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This Morning

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This morning I am thinking about my wife.

Today is her birthday.

I have presents for her, and I have a card, and I have my excited “Happy Birthday!” all ready to go. I’m going to take her out to dinner tonight, and I’m going to buy her something delicious for dessert, and I’m not going to tell the waitstaff that it’s her birthday because she hates when the waiters sing the song to her. Even if she gets a free dessert.

But I can’t possibly say all the things I want to say about her. I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the words: even me, even with all the words that I’ve written over the years, I still don’t have enough words to say how perfect she is. I want to use all the cliches, because (as good cliches do) they all fit: she is my everything. She is my queen, my angel, and my goddess. She is my better half, and my partner in crime. She completes me. She carries my heart.

None of that is enough.

But that doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter what I call her, what goes in the blank of “She is my ____________.”

That matters is the three words before the blank.

She is mine. And I am hers, but today I am thinking about the fact that she is mine.

There is nothing and nobody that I am happier to say that about, on this entire Earth, in this whole universe, in all of time forwards and backwards from this moment, this day that is her day. She is mine.

Happy birthday, my love.

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This Morning

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This morning, I want to be half as fascinated by anything as my dogs are by the smell of old shit.

And this morning, I’m wondering: why can’t I be?

When we go on walks (For those who don’t know, I have two dogs, Roxie and Samwise. Here’s a video of them going out in the snow.) my dogs will often stop to investigate interesting sniffs. Roxie prefers checking out holes, looking for small critters who will be her friends; Samwise is looking for markings from other dogs so he can understand them better and have meaningful dialogue. So it’s mostly  Sam who stands over old feces and sniffs it carefully, meticulously; I suspect he either has a very sensitive nose (even for a dog), which allows him to discover more interesting bits of smell than Roxie can, or a very sensitive mind, one that allows him to think more interesting thoughts about the smells he detects, and so he must take longer to think those thoughts through.

Now I don’t have an acute sense of smell; I don’t have any particularly acute senses, actually. I used to have remarkable hearing, but I’m 44 now, and it’s fading a bit. But I do have a very sensitive mind, and it allows me to think more interesting thoughts. Certainly more interesting than Roxie. (That’s okay, she is sweeter and more exuberant and funnier than I’ll ever be.) So while I don’t care much for the smell of old dog crap — or even new dog crap — or any crap, really — the things I do care for, I can take time with, time to think through my more interesting thoughts. I just have to let myself have them: have to pay attention to what is in front of me, and let my mind take it where it will, think whatever I can think.

I wonder where my mind will take me.

This Morning

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This morning I am thinking about pride. Where pride comes from, what makes it valuable and what makes it problematic. My central thought is this:

The price of pride is pain.

Christianity says that pride is a sin; I don’t agree, though I certainly recognize that pride can lead to sin —  arrogant dismissal of others’ value, nationalism, racial divides and conflicts, a hundred other ways that pride “goeth before a fall,” as they say. I also see where pride is strength: pride in my accomplishments, as a writer, as a teacher, as a human being, is often what keeps me going in the face of continued struggle and defeat. Pride lifts up the downtrodden and helps  them to fight back against oppression, often in the face of overwhelming odds. There is value in pride. It also may be that pride is essentially inevitable, that in a culture that constantly appraises the value of everything as good or bad, better or worse than everything else, there is no way a rational person could not see which of their traits are on the approved list, and feel a bump, or a jump, in their worth.

But like everything else that has value, pride has a cost. I think that pride has to be earned. I say it is pain, but I include painstaking effort in that; anyone who has fought hard for a skill or an ability or to overcome a prodigious obstacle knows that pain is not only limited to sharp injuries. There’s a great scene in To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout and Jem are trying to find anything in their father Atticus Finch to be proud of, and then they find that he is a crack shot with a rifle; when they ask their neighbor Miss Maudie why Atticus never bragged or showed off his ability, she says that Atticus knows better than to take pride in something that is a gift from God. His ability, the steady eye and steady hand that lets him hit everything he aims at, was not earned: it was inborn. (There’s an argument to be made that practice and training made him better, but this is both a simplification and a speculation on Maudie’s part. The point remains.) I am an American, but I did not work for that: it was an accident of my birth. I take no pride in accidents. I do take pride in the actions I have taken, the burdens I have carried, for the sake of my society, and which have made that society better; I vote, I pay taxes, I participate in the cultural and political conversations, and probably most importantly, I teach. I think that those who serve, both in civil society and in the military and public safety, have earned and deserve their pride in themselves and the country they helped to build and maintain. They (we, if I may be bold) have paid for it in effort and sacrifice, and often (they, not me) in suffering and loss.

I want to say that those who do not earn their pride before they hold it, flaunt it, and press eagerly forward to show it, chins out and hands balled into fists, will pay for their pride in suffering afterwards: that the fall will come, that they will be humbled and humiliated. But of course that doesn’t always happen. The universe is not just. There is an easy way that people with unearned pride can avoid the pain themselves, and that is simply to move the suffering off of themselves and onto others, and thus you have the Ku Klux Klan, and domestic abuse, and bullies. And Donald Trump.

But for those who are not that, who are not victimizers and warmongers, the point I want to make is that pride must be earned.

And the price of pride is pain.

This Morning

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This morning, honestly, I’m thinking about how much I have to teach my students still, and how little time I have to do it. I’m thinking about whether or not literature can be parceled  into discrete packets called “reading assignments,” and whether there is any point to assigning reading homework to people who don’t read. I’m thinking about whether it’s better to comment extensively on essay drafts, or to hand them right back and just say, “Make it better.” Independence or guidance?

On the one hand I have the pedagogical establishment in this country, which wants me to differentiate and scaffold and make all learning student-centered, preferably student-generated project-based collaborative group multimedia discovery projects. I honestly have no idea how to do this, but I suspect it is both transient and unsustainable: that too much effort would go into planning and organizing the perfect project units, and in pre-teaching protocols for students to follow in generating their own discovery learning projects, and in trying to make the groups work fairly, particularly with low-interest students; and within five years, pedagogists will have discovered a new element that should be added — though nothing will ever be taken away. The new element will not make this more practical.

And on the other hand I have Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery Herrigel was a German philosophy professor who studied traditional Japanese archery in Japan, and his book is credited with helping to popularize Zen in the west. His archery master has the perfect system: he shows the students how to do the thing — how to draw the bow, aim, and fire at a target (Also, most importantly, how to breathe) — and then he has the students do it, and he points  out their mistakes. Then he does it again. And again. That’s it: modeling and expert critique. There is no explicit  instruction at all.

There is precisely one reason why I have to rush, why I have to assign reading packets rather than whole novels, or better yet, just read whole novels with my students and discuss them as we go, and it is time. The determination that one class lasts for fifty minutes, that one week is five classes, that one semester is eighteen weeks, that one year is two semesters, that an education is thirteen years. We are in a hurry, all the time, forever, particularly with our children. That’s what ruins everything.

If I could teach anything, I would teach this world to take its time.

This Morning

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This morning I am thinking about thinking.

This morning I am thinking about the brain like it’s a computer. (Which means that this morning, I’m right. Also that I got the idea from the author Myke Cole. On Twitter.) The brain can do almost limitless work, but it isn’t actually limitless: there are a finite number of thoughts that I can think in my lifetime. It’s a large number, an imponderably staggering number — but still finite. When I give my brain a chance, it can think of some excellent creations. But too much of the time, I decide that my brain is tired, and that it could use some downtime.

I don’t think my brain actually gets tired. I’m sure it runs out of resources, runs low on fuel and energy; but usually, I suspect that the issue is that I am tired of my brain, and I want it to stop. I want to shut it off. I try to sleep, and sometimes I fall asleep with no trouble, the brain flipping into Sleep mode with the press of a button, the closing of my eyes; but sometimes, it keeps going, trying to finish a particular thought-cycle; it is worst when that cycle gets stuck in a loop. Around my anxieties, usually. But just the fact that my brain can keep going even when my body and soul are entirely exhausted tells me: my brain doesn’t get tired. It’s a machine. It runs for as long as I keep it plugged in — and though I don’t remember my dreams, I have them, which means it keeps running even when I shut it down.

This morning I suspect that my brain is most insistent in those thought-cycles when I have not spent enough time paying attention to useful thoughts: when I have spent too much time wallowing in trash thoughts.

A computer is a powerful machine, but it is only as efficient and effective as its inputs: GIGO is the word, Garbage In, Garbage Out. (I learned that at summer camp when I was ten. I took a programming class. My summer camp was cool.) And my problem is that when I decide that my brain is tired, I input garbage so that the thoughts will become — less troubling, maybe? Less effective, certainly, in that the thoughts have less effect on me. I’m tired of thinking. I want to relax, and somehow, that has taken on the definition of “thinking about garbage.” So I watch TV, I play idiotic video games, I scroll through social media. Purposeless, but enjoyable. It feels relaxing.

But this morning, I think these inputs are viruses. They put their own information into my brain-puter, (Compubrain? Combrainter? This is all bad. You know what I’m realizing this morning? “Computer” is an ugly word. “Brain” isn’t any better.) and then more often than not, my own thoughts, my own programs and content, get shunted aside in favor of the viral inputs. I get caught up in video games — “Just one more! Just one more!” — and I find myself wasting hours, staying up later and later, turning to the video games during the day even when I’m not tired of thinking. The same with the social media, which is simply an eternal scrawl, requiring an active decision to stop zombie-plodding through it, and while I’m taking in images and words, I’m not going to stop easily. Even if — especially if — they’re bad images and words, uninteresting ones, because then I keep seeking good posts, good information among the mounds and pools of shlock. The movies and TV are even more insidious, as they worm into my thought-files and corrupt them with their own information, so that my brain gets stuck making references to movies and TV, repeating lines and scenes and images and other bits of viral data. Then even my ideas replicate the viruses’ ideas: and that, I suspect, is why Hollywood has become so very good at remaking remakes and sequelling sequels.

 

This morning I’d like to say that I am going to stop watching TV and movies, and stop looking at social media, and stop playing video games. But I don’t want to lie. I’m not going to stop. Not only are they important to me — as downtime, which whether my brain needs it or not, the rest of me does, and I associate it with those things; though I may try some new kinds of downtime, like easy reading or writing, or listening to music while I drink wine, or something like that — but they are a part of my career, as social media is the best way to advertise as a self-published author, and also a part of my society, which is steeped in pop culture, and I want to stay connected and relevant. But I want to do some simple things that will mitigate the effects of these viral inputs, this malware. First, I will build firewalls: I will set limits as to when and how much I take in. Second, I will dedicate more time to using my computing cycles more productively; yesterday I spent my walk with my dogs thinking about things; last night I read; this morning I am writing. (I’m going to do it again tomorrow morning.)

I slept very well last night. I also took a splendid nap yesterday. So I’m thinking now that when I’m tired off thinking, I should sleep: and when I am not tired, I should keep thinking productively. My brain will keep running anyway; I’d rather it thought about truth and beauty, than about Candy Crush and reality shows.

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning I realized that giving up doesn’t hurt any less than fighting.

This morning I realized that I’ve been giving up.

This morning I realized that the world is a mouth, and we are all being chewed into a thin paste so we can be swallowed: some of us are soft and plump, full of juice and flavor, and we burst easily and quickly; and some of us are hard as nuts, would crack the tooth of the world if it bit down too hard and so it grinds at us and grinds at us and grinds at us and grrrrrrrrrrriiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnddsssssss at us until we, too, are reduced to little more than dry powder: and then down the hatch we go.

This morning I realized that the world-mouth metaphor is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t go anywhere useful; like I could get into meat, and have some of us be tender and chewy and some of us be tough as gristle — but if in the end we all get chewed and all get swallowed, what’s the point? Do I say that we have to enjoy our time in the mouth, getting chewed up, getting destroyed? It would be fun to try to talk about flavors mixing, and maybe those tough nuts can bathe in the juice of the soft plump fruits — but that’s either too gross, or too intimate. Bathing in someone else’s juices is either sex or murder, and neither is empowering. Or actually maybe both are empowering.

This morning I realized that not every thought, not every idea, needs to be pursued — but the ones that go somewhere need to be nurtured and loved, and even the ones that don’t work out should be sat with for a little while, because they may then get added to one of the better ones.

This morning I realized that I haven’t been writing, and I’ve missed it. I’ve missed me.

This morning I realized that fucking Candy Crush repeats fucking levels, and that my dream of living out the meme I saw and conquering every level and thus beating the game is a stupid one; that I should spend that time writing instead. That even if I can’t find it in me to continue working on my enormous book project, and I can’t craft a single clear idea into one crystalline pillar of perfection before I even start writing a blog, I SHOULD WRITE ANYWAY. And I should post my thoughts.

This morning I realized that I probably haven’t lost my audience, at least not completely, but I’ve let them down– I’ve let you down. And I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have given up. I shouldn’t have laid down.

This morning I realized that I can write short things that are worth writing, and therefore worth reading.

This morning, I came back to myself.

This morning, I stood up. I fought. I wrote.

This morning I decided to do it again tomorrow morning.

Expectations

Dusty Leave a comment

[With deep gratitude to Judy Brady for her incredible essay, “I Want a Wife,” which was the model for this piece. You can read it here.]

Expectations

I am a part – a cog – in that machinery called education. I am a Teacher. And I am quite fond of some of the individuals whom I teach.

A friend of mine has just earned his Master’s in Education – online of course – and has immediately stepped from his third year as an elementary P.E. teacher into an administrative job with a large suburban high school. The school is respected, well-funded, and effective; so as you would expect, my friend is looking to improve the staff with some new teachers in order to earn his new administrative paycheck. He’s searching for brand new teachers, of course, some of those with fresh energy and inspirational idealism. He has asked me to help him in his search for a brand new teacher, and I am always happy to oblige.

So what are the expected qualifications of this brand new teacher?

The teacher will be required to teach the classes. The teacher will be expected to manage a classroom full of 35 students, students grouped according to their birthday and where they happen to live around the beginning of the school year, students who represent 35 different levels of ability and interest in any given subject. When around 10% of these students will move out of the class partway through the year, and be replaced by a similar number of new students arriving in the middle of units, the teacher will be expected to bring these newcomers up to speed and familiarize them with the new material and the new learning environment. The teacher must do this gently, of course, because new students are under quite a lot of stress. The teacher will be expected to handle between five and eight classes of 35 students apiece, every day (five classes would be if the new teacher is part-time, a decision that will be made at the start of the new school year, or within the first six weeks of instruction); though next year, my friend told me, the school will be moving to an A/B block system: four classes one day and the other four the next day, with all eight on a shifting schedule every ninth class day, the day when the school will occasionally have special schedules for pep assemblies and school-wide activities such as the science fair. The teacher will be required to design something science- or STEM-related for the science fair. And the project will need to correlate to the teacher’s own subject. And also the project must draw new students to the school, so the school can compete with those charter schools. The teacher will also be expected to participate in the pep assemblies, preferably in some sort of costume provided by the teacher and related to the school mascot, the Phalanx. But that’s next year: this year the school has an eight-period day, so the teacher will be obligated to prepare for every class, every school day. Some of the classes will be identical courses, but the student makeup in each case will be radically different, and the teacher will be expected to find a way to keep all of the identical courses on the same pace despite the need to differentiate instruction. The teacher will be expected to reteach subject matter to any classes that didn’t master it, and to give extra enrichment activities to the more advanced students who did achieve mastery. The teacher is expected to make the extra work, both the remedial practice and the advanced enrichment, particularly engaging and rewarding for the students, who will not wish to take on extra assignments on top of the required work. There are three minutes between classes, shortened to ensure maximum instructional time; the teacher will need to avail themselves of that time to give students assistance if they fall behind the rigorous pace. The teacher will, of course, be expected to teach bell to bell. Before the beginning of each class, the teacher will be expected to be standing outside their classroom, with a pleasant but formal demeanor, and to personally greet every student as they come into the classroom. The teacher will of course have to make sure they don’t drink too much fluid, as they won’t have a chance to go to the bathroom until lunch at the earliest. Fortunately, lunch is only four hours after school starts. Unless the new teacher is given an early morning class before the regular start time. The teacher will also be expected to spend the lunch period supervising a public area to make sure students are not littering nor using inappropriate language or touching; the teacher can use the between-class intervals for attending to personal needs.

The teacher will be expected to know the content. The teacher will be required to answer all questions correctly and completely, while also encouraging students to do further research on their own, and to offer the students an organized and vetted list of appropriate resources the students could use to find their own information. The teacher will be expected to stay current with the newest developments in the subject, to attend professional development trainings in their free time, to learn the latest methods and strategies, which the teacher will be expected to incorporate into their lesson plans. All lesson plans must be filed with the administration at the beginning of each quarter, and any last-minute modifications must be approved by administration at least one week before they are implemented. The teacher will be mandated to be open to suggestions from administrators, and to be eager to benefit from administrators’ cutting-edge pedagogical training. The teacher is expected to know how their subject matter connects to other areas of instruction and other subjects, and be able to coordinate thematically with other classes. The teacher will be required to control the pace of instruction to match that of other subjects so that no student falls behind and has to suffer through overwork in order to catch up.

In terms of the students’ work, the teacher will be expected to assess baseline abilities, to place students along a continuum, and to develop individual learning plans for each student so that they can receive optimum instruction for their ability level. The teacher will be obligated to provide easily-read charts and graphs of all student progress, both in aggregate for conferencing with administration and for each individual student for parent conferences. Where appropriate, the teacher will be required to coordinate student learning plans with the Exceptional Student Services department; all ESS clients’ learning plans must adhere to all applicable laws and policies, and must receive approval from the ESS department and the parents of the ESS students. The teacher will be expected to issue surveys and to conduct ice-breaking, team-building, trust-fostering, and getting-to-know-you activities, so that the teacher can assess the students’ interests, their cultural backgrounds and biases, their maturity level, and their relative mastery of the curriculum so that the teacher can find  materials that the students will find engaging, but which will neither be offensive nor beyond their current developmental stage or ability level. Once all of the students are assessed and plotted, the teacher will be able to start differentiating instruction in earnest, in order to personalize each student’s learning for maximum improvement, ensuring at all times that all instruction is drawn from the district-approved curriculum and adheres to research-based best practices.

Most importantly, the teacher will be expected to communicate with parents, both about grades and about interesting and important upcoming events. The teacher will need to plan interesting and important upcoming events so that parents can be informed about them. The communication should be professional, such as (but not limited to) a desktop-published newsletter or a website that offers updates through social media interaction. The teacher should note that district computers are not to be used for social media access. The teacher will be expected to encourage parent participation: invite them into the classroom, to help supervise the class (Though of course the parent volunteer cannot provide the instruction, not being a licensed teacher; the teacher will be obligated to make sure the parent volunteers have security clearance, have their fingerprints and background checked by the FBI and ensure the parent volunteers have had a TB test and proof of a recent MMR innoculation); the teacher will be asked to recognize that having a few extra adults to help supervise activities can be very beneficial for students, even high school students, as well as a great help to the teacher. The teacher will be expected to plan class activities which the parents as well as the students will find interesting and educational. The teacher will be required to provide the parent volunteers with an outline, an observation rubric, and a teacher script so they can follow along with the teacher through the lesson, and help observe and chart the students’ responses, especially that of their own child, so the parents can be involved in their child’s ongoing assessment. The parents probably won’t know all of the students in their child’s class, but the teacher will be able to make a printout of the seating chart with student ID photos with only seven or eight steps through the online attendance database. The teacher will be mandated to ensure that the volunteers aren’t given too much information about the students, and to collect the seating charts at the end of the day, so as not to violate confidentiality. The teacher will be expected to make valuable use of the parent volunteers.

The teacher will be expected to prepare students for their futures, to ready them for college, or for the workforce – though of course the school prefers that all students attend college, as that is one of the administration’s own evaluation criteria. The teacher will also, therefore, be expected to make sure students graduate, even if that means simplifying the material and curving their grades; that way they can also participate in sports and extracurricular activities, which are important because they inspire students to work harder in school. Those activities do tend to take time away from school work; but the parents prefer that teachers not assign too much homework anyway, as that causes the students stress. This means that the teacher will be required to arrange to give the student-athletes all of their work during the regular class period, so that academic progress can be maintained without impinging on extracurricular studies; this is a splendid opportunity for the teacher to differentiate instruction. The teacher will also be expected to adjust grades as necessary to maintain athletic eligibility for our top performers.

The teacher will be obligated to sacrifice, voluntarily, for the children. The school has limited resources, and everything must be focused, unalterably, on the children. The teacher will be asked to give up money, time, healthcare, benefits, retirement, tenure, and all aspects of an individual and satisfying future, for the children. The teacher will be required to agree that they did not get into this to get rich, that they teach because they want to make a difference. The teacher will be paid commensurately with their willingness to sacrifice for the children, though regardless of level of sacrifice, the compensation will not be enough. The teacher is expected to have expected this.

In the unlikely event, which has recently grown significantly more likely, of a school shooting, the teacher will be expected to carry a firearm (Firearm, a state-approved method of securing the firearm until needed, and sufficient training in its use to be provided by the teacher) and to end the threat to the children. The teacher will be required to be aware that the school shooter is likely to be one of their current or former students, and the teacher must not hesitate to pull the trigger and put the shooter down. Though of course, the teacher will be obligated to not do anything to put innocent lives in greater danger. If the teacher is troubled by this turn of events, the teacher should consider whether the teacher could have done more to prevent the crisis before it reached this danger point. Perhaps the teacher should have paid more attention, and done more to build trust. And also reported any suspicions they might have of students to the administration, so the school can follow up with law enforcement. If only the teacher had paid more attention. And if the teacher is unwilling or unable to use a firearm to defend the students, the teacher will be expected to shield the children with their own body, and die. For the children.

This is what is expected of this brand new teacher. The question is: who the hell would want the job?

Love

Dusty 2 Comments

A student of mine wrote an essay defining “love.” Actually, a number of my students wrote essays defining “love,” because my assignment was to give a concrete definition of an abstract term, and “love” is a term I suggested as a possibility, and which a number of them felt like they had a reasonable grasp on and good cause to want to define. I don’t think most of them did a great job on it, though, for one simple reason: they’ve never been in love. I have – I am – and because of that, I believe that I have a better understanding of love than anyone who has never felt something like what I feel. I’ve always been one of those people who argues against the casual use of the word “love,” always been annoyed by my teenaged students yelling “I love you!” to their friends, often grumbled to myself – generally out loud, though not loudly – “No, you don’t,” when I hear one of them do that. I have always wanted “love” to be a word we reserved for the strongest connections, the most meaningful bonds. I still think that, and so after reading so many essays explaining that love could be used in any circumstance to describe anything at all pleasant, which was the prevailing view, I wanted to write my own to try to clarify what they all are getting wrong, and what I am getting right when I hold my wife in my arms and tell her, “I love you.”

I’ll tell you, though: this one student – one of my best, one of the brightest young people I’ve taught in 20 years – made me think harder about this. Because she said, “If words were seasonings, love would be garlic. Fits well in almost any dish, easily peppered in, improves whatever its included in.” And, well – I love that. I love this, too:

I don’t know if I’ve gone one day since I started speaking without saying the word “love.” If it is able to be overused, I overused it. I still do. I hang up the phone “I love you!” regardless of who I’m calling. I sign professional emails with it. I yell it at random strangers when I try to compliment them. When people who I hardly know share any opinion with me, I usually sum up my feelings towards them with: “Dude! I love you!” I use the word so much because it’s a great word. It means exactly what I’m trying to say. And what I’m usually trying to say is: “this thing or person or idea makes me feel happy and good.” That takes too long to say when someone my age on the street is wearing a Bikini Kill shirt and walking by me and I want them to know that i also like Bikini Kill but I can’t muster up a coherent statement. “I love you (or your shirt, or your outfit or that thing you’re holding)” works just fine. Perfectly non-specific. Perfectly over-intimate.

 

It felt very much like she was speaking directly to this prejudice of mine against the casual overuse of “love,” but in this opening paragraph, and in the rest of the essay, I was confronted with a simple fact: I overuse “love,” too. Because love is not just what I say to my wife; love is also what I say when I think about Cheez-Its, or coffee, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I say it when I see something that makes me feel happy and good. And that makes me a hypocrite.

Now, I don’t really mind being a hypocrite, if by “hypocrite” we mean someone who changes their standards from day to day. This is how my students frequently use the word; they apply it to, for instance, parents who partied in their youth and then tell their kids they shouldn’t party in theirs. (This is a new meaning of the word, I think, and a bad one; if what we mean by “hypocrite” is what I understand the word to really mean, that is someone who betrays their own standard while still holding other people to it, a liar who castigates people for lying, a thief who punishes thieves, then I do not want to be that thing.) Another sentiment I love, this one from Ralph Waldo Emerson, is:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

People can change. We can learn new things, we can have new ideas, and if those ideas contradict everything we said today, then so be it. This applies to the current subject of love in two ways: one, my understanding of love can change – and change frequently, and then change back again – and two, the meaning of the word “love” can change as society’s general understanding of the word changes. And that is also fine: I don’t feel the need to have one and only one understanding of the word “love.” The meaning of the word doesn’t have to be consistent; it can change according to the circumstances. Context changes the meaning of many words, as it changes the connotations and associations; that’s what makes language so beautiful and so complex. It’s kind of why I still have a job.

I can be inconsistent in my understanding of “love.” It can change according to the circumstances. And within that, there can still be a right and wrong meaning of the word, because someone could use the wrong meaning in the wrong context. So I can happily tell my wife I love her and only her, and then shout to a crowd that I love Ralph Waldo Emerson, and then throw dirty looks at students who say “Goodbye, I love you!” to their friends – but only if I can be clear in my understanding of these three contexts, and say that my students are misusing it in theirs.

Spoiler: they’re probably not. I am writing this to show myself why I am wrong, much more than I mean to show my students why they are wrong. But they’re wrong, too, and I’m right; I’ll get to that.

My instinct is that there are two feelings here. They are two different feelings, though related; we use the same word for them, though perhaps we shouldn’t. This is where language gets tangled (Which is better, tanguage? Or langled? Mmmmmm – neither.), and though that tanguage (See? That’s awful.), that langling (That’s not better! SO WHY DO I KEEP DOING IT! Because I love portmanteaus, that’s why. Love ’em.), means I still have a job, it’s not worth the pain it causes. This is my objection to English as a language: it has so many words, and so many shades of meaning for those words, and because the meanings of words can change according to context, we can’t all agree on what the words mean; because of that, I think, we avoid the words that are ambiguous, or the ones that are complex. We lose the nuances of our language, and force each other to create and learn new meanings of old words, instead. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s a problem with English exclusively, but I know that English could avoid most of these issues if we’d just take advantage of what English can offer, and that is: many, many words.

Look up “love” in a thesaurus. Mine has multiple columns of synonyms for love because love falls into at least four categories, desire, courtesy, affection, and favorite; and that’s not including God’s love, make love, love affair, and love of country, each of which has its own entry, as well. Even the Great Democratizer Google offers these:

love

/ləv

noun

an intense feeling of deep affection.

synonyms: deep affection, fondness, tenderness, warmth, intimacy, attachment, endearment;

devotion, adoration, doting, idolization, worship;

passion, ardor, desire, lust, yearning, infatuation, besottedness

compassion, care, caring, regard, solicitude, concern, friendliness, friendship, kindness, charity, goodwill, sympathy, kindliness, altruism, unselfishness, philanthropy, benevolence, fellow feeling, humanity

relationship, love affair, romance, liaison, affair of the heart, amour
   

*   a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone.

synonyms: become infatuated with, give/lose one’s heart to;

fall for, be bowled over by, be swept off one’s feet by, develop a crush on

infatuated with, besotted with, enamored of, smitten with, consumed with desire for;

captivated by, bewitched by, enthralled by, entranced by, moonstruck by;

devoted to, doting on;

informal mad/crazy/nuts/wild about

 

If we could just use these words, and agree on specific words in specific situations, and not change them all the damn time, then this would all be solved: I adore my dogs, I am besotted with my wife – my inamorata – I am devoted to my mother, I care for my students, I am wild about Cheez-Its. See how easy that is?

But nooooooo, no, that’s too many words to remember, and too many meanings to negotiate and agree on. We’d rather use one word for every one of those feelings, and then try to figure out what someone means when they say “I love you.”

That’s actually where my concern lies, with regards to how my students use the word, with how my bright essayist defined it:

The proper definition of love is supremely vague and exists on a spectrum. Love can be intense or delicate, long-lived or fleeting, romantic or platonic, emotional or physical. It is possible to love so many things in so many ways and for so many reasons, that it’s stupid and almost impossible to pinpoint the specifics. It thrives when left as a nebulous idea or concept. It doesn’t hurt anyone to love things. Why force someone to determine if something is worthy of the title of love? I think it can and should be thrown around as much as possible. It doesn’t need boundaries.

 

I agree with this; love can be all of these things. I don’t agree that the inconstant, ever-changing nature of love means that it’s “stupid and almost impossible to pinpoint the specifics.” I believe it is quite important: because there is one situation, and only one, where saying “love” and meaning it, and knowing that you mean it, and ensuring that the one who hears you say it knows that you mean it, is absolutely necessary. That is romance.

When I tell my wife that I love her, I mean something different than what I mean when I say it to anyone else, in any other situation whatsoever. This relationship is unlike every other connection I have in my life: this one, and only this one, is unique. I love my mother just like I love my father; I love my students (some of them) just like I love my coworkers (some of them); I love my dog Samwise just like I love my dog Roxie. I love Cheez-Its like I love Boston creme doughnuts.

But I love my wife like nobody else.

I want to explain, because this is the root of this essay, of this discussion for me; this is why I don’t like it when people use the word “love” for something other than what I feel for my wife. But at the same time, I don’t want to explain, because the life we have together is ours and nobody else’s, and I don’t want to share. Let me see if I can thread this needle at least a little bit.

I trust my wife. Completely, and absolutely. There is no one else to whom I would share as much as I share with her. I can’t say I share everything, as there are some parts of me that can’t ever be expressed, as there are with every human being; but everything that I can share, is hers. No question, no doubt. She is the only person whom I would trust to do anything as well if not better than I can. That’s not meant to sound arrogant, there are lots and lots and LOTS of things that I can’t do well; but the things I can do well, I want to do myself so that I can be sure they will be done the way I think they should be done, the way I can do them. Call me a control freak, if you will; it’s not true for everything, but it is true with, say, my teaching. I’d trust my wife to teach my class over anyone else, as much as my fellow English teachers (And more than some of them), even though she’s not an English teacher: I know that she could do it, and do it well. I’d trust her with my paperwork, with filling out, say, arrest forms or hospital forms. I’d trust her with my medical decisions, I’d trust her with my legacy, I’d trust her with my life. It’s not only the big things, either: I’d trust her to take care of our pets, to lock up the house when we leave on vacation, to drive – which she does better than I do, anyway. When I trust her to do something, I don’t worry about it, I don’t have to double check: I know that she did it right, at least as rightly as I could do it.

(Exceptions: I write better than she does. And she doesn’t really do the dishes right. Mmmmmm – that’s it. She could do anything else for me, if she wished.)

Along with that complete trust comes understanding. Because we have shared so much with each other, and experienced so much together, I know exactly how she thinks. I went to get a snack while she was reading this (It’s about her and us, so she gets veto power), and as I was coming back to my office, I thought, “She’s going to get hung up on that dishes comment.” As soon as she heard me coming down the hall, she called out, “What do you mean, I don’t do the dishes right?” This is not a first: we frequently find ourselves having the same thought, and though we don’t finish each other’s sentences, it’s only because we don’t interrupt each other. We don’t think the same way: she’s more liberal, more spiritual, and has a better sense of propriety (One of my most frequent questions to her is, “Too much? Does that joke go too far?” She frequently says, “A little.” And I take it out.), but I understand how she thinks, and she understands how I think. As well as anyone can understand anyone, that is.

My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. I don’t mean that her features are flawless or perfect – whatever the hell that means – because they’re not; simply that the feeling that one gets when one looks at something beautiful, the feeling of calm joy, a warm spread of soothing happiness and a desire to lose time in looking at it: that’s what I feel when I look at her. Watching her expression is the best: the slow smile, the way her eyes widen when she sees something interesting, the way they focus like lasers when she is working on something. It’s beautiful. I could watch her all day, forever. I’ve never seen another woman whom I could watch the same way. Partly, yes, because it would be creepy; my wife may think I’m creepy when I stare at her, but she lets me do it, anyway, without calling me out, without making me feel uncomfortable – without tearing down that warm calm that comes with looking at beauty. It’s that allowance, that permission to enjoy her, that is part of this; her walls are – not gone, but lower, or farther back, with me than they are with anyone else. That’s part of the privilege of love. Part of the honor of it is how I try to be worthy of that permission, of that trust.

Along with that – and not to get too graphic – my wife is the sexiest woman in the world. All the feelings of attraction and excitement, different and more intense and more fleeting and more addictive than the feelings that come with looking at beauty: I get all of those from being around my wife. Nobody else has ever, or could ever, have the same overwhelming effect on me so often, so immediately; all it takes is one glance in just the right way, and nothing else exists. Only she has that power over me. And it is a power, make no mistake: whatever I may want to say to hedge this topic, to moralize it, to objectify and reduce the feeling of sexual attraction, and the feelings of ecstasy, of connection, and of bliss that come with sex, the truth is, whether I can explain it or not, whether it needs explanation or not, sex is as powerful a part of love as any other.

It’s not necessary: I will say that. My relationship with my wife, our connection, our affection, our trust; none of that is built on sex, none of it relies on sex. I could not imagine, however, having the same relationship with her while having a sexual relationship with someone else. I don’t see how that would work. We could still be friends, even the best of friends; but she would not be my love. I know there are people who have polyamorous relationships, and I have to assume they care for their partners, and are excited by their partners, in the same way as I and my wife; but I can’t understand it. Suffice it to say that if everyone could share all parts of the relationship together, I can at least see how it could work; if people have separate intimate relationships in common, as in my understanding (based exclusively on televised fiction, which is why I don’t pretend to have an answer here) of religious polygamy, where a husband moves from wife to wife to wife on different nights – I can’t see that as the same kind of love that I have with my wife.

But then, I don’t think anyone else on Earth has the same kind of love that I have with my wife: I am unique, and she is unique, and thus what we have together is unique. So on some level, there is no word for what I feel for her, or at least no word that anyone else could ever know or understand or use. It is essentially uncommunicable.

Dang. Maybe my student was right. Maybe there is no point in defining love.

No: I still think it matters. My love for my wife is this way because it has grown and strengthened and become more for better than twenty years. When we met, when we started dating, and when we fell in love, there were all the same flaws and problems that other people have; maybe not as many, maybe not as serious, as there are for some relationships – after all, we stayed together – but love becomes unique and undefinable; I don’t think it starts that way. I think the feeling is, at first, recognizable, similar to what each of us had felt for other people in the past, similar to what other people feel in those circumstances. Knowing that, recognizing it, is what allowed us to first say to each other, “I love you,” and mean it. And I think it’s important that people recognize that phrase, and mean it when they say it, as something distinct from what people mean when they shout “I love you!” as they drive by the McDonald’s where their friends are at work. Because in a romantic situation, when someone says, “I love you,” and the other person says, “I love you too! You’re my best friend!” then there is at least a potential for serious and terrible heartbreak. There are countless dramatic moments in books, films, TV shows, based on this precise miscommunication, because it is one we can understand, relate to, maybe remember. That is the problem with using the exact same word for both very different feelings. And they are different feelings: I will use the phrase “romantic love” to separate them, but that doesn’t work in the moment, because you can’t say “I love you romantically” and mean it. When you tell someone that you love them in the way that I say it to my wife, then the word cannot be qualified and modified: it has to be everything, all in one, because that’s what the word represents: that’s the love I mean when I say it to her. Everything. All that I am, and all that I have, with her, forever. That’s love.

 

When I was thinking about this essay, I had an idea that I would end up defining two different meanings of the word “love:” one for the happy warm feelings that my student speaks of – call it the garlic love, in her honor – and one for the feelings I share with my wife, which I cannot truly express, not with all my words. I even had the idea that the garlic love, the one I feel for pirates or warm socks or the music of Weird Al Yankovic – and believe me, I do not discount and do not demean that love; I love that love – could be distinguished as the one that allows people to extend the word the way they do on social media, by adding more “e’s” at the end of it – “I LOVEEEEEEEE that movie!” I freely admit that bugs the crap out of me: because IT’S A SILENT LETTER! What the hell does it mean when you say it more, a long pause? But I also admit, just as freely, that this is my humbuggishness talking, that I have no grounds to be annoyed by that; I understand that people are trying to intensify the word within the limitations of the medium: you can’t do bold or italic or oversized font in a Tweet. You can repeat the word – “I love love love that movie” – but that’s neither better nor worse. In both cases, it’s clear communication of intensified feeling, and it does it the same way, by dedicating more characters to the idea.

I can distinguish that from what I feel for my wife, however, because when I tell her I love her, I don’t ever extend it. I don’t ever say, “I LOOOOOOOVVVVVEEEEE you!” I don’t say “I LOVE LOVE LOVE you!” But I would do either of those things – okay, not the second one, which strikes me as insincere, though again, no real reason for that, just prejudice and humbuggishness, the same as how I hate it when people use the word “impactful” – if I was trying to express how I feel about Weird Al. I LOOOOOOVVVVEEE Weird Al.

I love my wife.

Two different feelings, two different terms, even if they are sort of spelled the same. Even if they do both have the same positive, happy-making, basic feeling underlying them. And if I had my druthers, I’d insist that people distinguish: when they talk to their friends about their favorite breakfast cereals, they use the extendable one: maybe spell it “loveee” to be clear. When they talk about the person they want to kiss, they use only “love.” Spelled, and said, the right way.

But there’s no point in trying to do that. Language doesn’t change because people think others are using it wrong; language changes with people’s whims, with fashions, with the ease and quickness of flipping a switch, but never because people say that word there is the wrong word. I suppose I could try to make it unfashionable to use the word “love” in a casual context, but people want to say it. They want to express feelings, want to be open, and they want to be positive. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If saying “I love you” makes two friends happy, then who the hell am I to step in and say, “Actually, that’s not love; you should say you are fond of each other.” I mean, I can be a prick sometimes, but I’m not that bad. And while I said above that I wished we would take advantage of the richness of the language – and I still wish that, all the time and in many contexts – I could never say to my wife, with a straight face, “I am besotted with you.” (Note: I tried. Didn’t work.)

I think it’s okay, though. Because context changes meaning. So what we need to be aware of is the context we are creating when we use the word “love.” When we want to use it differently, when you’ve just been saying, “Man, I love Buffalo wings!” and you have the sudden urge to tell your date, “I love you,” don’t do it one after the other. (Though do picture that, just for a minute. “Man, I love Buffalo wings! I love you, sweetie!” Don’t even give the guy a pause; picture him licking sauce off of his fingers the whole time he says this. Nice.) Change the context. Surround the declarations of romantic everything-love with a situation that expresses what you mean: and if you want to clearly show the difference between uses of the word, then make sure the contexts are different.

What I really want to say, I suppose, is that love is a perfect thing for me. I don’t want to rename it. I also don’t want to keep it from having a name, from saying it is indefinable and indescribable, because I don’t want to keep other people from it – I want other people to feel what I feel. I think it has made me a better person, and given me a better life, than I could possibly have had without it. My wife is my everything, and she has given me – everything. If other people could know what I mean, this would be a better, happier world. But while my love is unique, my experience is not, because I know there are other people who have an everything love as much as I do. They have understood everything I have said here. (I hope.) That common experience is what allows us to communicate at all; and here, it allows us to understand what I mean by the word “love.” But even for those who don’t know, who haven’t felt, what I know and feel, and thus don’t quite know what I mean by “love,” at least understand this: when you say it, make sure the other person understands just what you mean.

I would love that.

Winning and Losing and Fighting

Dusty 1 Comment

I wrote this last night.

I just want to say that I have nothing to say.

My fiction has not had the appeal that I always hoped it would; I’m not sure if it’s more because my writing is boring and overly wordy, or because people have largely given up reading, or some combination of the two. But the point is that the ideas I come up with, which I think will get people to buy and read and talk about my books, don’t make any of those things happen.

I’ve also come to realize that, in almost all areas of life that I wish to write about, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I understand teaching well, and to some extent I understand writing and literature, but even there, I realize that I have only one of many perspectives on what I do, and I don’t think I have any real proof that my opinions are correct. I have suspicions that the same urge we all have to confirm and conform and support one another is the real reason why people tell me I teach well and write well.

This means  that I think there  is little reason for me to share my ideas. Those ideas are probably wrong, after all, and not well-written enough to be worth contributing just for the sake of  the eloquent prose and powerful rhetoric. I mostly just babble online, and the books show it. My essays show it. My audience shows it. My continued — shall we be generous and call it a “lack of success” rather than an abject failure? — lack of success shows it. I don’t know that I’ve ever convinced anyone of anything. I suppose I’ve been entertaining, though not on any scale that makes it worth doing.

So since I don’t know facts, and I don’t write lyrical prose, why would I say anything at all? Any time I think about picking a position and going for it, I think that doing so for the sake of fulfilling my urge to write creates an atmosphere of contentious disagreement, and if it’s not a strongly held conviction, then it feels like disagreement for an audience. Back to entertainment, and doing nothing good for my country — which I do love, by the way. But that’s not interesting. I don’t do that because nothing’s going to change my audience’s mind, so nothing I say is going to have any impact on the world. Et voila.

I have felt the urge to write. I don’t do well with not writing. I wanted to write tonight, about an argument that would be worth having. I thought about writing about Trump, but what I’ve seen for the past two years has shown  me that people, whether they agree or disagree  with Trump, will bend over backwards to show how they will never, ever, EVER, change their loyalty, no matter how many reasons they find to do exactly that. On both sides, too: if I were to write an essay praising Trump for what he has done well — engaging with North Korea and Kim Jong Un, maintaining the strong economy, even things like renegotiating NAFTA and getting NATO members to pay their fair share of the defense spending for the alliance — I’d get lectured on what he’s done that’s terrible (Too long a list to include). If I focused on the Naughty list, I’d get these things put forward as reasons why he’s done all the right things, and a dozen other angry disagreements about why I’m wrong and an unAmerican libtard. I don’t know that anyone would consider the points I’d raise, not least because I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about.

If I stay away from politics, which would be fine with me, then what do I write about? Teaching? Ugh; talk about beating a dead horse. I don’t think I’ll ever again have an interesting or informative story about teaching that I haven’t already told. So what, then? My dogs? They’re lovely, but I don’t know anything about them other than what I observe, all of which has already been observed by anyone with dogs.  Talking about my family is taboo, especially if I were to try to air the dirty laundry that would make those stories interesting. I could try to write fiction — I am trying, still — but then we come right back to that whole “Your writing sucks and is boring” theory I’m operating with.

Again: I’m not trying to garner sympathy or affirmations. I’m trying to explain why I haven’t been writing, so that other people who are feeling like they don’t have anything to say that’s worth hearing can understand how I got to feel this way. I don’t know if it started with the failures of my fiction career (which are not shocking, as fiction writing is a damn hard business to break into) or if it came with my recent understanding that I am often wrong in my political views, that many of them come from my party loyalty rather than my own rational thought, and that plenty of my ideas are based on prejudice rather than reason. (That also is not a knock against myself: that is a description of how 99.9999% of us act about our own political views, which are generally wrong if not simply irrational. Though this is my own opinion, and as such is highly suspect, as it is based on little or no evidence, like all of my political opinions.)

I’m not sure what my point is. I was trying to write something more in line with my absurd argumentative holiday, but I couldn’t settle on a topic, and then I couldn’t get it going; I suspected that it was because this idea, that I am not fit to write and that my opinions are not worth being written, has permeated my thoughts more and more lately. It is possible I’m being too hard on myself. If so, I’m not sure how to fix it. Maybe if I can share my honest feelings and thoughts — and that, too, is difficult, as my honest opinions and thoughts are exactly what got me into trouble some years ago — then it will help me move past them.

Though I don’t know if there’s anything worth saying on the other side of these doubts, either.

I really don’t know much of anything.

I posted it, and then twenty minutes later, I took it down. I decided people didn’t really need to see my despondency, and while I said in there that I was trying to be honest so people could understand how I felt and how I got to be that way, that wasn’t really my intent; I was sad, and I was frustrated, and I was trying to write something. Anything.

It had already had some effect, though, because I know there are people who get email alerts from this blog which contain the posts, so it went out to those people, at least, and some of them might have read it. And it had some effect on me: by the end of writing this, I was thoroughly depressed, and by the time I went to bed, I was worse. I woke up at 2am thinking about this post, and about my life and my writing; it took me two hours to get back to sleep, and now here I am, first thing in the morning, writing this, rather than doing my usual check of Twitter and Facebook while I eat breakfast.

Here’s the thing: this is not true. I am not a bad writer. I am not a failure. I am not a fool. It’s true that I’m not an expert in the things that I write about, but I am damn good at research, at critical thinking, at deciding what facts to include and what to discard, and how to show a logical path of reasoning to a conclusion. That means I can write a good essay, which is pretty much all I write on this blog, apart from the book reviews (which are also good, I think). There’s nothing wrong and a lot right with my attempts to speak to truth in writing. I don’t have to already know the incontrovertible truth before I do that. In fact, there’s a reason for me not to know everything when I start writing: part of my intent is, as I claimed to be doing here, to show my thought process; I can’t do that as well if the thoughts are already done and set. Besides, even when I really am struggling to find an answer, that still doesn’t mean I can’t write an essay, and a good essay: because the word “essay” comes from the French for “attempt.” That’s what it is, and that’s what I do, and I do it well. Most of the time, I know that. As much as I know anything.

So what happened last night, that left me oozing melancholy onto this blog (My poor blog: you’ve taken so much from me, with never a word of complaint. Thank you for that.), is simply that I set myself an impossible goal. I picked a battle that I could not win, because I didn’t think it through before I started fighting. (There’s a reason I’m using war metaphors, instead of, say, “I set out on a journey I couldn’t complete because I didn’t know the destination, or the path.” That would work too, and if that makes more sense for you to describe a creative endeavor, then think of that, instead.) I decided that I had to write something last night. Had to be done on November 5th. No other option. I decided it in the late evening, around 7:00 or so, and by 8:00, I had — no ideas at all. I did an eminently stupid thing, which was to look on Twitter for possible inspiration; I honestly can’t think of a less inspiring place for genuine thoughts — unless  it’s  Facebook, where I also looked for ideas.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. I started writing something political, but I’ve had a lot of trouble determining my political stance lately — or maybe it’s my perspective — and so I question every potentially political statement I try to make. Happened last night, and I swiftly gave up on writing about politics. (Though that’s why it has a prominent place in the deluge above. That and I do think writing has the potential to make change, and politics is the thing in our society that needs the most changing, I think. Actually, maybe I’m wrong. You know, I’ve never really written about prejudice or hate. Hmm.)

That’s when I gave up. Surrendered. Decided I had nothing to write last night, and therefore, I had failed. And thus, in a stubborn attempt to write something, I wrote about my failure. But I didn’t do it well, which is why I took it down, and why I’m writing this now.

I did fail last night. But only because I was impatient. I created an artificial deadline for myself, and then collapsed when I couldn’t meet it. I think now (this is what I thought about between 2am and 4am) that this tendency to make up imaginary deadlines is a common practice, and not only for creatives; I think a lot of us do it a lot of the time. I have to be married with kids by 30 or 35. I have to have my dream job by 25. I have to be a millionaire by 40, or retired by 55. We pick essentially random points in the future, and we center our sights on it — and charge.

And miss.

On some level there’s nothing wrong with artificial deadlines like this, because it does keep us moving. It keeps us from putting today off for tomorrow, especially when today is the deadline. That’s a good thing, because despite what my students say, there is actually nothing at all good about procrastination. It’s understandable, but it’s never good. My students say they work better under pressure, but honestly, the pressure always comes from within: either you make the thing a priority, or you don’t, and if you do, there’s pressure to do it, and if you don’t, there’s not. Invented deadlines can be a way to convince your underbrain, that lazy lizardy bastard, that this thing is a priority NOW. There are plenty of times when I’ve sat down to write, telling myself I needed to find something to write about — and I have found something, and I’ve written, and it’s been fine, and I’ve won. Most of Damnation Kane was written that way, to be frank, especially the first book. I decided it was going to be a serial, I decided it was going to have a chapter published every Saturday by noon, and so every Saturday morning, I sat down and wrote a chapter.

The problem is what I did wrong last night: sometimes you pick a bad deadline, or a bad goal, and then when you miss it, you feel like a failure. Last night I shouldn’t have been writing. It was Monday: Monday’s a bad day to write. I should have been listening to music and grading vocabulary sentences. It was my own fault that I felt like a failure, because I didn’t create a way for me to succeed. I lost the battle with myself, with my writing, because I didn’t think enough about my strategy, about my plan of attack or my objectives, and so I didn’t win.

Why am I talking about writing like it’s a war? Because today is Election Day. And just as we set imaginary deadlines for ourselves in creative endeavors, so we do in politics, as well.

We’re going to be hearing a lot today about how this is the moment, this is the chance, this is the make or break, do or die, last hope for everything we believe in. I heard on the radio yesterday that today’s election will determine if this is Trump’s America, or not. I had the same reaction to that that I’m currently having to my own bullshit (That was what I was trying to write about last night before I gave up on politics), which is: that’s fucking nonsense.

So let me be clear. Today is a battle. Last night was a battle for me. Neither last night for me, nor today for this country, is the end of the war. I didn’t write something useful last night; here I am, less than twelve hours later, writing something I am much more pleased with (Though it still may not be a victory. It probably never is, which is where the military metaphor fails. I used it to make the analogy to politics, is all.). If this election goes badly — and I mean that, in all sincerity, for people of any and all political positions, because this election, like all of our politics right now, is so supercharged and combative that any result is going to be heartbreaking for one side or the other, if not both — the most important thing in the world to realize and remember is: there is another election in two years. (We should also remember that politics is not all of life, but that’s a different subject.)

The truth is this: the struggle never ends. Never. We win small battles, we lose small battles — usually only when we surrender, especially when the battle’s with ourselves — but we always keep fighting. The victories that progressives have had in the last fifty years have built up the fighting spirit on the conservative side, and that gave us the current situation; that situation is now building up the fighting spirit on the progressive side. That’s maybe even the way it has to be. It’s almost physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and so the pendulum swings, and then swings back, and the farther it goes in one direction, the harder and faster the return swing is going to be. There’s nothing — nothing — that can happen that will end the swinging of the pendulum, other than the death of all humanity. (Which is a fair possibility, of course, and the one that should probably have the most urgency to it, because those deadlines aren’t so artificial.) If Trump was actually Hitler (He’s not) and he took over the country in a fascist dictatorship, then there would be a rebellion, there would be a war, there would be an overthrow. The struggle would continue, and eventually, it would move the other way. There would be untold suffering in the meantime, and I don’t mean to say the struggle doesn’t matter, therefore: what doesn’t matter is the deadlines.

In a creative endeavor like my writing, there is no end. I’ll never be such a great writer that I don’t feel the need to get better. I’ll never write a work so fantastic that I’ll never want to write something even more fantastic. I will at some point write something that I can’t beat, but I’ll always want to. I will want to keep writing until I die, whether I am successful or not, whether I achieve what I want to achieve when I want to achieve it, or not. The struggle — the journey — will always go on.

Last night I decided there was an end to the fight, at least in the immediate sense. And I picked the wrong end, and I failed. I am going to try not to make that mistake again; when it’s a bad night for writing, I just won’t write, even if I told myself that I would. My ambitions have to bend to reality, not the other way around.

Let’s all try to remember that today, okay? Today may be a chance to achieve what we want to achieve. And it may not be the right time yet. Maybe things have to get a little worse before they get better — whatever you think “worse” or “better” means for this country. But today is not the end. Tomorrow we will still have to fight, even if we win today.

Tomorrow I’ll still want to write. Today, I won.

Now I’m going to go vote, and hope. And stay ready.

Book Review: The Unnoticeables

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The Unnoticeables

by Robert Brockway

 

This is a badass book.

First, I mean that quite literally: it’s a punk book, with a punk character, written by a guy who wrote in his dedication that this should show all those people who said he was wasting his time going to all those punk rock shows – so I’m guessing he’s a punk author.

It reads like it. Carey, one of the main characters (There are two, as the book has two settings about 25 years apart) sounds spot on to what I imagine a punk in 70’s New York City to be: angry when he’s not indifferent, violent when he’s not wasted, wasted when he’s not broke. Always going to shows, always spending time with his friends, and criticizing and attacking every single element of his life and world, always trying to peel away the artifice and reveal the truth beneath, even when – especially when – that truth is ugly. As Carey himself often is. But he’s also a hell of a lot of fun to read.

The other main character, Kaitlyn, is also a badass, because she’s a stuntwoman, with the attendant skills, interests, and adrenaline addiction. Her story is set in 2010-ish, in LA, of course. Her story has a strong feel of peeking behind the curtain, as she is not, and does not want to be, an actress: she’s one of those rare people who really wants to be behind the scenes, essentially, at least not with her name in lights. She wants thrills, not celebrity; for the most part she’d be happy with steady work so she can quit waitressing.

The second reason this is a badass book is because Brockway has created a set of supernatural creatures that are thoroughly badass, in more than one way. Mainly, they are absurdly difficult to fight, because they are essentially unbeatable, unbreakable, and entirely deadly; you can win a fight against them, but they’ll just come right back the next day. And since they can make more of themselves, there’s really not much hope for humanity.

They’re also badass because they aren’t anything I’ve ever read before: Brockway created them. He calls them angels, because one of their forms is a geometric shape made of light; but they’re neither heavenly nor beneficent. Another of their forms is a human, but only on the outside; on the inside is –something else. Something deeply disturbing. Their third form is made by these disturbing creatures: it is a human, but one without a soul; at least, that’s the easiest way to describe it. That’s not how Brockway describes it. His way of talking about this group of enemies is interesting: they are forgettable. When you see them, your instinct is to look away, to forget you ever saw that person. These are the namesakes of the book, as there is something about these people that makes them impossible to remember; you can meet one, touch it, talk to it, even think it’s hot – but you can’t describe it. It is Unnoticeable.

Their final form? (Unintentional reference. Also, I have gone down in power, not up. The angels are the most dangerous and the hardest to deal with. But still, these are rough.) A giant man-sized mound of goo, which dissolves anything human it touches, like a walking (Well, oozing) acid bath. Those are the ones that Carey figures out how to kill, actually. The other ones he can’t kill, or at least so it seems. Doesn’t stop him from fighting them, though. And maybe – maybe – he can win. Sometimes. A little.

The absolute best part of this book, for me, was the motivation of the creatures, their reason for doing what they do. It’s just so goddamn clever, and poetic, and beautifully chilling. It’s one of those ideas I wish I had had, but since I didn’t, I will gladly go on reading Brockway’s story about them, and also, anything else of his I can find.

Because this is a badass book.

Highly recommended.