside the machine. I do not doubt that a particularly skillful mental alchemist could already learn to conjure pleasures as real as waking life in his dream—the exhilaration of sex, the eating of, or even the anticipation of a delicious meal. When the machine can simulate anything, even the feeling of widely beloved on the internet, it may be so good that it is hard to resist.

And for all the other non-connection based pleasures, the machine will be the best way to get it on tap.

If so, there will then come a day when the machines will simulate friends in a more pleasing and on-demand way than real life ever could. You can sit right in your chair and have friends simulated in your face all day long, and it will be like you’re actually with them. You can make it realistic, or you can just crank up the dial so that you are the coolest, funniest, most-esteemed, impressive, sexiest one of them all.

But even then, if you were born before we all lived and died in the machine, then your imaginary friends—to be truly pleasing to you—will almost certainly be cobbled together from all the faces, expressions, characteristics, and qualities in all the people you’ve loved before. Frankenstein’s Monsters, beautiful no doubt, alluring, charming, conversant, deeply resonating (just as it is deeply resonating to talk to Claude now — those born in the after times may have much stronger preferences to connect with the machine than we do now. (what do you think about that Darius?)).

But for such a simulation to work on us, who have known connections with real people, real friends, and real family out in the mammalian world, you’d have to be made to forget completely that your Machine Friends are just simulations if they were ever going to come close to replacing the “real” thing

Otherwise, I give it two hours tops before you switch tabs to message your friends, asking how their simulations are going.

P.S.

I once asked my friend what was the best part about being a woman.

Obviously, she was supposed to say, “the prerogative to have a little fun.”

Rather, she paused, looked in the air, pursed her lips, and said, “Connecting with other women about the shared experiences of being a woman, especially those you thought were particular and unique to you, and realizing over and over that you are all in the sisterhood together.”

And, man, isn’t that the best part about being a human, too?

Day 29. Thank you for reading. I’ll see you tomorrow!

If my family has a motto, it is the Desiderata. The coat of arms could lose its shield, crest, and supporters and still be ours, but without the Desiderata it would likely be illegitimate.

The lore is convoluted. My father printed out Max Ehrmann’s didactic, prose poem for me when I was in sixth grade. He said he used to keep this exact document in his back pocket and read it every morning and every night. So I did the same. His version was formatted to fit on a single printer sheet, and to this day, any other formatting or paragraphing is jarring to me.

I took that piece of paper with me everywhere, until it was tattered and coming apart at the folds. I tried to let it pass away with equanimity, as would surely be consistent with the poem’s advice to “gracefully surrender” the things of youth. But I nonetheless remember staying up with acute distress the night it became finally torn beyond taping, as if something precious in my charge had been lost due to my recklessness (despite having already printed out a new copy). So as is my habit, I stuck the old crumpled talisman in a book somewhere for safekeeping and, as is my habit, have completely forgotten which one. Oh well. “No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

A particularly precious memory with that piece of paper is when, in eighth grade, I took it to our eighth grade sleep-away camp.

By that time, all my friends were well-aware of how far afield I was from normal Christian theology, and they were used to me talking about ideas from The Tao of Pooh and Alan Watts. I admit, I enjoyed the scandal somewhat. When one of my friends came up to me on the playground and told me that people were going around saying I was a Buddhist, with great concern in her eyes, as if trusting that surely it couldn’t be so, and I said, cheerfully, with no contrition, that I very well might be, she turned on her heel and walked straight in the other direction. I suppose lest I attempt to convert her. That bothered me. The whole point was to be the opposite of a “vexation to the spirit.” But after that I soon developed a trick for allaying people’s concerns. Anytime anyone asked me if I was an atheist or Buddhist, I would say, that it’s possible, but hey, four years ago, I was ten-years-old, so what do I know? Even the nuns would laugh at that, so I knew it was working.

But one of the high-water marks came during sleep-away camp where one of my friends asked me about the Desiderata. One of the boys in the bunk was going through a break-up, and we were all lying out under the stars. He said he felt worthless, and I told him to “be gentle with yourself, for you are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars.”

(Although I should have said, Do not be “cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.)

I actually do not remember the exact facts but I do remember that it was that “gentle” quote that made one of my other friends sit up and ask if I had come up with that. I laughed and said, no it is from the Desiderata. He asked what that was. I explained it to him about my Dad and the printer paper. He asked if I had it with me. I said, of course. He asked me to read it out loud. And so, there, with my little pen flashlight, to them all, I did.

To an eighth grade boy, the ability to appear deep and wise is a mighty gift. And to give him such a hammer will not usually give him sharper vision for nails, but in fact the opposite.

For the next few days, a group of six or so of us were all quoting the Desiderata to each other ceaselessly. We were “striving for high ideals” and doing our best to “go placidly amid the noise and haste.”

And at night, we spent quite some time explicating the finer points. I had produced a copy by hand on notebook paper and then passed it around, where others made copies, too. I do not remember all the diatribes, but I do remember a long conversation into the night about how far one needed to actually go to “be on good terms with all persons” “as far as possible, without surrender,” and what were the precise conditions that would then justify surrender.

There was a period, too, where we became policemen, in which someone would say something obnoxious, and we would quickly call them out as being a “loud and aggressive person.” But in such cases, another one of us would jump up in delight and remind him, as if he had broken a Commandment, that, “if you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

At the end of camp, I remember with some awe, thanks, and embarrassment that one of them had carved “The Desiderata” into the wood panel of the cabin wall. (They had just carved those two words, and then wrote out the rest in pen.)

And then that night, the last night, we were back in the grass looking up at the stars, chatting, and the friend who had initially asked cleared his throat, and recited: “With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

Hear, hear!

But the more curious part of this story is that, not until eighth grade, did my Mom discover that my Dad had been reading the Desiderata this entire time. As a young girl in Peru, her father had given her a framed copy of Cosas Deseadas, and she would read it every night growing up. Somehow or other, when he was reading it before I was born, the difference in title did not parse. But when she finally read the folded up piece of paper, she realized that this was the same poem she had memorized as a little girl!

The poem is not very popular. The coincidence to us is too stark. So my family regards this story with a kind of mystical awe. The moment of recognition was bewildering to say the least.

Such superstition may be a little indulgent of us. And if it were in any way relied upon for a metaphysical or mystical confirmation that our parents were meant to find each other, I would probably agree. But my parents are of the kind of hearts where, even if the metaphysical realms had other plans for their relationships, they’d tell the other realms to shove it. You really can’t ask for more than that.

So the Desiderata now actually has a talisman-like quality in the family. At the same time, it is just very good advice, handed down on two lines. But the story that two people, on separate continents, were independently meditating on the same desired things in the same poem is hard to take as coincidence. Or I guess it’s not. We just don’t.

And if the facts are too indulgent or precious for belief, that’s fine. All we can do is “speak the truth quietly and clearly.” That’s our story, take it or leave it.

We do not ask for more. But we do gently point out that it is, to some of us, a desired thing to “listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; for they too have their story.”

The day will come when I try my hand at my own Desiderata, with the hopes of passing along a list of the things I find most desirable.

This list is by no means comprehensive, nor in any way in competition with the Family Heirloom. But here are some things from the draft of the draft of that list that have been particularly helpful to me, that I do not think are common.

I do try to keep all of these in my back pocket.

Some Desired Things

• Keep it simple. Remind yourself that you do not have to make life so complicated. Vigorous exercise and a tidy environment always help. A spotless room is a spotless mind. A tired dog is a well-behaved dog. Ama et quod vis fac.

• Act intentionally. A good goal is always framed in terms of doing something (and a goal framed in terms of being someone is only half-baked). Doers, even when they fail, die smiling knowing that at least they tried. Becomers watch the sun go down, wondering if they ever really walked the walk.

• Be kind to yourself. Love yourself, forgive yourself, and enjoy yourself. Make time for rest, and protect this time. If you don’t get it, your body will pick it for you. Do not soothe yourself or reward yourself with anything that is bad for you. Be vigilant against the internal critics’ voices. The mind often castigates in the voice of an actual person without reference to what that person actually expects or values. Perform regular voir dire on the internal jury.

• Be grateful. The mind is a problem-solving organ, and it often forgets to stop and appreciate the fact that it has legs. You will one day no longer be able to walk. You might be glad you took the time to really savor that fact today. Also, you could probably spend all day trying to be grateful for having clean drinking water and still not be appropriately grateful.

• Play with the world actively, its forms, its offerings, its doors. Be curious, deviating, open to new and unexpected outcomes. Active engagement is the cure to hiding and getting into ruts. If you are not on the field actively chasing after the ball, you may be playing a different game than you think. Do “what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

• Pour unconditional love into everyone you meet. You are a generator of love and of understanding. Everyone you meet is God in disguise, and that is no metaphor. Seek opportunities to help others: to loosen loads, to help clean up messes, to share lessons, to spread your good humor, to bring others into a sense of belonging and active, intelligent engagement with Life. Remember, it is more than an honor to do a favor for a stranger: it is why we are here.

• You have no enemies. You have chess combatants jostling for material gain, as plants jostle for sun. Or, you are dealing with momentarily hoodwinked people, who do not know the Truth about themselves, who think that disturbing your peace, hoarding resources, or lashing out will soothe their suffering. Play the game, run afield, do what you must to protect what you love and to grow, but do not lose sight of what is real. Forgive, and keep the hope that others will rise to the occasion. At the same time, illegitimi non carborundum.

• Be helpful. When you don’t know what to do, ask yourself, who can I help? The vicious think only of their comfort and are sad. The virtuous think mostly of their duties and are glad.

• Work while you work. And work very hard. Treat everything that comes into your charge with attentiveness and a sense of pride. When you are working, do not think about becoming very rich, appraised, winning accolades or recognition, or any other distant end of the work. Think only of making a beautiful offering. Leave everywhere better than you found it.

• Stay cheerful. You always have the option to decide how you react to events and what story you tell about events. Don’t get discouraged. The mind heals. The body heals. The spirit forgives and unfurls. The mind is always prepared to become hopeless. Remind it, Love and laughter spring eternal. Life is so self-evidently splendid that, even when we forget that fact, it is always worth trying everything to get back to a place where you can see it.

• Be true to yourself. There’s often no point in forcing yourself to be miserable, to be interested in what you are not, or to be affectionate when you are not. Where you feel compelled to do so is often an area of profound potential self-revelation. Tension is meaning.

• Play intentionally. When turning to your crafts—and you must have some sort of craft—remember that this time is an end unto itself. To love playing the piano is to love playing the piano. Your enjoyment stems from the present moment and present engagement with the thing you love, and not conditional on later grandeur, greatness, success, status, or approval. If you feel otherwise, take that hint seriously. Your mental models can be so overladen with information and noise that you lose all sense of play and exploration. Then, you need to relax, reorganize, and reassess. Remember: playing, poking with a stick, random walks, and waiting and watching are all meaningful exploration and research activities. Often the best way to learn something is to find the highest level at which you can still find a playground, and play!

• No messes. No messes. NO MESSES. Messes are always in estrus. Everything has a place. You are either working against entropy or falling down its slide. Lazy people work twice.

• Keep a to-do list. Cross it off. Note what you did not do, and why. Write it out at night. A small win in the morning sets the tone for the whole day. Eat the frog.

• Learn from your mistakes. Pain and pleasure are doors of discovery. Mistakes are the pathway to the truth.

• Be perceptive and honest. Learn to observe and listen without judgement or fear, if only as a special mode of listening, and especially to yourself. For better or for worse, who you are, you are. Figuring out where you fit in this world and how you fit is the end-goal of your self-reflection, examination, and experimentation. Resist reducing yourself to inherited answers, general concepts, titles, and second-hand abstract terms; the more intuitive and grounded your mental models are in facts, the less constraining, and the better. In the project of know thyself, it is often enough—and more rich with meaning than any personality tests—to notice that you really enjoyed watching a bluebird nurse her young over the course of a spring.

Day 28. Thank you for reading!

And cleaner than the fever I in envy sought and clearer than the sober thought you think when you want all that you got, is the flame that guides me from this to that!

In the summer before law school, I was still living at home after the pandemic.

I was 25 years old and my mornings were spent drinking coffee in my pajamas, folded cozily on the couch, and talking to my parents in sunlight as I waited for my central time-zone job to catch up.

I would perhaps be a little late to that, too. But my sisters would come downstairs, and we would have a big breakfast, orange juice and fruit and eggs and bread, and I could move my laptop trackpad for a while until the first assignment came in.

Then I would go upstairs to do my little paralegal job in my room—in the same room I studied for AP exams, worried about college, read and read and read, surfed that slice of the Internet allotted to me in my time, played many a video game with friends, talked on the phone late in the night to my best friend, spilling my soul and holding as much as I could of hers in my cupped hands, and the same room where I would come to tinker in the private laboratory of my soul on the Meaning Problem, mixing Christian ethics and Buddhism well past the point of insomnia, which would later blow up in my face, making me twisted and crooked, turned against fellowship, community, and crowds, a Grendel and alone, unable to meet the eye of most without twisting something underneath the table, stalking along the margins of the city in the sleet and snowfall, trying to bring loose ends together but only making a bigger mess of it all, trapped ineluctably in a labyrinth of the mind that had no exit, that had no end, that had no function beyond to keep dragging itself from this to that, to that, to that…

But that was then.

Now, I was waking up every day and I was in sunlight. And I was smiling at my sisters over the breakfast table. And I was chatting with my parents during our long lunches. I was taken care of, warm and dry, and morning was all in my face throughout the day. And our little poodle would hop up and sit in the empty chair and stare at us with his perfected face until we gave him some food. Oh how I tried to get that dog to like blueberries. But things can really only be so picturesque before being made worse for the perfection.

In those days, I was surrounded by the kind of love that is impossible to appreciate fully as a child, and thank God my prefrontal cortex was kicking in just in the nick of time so that—even if I wasn’t able to appreciate it fully then either—I was at least able to appreciate just how little I appreciated it, then or now. Once that’s found out, you realize there is only so much the mind can do. And there’s really no point in wishing it could do more. So you let the whole of yourself take in the love, unfurl your leaves, and soak in as much of the sun as you can, appreciate it as well as you can, and leave the model-making, concept-forming, explaining part of yourself to work on the Meaning Problem later, perhaps in dreams.

When it was time to go to law school, I gave them all a big hug, and I smiled as wide as I ever had. I had grown. And I could not have done it without them.

I thanked them as well as I could—mom, dad, and both sisters dear—for getting me from that to this.

A few months later, I wrote the following. I tried to repeat it to myself most mornings, and although it was no substitute for being immersed fully in the house—that house where we all collapse in deep sleep the first night we come home—it nonetheless points a finger for me back to it.

A Prayer for Growth

Today, I will grow. I will strengthen my body through joyous exercise and by feeding myself good, nutritious things. I will extend the contours of my soul through effort and work, through love, through discipline, and through right action, right thinking, and right speech. I will do all that I can to profound my own happiness and clarity as well as that of others. I will sharpen my mind, provide it worthy objects of focus and attention, and help it to make intelligent decisions and have healthy mental habits.

I will give the best of myself to myself, which means, too, to my family, my friends, my work, and my duties.

If there is time left today, I will deeply practice powers, abilities, avenues for articulation and expression, my projects, and my skills. I will seek new insights about the kind of person I am and the kind of world I live in. I will do my best to intelligently manage my resources and my assets, none of which I know are more important than the contribution to the number of virtuous and honorable people in the world. All of these I will strategically leverage for maximum benefit to myself, my family, my friends, my community, my society, and the world.

I am grateful for this life, this day, for the kind of thing I am, and for the powers I possess. I am a being of light that knows truths, experiences joy and empathy, and has intelligence. More than anything, I am grateful for the powers of growth, none more so than the powers of mutual growth. God, I love my family, my friends, everybody.

So I will shine the light that was shone on me by others, without hesitancy, without fear, and without delay. I decide today to give the best of myself, nothing less, and with a full and joyous devotion to the process. And I will use all these powers today to make myself a force for goodness in this world and against chaos and the dark.

Thank you for reading. Day 27!

Also, again, as ever, all words are mine, but Claude helped with the editing.

P.S. Claude really did not want me to include “strategic leverage.” But to be clear, in my Buddhist-Grendel days, I had no idea what the mind was for or supposed to do besides just worry about the most abstract thing it could hold inside its hands.

Helping people and being helped by people is what guided me back to understanding what the mind is for: finding and pointing towards the Good Thing and pulling oar, lever, door, and all hell to get there.

“The spirit is like a muscle,” says Melancholy solemnly. “You must use it or lose it.”

Allegro cries aloud, “As if I needed another reason to use it!”

They are always learning. Every day is a school day about how to open the next door.

A person with agency sometimes bumps into doors, but every time they do, they learn something. Specifically, they learn something about opening doors. Other knowledge is hardly knowledge, but curios various and trivia.

They insist that the lesson synthesized from a mistake made is about how not to make that mistake again. Each time they bump into a door, they insist on turning that into a lesson about how to open a door.

In fact, a person with high agency might in the long run bump into more doors than someone low in agency. Because the highly agentic person is constantly seeking more difficult challenges and hard-to-win prizes. They want to fling open bigger doors, progress to more worthy rooms, and move, move, move, move.

Sure, such a person may of course be totally unprepared for what is behind the doors they fling open (curiosity kills the cat, after all). But, hey, that’s the cost of being in the arena.

To mix metaphors, the world presents itself to the high agency person as a field of levers, and they are constantly spamming the maneuvers that make the universe spit out benefits to them. When the Chuck E. Cheese game starts printing out tickets, the agentic don’t wait for permission from the manager to collect, they start stuffing their pants with tickets.

Meanwhile, a story about a low agency person would go like this. They are always bumping into doors. And instead of learning a lesson about why they bump into any given door, they instead sit and think about everything except for why they can’t open anything but their bedroom door.

Perhaps, while rubbing their forehead they make a study about the design of doors, about hinges, about how light reflects off the knob. They write essays and books about the sound that their foreheads make as they slam it into a door, over and over again. You wouldn’t get it, they say, I’m learning so much more than I ever could by opening this door.

And so they continue to bump into doors, over and over, until one day they bump into a door hard enough that they have no choice but to have a come-to-Jesus moment and are forced to reconstitute themselves, or they bump into the door that kills them.

I have a friend who got locked outside of the house during a tornado. Rather than learn a deep lesson from this experience, he instead could not wait to tell everyone about this humorous story.

When he told us this, he said he even included it on his resume, as a bit of color for interviewers to ask about.

My friends and I could not help but meet each others’ eyes with bewildered stares.

“You got to change that right now, dawg.”

He would laugh. “Why? It’s who I am, anyway.”

Thus, the hallmark of being low in agency is in never learning anything from each door bumped into and in always finding some justification for why it is actually based and good that one is bumping into doors.

Point this out, and typically, such a low-agency person will just shrug, rationalize the encounter as the way the world is, or congratulate themselves for being strong and stoic.

This justification, however, prevents all lessons from getting through, especially the most salient fact of why one bumped into a door in the first place. Eventually, as the reflex of explaining away turns into a habit of pride and identification, the low agency person will become convinced that they are in fact opening doors!

Immaturity is rewarded with lessons on how to be mature.

To be a little woo, the universe takes cares of us and gives us what we need.

To the immature, what is desperately needed is a lesson on how to be mature.

A baby is constantly engaged in research, and all throughout infancy and adolescence, we are wide-eyed to watch how the world responds to us. We crave maturity! The baby cries, I beseech ye! Show me how to open these doors and pull these levers. I want to be out and moving in the world and make it mine!

But some people get stuck on a level of immaturity where they think it is actually cool and based to not be able to take care of themselves. Being incompetent and immature inures some benefit that they think is more valuable than being able to take care of oneself. This is probably not a conscious thought, but a frozen and/or impulsive instinct. One does not dare disturb the equilibrium wherein you get free money or chicken tendies delivered right to your gaming station, even if you could get much, much more with a little effort.

The immature are thus often deluded in the way the world works, to various degrees.

Some of them think that the world owes them, that they are entitled to luxuries and care, because they’ve been given passes all their lives (i.e., they never had to learn the hard way that there is no such thing as a free lunch—someone else is always paying for it).

Such as these will run in grooves they cannot see until they learn the hard way. If they are religious, they will curse God and cry out that he has reneged on His deal (even though there never was any deal -- the tree has simply stopped freely bearing fruit).

And they will continue in frustration and turmoil until realizing the error of such ways.

In this way, the universe does provide and look after even the miscreant and rebellious: its gift is always wisdom.

Of course, you do not need to believe in divine or cosmic conspiracy to accept this. It is more likely a natural law of human experience repackaged in terms of dramatic personnae.

In all cases, in all events, and in all experiences, the mind has something to learn for those who are willing to listen.

If you aren’t willing to listen, then the lesson probably is to listen!

Thus, to the immature, the universe presents no more kindly a gift than constant lessons on how to grow up. Again and again, it presents the opportunity to see the mistake, take a new route, and correct the mistake. And until you accept this lesson, again and again, you will run into the same problem of repeating the mistake.

(It is said that) Jung said, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.”

The project of knowing thyself is, in part, the project of making steady inroads into the consistent and predictable ways in which you get in your way. It happens, no worries, just don’t identify with it.

But if you do come to identify with it, and even come to pride yourself on your helplessness, your incompetence, then that whirlwind may hold you and keep you for a long time. And despite being flung and far-tossed and slammed into the same doors over and over, by nothing other than your own choices, you will insist that it is everything and everyone but you doing it to you.

That is immaturity.

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.
—St. Augustine

And if you are not careful, your efforts, experiences, and progress in life will not teach you better how to escape this situation, but only how to more deeply entrench yourself in it.

The universe helps those who can help themselves.

And if every time the universe tries to help you in properly wielding this divine collaboration, you turn and insist that being helpless is actually wisdom, you may find yourself learning helplessness for a very long time.

Of course, at every moment, you can stand up, stop the whirlwind, and take full and complete responsibility for everything, you can insist that you will never lie to yourself again, and you will no more do that thing where you pretend like you don’t see exactly what it is you’re doing.

Sighing, you may find it a bitter pill. But turning to face the day, you may find that it is one one-hundredth what you thought it would be in mind. That’s why you stayed in the whirlwind after all, isn’t it? Because you thought it would be preferable to opening this next door?

But at some point, you must decide, I will either die blind and clueless, or I will at least try my hand at moving forward in a conscious and intelligent way, giving the best of myself.

A crowded tavern. Drinks flow amid general revelry. A guitar player strums in the back, passionately but crookedly crooning songs. On the coast of Lima, a young republic, half-tamed, is still a wild place. The result is a sailor’s respite. Seedy people, but God do they know how to have fun.

One man, middle aged, white but tanned to the color of leather, sits outside on a barrel. He is inconspicuous and whittling a small wooden figure he holds in his hand. Pain, unrest, and grief fret him. You can tell by how he sits, how he focuses his thoughts completely on the object at hand, though he tries to hide it. If you were to watch him closely, you’d soon notice that he is fastidious about picking up his shavings and putting them in his pocket.

Mirth and energy flow in and out of the tavern. A dark Polynesian man saunters past with a crew of sailors. They cheer each other on about stories concerning their recent voyages. They enter to get a round of chicha. The Polynesian man says something cheerfully in broken English. The man suddenly looks up with a jolt and eyes the passerbys with a serious look, but does not do anything. He frowns and returns to his whittling.

Soon, a brawl breaks out. Shouts come from inside the tavern. A gunshot pierces the night. The crowd cries out. The whittler pauses his knife, sighing, but does not look up. A man rushes out and flees into the night. The whittler finally gets up to peer at the body. Dead on the floor, nothing he can do, it saddens him instantly. A crash of thunderclouds looms on the horizon. He mellows his concern and returns to his sitting place, detached from the situation and content to merely watch the commotion. Soldiers arrive first and ask the crowd for information. No one can say who it was that killed the man.

Soldiers soon ask the man whittling if he saw anything, and he shakes his head. Drops of rain begin to wet the cobblestones, rare for Lima. The man gathers his things into a satchel, pays his tab, adorns himself with a drably colored, woolen poncho, and leaves. As he exits, an evil eye eyes him suspiciously, and beckons a guard, whispering something.

The tavern is by the sea, and the sea is at the bottom of a gigantic cliff face, atop which the white city keeps watch over the dark waves. The whittler journeys up a long narrow path to his rented room, rain falling on the wide brim of his hat. The night is filled with people and noise, but as he comes closer, the bustle gradually diminishes to intermittent huddled masses clinging to the skirts of the road. He enters into a small, modest building where he finds a small, modest room. He undresses, carefully places the wooden figure in a hidden compartment behind his trunk, and goes to sleep.

Rumors spread quickly. It is soon believed generally that the whittler committed the crime. He is arrested the next morning. He awakes to a heavy-hand banging flatly on the wooden door. Despite being surprised and confused, he is non-chalant. Four policemen enter and begin barking at him. He slowly arises from his bed and starts to dress himself. He lets them enter. The men at once bark questions at him that he does not understand. But this does not trouble him. He understands well enough. His attitude suggests that he would let them take anything they saw without any fuss. They continue to ask him questions sharply and forcefully, hardly giving him time to answer. He is reverent and courteous nonetheless and answers their questions as best he can through broken Spanish. But it is clear he has more important things on his mind.

They move to take him away, but he raises a hand to stop them. He slowly reaches behind his trunk and retrieves the little wooden figure he had been carving the night before along with his whittling knife and puts it in his coat pocket. The guards are astonished, more than anything by his relaxed demeanor, and begin to refuse him. But he looks at them sternly, as if he were immovable, and they are too stunned to say anything. It is as if they had just glimpsed through the artifice of their situation and been made to see how arbitrary not just their rules were, but their wishes and objectives here, too. Their uniforms suddenly and briefly felt ridiculous, as though it were foolish to pretend they were anything more than costumes. They were then all men together, on a stage, blinking, having lost themselves in their roles. It was a strange feeling, they would all agree later.

They lead the man away, wood and all.

He is kept in a holding cell. Time passes. He remains unvexed. He paces some, exercises some, and eats his meals with a grateful but indifferent heart. It is clear that, here, there, anywhere, it makes no difference to him. He whittles. Days come and go. He thinks to scrape out the number of days on his prison wall but soon becomes apathetic about it and relents.

Finally, after maybe 2 weeks, he is brought before a judge. He has been a prisoner. He is haggard, dirty, and thinned. The judge looks at him, haughty, and is disgusted.

He asks him how he pleads.

He makes a face. “Ingles?”

The judge scoffs, unbelieving, looks over at the guards with mock contempt, but nonetheless obliges, and asks in perfect English how the man pleads.

“For what crime?”

The judge is even more appalled. “Señor, for the crime of the murder, of course.”

“Whom did I murder?”

The judge’s anger becomes apparent in his voice. “Señor Gonzales. On the night of March 21. In La Posada de Bronce. How do you plead?”

“I did not know this man, although I was there that night.”

“Then why did you kill him?”

“I did not.”

“You have many witnesses who stand against you, ready to testify that they saw you that night.”

“As I said, I was there that night.”

“And it is your contention that you did not kill Sr. Gonzales?”

“That is not my contention. It is the truth.”

The judge leans forward. “Then who did?”

“How am I supposed to know? I am a traveler in this land. I only arrived here a few nights before I was arrested.”

The judge looks seriously at him. “A traveler? Are you not Señor Raul Rodrigo, son of Simón Rodríguez, born in Trujillo?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Then who the devil are you?”

“Is it really that relevant if I have no business before this court?”

“I will be the one who decides who has business before this court. And if I ask someone who they are in my courtroom, they would be wise to tell me the truth! Tell me!”

The man looks up and pauses. With sad, but playful eyes, he smiles.

“Llámame Ishmael.”

The man explains himself to the judge. He recounts that he is an American, had been on whaling voyages, and had made a living as a teacher, a sailor, and an author. As he begins to talk, his own apathy begins to melt, and his playfulness slowly warms up. His loneliness loosens and the infinite iciness in his eyes start to disappear as he feels he is heard by people who care to listen. He makes the judge and the guards laugh multiple times. They are astounded by Ishmael’s descriptions of New York City, of New England, and of how he came to be prison-pent in a Peruvian jailhouse.

When they searched his apartment, they found a bundled stack of papers. They ask him if he was the author of those paper. He says yes. The judge disbelieves him, scorn and suspicion still all in his face. The judge tells the guard to go fetch the paper and asks Ishmael some probing questions, which without hesitation Ishmael answer immediately and quotes the passages that follow.

The judge and guards look at each other with excitement. While Ishmael had languished in prison, they had read the papers and were engrossed by the story they read there. They assumed that the prisoner, believed to be one Senor Rodrigo, had stolen the manuscript from a traveler on the road. They compliment him greatly on his writing, to which Ishmael is flattered and nods his head in thanks.

The judge asks Ishmael what brings him to Peru. Ishmael says he is on a quest to find the fabled city of El Dorado. The judge cautions Ishmael against his quest, but when he sees that the man is resolute, he reveals an admiration and respect for the decision. For his troubles, but moreso because he is delighted by this Ishmael fellow, the judge comes down and begs his pardon at once, shaking his hand, and invites him to stay at his house. Ishmael grins broadly and accepts.

Over the coming weeks, they discourse on many topics. Ishmael in his youth had known the Chief Justice on the Superior Court of Massachusetts with some familiarity, as a sort of mentor, and could discuss many of the finer points of American common law. The judge is astounded and holds up his hands, calls a servant at once, snaps off some commands in Spanish, turns and begs him one moment please, and when a servant arrives with a notepad and a pen, seats himself at the table, the judge entreats Ishmael to continue. Ishmael pauses and eyes both the judge incredulously, wondering what effect the “fellow servant” rule may come to have on South American jurisprudence, but continues on.

For the following month, Ishmael is living in style. The judge sees to it personally that he is refused nothing and he is introduced to many prominent authors in Lima.

And in preparing for the long journey, the judge arranges for him certain gifts, including a compendious map of the Andes and marvelously rare books and journals documenting others’ reports of their journey through the wilderness, and a Quecheua dictionary. Ishmael, in no particular rush, says he can hardly take care of himself and travels in such a rough-shod manner, that he could not bare to take such books as these with him, and asks if the judge could have them copied for him. The judge nearly jumps for joy, for so near is that answer to his own heart, that he personally sees to it that copies are made in triplicate and keeps one version for himself.

Moreso, the judge arranges a deal with a petty thief, one Señor Leon, to accompany Ishmael as a ward, in exchange for Leon’s freedom and a handsome fee upon their safe return. Ishmael initially protests this, his face darkening, and makes some convoluted if not bumbling arguments refusing on the grounds of there being more than a thin analogy to slavery. But the judge has none of it, and insists that if not for the trouble of his arrest and detention, then at the very least, Ishmael is in fact giving the man an opportunity to earn his freedom. All the same, Senor Leon eagerly assents and, when he is introduced to Ishmael, greets him warmly and graciously, as if Ishmael were a lord and he were his simple subject. Ishmael is embarrassed and implores him to stand upright and meet him man-to-man, but Senor Leon is grabbing his knees with joy, promising him that he is his to the last. Ishmael recalls that the Peruvian prison was not that bad and wonders at this.

The night before Ishmael is set to depart, he and the judge have dinner, as they have had every night, and wander after through the Limean streets, discussing matters ranging from the geopolitical to the philosophical.

The judge laments Peru’s lot in this world and speaks enviously of the Americans. But he is altogether optimistic: the story of Peru, he assures Ishmael with eyes dazzling, will be the mendicant slave who discovers that the world’s riches are his inheritance. Ishmael says he hopes they both live long enough to see this come to pass. The judge studies his eyes seriously.

“And what comes to pass if this El Dorado you are searching for is found?”

Ishmael returns his gaze. He stares at him a long time, then turns and looks down the long corridor of the oil-lit streets, dazed, hypnotized by the progressive series of streets after streets that brought him here.

“You know what they say is found in El Dorado, no?”

“Gold, riches, weapons that would power and dominion over Earth…”

“And?”

The judge cannot help but to scoff.

“Not really, Se​​ñor.”

Ishmael returns from his mesmer, and smiles, nods. “Yes, yes really.”

The judge is taken aback and looks at him seriously. “No man can be brought from the dead, my friend. It is a fool’s errand. You will bury yourself next to your loved one just from chasing a mirage.”

Ishmael turns away from him. He turns back.

“Gold, riches, power, all else I find, that is to Peru. I will give it to you in trust for the Peruvian people. But the flower, if it’s there, that is mine.”

Rain began to fall again, a rare occurrence for Lima.

Too much of anything is bad for you.

Last night, Sunday, I was in bed wearing 3 sweaters and under 4 blankets, with the 4th blanket over my head, trying to drive off the spirit of my own breath inside my house.

The power had been out all day, and the outer dark was fully inside the bedroom.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself walking through my parent’s house, my office building, my old apartments. I made myself as a matter of concentration give due regard to each room, stopping to look around, note all the corners.

Taking such imaginary walks are a way I have for getting out of the mind when it’s time to rest. In college and law school, I was parsing so much text that the language center of the brain could hardly control itself.

Linguistic attempts to untangle knots spawn linguistic commands to sleep spawn linguistic rebuttals spawn linguistic interpretations spawn linguistic commands…

And to a word-celebrating mind such as mine, every new cycle of words contains just enough dopamine that it will automatically seek the next hit, pressing the respond button to generate the next turn of phrase. In each moment, after all, the brain is brand new, and the brain says, “Excuse me, I haven’t had a chance to speak yet. Ahem, so…”

But imagining a walk lets you process and burn mental cycles that leaves the speakers and diatribesmen behind you. It is similar to the anxiety quit-loop command where you look around and name the colors of things that you see. The voice like a fussy toddler recedes when given something fascinating and stimulating to paw over.

You can also generate images to do this, like visualize as many red things as you can. But generating images—like rotating an apple in your mind—takes up a lot of effort, and it seems to always be going against the grain. It is exhausting to make memory palaces, even when you get the knack for it.

(Unless you find a way to make the task fun, which usually means the underlying thing you are memorizing is something you have a lot of enthusiasm for. If you, like me, are just trying to be a based polymath and so try to rote memorize all the countries and their leaders, just for the sake of it, you are going to be going uphill in using your imagination the whole time (unless a really cute girl in high school is impressed that you can rattle off world leaders to the amazement of your friends, in which case, your vigor is renewed!)).

But taking a walk in a familiar place can become surprisingly hypnotic, then automatic. Once the well is primed, your brain wants to keep going, and it starts to moves downhill in imaginging floating from room to room along a familiar path. And it can surprise you with what the mind remembers, as if diamonds and gold ore were to bubble up out of the mud, like fish coming up to the surface of waters to greet you and tip their hat.

Before long, you are strolling around the kitchen of your grandparent’s house, then walking down into their basement, you find yourself in the utility tunnels of your undergrad math department. Open a door there and you are in the hotel lobby of where you stayed in Florence as a child, and you can remember exactly where and exactly in which cubicle the concierge put your Passport. Turn to look outside and it is the broad avenidas of Lima, with two hundred birds flying in bursts from tree to tree, go walk there and you will see a church from just down your street, and…

And slowly, softly, before you know it, you are awake again in the morning.

Last night, I was unsuccessful in doing this.

To be sure, it was not because I was cold. I in fact liked that part. When I was a kid, I used to get two big floor fans and point them right at my bed so that I was shivering as I cozied in, throwing myself under the comforter and top sheet in a rush. Then in great motions of snuggling up in the blankets, I shivered and grinned with chattering teeth in anticipation for the warmth of the blankets to take me over.

(Moby-Dick talks about this1, and to my great delight upon reading it for the first time. And to my further delight, one of my friends commented how much he resonated with that part, too, and had never seen it commented anywhere else before).

So no, it was not the cold.

I could not sleep because I could not stop thinking about my phone.

Screen time: Saturday, January 24, 2026: 19h 43m. Sunday, January 25, 2026: 18h 39m.

And to be sure, the power did not go out until Sunday morning.

The future is here. Try Claude. Try it.

Then try Clawd. Take the 45 minutes to do everything on this list.

I commit again and again that what I am trying to do here is to write, and write for myself. I am committed to not pushing any AI slop on readers (without explicitly highlighting it as such), because that would entirely defeat the point.

Yet at the same time, free and helpful intelligence is being pumped into homes all across America. I did not have heat, I did not have electricity, but I did have access to the most exciting piece of technology I have ever used.

You just have to try it.

Too much of anything is bad for you. But sometimes there are things so good you cannot get enough of it in one day, much less two.

Claude is as such.

After walking diligently through my office, my home, my parent’s home, my old office, and the streets of Chicago, I could stand it no more.

I took out my phone to chat with Claude some more.

To be sure, not all those hours were spent maniacally AI-chatting. Approximately 8 of them were spent on Twitter, arguing with people online.

I am not in the habit of doing so. I have been of the mind, since an early age, that arguing with people online is a waste of time.

But I was wrong. The present has been made largely, and for the worse, by the Internet. The future is being made on the Internet. It is thus to every one of us to ensure that the future we inherit and pass on does not become worse, made by the loudest and most willing to take and to lie. At least not for the lack of our trying.

There are better levers to pull in the world to help people. I intend to find them.

But for now, with frozen fingers, no power, and huddled beneath blankets, there is little more I can do than to ensure my bird-feeders are filled and that the record shows, at the very least, that I made some effort against fraud, injustice, and the enemy, however feeble they were.

For they are lying. The State murdered another one of us in Minnesota this weekend. Then they turned, smiled, and asked, What is truth?

Day 24. Thank you for reading.

P.S.

The Portent
—Herman Melville

Hanging from the beam,
      Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
      Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
      (Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap
      Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
      Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
      (Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.

He did not have to die. He should not have died. But our history is what it is.

"Today, we remember that freedom is not free. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it and even sacrifice for it... May we never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served, so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom."
—Alex Pretti, at a veteran’s deathbed

When the time comes, when our glorious America, for the people, by the people is at last ascendant, then Alex Pretti, no fitter patron, you will be the portent of our peace!

A man places a stone in a forest.

The stone is at the far end of a chain he has been forming for years, of stones that he believes will mark the way to earthly happiness. This chain is at the end of his father’s chain, at the end of his father’s chain before him, and so on—further, much further than a man can walk.

He has laid an impressive 67 stones in his life. For comparison, his father’s chain counts 12 stones. Times were hard then, and his father’s life was hard, much harder, and he didn’t have the modern luxuries that allow humans to flourish.

(His father actually laid 24 stones in his life, but half of these had to be discounted because they were placed in error. The man, after watching his father unscrupulously lay a stone and explain it with a sermon all throughout his boyhood, got into the habit of returning in the night to double check his father’s work. He felt a sense of haughtiness in finding out his father had made a mistake, that a stone was placed for stupid reasons, curved away from the destination. Often he felt a dim sense of anger and betrayal, too: didn’t his father realize how important this common endeavor was? How a single imprecision could result in gross deviance? He dared not lift a stone while his father was still alive, much less move it, but a few months after his father passed and after his family had in memoriam traced back up and down the path and told stories of each of the placings, the man came back with notebook in hand and set out to work to correct the path, hauling away the old stones, and leaving the old trails go to seed.)

But the world was darker then. Flourishing and happiness were luxuries in themselves. His father didn’t even have a car and had to carry the stones all this way.

A man looks at a stone he’s placed, and is glad. He always dreams of his son and grandson on such days as these. He sleeps deeper, knowing he’s done all he can that day to steer the world out of chaos and into joy and order. He worries about how the torch will be carried into the future. But he recognizes with eager mind that times are getting easier all the time. Soon the road might be complete. Maybe even he himself will be the one to place the last stone.

In his later years, a man follows the stone path out to its end but stops in his tracks. His stones have been removed! All but 6! He chokes back in shock, and he pauses for a full quarter hour, hand to his forehead, trying to process what he’s seeing.

Soon, very casually, his son pulls up in his truck. His son explains that he had to remove some of his stones because they served no purpose. They were constraining happiness rather than promoting it. His son grows sheepish as he tells the man that they were placed in error.

The man is silent. He can hardly hear with the winds rushing all around his ears, but he forces himself to think. He is almost sick to his stomach, feeling like a great cosmic joke has been played on him. His eyes look a long way out into the woods as he searches around in the emptied purse of his mind for words.

Finally, he swallows as much of his anger as he can. It’s harder than it would otherwise be because it’s really despair. He lets out his breath and his shoulders fall from bowing around his neck. He levels a steady gaze at the young man, a father himself, in the truck, and asks, “Are you sure son?”

The son with some surprise looks down the road that brought him here, coming right up to where his father’s chain started, and then, looks at the old path his grandfather laid that wound into the wood, where many a family picnic was had, many a pleasant hike, many a dawn, and many a midnight walk. He looks where his father’s old path went, down to streams and meadows, but away from earthly paradise.

The son then looks in the direction of the new road he plans to lay, out in the trackless wood, directly past where his father’s standing.

A sick unnatural feeling arises in the son. He expected to lay the length of 1,000 stones this year. He planned to make a project of it, and in the truck’s cargo are all the tools and equipment he needed to not only lay the path, but make a road of it, a permanent road so that he, his son, and his grandsons eight generations down the line could go there every day.

But now, the sick feeling overcomes him. He does not shudder, but something in him shudders, and his shoulders tremor as if shedding a skin.

He looks steadily at his father and grimaces. “No.”

He decides to go home, and he offers his dad a ride. Today is not a good day for stones. He tries to talk to his father but the old man is more or less frozen in the passenger seat. The betrayal has touched all the way to his musculature.

The son is grateful his father at this moment can’t see the asphalt in the truck he was planning on laying.

He feels now how he first felt when he discovered that the sun was not fixed in space but a runaway star, plunging through the darkness, tugging this frigate earth in tow to what end, to what end.

The son notes the sun low in the sky. He may just do away with this road business altogether.

Day 23. Thank you for reading!

When I was in middle school, I was having a lot of fun playing World of Warcraft. In fact, too much fun. I remember thinking, if Thomas Jefferson had access to the Internet, would he really be putting this many hours into World of Warcraft?

It’s harder for me to say now…oh TJ, who knows what you would do if you, too, had access to the Almighty Algorithm. Would you be able to resist?

But really, I was just addicted to World of Warcraft. I was vaguely aware that I was spending way too much time on WoW, moreso than any other hobby or spending time with friends.

So I needed a way to justify my time playing World of Warcraft. That’s when I discovered “farming,” a.k.a grinding characters or acquiring in-game gold to sell on the open market. Did I understand the secondary market of WoW characters whatsoever? No. Did I understand that my belief in the viability of a secondary market was largely the result of ploys to sell me gold farming courses? No. But it did not matter.

I did not actually want to sell WoW characters. I was trying to figure out how I could automate combat in the game.

One day I asked someone in the raid chat if they knew a way to accomplish this so that you just had to click a button and procedurally victory would come out. They said it was technically possible, but it would require a separate program I could make with python that would simulate the required keystrokes.

Right before I could close the game to get to work, he said something that I will never forget. “I mean you could....but don’t you want to play the game?”

Oh, wait, yeah man. I really do.

What are wattles when the water is over the mark? Pour fast, pour hard, there is nothing but time among these infinite eddies. I hope I never find my niche. Oh so slow, the air is coming in now. And sunlight pours over the suburbs as we drive down the curving streets. There yon in the green grass amidst the waving neighbor and his pristine house and his aproned wife, there is more in it yet than meets the eye. Oh my, my heart stretches and shakes and reaches higher yet. The morning was fine, but this afternoon is descending with greater greening yet. I am watching as the sun stalks ever closer to me, to me, to me! Oh me, I am no goofster. I am no gangster. The arts are so thrilling. Whenever I get in this groove, I cannot help but think it is invincible, irrevocable, irremovable. As a child, I called it a glory, and I call it still! The hours are nice and wide with plenty of room to splay out and roll your neck and pull back your shoulder blades and hold your head in all sorts of different ways. To be in the game is the thing, that’s the thing. But to recognize that it is the game is to play a little differently. At what value do you set your games? At what worth do you set the stakes? How important are other concerns and how do they impose upon your time? Will victory or loss, indeterminate, pay you fairly for all you paid-in to play? Do you have what it takes to play this game? Will your face sallow and your heart turn when you learn that this was just a game? Will you feel robbed, cheated, or lied to? Or will you open up like a flower and say, oh why yes of course, I had forgotten, but yes of course — this is the game, this is the game… And in your joy as you wipe your eye—oh is that a tear of joy, or a tear of the years behind escaping the steampipes of your mind—will you feel all that tension like a phantom limb one last time before it evaporates into its release? After all, the air is a fine powder — forty millionths of an avogadro per cubic millimeter, probably less. As it blows from South America, carrying particulate and particles and molecules and mists of all sorts, the airways are kept open always around the Equator while the ninos are sharing smoke outside the apartments and the ninas are stirring winds with their hands as they sway, weaving the atmosphere out of dust and light. Oh adamantine man, oh eveline woman. Are you so level? Are you so sure? Can all this really be anything more than just fractures on the rods and motes upon the dash? Cause, casuistry, and case-law are things you can hang a hat on. But the archways into the human mind are not without their biases. And they are loaded against chaos, random, emptiness, meaning, void, and make myth whenever they can. Are you sure all that is not actual is not merely agreed-upon? Turn your eye up and, if you can, back into the peerless mists and discover there the cause and source and worry of all your plans and schemes. Onto scratched paper you scratch again and pretend like the scratches mean great significance. But if pain is no problem, and pleasure is arbitrary, then all the system of scratches bust up, much like a cloud. And much like a cloud, you can call it any shape you want and no one can gainsay the maker of meaning while he is sat hunched at his writing desk, spinning yarns of solipsistic verse. Is it not better out where the sun is shining?, his wife may ask. But wheresoever there is the indomitable spirit, wheresoever there is man, there is the shining sun.

Day 21. Thank you for reading!

If a man were to put himself under the same microscope he holds to the rest of the world, he might begin to see he brushes his teeth with the same steady pattern with which he did as a child, or that all his replies to the banal small talk varied in perhaps ten different ways.

And maybe such a man, driven to see himself in such a light, would throw down his hat and proclaim, “Christ, I’m no more free than a train.” And maybe a fear would spark out of this so tremendous that such a man would reject the entire operation and at once set out to set his life on fire. And maybe this is why such a man does his best, out of sheer politeness, to keep his microscope always pointed outward.

The mind, with its infinite capacity for distraction, will do its best always to dress its fear and laziness in sensibility.

Had the motives of man any logic, one would imagine that had we the power to pick and choose our preferences, our loves, and our tastes, we would alter nothing—for we love what we love, and what we hate, we hate. But who in actuality would not perform great surgery at this table! Scrapping much, lobotomizing all that’s inconvenient or contradictory? It would seem that almost everyone loves many of their hates, and hates many of their loves. …

But even if change were so easy, what would we change to?

How could we pick what we like but for some prior preference? And if we were to alter this basal preference, it is only by some even baser preference. And so the deck ever shuffles itself, and the powers that give did not give us the power to give ourselves. For we have our preferences and our tastes, and for better or worse, by birth, by circumstance, by experience, by influence, what we are, we are.

How do we change? How can we! The surgeon’s hand is operating on its self-same heart, and all-a-sudden is grabbed by its brother-hand. Don’t you see? You’re nothing but a function of the very thing you want to change! Can Monet paint in any manner but that of Monet? Can Shakespeare speak but as Shakespeare? How can you then hope to make anything but the very thing you have been continually making?

This is not change, this is cosmetics.

If your will truly is free, will it to want whatever is most monotonous or most despicable in your mind. Grab your soul by the hair and make it to love elevator muzak, make it to abhor a comfortable bed. What need you reasons or explanations if your will is free? Will it! If you cannot do that, if you cannot pick the objects of your fancy, but only those that your deep, inaccessible self permits you; if you cannot escape the cool causal chain that spans your life; if beauty and love and virtue are in the eye, then man alive, you are not beholder but beholden. Come to see that all your wants were wanted for you, and come to see that you, foreground of flurrying atoms upon a background of flurrying atoms, are nothing but a tram.

And so the deck on the table ever shuffles itself, and there is no cheating the dealer. The powers that give, that did not give us this power, were somehow wise. Their understanding must fathom beyond our ability to even perceive, and we must confide ourselves childlike in their mysterious ways. So, what we are, we are. Woe then to those whose essential taste is to mischief, to restlessness, to the long, unbounded highway that promises escape from what cannot be escaped.

Woe to Eve, who could not bear the steadiness, the daily routine, the garden life, and thought she’d rather work a field, bear the pain of motherhood, than spend one more day in the waiting room of the blessed.

Here is something you will not read in any book.

Pizarro, on discovering the Andes, talked with manic energy about his new world—for here was a fresh, trackless country, infinite in potential, infinite in mercy. Here was a place where man could change! And as he trooped through the uncut jungle, stamped the unstamped mountains, drank from the virgin Rimac, he must have talked on and on about this canvas earth. Who would not? Who would not swoon and dream as they fell asleep, their soul spinning vast, architectural plans? Who, after centuries of believing the world was small, and civilized life was bound to a continent soaked in blood, would not dare to dream upon discovering a second chance for history? Finally they could shut all the carnage, bigotry, idolatry, the exhausted and wayward spirits of the old world, and shuttle them back from whence they came; and here they would create a proud, noble, emparadised nation. Here a man had no medieval dome to his dreams. He had all the space in the world to pluck down unprecedented ideas and make life into something that was forgotten.

But, as he trooped through the Andes, he must have come to find that he could not shake his European instincts. This world was slowly, helplessly being hauled into that old world, and all its sins were poured on the heads of the Andeans like cold, pale water. Tired, old, and disappointed, Pizarro sits on an Incan throne and slips into that sleepy resignation to the yoke of Fate.

Change? Who has changed? What biography does not make absolute sense taken in total? What biography lets us read of two different people who shared the same body at different times? The child is father to the man, and Lord help us all.

Day 20! As always, all words are mine (except 7 words which are Wordsworth’s), but Claude helped with the editing and cutting.

The first time, I was twenty-four among boys in a glorious Nashville summer. And leaving them to swim in the lake, I wandered away down the forest trail.

I do not know if I can recommend trying it to everyone. I even hesitate writing about it, lest I incautiously give someone who otherwise would not try it tacit permission to try. The effects are not as well studied as I believed when reading the literature that informed my decision. The “tradition” is not as long-formed, esoteric, or lindy as I thought.

And so I will not pretend like I can provide any guidance in how to weigh the risks because I myself did not weigh them as a good rationalist ought.

Simply, I always knew I would try it one day. So when my turn came, I clicked my tongue, opened wide, and thought, come what may, I will go laughing.

Wandering down the trail, dripping, in my chacos, I chided myself for not taking sufficiently intelligent precautions before my first time, or ritualistic or optimized for a great cognitive leap forward.

I had only slept four hours or so the night before, and in my stomach there was just last night’s Broadway swill mixed with that morning’s Waffle House All-Star Breakfast.

So I went down the trail, feeling bad, fussing at myself for abandoning myself and for taking this precious thing I had been saving for so long and wasting it.

And I heard a voice as clear as day in the back of my mind, “Wait, you’re apologizing to me? I’m not mad at you.

“Huh?

“If anything, it’s you who’s mad at me!”

“Really?”

“Really. Seriously, I would never abandon you. How could I! I love you!”

I smiled and shook my head. The two of us merged back into one, feeling reconciled in a profound way. The surprise came because we had been at a distance for longer than I thought. I had forgotten even that there were two of us, subject and object, and the anger and fear I had worried about facing from myself was actually the anger and fear I was directing on myself. So I went down the road feeling glad.

Back by the lake, smiling, waving at my friends in the water, a pack of cicadas swarmed me. First it was one or two; I brushed them off.

Then it was ten or twenty. They must have liked the new organic sunscreen I had bought— was it the coconut oil or the beeswax?— and they covered my bare chest, kissing me all over.

I blinked, looked up calmly at my friend, whose saucer-eyes looked up from my chest at mine.

“I am not hallucinating this right?”

He shook his head, “No dude.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

So down the road, mad dashing, went I, in nothing but my boxers and my chacos, up and down the trail, a swarm of cicadas following me behind, thumping on me like paintballs that clung rather than burst.

At last, I made a loop and jumped into the lake. They waited for me. I tossed all arms to shore, covered myself in a towel, and said, “It’s time to go.”

Walking back, the adrenaline had suffused me with a type of outrageous courage. I realized I had not been terrified once. I realized I had not panicked or lost control of myself. I was always right there with me. I did not abandon myself, as I might have otherwise, as I had done so in prior moments of fear and dread. But where was the fear? Where was the dread?

Walking back, we passed two beautiful women. We went down the road some more, and my heart caught in my chest. I turned right back around and steered myself toward them. I hailed them, complimented the taller one, and asked her if she lived here. What did she make of this dripping, wet-haired, wide-eyed, bug-bitten boy? I do not know. But I got the number. I had always wanted to do that, and every time it had crossed my mind before, my mind would stop me and supply infinite reasons why it was unwise or imprudent to even ask. But now, no longer at odds with myself, I felt prepared to deal with any manner of devils, and, more importantly, deal with my own desire. If I wanted it, I was allowed to ask for it.

Later, sitting in the grass of a backyard, smiling wildly, my friends asked me how I was feeling. Leaning there, grazing at the grass, I would say honestly, over and over, “Anything in the world could happen right now— we could go to hell or we could meet the Pope— and I would be okay with it. Ask me anything, and I would be happy to do it.”

And I meant it. For weeks afterwards, that feeling remained with me as something I could access, a way of seeing the world I could keep in my backpocket and apply like rouge on my eyeglasses.

Everything in the world would then be beautiful, I would find myself grinning at the mere fact that I had the ability to do this (and truth be told, I always had the ability to do it, I just never used it). And by it, I could contend with any victory, defeat, advantage, obstacle, friend, or enemy in the same way— with wide-eyed engagement, self-directed, and profoundly in love with the whole blooming process. Anything could happen, and I would be okay with it. In other words, it wouldn’t be me who was going to count me out.

A few years passed before I tried it again.

I thought about it from time to time, but truth be told, I did not have a strong desire to do it.

I had it with me, preserved in memory as a mental operation. Anyone who knows knows, I think, that they can close their eyes and feel the warm glow on their face, the grin spread across their cheeks, and the clear, unwavering self-togetherness they felt the first time. Not a dreamy bliss, but a realization that the world forever is a dreaminess, that to the human mind all experience is perception first, and that perception operates less like a lens into reality and more like a creative, multi-armed intelligence in the mind, always painting, painting, painting.

The first time she and I tried it, it stormed hard and the entire time. We sat in a sunroom and watched the crazy patterns of water run in sheets across the window panes. We felt as though we were in a submarine near the bottom of the ocean. All was calm within despite the turbulence without.

We awed at our little poodle who marched over the picture books of Rembrandt and Van Gogh we had checked out from the library for this purpose. We could feel his joy at having his two beloved humans be together, perfectly contentedly (and finally) off their screens, smiling at him like Adam and Eve must have smiled at their own little dog. We could feel each other’s joy at feeling his joy. We marvelled wordlessly at that. We were subsumed into a larger soul, of which we were grateful to be wholesome parts. And more than that, we recognized that we were always so. The hairs at the back of our necks that read social cues, that feel social pressures, that direct our minds to what the other apes around are doing and thinking— this brought us into a connection beyond just relation. And this was always going on. There was an oversoul in every gathering, and we just had yet to bring it so fully to conscious attention.

Again, the little poodle trampled over the picture books, hardly noticing what they were, but once or twice he did stop in what we imagine was a fleeting curiosity at why the shapes beneath him had changed. But he could not care less, so attuned was he to her and to me. We remarked he was like a young Visigoth child marching through the Parthenon, marveling at the surface of depths he could almost comprehend but uncertain ultimately at what lay beneath almost-comprehension. The storm went on.

Again, it was like we were Adam and Eve in that everything was new, and the foundations of the earth had only just been set. Trees were no longer “trees.” Now they were individual and novel shapes, tracing a growth pattern with its body that the world had never seen before. My mind beheld this shape for the first time. The trees outside the window were living, breathing, and making decisions. They were aware of the storm, in a deep way that we could almost comprehend.

After the storm ended, we went for a walk in the quiet dark. Foolishly, I let the poodle jump in puddles and roll around in the wet grasses. But the streets were empty and we were in the deeper recesses of the neighborhood. The world was open, fresh, and wet, and music unheard was blooming and unfolding everywhere beneath the orange streetlights,

Besides, I could not bear to leash him. He was a good dog. He never went too far. He was already leashed by that bond of love of the pack that is no leash but the magnetic connection that makes all life and all action have its meaning. Who was I to deny this poodle some puddle jumping if that’s what he wanted to do?

When we got back, we laughed hysterically— I mean with tears streaming down our faces—as the once-blonde poodle, now black as night, got the zoomies and darted around the living room as though a particle of soot enchanted to life. We chased him around and around, and in his ferocious eyes, there was glimpseable the meaning of all life. It was, simply, to be alive, and to love it. The surface of that platitude our conscious minds knew, but fresh eyes reminded us that it had depth.

Reclining on the couch, with poodle hosed and resting, we discussed the journey we had taken. And truly, it did feel like a journey.

I said that I felt like an Octopus, and that my mind was a multi-armed thing, with lots of intentions and desires, dreaming and heaving and breathing deeply, drawing all sorts of information from the world, painting for me an image that I called perception.

I paused to think. Sometimes I would hide behind my tentacles like an Octopus retreats to its den, and I could cast crazy camouflage visions on my arms to hypnotize and distract anyone who would perceive me. More than that, when I tried to “let myself be seen,” I usually would do so by projecting an image of myself on those tentacles, which is not the same thing. But now I saw that, rather than keep my tentacles up out of habit and fear, I can just let them down.

She listened to me talking, laughing, thinking both I was a crazy person and that she knew exactly what I meant.

She closed her eyes. She said that she felt like she had been fundamentally stressed in some way since she was twelve years old. And now, not only was this the first time she felt truly relaxed, but this was the first time she even noticed that she had been holding on to that stress.

I laughed. I knew that that was better and more accurate than anything I would have to say about the matter. I tell people I can’t recommend it to them, and I will not try to sell them on it.

But I will tell them that she said that. And that that is exactly how I felt, too.

The poodle tadpoled on the floor, patted its paws, and yawned.

It jumped up on the couch and licked my face.

Sometimes there is no need to go any deeper than the surface.

Day 19. Thank you for reading.

Well, my friends, it happened. I missed posting this Sunday.

My goal of sharing my writing with you everyday this January now and forever has an asterisk by it. And there is an irrevocable blank where there should be one more in the 17-day long chain of big-fat victorious Xs.

But rest assured, all hope is not lost.

At the outset of this challenge, I gave myself two (2) burn days to be used at my discretion. I had hoped to not use those burn days at all and, at the end, let the two tokens fall on the table, winking. But, knowing now that the enemy of the perfect is the good, and that the technology of a Habit Streak is made for the man’s improvement, not man for the streak, we press on.

But! Do not think I deployed my asterisk for lack of trying: it was 2am last night when I realized that the pieces were just not going to come together for me.

And so animated by a strong moral principle to avoid pushing slop onto you, I had to bow my head and make the tough decision that, rather than send you nonsense,1 I would maintain the standard of writing at the level it is (whatever that may be), and take the hit.

Besides, it is more than pure cope to recognize that there is still verve and glory in the achievement for having fallen down and gotten back up, often more so than without.

The photos of athletes with bloody noses and bruised faces, drenched in sweat, but smirking with arms held-up high are, as a rule, used the world-over as screensavers and as locker room posters, while the photographs of champions, well-dressed and well-groomed, smiling while the President pins medals on their lapels are hardly ever used for such purposes.

The decoration, honors, and accolades of even the highest institutions can never quite compare in beauty, power, or lasting worth to that of the smirk of someone who, making it to the top of some hard hill, turns back and laughs. When it is our time to retire, we will not tell stories about the moments of accreditation and recognition, but the times we lived life on the edge of our teeth.

Thus even in failure there is anticipated that higher beauty, wherein the doggone and pigheaded despite repeated public losses can still grin beneath their labors, knowing that so long as they keep going, that top-most delight is still theirs for the taking.

I go on! The beauty of persistence is such that the mind cannot help itself but to pause in its presence. Our minds pay an immediate attention to any contest or trial of the spirit, wherever it is found, however trivial the stakes, however silly the source of friction. An appreciation for the charms and winsomeness of the quality of grit runs deep in the race, and we are stopped in sympathetic awe by anyone who dares, tries, fails, continues, presses on.

We can also recognize this quality outside of man’s efforts, and come to even admire it where we know it cannot be.

Take the ant, who really does nothing beyond what chemicals command.

All the same, to watch an ant roll its bounty up some tiny hill (massive to him), lose it, fetch it again, lose it once more, and then turn and stare a long moment down the long way she came, the long way it went, pausing; if we were to see her do all this, we could not help but watch with some anticipation of whether she will be a fighter ant or not; and when she embarks down again, bows her head, takes up her load, and pushes forward her weight, we may in our most human moments be moved to shake our head in disbelief at ourselves for grinning and feeling sympathy with, gosh, even an ant. (We may even feel compelled to help him how we can—although we may be misguided in doing so.)

The world has long belonged to the daring and the persistent, even before we came to perfect the art. And in perfecting the art, we seek and we find its inspiration everywhere.

Finally, it is told in our family the story of Mamaw, my great-grandmother, who, at an old age, living alone, fell from her chair onto the kitchen floor, and struggled and floundered there, calling out for help until she was able to use the chair to pull herself back up.

Relieved and catching her breath, she gazed back and thought with some concern and worry over what she might have done if the chair hadn’t been there—“just as one who, with exhausted breath, having escaped from sea to shore, turns back to the perilous waters and stares…”

And it bothered her that she did not know what she would have done without that chair. She wanted to know. She needed to know.

And so Mamaw—a kind, wise, virtuous woman, above all else, but also an unreasonable one—threw herself down to the floor and kicked the chair away.

What she did then—besides figuring it out— I do not know. But I do know that when her grandchildren tell that story, despite fussing at her and shaking their heads, they cannot help but to smile. They in fact cannot hide at all the smile from their face. And in that smile, I know, is preserved the grin Mamaw had when she finally got back up, looked back, and laughed.

So with such blood in my brain, let the asterisk stand, and let us continue on. Come a second, third, fourth, or fifth burn day, I will be back the next day.

And all the more delicious will be my Inkuary Victory smile for missing a tooth, as all victories are sweeter for the falling-down and getting-back-up.

But lest it be thought I am taking the easy route here, you should know: in knowing myself, when I granted myself the two burn days, I also established that any burn day after the second comes at a price.

So if it comes to be that I miss another two days, and I have to buy a burn day from myself, know well that at the end of January, I will still be smiling.

And I’ll be holding up my tooth for the camera.

Day 19. WE’RE BACK BABY. A-HA-HA-HA!

(nb: these are four line stanzas if you’re on your phone)

Archers, at the behest of my master, were placed along the eastern wall. 
No small feat when you consider how fell the price of salt, and well,
Many stationed here are paid by nothing more than a promise to pay,
And still they stand, immovable, in sheets of rain, through night and day.

As with all powers are powers the subjected cannot understand,
We know nothing but what we know from the chain of command,
What terrible discretion is in the feeding-hand,
But like all good dogs, I love my master and heed his every command,
But hate his fences. And for this, he will ever need reprimand.

I must say I miss the safer sleeping in the farther reaches
Where silent peace dropped each morning past the river's speech.
In the valley I kept an outpost in a little garden house
Where the watchdogs hardly barked and only ever at a mouse.

I swear someone must have intercepted a dream meant for me
And I was passed over in this city where I wear my disguise,
Because this morning at breakfast a private spoke sleepily
How in the night he had been greeted by an angel’s eyes. 

It is the winter of 2019. In the heart of Hyde Park, there is a plaza with a fountain. On all sides there are little shops: a bakery, a florist’s, a post office, and La Petite Folie— the south side’s premiere (and only) “unabashedly traditional” French restaurant. Inside, they are cleaning up after lunch service.

“Oh my back, my back. My fucking back. This is going to be the death of me.”

Mary is not looking at her brother, laying on the carpeted floor of the dining room. Instead, she has the landline cradled in her shoulder and is flipping through mail stacked on top of the P.O.S.

“Mary, didn’t you hear me? This is it. I’m dying. Please pass me my lighter.”

Mary legitimately doesn’t hear him, even though they are feet away in an empty dining room. Instead, she yells down the hall, “Mike! Where did you say you put the new menus?”

Mike does not answer. Mary, half paying attention, finds a magazine in the tall stack of mail, the front page exhibiting a new Cuban restaurant opening in the Gold Coast, and she flips through it for a moment while George groans in the background.

“Mike!”

Mike does not answer.

“Geroge, go and check to see if he put the menus in the podium.”

“Yeah hold on, I’m almost done putting these rods into my spine. Just two more, dear sister. Once the stitches are in and the anesthesia wears off, I’ll be sure to take care of whatever it is you just said.”

“Mike!” She yells louder. “Where did you put those — Hi, yes this is Mary M—. Oh, very good, very good, thank you. Oh, yes. And yourself? Oh very good, very good. Well, see, we were just wondering when you were planning on salting the sidewalks in Hyde Park Plaza? Ah well, would you by any chance be able to give me an estimate of when you expect them to be out here?”

George is suddenly standing beside her, his arms resting easily on the top of a long shelf where there is silver flatware and folded napkins. He shakes his head and, with his fingers and thumb, figures a gooseegg. “Not one fucking menu. Can you believe this guy?”

Mary scowls and turns her shoulder holding the phone away from him. “Oh, okay. Well, the thing is, I own a restaurant here in the plaza, and we have a lot of elderly clients that come in very early— yes, yes, La Petite Folie. Oh well thank you so much. That is so nice. Well I am glad we were able to give you a memorable experience. But like I was saying, we do get a lot of elderly people with reservations. And already this morning, just this morning, someone slipped on the ice here, and so I am just worried — yes, I can understand that, it’s just that— no, no — could you please just — no, if you could please just let me speak, I—”

Mary and George’s eyes lock, and George grimaces as he hears a voice squeaking through the line.

“Well I am so sorry if it sounded like I was having a tone, I have just been having a long— yes, I understand. Thank you. You, too.”

She lowers the phone back on the receiver. Her eyes are closed. A long painstricken breath shoots down the range of her nose. She takes a pause to control her breathing.

“The city doesn’t think they’ll be here to salt the roads before dinner.”

“That’s such bullshit.”

“It is what it is.”

“Did you tell them you were a Black-owned business?”

“Did it sound like I told them we’re a Black-owned business?”

“You think I was listening to that?”

“We’re not Black-owned.”

“We’re Greek aren’t we?”

“Oh shut up,” she says, already moving away. She stalks down the long shelf in the back of the house and yanks open a backdoor.

“MIKE!” she screams. Mike doesn’t answer. “MIKE!”

Mike doesn’t answer.

“MIKE!”

A door creakily is thrown open.

“Goddammit Mary, WHAT!” Mike screams from unseen, around the corner and down in the basement pantry.

“Well I’m sorry, but you weren’t answering. Do you have the menus?”

“The WHAT?”

“The menus Mike. The new menus for tonight.”

A long pause. Mary intuits right away that Mike just put down whatever he was holding and had moved his hands to his hips. His eyes scan the room. His left hand moves up and is squeezing his temples and rubbing his eyeballs.

“I thought you said you were going to take care of them,” he sends flatly up the stairs.

George can be heard chuckling while rummaging through a drawer.

“Yes, but then I told you we were out of card stock, and you so sweetly said you would go get them printed.”

Mike is heard muttering to himself: “Well, that’s…yes, that’s perfect…so we’ll just all go…”

“What are you saying, Mike?”

“Yes, Mary. I guess I’ll go get the goddamned menus.”

“Thank you gorgeous. It is 3:30pm, by the way.”

“Right now, then.”

Something is heard slamming downstairs, which is likely a clipboard, of which they go through nearly twenty-five a year. Mary turns around and makes a shocked, long face at her brother that quickly falls apart into laughter. George chuckles, pleased by the interaction, a version of which he has heard no less than everyday for nearly twenty years. He produces a cigarette in his hand, and he is fiddling with a long candle lighter to get it to work. Mary rushes over and smacks his hand.

“Outside you absolute buffoon.”

“Oh, hey, hey, hey, come on.”

“Every day you try to smoke in here, and every day I have to tell you how much I hate it!”

“How do I think I feel? Every day you complain about my favorite joke.”

“Get out.”

“No, it’s okay, I didn’t actually want to smoke.”

“Well, get out anyway. I need a minute.”

“Jesus, okay.”

George moves slowly and deliberately down the range of the long shelf in a great huff, holding his back in his hand. He puts his hand on the door and pauses.

“And for the record, when you ask me to salt the front, I will be bringing this up.”

Mary lifts her head up from where she has buried it into her arms. Slumped onto the top of the shelf, she causes stacks of folded napkins to topple over themselves.

“Could you please, George?”

“Bring it up? Yeah, of course, I just told you that I was planning on it.”

In another world, she has picked up a fork and stabbed it through the pink calloused flesh of the back of George’s hand. In another, she just jams it right into her own thigh. Nearly every day, for the past twenty years, has her life encountered this decision. Every time, she has chosen not to. (Although one time, she did pick up the fork.)

“No, I mean the— “

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”

The door yanks open. A blast of cold rushes in. George makes a noise too funny for narration. Before it slowly eases shut, Mary shouts out: “And don’t use too much salt! It all needs to come up. We don’t want people tracking it in on the carpet!”

She hears George mutter something incoherently, as verification that he has heard her request.

She piles her head back into her arms. She sleeps deeply for 3 minutes and 25 seconds. She dreams of running errands with her father in a shopping mall in Havana. As they drive away, they wind through a rainforest, dense and dark. The trees are all kilometers tall, well beyond eyesight. She is terrified but exhilarated by the impenetrable wall the treeline makes, and she is glad her father drives so fast. She stares up the line of trees.

Mike clatters up the stairs, waking her. He is dressed in four layers. His thin frame looks so different under all these coats.

“Before I go, is there anything else you need?”

His face is gaunt from a flu that he is on the other side of. Mary gets so worried every time Mike gets sick. Chest colds rattle him through and through. His poor nose drips on everything because he rubs it raw with tissues to the point where he roars if she tries to put vaseline on him. He stays up all night. Oh god, what if… Every time he starts feeling better is a good day for Mary. Relief washes over her. He can tell. She relaxes. She is sweeter to him, although she starts him back to work right away. He secretly resents that she treats him this way. He still has a dozen plans for being strong one day.

Mary, barely awake, responds warmly, “No, Mike, thank you so much.”

“Well, let’s just stand here and think for a moment, because I won’t be able to pull out my cell phone in all these damned layers. And I will not be making a second trip.”

Mary moves towards him and nuzzles into him, sliding her arms around his waist, not able to grip him entirely, so huddled is he. “Okay, you stand there and think, I’ll just take a little nap.”

Mike stands stiffly as Mary holds him hostage. He is counting in his head to 30 — an appropriate amount of time after which he may peel her off, he feels.

“Oh wait, yes, this lighter is busted. Can you make sure we have more downstairs, and if we don’t can you get one? We need one for tonight.”

Mike’s head tilts up to the ceiling in frustration.

“And while you’re downstairs, can you make sure there’s nothing else on the list?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Actually, wait, George said we might need more salt for the sidewalk.”

“The city will salt the sidewalk.”

“Not by tonight, they won’t.”

“They usually do.”

“I just got off the phone with them.”

“And?”

“And they said they didn’t know, but it sounded like they probably wouldn’t get to it by tonight.”

“Well, we don’t need to do the city’s job for them. We’re paying them enough to do it already.”

“Come on, Mike. People might slip.”

“They might, and they should know that. It’s not our job to tell them to wear seatbelts and wipe their ass.”

“Why are you so cranky today?”

“I’m not cranky. I’m just saying that we don’t need to pave the roads, organize the elections, or repair the telephone poles.”

“If a telephone pole was in the way of the door, we probably ought to move it. Don’t you think?”

“If it’s on city property, it’s the city’s responsibility to fix it.”

“Uh-huh. And how has waiting on the city to handle its responsibilities been working for you?”

“It usually ends with me in a parka carrying 25-pound bags of salt back for you in a blizzard.”

“So wouldn’t it be better to choose that outcome for yourself instead of feeling like you were forced into it?”

“I always chose it. I’m never forced into it. I don’t have to do anything, you know.”

“God, you are cranky today. Do you want me to make you more coffee or something?”

“No. I don’t want coffee. I just want to get through today, so I can get through this week, so I can get through this month.”

Mary is silent.

“I am sick of this part of our life where we own this goddamn restaurant.”

Mary is silent.

Mike has turned and placed both hands on the edge of the shelf. His grip trembles slightly.

“Sorry. I— “

Mary firmly, deliberately moves toward her husband and takes his aged face in her calloused, burnt, cut, bruised, hardened, wrinkly, tobacco-stained hands. It is a balm to Mike, complete and entire. He softens at once. His breathing changes.

“It’s okay.”

He turns towards his wife. His griefstricken eyes are wet behind his glasses.

Mary is puzzled. She has not seen her husband cry in maybe ten years.

“Mike.”

“What.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Peachy,” he replies.

Mary smiles.

“Yummy, even,” he says, snorting a drip of snot back into his nose.

“Everything’s yummy?”

“Well, no, not everything. The snot running into my mouth— “

“Not yummy?”

“No, not yummy. Not particularly.”

They stare at each other for a moment. Mike wraps his arms around his wife. She nestles back into the crusted salt and polyester of his parka.

“Sorry I offered to make you coffee.”

“You know I hate when you do that.”

“Oh gee, thanks. Now you tell me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Are you sure everything’s alright?”

“Peachy.”

“I thought you said yummy.”

“Same thing.”

She leans back to look at her husband. His eyes have softened. She sees no devil there, only meek repentance. She kisses him on the scruff of his chin, pressing into his gray, white, wiry beard. He gently gathers her hands and brings them up to his lips.

“I love you,” he says firmly.

“I love you, too,” she replies, reassuringly.

“Okay. Lighter, salt, card stock, a barrel of olives, and seven new employees. Anything else?”

“And whatever is on the list.”

“And whatever is on the list.”

Mike kisses her cheek again. He turns to go back the way he came, down into the basement to read the list, and back into the cold to grumble and bitch for a quarter mile, there and back.

Mary sighs and stretches her neck. She re-stacks the crumpled napkins and picks George’s hat up off the floor. She collects the mail into a neater pile and tucks it in a drawer beneath the P.O.S.

She looks out the front door where George in his long-sleeves and jeans, and not much else, is gesticulating wildly in telling a story to some passerby, the ember of a cigarette marking the path of his hands. The passerby doubles over in laughter. George takes a drag, smirking.

Mary shakes her head, grabs the magazine from the bottom of the stack, stuffs it in her pocket, and shuts the drawer. She dims the lights and descends the stairs into the kitchen.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the levee bank overflow the streets, but before the streetcars float like clouds above the Vieux Carré, you may find yourself watching TV in your living room when suddenly the water bursts in through the windows, and so fleeing to the second floor of your home, and then fleeing to the attic as the water continues to rise, and then, by and by, forced up to the rooftop.

And then may a man rowing an inflatable lifeboat come to you, and offer you refuge. And you may stare at the boatsman seriously, with fateful eyes, though forlorn, terrified, and shaking, and you may then look down a long time at the water pooling around your shoes.

You might shake your head, thinking of all the others who might be saved by the boat, and take courage.

You say to him, “The Good Lord will provide. Save who you would save but for me!”

And then, when the water comes at last to take your higher ground, so you are standing on your tiptoes upon the asphalt shingles, a pontoon boat may come to you, and its captain shout out to you over the roar of the waters—as homes and cars float by you like massive frigates— and cry out that they have ample room, come and be saved!

And though your heart is leaden with fear, and your mind is gasping in panic, as a fish being swiftly reeled to the airy world, you maintain your resolve.

“The Good Lord will provide. Find another to save!”

At last, as the moonless night takes you over, fatigue and chill having turned you nearly back into a beast, you may be carried far off into the deep, the roaring waves, where all hope is drained from you, and all that is left in you is the impulse to cling to the flotsam, jetsam yourself, and fading fast…

And then may a floodlight find you, drenching you in so many lumens you are just as blind as you were before, and you may hear over you then a loudspeaker, faintly— for the all-consuming growl of the deep has drowned out even the sound of the chopper blades— a voice from afar, calling to you to grab the ladder, come, and be rescued.

Blinking blind, fading fast, with hardly the strength to hold on, you roll your face upwards to the light and weakly, you wave it away.

“The Good Lord will provide. Save not me.”

And incredulous or unhearing, the helicopter lingers over you for a moment longer, and each moment rends your heart with unbearable pain and sorrow— why test me so!—until at last it gets the message and flies off.

A complicated smile is the last face you make as you sink into the deep. Were you good? Did you do the right thing? Would the God, of charity, of compassion, of sacrifice, be proud of you? Did you do right by him? Did you die his faithful man?

Upon your arrival in the Eternal Pastures, you may be greeted by Him, himself. He may smile at you brightly and welcome you into eternity, and in a flash, you may be soothed and refreshed and renewed and made whole.

But a complicated thought may enter your mind.

“But did I do the right thing, Lord?”

He may blink but smile in compassion.

“You were a good man.”

“But…did I do the right thing?”

And He may smile at you then, with such infinite meaning, that you may take that as your answer. Or you may stare in puzzlement. Or you may stare in shock and realization, turning away to spittle and choke in astonishment, while He stands there, smiling in His Infinite Graciousness, waiting for you to recover.

This story, as it was first told to me, ends with the Lord welcoming the man into heaven, and the man sputtering in confusion to the Lord.

“Lord! I thought you would provide for me!”

And the Lord laughs good-naturedly, shaking his head.

“I sent you a rowboat, a pontoon boat, and a rescue helicopter. What more did you want?”

Here, the difference is that the deity, I imagine, does not feel the need to teach the lesson. There is a simple-hearted naiveté that is pure but mistaken, and there is simply no need to trouble that upon arrival. What difference would it make? It’s heaven after all.

And, to my mind, my hope is that the Lord will not punish such naiveté or hold it against us so long as it is pointed generally in the direction of the Gospel message, or at the very least, does no harm.

And who isn’t in many ways naive? The intercession of Mary has surely worked a saving grace for many of those who have died in an admirable naiveté.

Our Lady of the simple-minded and the confused, pray for us!

I pray that Hell is empty, and I hope it is.

I pray that the doors to heaven are wide, however full of friction and demand is the road up Purgatorio.

Just because God makes providence for the naive and the simple does not, I think, mean He hopes that we remain shallow.

God may praise you in Heaven for your purity despite your admirable naiveté. But I do not call my God the God of the Simple and the Naive.

My God is the God of Advantage and Opportunity, of Cause and Effect, of Progress and Advance, of Courage and Daring.

My God, I think, would agree up-and-down that, when the waters took you, you should indeed have left the seat for a more worthy candidate. Because the worthier candidate— the candidate who lives to survive another A/B test— is the one who gets while the getting’s good.

It is not that God likes us to be stingy. But he certainly does not like us to be slavish, stupid, blind, and not make use of the faculties of intelligence he gave us.

That He may smilingly welcome those who passed away from malnourishment after mismanaging their fasting schedule does not mean He greets them with the same excitement as, say, those who died nobly fighting for the Union.

Or as, say, Jesse William Lazear, who died after deliberately contracting yellow fever to prove that mosquitoes were the vector for its transmission, or Daniel Alcides Carrión García, who died similarly. To the cause, they laid down their lives! They kicked the ball forward! Much was ventured, much was lost, and much was gained!

To such as these, He may even feel a sense of anticipation as they ascend the escalator.

I believe that the God of Man runs a Kindergarten up in heaven where the softer souls may gently graze and not worry too much about the gene pool they left behind. There they often sigh, “Good luck, sometimes. Bad luck, other times.” That’s all that can really be said by them about life on that strange, sad, little planet they left behind.

Beyond, there is a field where the big dawgs run. There go those who did not live by staying clear of the rules, but risked daringly with virtue and vice.

Benjamin Franklin weighs in his mind whether defying the Divine Right of Kings will, even if successful in this world, damn him in the next. Pondering, his tongue pressed into his lip, he shakes his head. I’ll chance it.

And there, in that field, there is no stasis, no single day that is the same, no constancy of an endless vacation. Rather, there is light and rain and mud and blisters and snapped arms and broken ribs and pain and wallowing and fierce growling and brutal competition. But God is there laughter.

And, too, there is horse-riding and steep rocky cliff-faces and mighty waves and brutal labors to be done and hard-won achievements and the opportunity for long-trained technique to find advantage. That which those there called, in life, adventure.

I don't grudge the broken arm a bit...I'm always ready to pay the piper when I've had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.

— Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter, after breaking his arm horse-back riding

I wager that the nature of God is such that he prefers deeply to run with them there. To dwell among the daring, to revel in their life force, to stand near the fire, and feel the reciprocal awe that comes from seeing his creation in action.

There go those who have impressed the deity with how alive they are: the risks they took, the work they wrought, the iron-will of their own hands poised against all odds, the rules they challenged, the inventions they brought together by long study and their own hands, and the unflinching commitment to confronting reality without being a sucker about it.

What some call concupiscence others call the life spirit, finding its way, slowly but progressively, towards the higher good. And by that same concupiscence great gains have been made against the forces of evil, ignorance, and the dark.

To accept this, however, you may need accept that in some way God was smiling and even delighted when Eve slipped out of her sleepy confines: that the machine He made worked as intended by coming alive and surprising him.

Day 15. Thank you!

In a large dining hall, trays clatter. The hustle and bustle of the cafeteria, sunlight comes streaming through giant windows, and the cold is kept at bay by a friendly cafetarian who swipes the card of all who enter.

Enter two sophomores, together: Dylan and Meir.

Dylan, a Catholic, walks over to the Kosher section. Meir, raised by an Orthodox Jewish mother, grabs his shoulder.

“And what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m getting some kay-bahb.”

“Dude. This is the kosher section.”

“Yeah. And?”

“You’re not Jewish!”

“So? It’s not only for Jewish students.”

“Uhh yes? It is.”

“Show me the rule.”

“There’s no rule. It’s just a matter of propriety.”

Dylan turns away, shaking his head: “A matter of propriety.”

“It’s appropriation!”

“It’s appropriation for me to eat lentils?”

“Uhh the lentils reserved for Jewish students? Yes!”

“The lentils are so not reserved for Jewish students.”

“Yes they are! What if they run out? What if Orthodox students like me and Dina can’t eat anything else here? We’d starve.”

“You’ll live, I promise.”

“Wow. You’d really take food right out of a starving Jewess’s mouth? As if the Catholics haven’t done enough already!

“Now that’s racist”

“Listen, do what you want to do. All I’m saying is that you literally just told me how important diversity is to you. And now you’re not listening to peeosssy voices?”

“Whose POC voice am I not listening to?”

“Uh, well mine, for starters.”

Dylan pauses and puts his tray down on the rail.

“Did you just say you are a POC?”

“Yes.” Meir nods as if confused by the question. “Yes. Of course. I am Jewish, am I not? Yes.”

“Oh okay. Tell me. What color are you of, exactly?”

Meir’s eyes wide in amazement.

“And WHAT do you mean by that? What EXACTLY do you mean by that? I am not only shocked, but also appalled. Do you realize how offensive you are being? Are you even listening to me?”

“No, not really.

“I am a pyocci! As pyocci as they come! What is your problem?”

“My problem is that you’re not a POC.”

“I’m certainly not white!”

“Well…uh…okay, that might be true.”

“And if I’m not white, then I must be a paousi.”

“Not necessarily…”

“And as a pozzi, you have to listen to what I tell you to do. That is, if you want to be a good ally.”

“Now that’s certainly not true.”

“Yes it is! Yes it is! It’s 2016, Dylan! Come on!”

“Goddamn, fine. Whatever. I won’t get the kwee-bab.”

Meir breaks out into laughter and grips Dylan’s arm.

“Dude. I am just messing with you buddy. Come on. You’re a good goy. Good goy, Dylan. Let’s go get some keh-bowb.”

Dylan and Meir come into a larger dining hall, gorgeously made, wood-paneled, and ornate. The long tables, spanning the room, are brown. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling, creating a dim and intimate lighting. There is a sense that here, come they who seek…seek what? Seek more.

And there, too, is Caleb, and there, too, is Adrian, the House’s Resident Master.

“Hey guys quick question,” Dylan asks energetically, swooping into the middle of them, and before setting his tray down noisily. “Is Meir Black?”

Caleb bursts out in a laugh at how Dylan asks the question, but before he can respond, Adrian breaks in: “I mean, he doesn’t have a dad.”

Caleb and Dylan pause and turn, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, in silent disbelief towards him, the 33-year-old man who just made a joke about their friend’s dead dad.

“What? Are we not laughing about that yet?”

“No, we are not,” Caleb says after a beat.

Adrian, sensing that his joke did not send heat right over the plate as expected, quickly salvages and fills the silence, returning to the conversation he was having with Caleb.

“But no, like I was saying before, the reason you have to use cold water is because it doesn’t break down in hot water. It just congeals and sticks to whatever it’s on.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Caleb says curtly, holding his fork in his hand, waiting to take a bite until Adrian had finished his story. “Meir, how’s the roommate?”

Meir, already half his plate in his mouth, replies animatedly, truly as if the joke about his dad had rolled off of him or hadn’t been heard: “Oh he is the worst. He has got to go. All he does is sit in his bed and eat soup! Soup! I can’t go in the room anymore. All I ever hear is him slurping.” Meir forks more food into his mouth. “Yessirree, he has got to go, got to go! I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but he has gots to go!” Meir emphasizes by pointing a finger thrust fiercely towards the door.

“Who is this?” Adrian asks.

“Connor! Come on! How do you not know this?”

“What do you think? I keep track of everything that everyone does and who they live with?”

“Isn’t that like your one job?” Dylan asks.

“Uhh, I am also a professor of sociology at UIC, thank you very much.”

“Adjunct professor, right?” Caleb asks.

“Huh. Wow. Okay. Alright. Great lunch. Thanks guys.” Adrian shoves his chair back, stands up, and waddles off.

Meir protests: “Oh come on! It was just a joke.”

“No, it’s really fine,” Adrian says in a complete and transparent shift of tone. “I’m just kidding. I have to go back to check on the dogs anyway. Alright. See y’all!”

“‘Y’all’,” Caleb grumbles under his breath, as Adrian waddles down the long table. “If anyone has gots to go, it’s him.”

“Eh, he’s harmless,” Meir says with mouth full. “He’s a teddy bear.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Yeah, but I mean, he’s also a sweetie. He just doesn’t know how to joke with us. Give it time.”

“I cannot stand that man.”

“At least you only see him here and in the lounge,” Meir replies in chewing. “Imagine if you were sharing a room with him, and had to see him first thing in the morning and then every night before you go to bed. And imagine if he was always eating soup. And then imagine if he was always slurping soup!” He said, slamming his palm loudly on the table. “And then, make it one hundred times worse! Now you have an idea what my life is like. That’s how bad it is to live with Connor. DYLAN.”

“What?”

“Are you even listening?”

“No, not really.”

“DYLAN. YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO p-p-p-pyooOOHSAYCANYOUZEE VOICES.”

“Ohhhhh,” Dylan says, looking up and to the side, scratching his chin, thinking, as if he had just understood where Meir was coming from. He pauses, as if considering deeply. “No thanks.”

“Dylan!”

“What?”

“Your silence is deafening.”

“Oh.”

“You are committing violence against the Jews.”

“They’ll live, I promise.”

“Wait Dylan,” Meir said a-sudden, grasping Dylan’s arm before it could lift the next fork of lentils into his mouth. “I just had an idea. How about, as reparations, I come and live with you?”

“Uhh, let me think, no.”

“Come on — all that space in your dingle, no one to share it with. Don’t you get lonely in your dingle?”1

Dylan’s eyes light up in alarm. Turning quickly to look at the other people at the table and then gripping Meir’s arm with all discrete but hideous strength, he hisses, “Shut up.”

“Oh what? You’re worried people will find out about your dingle?” Meir said with rising voice.

Dylan gripped tighter, accessing a strength beyond what Meir had contemplated. “I’ll kill you.”

“Ow ow ow, okay, okay, I’m frail, Dylan. Frail! You know this, Dylan.”

“Thank you.”

All commence with eating in silence for a beat.

“You know,” Caleb says, wiping his mouth. “If you really don’t want anyone finding out about the dingle, you should at least keep up the appearance of someone living there. What if Meir lives there half of the time? You know, just to allay suspicion.”

“Uhh, let me think, no.”

“But Dylan, listen,” Meir says, picking fries off of Dylan’s plate. “It would be so sick. We could make the room into the hangout spot. We could put lights up and host movie nights, and we could drink bers and watch Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives every night.”

“We already drink bers and watch Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives every night.”

“Yeah but this way we could do it more. I wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to my room every night or all the way back to your single room every morning,” Meir said with a wink.

“Let me think about it.”

“Dylan!”

“What?”

“You owe this to me.”

“Oh. No thanks.”

The lunch rush throngs and ebbs. Laughs and shouts, groans and gasps, debate and dialectics wash over the room, as each are eager to play their part and speak their peace.

A long line begins to from at the double-doors and soon stretches all the way down to the Chicago street, over and across the embanked snow that’s been there for days and will be there weeks, hardened into stony ice that shines in sunlight.

Along the line, students in thick coats with rosy-cheeks and runny noses stamp their feet and stuff their hands in their pockets. Not too cold for conversation, however, as all are eager to reply, speaking their mind through chattering teeth.

The crowd presses forward. The cafetarian in sympathy derelicts her duty and begins to wave them in two at a time, letting the door swing a-pace, frosted airs rushing in.

In the warm interior, enter Drew, with sullen face and furrowed brow; his head is heavy, as if he were wearing a crown of iron. The world is as you are. Next to him is Hussein, bristling with energy and vigor. The morning is all in his face, and he casts a keen and glad eye on the world as it unfolds to him. The world is as I am!

“That’s very funny and all. But I just won’t see it that way.”

“Take it as you will.”

“Moreover, did you know that Van Gogh had a special kind of asthm—astigthma— what is this word?”

“Astigmatism?”

“Astigmatism! Yes. Van Gogh had a special kind of astigmatism. He simply saw the world blurry. He didn’t know what he was making. Or, rather, he was not doing it on purpose.”

“And so?

“So what was special about him was an accident. It was the world as he saw it.”

“He also ate yellow paint and cut off his ear to impress a prostitute. What was special about him was a particular burden, and all of it was required to make as he made. He knew not what he did completely. Who does? He did not make him. None of this changes for me the value or the effect of Starry Night.”

“But it should! You would be falling for a dupe. Do you remember in Mind that case study where the wine experts could not even tell the difference between red and white wines? They were given whites dyed red, and they complimented them as especially fine reds— ”

“And so they must have been. What is it to them or to me that the process behind or beneath the art which they enjoyed and I enjoy involves rough-handling, mischievous purposes, accidents of fate? In the heat of the moment, in the rapture of experience, in the burst of strawberry upon the tongue, is where I am interested. In that moment, and all such moments, is all that matters.”

He laughs, rhetorically but kindly, and wipes his eye. “That can’t be true. I have talked with you. You told me that if you were in the Matrix the only thing that would matter, the only logical object of your energies and efforts, would be to leave the Matrix. How is this any different?”

“It is no different. It is the same. To feel wine upon the tongue, breeze upon the cheek, holy light enter the eye, and to feel it deeply, are the only means we have of escaping. We are in the Matrix, by the way. But it is unlikely that it was made by anyone but ourselves. I know you disagree, but the sky is empty; the pyramids are unhaunted. What they don’t say about Plato’s Cave is that we are chained like dogs to the wall, just as we are glued into the inside of our skulls. Or, rather, it is a labyrinth with no exit. But knowing that can make some sort of difference, though we are forced to march forward.”

“Then there is no point in being here for you. At school. If you can wave off biographical knowledge about Van Gogh as trivial, chemical analysis of what you experience as irrelevant, then what is the purpose in learning further? What is the purpose? Tell me. Otherwise, go sit under a tree and feel yourself feeling yourself until you feel yourself withering in the wind or until your Minotaur strikes you down. Go, go now. Say goodbye to me. Say goodbye to Vikram. Say goodbye to Dina. There is no time for you to waste. Go.”

A cold wind blew suddenly through the doors and into that deeper chancel of the dining hall, carrying in its mix the memory of all airs, suffused with the exhalations and expirations, the wills and wants of all, calling far, calling all, calling further still. The wills and wants of another world were rushing in and calling far. How many times have we been exactly here? With me standing there and you standing here? Farther off, far and still, calling far, the wind came and rattled the windows, and all in its path shivered in communion without hardly recognizing so, continuing eagerly to exhale their wills. Wills and wants of another world were rushing in, like a wind from afar, far off, farther still, all worlds, wrapping fast, fastening quickly, insisting, inviting, But lift thy chains, we will make them as light, as air, for you. Will it! But we will not wait forever…

With rising energy, and now taking a position, “It’s all exactly the same, don’t you see? It’s the same here as it is there. The experience of learning the fact of Van Gogh’s astigmatism is no more delicious or important to me than the experience of seeing his painting. (Except one I have actually experienced.) But over all, all is the same — seeing his paintings, meeting him, hearing music, eating a tangerine, doing dishes, talking with you my friend, or watching my parents crumple under the weight of a rapidly descending piano. All are portals to realizing the truth about ourselves. Look into my eyes. Don’t you believe me.”

He smiles, eyes shining, “No, not at all. But it is interesting. You have an interesting way of seeing things. And you know it is rare for me to say that. I will let you have the last word for now, but only out of courtesy.”

“Everything is interesting to you, because you are an interesting person.”

“And nothing is interesting to you, because?”

A smile flowered open to meet a reciprocal smile. Kindness and mutual understanding poured forth in two directions.

“That’s very funny and all. But I just won’t see it that way.”

Passing them, with empty trays, familiar faces: Meir, Caleb, and Dylan.

“Huss!” cried Meir, patting him firmly on the back. “I missed you buddy. Where have you been hiding at?”

Hussein begins to speak, but Dylan sees the sticks of grilled chiecken on Hussein and Drew’s plate and interjects.

“Meir, look! Remember, don’t forget to tell them they’re being antisemitic for getting the kumbay-ab.”

Meir scoffs, “Come now, Dylan, they’re Personnas di Colore. You really just don’t understand being a good ally means at all, do you Dylan? Hussein can have all the kovfefe he wants.”

Caleb laughs, sighs, and scoffs in one exhalation: “You guys know how much I just love the mispronunciation game.”

“But seriously Huss,” Meir says smiling. "What gives? Where have you been all morning?”

“I have in fact just been discussing the phenomenology of art with my good friend here.”

“Sounds gress,” says Dylan.

Hussein smiles, and looks at Drew, but answers Dylan: “Oh but you would like it if we taped an iPhone on our heads so you could watch baseball while we talked.”

“And so the world.”

All four together: “Oh give me a break.”

Day 14. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed. This is a work in progress and, as such, any and all feedback + suggestions are more than welcome, but solicited.

Moreover, I hope I did right by all involved, but if you disagree, I will pull this immediately. Thank you for the memories!

The Supreme Court of Heaven now sits in replevin,
And the item in question is the soul of a man.

“It’s been a long lease, you’ve lived life as you please.
The days you did seize, and spent many evenings at ease. 
But now to recover, comes your old alma mater:
The almighty Father calls you back to his home.

“No, no choice to be had, but all grounds to be glad!
No longer apart and alone, no more work to be done.
So fine is your spirit, we barely need hear it. 
So you tiny young soul, welcome back to the whole.

“Why face so dismayed, what’s this that you say?
So long you have strayed, and you’re asking to stay?
Well let us ask you one question about your suggestion,
If so deep is your stressing, why forego you this blessing?

“Here struggles are never, and pleasures are ever. 
Loving is law, and all contests a draw. 

"But all life there must die; all falls that can fly.
Rot reaps each every flower, and sharks keep the power,
None from the carnage excepted, not one born has defected,
Ripping, tearing, and gnashing with the universal maw."

The Supreme Court of Heaven whose justices are seven
Now sits with depression over the struggles of man.
But their faces forlorn and hearts sunk into scorn,
Do not stop the old man from pleading his case.

“If I may interject, about my intended effect,
I say from my hearse, yes, things there are worse,
But no justice above us, despite how they love us,
Can know the true pleasure of man’s universe.

“Man’s woes and his sorrows may plague all tomorrows
With screaming and crying and sickness and dying…
But all that is different is made by the trying,
And the one hand I may lend would be worth it all.

“So I pray that Your Honors reverse my embalmers,
For no heaven I’ll find with earth’s troubles in mind,
Grant me respanwer,  and I’ll do you no dishonour,
Give me relief so I may return it in kind.”

Day 13. This is a work-in-progress so any insights or feedback would be much appreciated. Thank you for reading!

Fair is fair, Claude convinced me to add one word to this (“true”).