Tag life

The Most Important Lesson

Dusty Leave a comment

So this is how I started my English 10 classes this year. I first had my students write an essay about what they want, and what they need. Then I showed them this, and asked them first to discuss what I had to say here about wants and needs, and I asked them to write a second draft of their essay. Then we read a short story — “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov — and talked about how that story said something about wants and needs, because the goal of the class, in part, is to get them to think about what literature has to say about life and about the human condition, and how it relates to them personally and directly. Then I asked them to add another piece to their essay about that short story, which I also did with mine.

So here is my essay, on the most important lesson anyone can learn.

***

When I was learning how to be a teacher, we had a presentation from a guy who had been a teacher for a long time. He came in talking fast and loud, brimming with confidence: his opener was something like “What I’m about to show you is the most important lesson you’re ever going to see!” He was saying that on two levels: he was talking both to us, a group of university students on the way to becoming teachers, and to the students we would eventually have, because this was how he started the lesson he was presenting to us, which was the way he started his own classes as a teacher, and he was telling us what he thought we should say to our future students. He was saying this was the most important lesson we were going to learn, that would make all the difference for us as future teachers, and telling us that we needed to take advantage of it: and he was telling us how to pitch his lesson to our students, the way he pitched it to his, as the most important thing they would ever learn. And then his lesson was on the difference between wants and needs.

Here’s how it went. He would start his class by asking his students what they needed. Right then, in school or out, whatever: he wanted them to say what they needed. He would call on some, get some volunteers, and make a list of things on the board that they said they needed. “A job” was one. “A car” was another. “A girlfriend” was the one he put down as a joke, but I don’t doubt that he got that response many times over his years of teaching this lesson this way. “Sleep” might be another example, or “McDonald’s.” 

Once he got this list, he would then ask: Okay, what happens if you don’t get this? He would pick out the students who gave the different answers, and ask them: what will happen if you don’t get a job? If you don’t get a car? If you don’t get a girlfriend? The students would joke about it, maybe – “It would suck!” “I’d have to rob banks for money!” – and then get down to the answer, the truth: nothing would happen, really. If that student didn’t get the car, they would just continue getting rides from other people, or riding the bus or walking, or however they got around. They would be able to continue on just as they had been up until that point, because of course they did not have a car (Imagine if someone who had something said that they needed it? How ridiculous! You don’t need things you already have!), and they had been able to get to that point in their lives just fine.

“Okay,” the teacher would say. “Then you don’t need that. Right? You don’t need that job, that car, that girlfriend. You just want those things.”

Then he would go to one of the other examples given: like sleep. Or McDonald’s. And he would focus on those: what happens if you don’t get sleep? Is that the same as not getting a car, or a girlfriend? Or McDonald’s: okay, maybe you don’t actually need a Big Mac and fries – but if you don’t have any food at all… you would not be able to keep living.

That was different from not getting a car, or a girlfriend. Without food, without sleep, we cannot live.

“So those,” he would tell his students, “are needs. Things you can’t live without. Everything else is just a want.”

That lesson, that conversation, has stuck with me – obviously – for a long time: more than a quarter century. I’ve never actually used his lesson, because the want/need discussion went on to a different topic, which was his actual point: he would then talk about control. We all want control, he would say to his students, but we don’t need it. His point was that those students did not get to have a lot of control over their own lives – as you do not – and that they wanted it, as you probably do; and it was his belief that much of the misbehavior that students carried out in his class was an attempt to take control: teenager gets bored of doing what the teacher wants, which is really being tired of being controlled, so they yell out something disruptive or do something distracting, because they want to take control of the class. They don’t necessarily want to focus on the distracting thing they say or do: they just want to remove the teacher’s ability to control the class, and to control the time and attention of that particular student who was being disruptive. Who was trying to take control of themselves, and coincidentally, of the class. And he said that he would ask his students to allow him to have control over the class, so that the class could get through the work they needed to do: and that was why he talked about wants and needs, because while the student may want control, what they needed was to learn; and so while he as the teacher may not want control, he needed it if they were going to learn anything. He needed them to let him have control over them, to choose to let him take control. On days when they might be struggling with being controlled, he would take the disruptive students out into the hall and ask them if they could let him take control over them temporarily, and they generally would let him – or, if they just couldn’t stand to let him be in charge of them right then, he would accept that and just ask them to go to the principal’s office, where they would not be under his control, but they also wouldn’t be taking control of the class away from him. And when he gave them that choice, they usually were able to choose one or the other: accept his control over the class, or accept leaving the class for that day.

He said it was the best method he had ever heard of or seen for maintaining discipline in a class. He actually told us that we were not allowed to use his lesson if we ended up teaching in the same school where he taught, because he wanted to be the one to use it and he didn’t think it would work if two teachers used it with the same students. I remember being impressed by that. Because most of the people we learned from were not actually teachers, not in high schools or middle schools; they taught teachers, they didn’t teach teenagers. But this guy did teach teenagers, and this was a lesson that was actually important to him: not just an idea he had that he thought might work, maybe, which was my impression of most of the rest of the examples I was being given.

But I never taught that lesson to my classes. Because I hate the idea of taking control. I like the idea of being allowed to have control, of asking people to consent to my temporary control, because I recognize that I need to have some control to teach the class; but I hate the idea of taking it. I hate telling people what to do. Which is maybe something I shouldn’t be saying to you. Because what if you now think that you can take control away from me, and I won’t do anything to take it back?

See, the thing of it is, I may not want to take control. But if I need to, I can. And I will.

What I would rather do, though, is get you all to understand what you want, and what you need – and what I can do to help you get what you want, and what you need. So let’s get back to that.

The reason that teacher started his lesson about control with a discussion of wants and needs was that he wanted his students to recognize that they did not need to take control of the class, because they already had control over the only part of the class that really mattered: themselves. The teacher was telling his students – and us, his potential future co-workers – that we had control over ourselves, all of us, because we have choice. His students could choose to let him take control over them, or they could choose to leave. If they chose to leave, and go to the principal’s office, there would be consequences, of course – just like if you all choose not to come to school at all, or if I chose to quit my job – but the truth is, there are consequences of every choice: choosing to come to school and sit in class and let the teacher be in charge means you are choosing to be bored, at least some of the time. Choosing to sit through things that you already know, or do not need to know, or do not want to know. Choosing to be uncomfortable, to not have the things you want, right now, like sleep, or McDonald’s.

I never taught the lesson that teacher showed me (Which was titled “EVERYONE IS TRYING TO CONTROL ME AND I CAN’T MAKE THEM STOP!”) because I do not want to take control. I don’t like the idea of telling my students that I need to take control over them. (His explanation of how he proved to the students how they chose to come to school was “Nobody is holding a gun to your head!” And I do not like that, do not like the idea of a want being anything that is not literally a risk to the continuation of your life, do not like the idea that the need I am providing for is, therefore, someone holding a gun to the heads of my students.) I do, however, like the idea of helping my students to see that they already have control, because they have choice: you have choice. You can choose to be here, or you can choose to not be here. Both choices have consequences, of course, but both are possible. There are, in fact, several ways you could achieve your goal, if your goal is to not be here; and all of those ways have consequences, and all of those ways have steps you would need to take to get to where you wanted to be (Not here). For instance, you would not be here if you went to a different school; and there are ways you could try to achieve that. You would not be here if you graduated early; and there are ways you could achieve that – even at your young age, though you would have to have already started on that path to have achieved it by this current moment. Still: you could have achieved that. You could achieve not being here by ditching class, and maybe you could even avoid those consequences; but probably not for long. But hey, maybe your consequences for ditching would be a suspension – and then you wouldn’t be here!

Or, you can choose to be here. Which then leads to several more choices: you can choose to pay attention, or not; you can choose to participate actively, or not; you can choose to disrupt the class, or not. All of those choices have consequences, some good and some bad – though all I mean by that is that some are consequences that you may want and some are consequences that you would not want. (Choices also have moral consequences that make them good or bad, but that’s WAY too big a topic to get into in this conversation.) – but all of them are choices you can make. Because you have control over yourself. Unless you give me control, unless you choose to give me control, I don’t have control over you. Which is good, because I don’t want it. 

Why don’t I want control? Especially when so many other teachers do? Let me put it this way. There’s a part in a story I teach in one of my classes (“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin) where the main character realizes that she is now free, that no one will be able to control her any longer; and she thinks “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.” That last part, when I read it and thought about it, hit me hard: controlling someone else – imposing my private will on them – is a crime, whether it is done with a kind intention or a cruel intention. That’s why I don’t want to take control of you: because I don’t want to commit a crime.

Please notice, though, that when I do take control as a teacher, it is not me imposing my private will on you: it is done because it is my job to be in control of this class, and it is justified by the fact that you personally are not the only person here. There is a public need which overrides private will. But this is beside the point. The point is that I do not want to impose my private will on you. Ever. I want you to choose to work with me.

So that’s why I wanted to write about this, and to share it with you. That’s why I wanted you to write about what you want and what you need, and why I want you now to think about it more – and talk about it more, if you want to do that. Because while that other teacher focused his lesson on control, I want to focus on wants and needs; I think those are much more interesting, and important, to talk about, and think about, and then write about. (If you want to talk about why wants and needs are more interesting than control, we can talk about that.)

I think his distinction, the difference that he described, between wants and needs – that needs are things you can’t live without, and wants are everything else, which you can choose to have or not – is much too simple. I mean, you could get everything you need, and you would survive, but if you never got anything you wanted – would you want to keep living that way? And even in terms of getting what you need to live: how much of it do you need? Are there things we need more than other things we need? We need food and water and shelter, because without them we cannot live; but we also need sleep. But we can live without sleep: just not in any way we would want to live. The same with social interaction, with relationships with other people: we CAN live without any of that at all; but not any kind of full, healthy, satisfying life. And then, for me personally, I don’t just eat because I need to live, I eat because I want to. I love food. (Not McDonald’s, though.) So much, in fact, that I eat more food than I should, and that will at some point lead to me having medical problems that might make it harder for me to live; so, too much of what I need, as much as I want, becomes something I can’t have. 

His claim that, if you didn’t get what you wanted, then nothing would happen, nothing would change, is not true. There are consequences to both getting and not getting anything, wants or needs. And the idea that someone who had a car would not say they needed a car, because you don’t need something you already have, is clearly not true: we say that we need food even when we have food: because the need is ongoing. When we eat the food we have, we will need more food. Having it doesn’t mean we don’t need it any more. In some cases, having something might even mean we need it more, because we get used to having something – like a car, or a girlfriend – and we would suffer without it. Once we have it, and get used to it, we need it more than we did before we ever had it: so even a want can become a need, maybe. 

It’s complicated. But I also think it’s incredibly important. And also pretty interesting.

There’s a story about this, which I think comes at it in an interesting manner: Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet.” The story is about two men, in 1870, who make a bet about – well, actually, it’s not clear what it’s really about, or what their motivations are; it seems fairly clear that the bet is really just an example of how foolish these two men are, in different ways and for different reasons. The bet arises during a dinner party conversation about the death penalty: the participants discuss whether capital punishment is more or less moral than life imprisonment. Uninterested in actually considering what the meaning of “justice” might be, or the purpose of the criminal justice system in our society, a banker gets irritated at a lawyer who claims that life imprisonment is not so bad, and he bets the lawyer two million (he never mentions the units, but maybe “pounds” makes sense – which translates to something like $400 million in modern money) that the lawyer can’t stay voluntarily imprisoned for five years. The lawyer, apparently so incredibly arrogant in his opinions that he cares about nothing more than proving he’s better, ups that time to fifteen years, and the two agree. The lawyer then goes into confinement in a wing of the banker’s house for fifteen years. He actually goes through with it: he spends the next fifteen years trapped in a single room, without talking to a single person, without seeing the sun once. In that time he is given as many books as he wants, and he reads extensively – of course, having not much else to do – and then by the end of his confinement, he has changed. The banker has changed as well: since he is careless with his wealth (As is pretty obvious when a man is willing to bet 2 million pounds for – what? For winning an argument? He says later that this bet doesn’t prove either side, not that capital punishment is better nor that life imprisonment is better. Is it for the thrill of winning? Why didn’t he insist that the lawyer put up stakes? The banker stands to profit exactly nothing from this bet even if he wins it. That’s not a good money manager. So actually, I guess he has not changed.) he has lost much of it, and if he now has to pay out the 2 million pounds, he will be ruined. So, as one does, he decides to sneak into the locked room the night before he loses the bet, and kill the lawyer. However, he finds a letter beside the sleeping lawyer; he reads it and finds out that the lawyer has decided that nothing in this life matters, that he doesn’t want anything, not freedom, not money, not life; and so he will intentionally lose the bet to show that he doesn’t need the money. Saved from destitution, the banker leaves; then the lawyer leaves, losing the bet – and then the banker conceals the lawyer’s letter.

The interesting element of the story, for me, is the choices these two characters make, and the motivations behind them. Why does this bet happen? What are the characters after? In other words: what do they want? It’s definitely not a need – no one needs to bet anything, really. The original bet happens because both men are bluffing: they each want the other to give up. They both go through with the bet because they want to prove that they are men of their word: even when their word is foolish. It makes me realize that I want to be a man of my word, as well; though I think I need to not make foolish promises like “I will stay in one room for fifteen years just to prove that I can.” By the end of the story, the lawyer, after years spent alone reading and studying everything from natural science to philosophy to religion, comes to the personal revelation that Heaven’s value far outweighs everything on Earth, and therefore he does not want the money for the bet – but he also does not care if he has his freedom, or even his life. He stays in the prison voluntarily (as he has all along) to show that he doesn’t need freedom or health or anything on this Earth; he leaves just minutes before he would win the bet to show that he doesn’t need the money, either. I’ll agree with him that money is not something we need, not something of great value: but I could not disagree more that life on this Earth is without any value whatsoever. I need my life, on this Earth, and I need it to have value and purpose, while I am alive. Whether there is a heaven or not at the end of this life is irrelevant to this life, because we do not know anything other than this life exists: therefore this life is, for now, everything.

But in the story, both men’s choices are interesting to me. Among other impressions I get from this, I think it shows that more of our needs are really only wants than we actually think; when the lawyer deprives himself of things we see as critical to our lives, primarily human company, he realizes that he does not actually need those things at all. But I think the story also shows that we do need an audience for the important things we have to say – more often than we probably realize – and that sometimes we need to keep other people from having an audience, which is why the banker hides the lawyer’s letter at the end of the story. The narration claims it was to “avoid unnecessary rumors,” but it does not identify what rumors the letter will start; I have to wonder if it is the “rumor” that maybe two millions – or even $400 million – is not anything of great importance, if you choose to think of it that way. The banker’s decision to murder for that same amount shows that, for some people, that money is certainly important.

I would say that the actually important thing here is choice. 

So now you have a choice, which I am giving you because I don’t want to take control and tell you what to do. (Though I am limiting your choices within the boundaries of what I can control, and I am requiring you to make this choice; so in some ways I remain in control. Though you still, of course, have the choice to pay attention or not, to participate or not. As you always do. With consequences no matter what you choose.) We can talk, as a whole class or in small groups you will choose, about the difference between wants and needs, what it means to want something and what it means to need something; or you can each think about it on your own. In either case you will write about it, expanding on what you wrote before, because I want you to learn that writing about something is an excellent way to help you understand it, as long as you actually think about what you are writing about, especially after you already thought about it and wrote about it a little, and then read something about it and think about it some more.

No matter what you choose, you will eventually need to figure some of this out. You need to know what you need, and what you want, in your life. You need to figure out how you want to get what you need and what you want in your life. Not right now, not all at once – but eventually, you need to know.

Or else you won’t get it.  

And that’s the most important lesson you will ever learn.

***

Unfortunately, my students did not seem to learn this lesson. Their first essays about what they want and need were (mostly) incoherent, because they (mostly) do not think about what they write: they write to complete a task, to get finished and turn something in so they can get a grade. Their second essays were the same: because they (mostly) don’t re-think what they have already done; the task was accomplished without thought, what good would it do to think about it afterwards? Their third attempts, after we read “The Bet,” were confused in two ways: first because they didn’t really understand the story, they just thought it was weird and really dumb that the lawyer would choose fifteen years when he could have gotten the money for five, and they were pretty sure they would have done five years for millions of dollars, because money is (clearly) the most important thing in life; and then they were confused about how to include those weird ideas in their essays, which were about different things, things they want and need, not what some old guy in 1870 wanted and needed.

I’m exaggerating a bit (and leaving out the examples that were from students who really did think about this stuff, and really did have some insights and some interesting thoughts), but basically, my students did not see the need to think very much about any of this. They just wanted to get the task done. And when they found out that they would get a 100% for completing the essay, no matter what they wrote or how, they decided not to think, because it was easier to just do nothing. And while they accept that they need to do schoolwork and get good grades, so they can graduate and get good jobs, so they can make money (because money is the most important thing in the world), they don’t want to do anything other than fun stuff like talk to their friends and play video games. Which, okay, valid.

And I don’t want to control them.

I think I need to find a new career.

Day of Hope

Dusty Leave a comment

Yesterday was my birthday. I had a great day: my wife and I went out for an incredible brunch at a restaurant in Tucson called Blue Willow – HIGHLY recommend the breakfast burrito, if you go – and then went home and had presents – I got two awesome t-shirts and a video game, Skyrim for my Nintendo Switch, which is a lovely thing mainly because Skyrim was one of those games I avoided when it was new, since I knew it was exactly the kind of video game I love most (sandbox swords and sorcery) and would therefore consume all of my waking hours once I opened Pandora’s Box and started playing it, and as I told all of my students at the time when they asked if I was going to play Skyrim, I have a job; which means that now I have been given permission to go ahead and let my free time be consumed, partly because I deserve and need nice things, and partly because the truth is that I will not actually allow ALL of my free time to be consumed, that I can be trusted to do what is necessary even if I would rather just dive back into the video game (Hold on, the t-shirts reminded me: I need to cull my collection. Be right back. [Got rid of seven shirts. Good progress.]) – and then we went to an arcade with friends, where I got to play pinball and a car racing game and a pirate shooting game and the BIGGEST SPACE INVADERS IN NORTH AMERICA, and then we came home and ordered Chinese food in and then had huge slices of an AMAZING cake. It was a great day.

Yesterday in Washington D.C., the Republican party passed Donald Trump’s “Death to the Poors” bill (I will neither call it the B.B.B. as that shitmouth named it – though honestly I appreciate the bald hypocrisy of that, coming from the party that has been loudly and repeatedly criticizing large omnibus bills for years if not decades, until said omnibus comes from President Turdtongue – nor talk about it as a tax cut bill as the news outlets insist on calling it, while they also name it as a Asslips’s “most significant accomplishment,” which is a wild phrase: just imagine talking that way about, say, Auschwitz, or the Night of the Long Knives, or the invasion of Poland, as Hitler’s “biggest achievements” to date. I will come back to hypocrisy.), which Pres. Butt-Teeth will be signing today, in a continuation of his efforts to taint and corrupt every single piece of American culture so that nobody can ever enjoy anything ever again in this country.

Not that this is my favorite holiday: I’m a vegetarian, and I live in Tucson, Arizona, so barbecues at the park are out on both meat-related and heat-related grounds; plus my dog is terrified of fireworks, and I personally dislike the strong possibility of wildfires being started by an idiot with a bottle rocket and a match. But there are, nonetheless, reasons why I want to celebrate this holiday, and hold onto it in the face of ol’ Colon-Throat’s attempted appropriation. And I want to write about it today because I realized that the reasons for me, for us, to hold tight to the Fourth of July are the very same ideas that I want and need to write about.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. Part of me doesn’t want to write at all: I just want to curl up on my couch, pet my dog, and play video games. (And not only because I just got Skyrim, though that is definitely part of the draw… I can hear it calling to me right now… No, wait, that’s my cockatiel Duncan screaming because he’s upset about something.) And while I want to rant about Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court, and the Congress, because all three branches of government have been captured by the proto-fascists who want to turn America into a white Christian ethnostate with a patriarchal dictatorship that is decidedly unChristian, I don’t know what the value would be in ranting: the people who would read it already agree with me, and it would just make them sadder than they already are because the horror is relentless and it’s hard to remain so ourselves; and the people who might read it who don’t agree would find it tiresome to just hear more ranting; and the people who are on the opposite side of these issues (who don’t read, but just hypothetically) would be giddy with Schadenfreudish glee, cackling about how angry I am and signing up for WordPress accounts just so they can comment “Cry more!” and throw down some of the memes I’ve been getting hit with because I have (foolishly) been commenting on news stories on Facebook. And I don’t want to create any of those responses.

I recognize that the most important thing we can do is spread good information, and so that makes me want to become a journalist, and share correct information, and – I mean, maybe I should do that. But I already have a job. And it’s a hard job, and I work hard at it. And I have a family which I love, but which, like all families, requires a lot of time and energy – and not that I begrudge that, I do not, I would spend all of my time and energy on my family if I didn’t have to work, and I look forward to the day when that happens; I’m just saying that I will not take time and energy away from my family in order to become a journalist. There are already better journalists, trained and professional journalists, out there doing that work, so I shouldn’t have to. Clearly my fight against misinformation is in my teaching, and I will continue to do my very best there, in every way I can.

But that leaves me with nothing to write about.

It is summer, and so that makes me want to write, because over the school year I am often too tired and burnt out and frustrated to write; but I have been facing this conundrum about what to write about, and I haven’t been writing much. (Also my summer has not been all that restful, but it’s mostly been family stuff, so I don’t resent it.) As I haven’t been writing, however, I have been trying to get back into my other great passion that I haven’t been able to spend enough time on: I’ve been reading. And one of the things I’ve been reading has been these:

These are my great-grandmother’s novels, published in the late 50s, when she had retired from teaching. (Have I mentioned that I come from a line of teachers and writers on  my mother’s side? This is part of that line.) I’ve never read them before, partly because I never knew my great-grandmother; for most of my life I didn’t even know that she had written books or published them or that we had copies. So I’m reading them now, and they have shown me a couple of things. First, because these are young adult books, and historical/regional fiction (They are all set in western Washington, where the Mitchells lived and where both my grandmother and then my mother were born and raised, during the frontier times between about 1970 and 1890, when the Mitchells did not live there – Faye and her husband Burt emigrated from Kansas), they are not great literature in a canonical sense: but they are good stories. And this helps to settle in me something I have always struggled with, because I am not a writer of great literature, and though I don’t want to be, I always think I should be; but I think that in truth I am, like my great-grandmother, a storyteller, not a literary giant. And I would rather be that. Second, these books, because they are set where they are and because the main character, Abby Conner, is a young woman who wants to become a teacher and a writer and who talks about what it means to be a teacher and a writer, are helping me to be prouder of the teacher and the writer that I am, because I think that my great-grandmother would probably be proud of me, and I like that – and my Nonna, whom I loved and respected but who passed before I had even decided to become a teacher, would definitely be proud of me, and I love that. And third, because my great-grandmother clearly wrote about what he knew, I have been thinking about how I need to do that. Not with my novels, which are almost certainly going to stay fantastic and more about vampires and time-traveling pirates and magical dreams that change reality; but with these blogs, and with the things that I write every day: I need to write about what I know.

So this is what I’m going to do: I’m going to write about what I know.

So. What the hell do I know?

…

I used to be optimistic.

My wife talks about it, about how I used to be much more cheerful, and much more calm, and much more positive. She doesn’t make it sound as bad as I just did: she doesn’t say all those things at once, and she doesn’t say it with any kind of accusation or disappointment or anything – never “You used to be a lot more fun!” or anything like that. She has taken note of it out of concern for me: because my general demeanor has become darker and angrier over the last decade or so. And it’s coming out in ways and in places that I don’t like: I have had a hard time keeping myself from losing my temper with my students, and I have failed at that, and lost my temper, several times in the last few years, sometimes to my real regret. I am also having a hard time keeping my spirits up in order to push back against my wife’s occasional depressing outlook, which is sometimes something she needs me to do (Don’t we all?), and which I have not been doing as well as I used to.

I suspect this happens to a lot of people, if not to all of us. We lose our idealism, and our hopefulness – those of us who ever had it, that is, which is not everyone. But I think as time goes on, and life gets harder, and as people just keep on disappointing us, over and over again – say, by re-electing an orange-tinted fascist would-be dictator even after he tried to overthrow our government the first time: it’s hard to look down the road and think that it actually goes to a better place. And while Trump certainly wasn’t inevitable, the difficult and sad things that happen as we get older are inevitable: we lose people we love, and eventually we lose ourselves, and there is often a great deal of suffering on the way to that. As that happens to us more, and as we are shielded from it less, our lives become sadder in many ways, and it makes sense that we would do the same.

I do also think the last few years have been rough on people in this country. Trump’s two electoral wins and two administrations, the pandemic, the various economic and global crises: it’s been tough to keep looking on the bright side of this pile of shit. I certainly haven’t been immune to that. In fact, it has been directly detrimental to my optimism: because I keep thinking, and saying, and arguing, and preaching, that things are going to work out the right way: and I keep being wrong. I said that Trump was going to lose in 2016, both in the primary and then in the election, and I thought that he would go to trial for his crimes and that he would get convicted, and I thought he would lose in 2024. Wrong, every time. (Okay, he was convicted, but only of the least important one, and it didn’t affect his political ambitions in any way at all, which I also thought it would. Still: he is a fucking convicted felon, and anyone who claims it was only a politically motivated prosecution, you’re goddamn right, and it was a successful one, and it should have kept people from voting for him, and it was therefore the right thing to do – but I think we can see that, even though it was a politically motivated prosecution, that didn’t affect the general populace very much: the election is evidence that the jury was honest and sincere.) That record makes me not want to keep my hopes up: not mainly because I hate being wrong and looking dumb (though I do, both), but mainly because I don’t want to give people false hope and then have them fall farther and harder when my false hope is proven wrong. Again.

But okay: now let’s talk about the Fourth of July. (See, this is why I’m so goddamn wordy and circuitous in my writing, even though the only way to write great literature is to keep it short and simple, as much as possible, to edit even more than you write: because I’m not a great literary mastermind, I’m a storyteller, and this is how stories get told. Thanks, Great-grandmother. Actually, since I called her daughter Nonna, I’m just gonna call Mrs. Mitchell Grandnonna. I hope she would like that. And let me note that, as wordy and circuitous as I am, I get back to where I want to go. Eventually.)

The Fourth of July is a convergence of three of my heroes. Three of the greatest writers in American history, because all three were three of the greatest thinkers and idealists in American history. Not all the best people, but I generally think the art, and the truth, can transcend the people who discover it or create it. If you look at science, for instance, there is not and never has been a scientist who was worthy of the power of what they discovered: not Newton, not Darwin, not Einstein… maybe Carl Sagan. I don’t know if Galileo was a good man, honestly, but how could he possibly be good enough to live up to what he did for our understanding of the universe, for what he made possible? He couldn’t. The same with great artists: the people who affect the lives of millions and even billions of other humans in positive ways couldn’t possibly be good enough in and of themselves to really be seen as deserving of the praise that their impact deserves. Martin Luther King, Jr., could not possibly be good enough as a person to actually deserve the honor that he rightfully gets as the civil rights leader and genius communicator that he was, even if he hadn’t been an egotist who cheated on his wife. But his impact, his positive impact on the world, is beyond measuring: is beyond what one person could contain. So I am willing to praise the work, and the words, and the ideas, even if the person who created those things was worse than their impact.

This does not excuse J.K. Rowling, by the way, though I do also think the criticism of Harry Potter is lazy and vicious and incorrect; but Rowling is, it turns out, a terrible person who should absolutely be canceled entirely. While we all keep reading Harry Potter. Don’t worry, it will get easier when she is dead.

So: the three people who are connected by the Fourth of July and whom I find inspiring are Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. (See what I mean about not the best people? Douglass was a saint, but I only say that because I don’t know enough about him to know the bad stuff; Lincoln was a racist egotist, and Jefferson owned his own children. But the point here is that we need to look at the work, and the ideas, and the words.) Thomas Jefferson, of course, wrote this:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Those two paragraphs might be the best argument ever written: because the words are perfect, the logic is perfect, and the idea was so much better than the people who formulated it that it has led to better outcomes and a better world for hundreds of millions of people, for two and a half centuries. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

All men are created equal.

(Which also means that we all suck. Just sayin’.)

And I think we know why this idea, these words, and this man are connected to this day, for me. For all of us.

Lincoln, on the Fourth of July in 1863, said this:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This is sometimes described as the perfect speech – partly because it is so short, and therefore nothing that I ever could have produced – and there’s an argument to be made for that. I find it inspiring because I think it translates some of Jefferson’s ideals, which were intentionally more universal, into something more personal, more grounded: this is how the idea that all men are created equal comes to be an American ideal instead of a human one – though it is still, and always should be, a human ideal. Still, Lincoln and this address are why we as Americans should consider this to be something personal, something we own, not simply a truth that exists in the world. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers are part of that as well, because the Declaration of Independence was not just a statement of ideals, but also a political and pragmatic document (which is why I include the first paragraph in the quotation from it, and in what I describe as the perfect argument: that sets the purpose for the second paragraph, where all the intellectual brilliance is. But as a rhetoric teacher, purpose matters, so the first paragraph is part of that, and part of what Jefferson and the rest of them were committed to, like Lincoln.); but because the Founding Fathers were patriarchal slaveowners who didn’t want to pay taxes, their purpose doesn’t rise to the level of their ideals. Which makes them fascinating, really, because slaveowners who didn’t want to pay taxes somehow managed to formulate and then enact one of the greatest ideals in human history, that all men are created equal and that government should be based on that fact and all of the logical consequences of that fact, such as the necessity of consent; but Lincoln’s purpose in saying his words was, first, to honor the sacrifice of people who died for those ideals, which is one of the most important and perhaps most abused elements of recognizing the worth of all humans (and not something expressly focused on in the Declaration, not even in its lists of abuses and usurpations), and second, to maintain the existence of the nation based on that fact, and to help bring it closer to being a nation that lives up to its own purpose, a nation governed by a system based on the fact that all men are created equal. Those purposes are worthy of those words, of the ideas they express, as the words and the ideas are worthy of the purpose. Probably not so with Jefferson.

And then Douglass. I wish I could have heard Douglass speak, because unlike the other two, Douglass was a great speaker as well as a great writer; but at least we have the words he wrote down, and the story he told with them, the story of his own life. And if you don’t know why Frederick Douglass is connected to the Fourth of July, it’s because of this:

(1852) Frederick Douglass, “What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July”

Frederick Douglass

Daguerreotype photo by Samuel J. Miller

That whole speech is worth reading. But let me focus on this:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been tom from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

Here we see Douglass’s purpose, and the reason he also needs to be included in this list of great writers connected to the Fourth of July: because Douglass held this country to account for its hypocrisy. (Told you I’d come back to it.) Douglass showed, more clearly than anyone else, that the United States has never lived up to its ideals.

He said this:

I remember also that as a people Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait—perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout —”We have Washington to our father.”—Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones.

And this:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Douglass said a lot that could apply to us today, which is why it is worth reading the whole speech. (And I’m thinking now I may teach it next year. We’ll see.)

But, since I have now gone on for far too long (Not gonna feel bad. Storyteller. Also, I was quoting.), let me get to my purpose: the reason why I wanted to talk about these three men and their writings on this day, the Fourth of July.

Because all three of these men represent hope.

If they did not believe that this nation could exist in its ideal state, or at least that it could come closer and that approaching that ideal would be better than moving away from it, they would never have said what they did. None of them lived in this nation in its ideal state, and probably none of them thought they ever would live in that nation: but they all believed it (or something close to it) could exist, and that that wonderful reality was worth fighting for. I know because all three fought to achieve it, for essentially all of their adult lives, with all of the considerable powers at their disposal. They fought, for years, for decades, in the face of insurmountable odds, of endless trudging through swamps of opposition, the stinking mud sticking to them and tainting everything they did and everything they saw, making absolutely no progress, for longer than some people have to live their whole lives.

But they kept fighting. Because they believed they could succeed. They did not give up. No matter what.

That’s what optimism is. It’s determination, and belief. It is hope. It doesn’t have to be based on reality and an understanding of the truth and the terrible odds stacked against us: but when it is based on that, it is that much stronger, that much more potent. That much more indomitable.

I don’t know if I’m indomitable. But I do know I’m stubborn as fuck. And maybe that’s the same thing.

I don’t know if I have that kind of optimism. But I hope I do: and so I’m going to keep fighting, and keep trying, and keep writing. Because I think that my purpose, and my ideals, are worth all of that effort, and all of that fight, and all of that struggle. And because I believe that the world I dream of is possible. Even if I never see it.

But I hope I do. And I hope you will, too.

Happy Independence Day.

There Are No Rules

Dusty Leave a comment

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

One of the difficult things about teaching English is the number of bad ideas that students have about the rules of writing. 

And one of the things I find most upsetting about teaching English is the number of bad ideas that students have about the rules of writing which they learned from past English teachers. For instance: one should never start a sentence with “and” or “but.” One should never use the pronoun “I” in a formal essay, one should only refer obliquely to one’s self, preferably in the third person. One should use transitions for every paragraph in an essay, because they help the flow; and one cannot go wrong with the transitions “First,” “Second,” “Third,” and “In conclusion.” And, of course, every essay should be five paragraphs, and every paragraph should consist of at least five sentences, and every sentence should be at least — but actually, I don’t know what the drones tell students the proper minimum length for a sentence is; I would guess about 10 words. Also one should never use fragments or run-ons.

Ridiculous. All of it.

There are no rules.

One of my favorite days as an AP teacher is when I mention to my new students that they can now ignore these rules, for the rest of their writing lives, and that, in fact, if they should never use “In conclusion” again, nor limit themselves to five paragraphs as a structure for an essay, they will make me very happy. The relief is palpable — and sad. We constrain young writers so much: and it helps to crush their creativity and desire to use words, and that is an awful thing to do both to young people and to this language. 

There are, I think, two reasons why teachers present these rules to their students as rules; and one of them is understandable, if not valid. The bad reason, the invalid one that is not understandable, is that teachers were taught these things themselves as rules, and they were never allowed to deviate from them, and so now these things are unbreakable rules: sacred cows, taboos never to be questioned, just like the prohibition on the use of the word “Fuck” (And all I really have to say about that is this). I was taught at least some of those things, too — though to be honest, I don’t remember learning them, so either I had genuinely good English teachers, or I spaced out at just the right time and never heard or cared about these rules — but come on. We grow up. We learn to think for ourselves. We see countless sentences that begin with “and” or “but.” We read countless pieces by authors who use “I” in even the most formal of essays. We stop counting words and sentences and paragraphs, and just — read. (I confess I still count pages. This, too, is a bad habit; but if we’re at the page-counting stage, at least the work is long enough that word counts and sentence counts and paragraph counts become moot.) WE FUCKING USE THE WORD “FUCK” WHEN IT IS APPROPRIATE: and we recognize that there are, in fact, many times, many times, when it is appropriate. 

So why don’t teachers teach their students that all of these things are bad rules? For one (And damn me, I first wrote this sentence starting with “Well,” and I HATE when my students do that, answer their own rhetorical question starting with “Well.” I caught it, though. Also, that’s not a rule.), teachers do not always question authority. Teachers come from all groups and kinds and flavors of people, but the majority are those who loved school, who were the top students, and who want to pass those wonderful learning experiences on to other people; those people never challenged a teacher in their lives, they were the ones who argued back against the students who did challenge the teacher, the ones who said “Shut up, he’s the teacher, don’t argue with him!” in class when someone else said “That doesn’t seem like the best way to do that.” And then they become teachers, and they don’t want to be questioned by students — who, to be fair, are completely freaking annoying when they argue, because they are used to having their points of view denied, their arguments summarily contradicted, usually by adults who say “Because I said so, that’s why,” or some permutation of that (Like “Because I’m the teacher, so don’t argue with me.”), and so all they have left is making one irritating point and getting a reaction from the authorities who squash them into molds, every single day. But this all means that when an English teacher says that a paragraph has to have a minimum of five sentences, and a student asks, “Why five?” The teacher wants to respond with “BECAUSE I TOLD YOU SO AND I’M THE TEACHER AND MY TEACHER TOLD ME SO WHICH MEANS IT IS A TEACHER’S RULE SQUARED!”

I am not one of those teachers. I did not like school. I questioned authority as a teenager (and I was annoying about it) and I continue to do so now, three full decades out of my teens. So I expect my authority to be questioned; in fact, I invite it. I never say “Because I’m the teacher, that’s why.” (Though I do jokingly argue with students who question my spelling, “How dare you question your English teacher on spelling?!?”) So when I tell students that an essay needs to be longer, or that a sentence is incomplete, and they question me, I tell them why. But then, I’m weird; I like arguing. I like explaining. I like helping people understand why something needs to be changed, why it is incorrect. I think doing that makes the world more comprehensible, and therefore more manageable. I think making the world more manageable for my students is my job, a lot more than making them write five-paragraph essays. 

The more understandable reason why teachers don’t tell students that these foolish rules for writing are not ironclad is more to do with arguments. Students like asking “Why?” Not always because they want an answer, either; but because they want to catch the teacher looking foolish, and they love to waste time and thereby avoid work. Sometimes, then, when they get the real answer, they’re not ready for it; so they don’t understand it, because they weren’t really listening — they asked the question only to make the teacher talk instead of assigning work, so when a teacher answers their question, the only response is “Huh?” So when you present one of these writing rules as they should be presented, as something that is entirely dependent on context and writing intention; that, for instance, the use of the word “fuck” in a formal essay, though not entirely forbidden (If you are quoting a character in a Martin Scorsese film, for instance, you have probably a 90% chance that any given quote will include “fuck,” and any form of censoring the word has a poor effect on the serious treatment of the film because it makes you seem too prudish to deal seriously with a movie that has profanity in it) does tend to contradict the tone of a serious essay, and is therefore jarring for the audience to come across in a context that doesn’t require the word be used; then you are going to get argument. Or stupid questions. Mostly stupid questions. (“Can we say it in class? Can I say it right now? Can I change my name to Fuckface McGee, and then you have to call me Fuckface all the time? Would you still say “fuck” if the principal was in the room?”)

So teachers, who deal with enough stupid questions as it is (And yes, by the way, there are stupid questions — see above), will often state an ambiguity as though it were in fact ironclad, just so they don’t have to argue with students. And since the argument won’t bear weight for the thing it is, we have to rely on even more annoying arguments which do have the advantage of shutting down debate: namely, “Because I’m the teacher and I said so.”

This is why, when I was in 3rd grade, the teacher told me that you could not take a larger number away from a smaller number, that 3-7=x didn’t make sense. Not because that was true, but because the teacher didn’t want to explain negative numbers to me right then. The same reason my mother, when I was 4 or so, told me, when I asked where babies came from and where specifically I had come from, that half of me was in my father and half of me was in her. And I assumed that meant that the bottom half of my body was inside one of them and the top half was in the other and they sort of stuck me together like a Gumby figurine (Don’t get that reference, kid? Look it up.), but also, the answer shut me up at the time, which was my mother’s goal.

I understand how annoying students are, so I understand teachers giving guidelines for good writing (It is a good idea to avoid saying “I” in formal essays for two reasons: first because talking about yourself personally is a way to connect emotionally with your audience, which is informal communication, not formal; and secondly because most of our desire as writers to use “I” is in phrases like “I think” and “I believe,” which we are tempted to use in arguments and statements of truth so that we don’t seem too arrogant, and so that we don’t seem dumb if we should be wrong. It’s safer to say “I think Martin Scorsese’s films say ‘fuck’ too often,” than it is to say, boldly, “Martin Scorsese’s films say ‘fuck’ too often.”) as if they were ironclad rules. It’s just that teaching these things as rules takes away all the nuance, all the flavor, from writing; it makes writing boring, which makes students not want to do it. It’s better to tell the truth, and deal with the consequences: there are no rules in writing that cannot be broken, it’s just a matter of what is the best use of language in a specific context.

And no, Jimmy, that doesn’t mean you can say “fuck” in your essay about Sacagawea.

So this went on much longer than I meant it to: this was meant only as an illustrative example, not as the heart of the essay. I really just wanted to talk about how we try to apply rules when there aren’t any rules, and shouldn’t be any rules, and that that is a problem. My main point wasn’t even about English: it was about life. Where there also aren’t any ironclad rules. That’s why I quoted the poem to start:

since feeling is first

by ee cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate 
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

I love that poem. I did a podcast episode on it if you are interested in the whole breakdown of what it’s about and what cummings meant to say in this; but for now, I just want to focus on his first stanza and his last two lines — sort of his introduction and conclusion, one might say. (Though please note he does not use transitions between his — err — paragraphs. Especially not “in conclusion” before the last one.)

So the first stanza: since feeling is first, he starts with, which means either that feelings occur first, before thoughts or actions or understanding or anything else, or else that feelings are more important than anything else, probably with both thoughts connected; but clearly, feeling is better: because he who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you. I love that, because “syntax” is such a nerdy English writing/grammar thing to talk about; it means the way things are organized to create meaning (words, specifically, but you can have a syntax of almost anything that is organized to create meaning), so word order in sentences and sentence order in paragraphs, and aspects like word length and the use ofpunctuation and so on; all of that is syntax. For the lines about the syntax of things and kissing, I think specifically of this scene from the movie Hitch, where Will Smith’s character tries to teach Kevin James’s character how to kiss: but in this scene, it’s not only about the syntax of kissing and of relationships, but it’s about math: and so though Smith tries to get James to think about the passion of the moment, he focuses so hard on the proper methodology that he does not show any passion at all — and then he loses control and flubs it. 

The point is, there are not rules to kissing, and there is not math. And the more you think about rules and math and methodology for kissing, the less you are focusing on what you are feeling for the person you are kissing: and that means you are not kissing wholly. Because feeling is first. 

So with that in mind, let’s talk about the last two lines, and what I originally set down to write about today. 

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

I love this because it can mean a bunch of different things, and that’s what I like best about poetry: in order to distill the language down to its absolute minimum, just the essence, poets take out much of what is usually there to provide meaning to the audience; this leaves the audience having to fill in gaps, make guesses — bring their own understanding to the conversation. Because of that, poetry does a better job, in my mind, of presenting what literature is supposed to be: a conversation, not a monologue. An author is talking about things they have observed or experienced or imagined, and the audience is listening and then agreeing or disagreeing — and adding to what the author says. A poet leaves more silence for the audience to speak, so though the poet may say the same thing in every conversation, the audience always has something new and different to say — and so one monologue can turn into almost infinite dialogues. I love that.

(And because I am pedantic and wordy, I don’t write poetry, I write novels. Heh.)

But because these last two lines use the names of two syntactical structures — paragraph and parenthesis — these two lines connect to the opening stanza: it is telling us that there is no clear structure to a life, and there is not a simple punctuation mark at the end of life that tells us exactly how a life is to be thought of — and maybe my favorite idea present here when I read this is the idea that death makes life silent, makes it unimportant, like a parenthesis makes the words that it contains, turning them from a main thought into supplemental but unnecessary additions. We treat death too often like it is the most important factor in a person’s life. It is not. The life that precedes it is far more important than death. 

But in either case, life is not a paragraph: it does not have a definite way that it is supposed to go, with a topic sentence to start (After a transition, of course), and then an illustration of the topic, and then two (or more) pieces of evidence or commentary on that topic, followed by a concluding sentence that shows the meaning or importance of this topic in the broader theme.

And then a parenthesis.

We think this way about life far too often. What actually set this whole discussion in motion for me was a conversation I had with my wife, in which she was railing against people who made decisions about how old other people should be to act certain ways, and how people should act based on what is appropriate for their age. 

I am certain you have all had these conversations. Most if not all of you have also made these prescriptions for other people, and probably for yourselves as well. Right? I mean, we all know it: we know that 8-year-olds are too young for R-rated movies with sexual content, and we know that 11-year-olds are too young to drive — and teenagers are mostly too old for dolls and stuffed animals. 

We know that 17 is too young to get married and have children, and that 50 is too old for those things. We know that 18 is old enough to make decisions for yourself, and 25 is when everything starts to go downhill. 40 is too old to buy a new sports car, because then it’s nothing but a midlife crisis; and the same with a second marriage to a younger person. And while we’re on that: 5 years is too much of an age difference when you are under 20, and 10 years is too much of an age difference when you are under 40, and two months is too much of an age difference when one of you is under 18 and the other is over 18 BECAUSE THEN THAT OLDER ONE IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR AND A PEDO AND SHOULD BE CASTRATED AND THEN FED TO WOLVES.

That last one is challenging: because I don’t mean to disagree that people under the age of consent should not have relationships with people who are older and may be taking advantage of them. But I do want to point out that the idea that the second someone hits 18 they are capable of taking care of themselves, and the second before that they are not, is absurd. 

This goes for all of this. There are certainly stages of life and development, and some of them are appropriate for some things and some are not; I do not think that teenagers should be running the country. I know lots of teenagers. They would not be good at the job. But also, the idea that octogenarians are exactly the right people to be running the country is not more reasonable, based on my experience of octogenarians. Especially those running the country right now (and the septuagenarians who want to run the country right now. Not better.) But at the same time, almost every stereotype and bias we have based on age is belied by not just one exception, but by a whole slew of them. Ten years is a big age difference for a romantic relationship, especially in one’s 20s — except my wife and I met when I was 20 and she was just about to turn 30, and we’ve been together now for the same 29 years that she had lived before she met me. I think it’s worked out pretty well. My father and his wife had a ten-year age difference, but since they met when he was 50 and she was 40 (or thereabouts), and since the man was the older one, nobody thought anything of it. And then, although everyone assumed that she would take care of my father at the end of his life, that went exactly the other way, and he was her caretaker until she passed this last February.

Now my dad is 82, and alone. Should he find someone else to love? Or at least have a partnership with, if not a romantic connection? Or is there not enough time left for him to enjoy a relationship? Would it be too much of a burden for him to put on somebody else, to love him for only the few years he has left? Would it be inappropriate for him to date? To date someone younger? Someone older? How much older? How much younger? How much life left is enough to fall in love?

It this is too much of a dark theme, let me ask a few others ones: should my dad have a sports car? Should he have a fun car, like a bright orange VW bug? Should he get a pet, if he wants one? Should he wear a bathing suit in public? Should he dye his hair, if he wants to? Get a tattoo, or a piercing? Or is he too old for that now?

It struck me in thinking about this that we make exactly the same decisions about the very young and the very old: just as most people would see my dad, at 82, as being too old for a fast car or a fast woman, or a new career or a new hobby or a style change that included something hip and modern, so people would think the same about, say, a ten-year-old: that a ten-year-old should not be in a romantic relationship (I agree with that one) and should not have a car (Less certain on that one) and should not have a career path picked out (Don’t agree with that one: if a kid knows that young what they want to do, then mazel tov: my wife knew she wanted to be an artist before she was ten) and should not get their hair dyed or their body pierced (Other than the earlobes, which apparently are fine for stabbing — hey, does that mean a child could get their earlobes tattooed? Or is that shocking and inappropriate?) or wear makeup, or wear clothing that is hip and modern and stylish. 

The way we bracket our lives, with the greatest constraints on the young and the old, turn those two stages of life, the beginning and the end, into — parentheses. We freeze both those times in our lives into immovable requirements: just like kids can’t wear makeup, and can’t possibly make decisions about their sexuality or their gender identity, women must get their hair cut short when they are older, and men have to start playing golf, and men and women both have to retire and may not begin a new job. Kids have to be cheerful and energetic, and old people have to be slow-moving and cranky. And anyone who doesn’t follow these rules, these iron-clad, unquestionable sacred cows, these taboos that are never allowed to change without disapproving frowns and pearl-clutching gasps, is deemed not only unusual or eccentric: but wrong. The butt of jokes, the target of angry stares and social ostracism. Because those are the rules: don’t question society, just do what you’re told. 

But no. Because there are no rules. Look at ee cummings’s poem: there are no rules. None that he follows. And yet: it makes sense, even more sense than what most of us write, even though we may follow the rules in order to make our words make sense. The fact that some people are better off following the supposed rules doesn’t mean those rules have to make sense in that way for everyone. Like I said, there are certainly stages of life and development, and children should not be romantic and should not be required to be responsible and adult before they are ready to be; but beyond the most obvious age distinctions around puberty and adolescence, there is no rule that actually encompasses everyone. And there shouldn’t be. Some kids can handle driving a car. Some could write books or create musical masterpieces. Some can know just what they want to do with their lives. Some can wear makeup and have pierced ears, and make it look stylish and cool. And just the same, while older folk are physically more frail and should take that into consideration when picking new extreme sport hobbies (And let me note: kids should be careful about extreme sports, too — because they are also frail, or at least small and fragile.), there too, there are no rules that encompass everyone. If Tony Hawk gets on a skateboard when he’s 80 (if he lives that long — and let’s hope so, because he’s one of those people who is awesome on the Betty White end of the scale) then I’ll watch him drop into the halfpipe, and cheer when he pulls off a trick. Because he could: and even if he can’t, I’d be happy to let him try, if that’s what he wants to do. It’s his choice. It’s all of our individual choices, and none of society’s business as long as other people aren’t getting hurt. Sure, Tony Hawk at 80 would be in danger of hurting himself on the skateboard: but do you know how often he has hurt himself on a skateboard while he has been young? And then adult? And then middle aged? Right. We let him do it. Because it’s his choice. People should be allowed to do what they want, without the weight of social disapprobation because of their calendar age. It’s stupid. 

Feeling is first. Life is not a paragraph.

Death is not a parenthesis. 

Wanted:

Dusty Leave a comment

 


(Couldn’t resist)

I want to say that I want everything back that I’ve wasted. All the money, all the time, all the opportunities.

The money I spent on things that would have been cheaper if I had waited, or if I had gone to another store. The money I wasted on things that I thought would be better than they were. The money I threw away  on things that broke as soon as I bought them: things that I threw away almost before the money for them left my hand. I want back the money I spent on the ten bikes I lost between the ages of 8 and 18. One a year. I want back the money for all the food I have bought and dropped, all the expensive coffee I have spilled, everything I’ve bought that went bad before I got a chance to eat it.  My God, I want back all the money I spent on cigarettes.

I want back the time I’ve lost being bored. Being depressed. Thinking that I just didn’t feel like doing anything useful or important, or even anything fun. Just doing something I enjoyed would have made me feel better; why couldn’t I just do that? Just start? All the time I have spent changing channels instead of turning off the TV, and turning pages of bad books rather than putting them down and picking up better ones, and all the mindless video game levels I have played, and replayed, and played again. I can’t even remember the video games I’ve finished: but I remember  how anticlimactic it has always been to reach that final screen. I have never had a less satisfying “win.”

I want back the time I gave to people who didn’t deserve it, and I want to spend that time with people who deserved more than I gave them. I want to tell Rocco that I made it. I want to talk to my uncle Rob and my cousin Chelsea more. I want my Nonna to read my book.

I want another chance at all the opportunities I’ve missed: because I was too slow, because I was too lazy, because I was too afraid. I should have written twice as many books, and I should have sent ten times as many query letters; maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this: because I wouldn’t be teaching any more. I want the opportunity not to do this any more, and if I’ve had it and missed it, I want it back again.

I want it all back again. That’s what I want to say.

But as I was thinking about this, I realized: those things I wasted were only wasted for me — and not always that. Every opportunity that I missed, gave someone else their chance, or gave me something that I wanted even more. Every dollar that I wasted taught me something, or gave me a laugh, or a story to tell: and those laughs and lessons and stories were worth more than the dollars they cost.

Well. Maybe not the cigarettes. That really was a lot of money. A pack a day for almost 17 years, and the average price of those packs was at least $4.00. It’s about $25,000. I don’t have any stories worth that.

But maybe I do: and maybe I have missed opportunities to write them, or to publish them; but every time an agent said no to me, that agent looked at the next query, and liked it more: and someone else got their dreams to come true. If the agent picked my book, then they would have had one less space to take on someone else; the opportunity only missed me. And my turn will come. In the meantime, I’ve become someone I am proud of. I don’t know if that would have happened if I had gone straight into professional writing; a lot of literary people are not people I want to be. Or if I had stayed a janitor, a job I could do in my sleep; maybe that would have been easier, but I was never proud of how well I scraped gum off the bottom of the seats.

Okay. I was a little proud of that.

Time is never wasted, because no matter what, you keep moving forward: and sometimes the path, even when it’s rocky and difficult, leads places you don’t expect. When I was a teenager, I hated high school. Partly because my father moved to California when I was in 8th grade, and without him around, I lacked structure and discipline,  and my native laziness and idiocy took over. But mainly, I felt like high school wasn’t for me, wasn’t good for me; it didn’t teach me anything I wanted or needed to know. So I never put any effort into it, and I got back pretty much the same nothing. A few teachers mattered, a few classes; a few friends. Not a whole lot. For the most part I was a failure at high school.

But because my father moved to California, that’s where I went to go to college. And because I was a failure, I went to a community college, because I couldn’t get into the university I wanted to attend, with my nothing grades.

And that’s where I met my wife.

If I had been a success in high school, I never would have met her. And that would be the biggest loss of them all. She also helped me become and stay a teacher, where I got the second advantage of my failure: being a teenaged idiot made me a better teacher, because I understand my teenaged idiots better than most of their teachers do, because their other teachers were not idiots.

If I hadn’t wasted time reading bad books, watching bad TV, and playing bad video games, I wouldn’t have the sense of humor I have now, nor the ability to draw something useful from almost any pile of crud you put in front of me. I can do things that matter to me more efficiently now because I’ve wasted so much time in the past. (I wrote this in about 45 minutes.)

The money I’ve wasted, which has gone to make good stories and funny experiences, for the most part, has paid for other people to do things that might have been great. Not many, because I’ve never had much money to waste; but every little bit helps, and it hasn’t hurt me very much. Except for the cigarettes. That one still hurts.

So you know what I want? I don’t want that money back: I spent it, and even if I didn’t get my money’s worth, somebody else did. I don’t want that time back: regretting the choices I’ve made would mean regretting all the wonderful things that I have now because I’ve taken the particular path that led me here. I don’t want those opportunities back: I want to make new ones, better ones, and while I still want to be better about seizing those opportunities, I know that every one I let slip by makes me stronger and faster and better at grabbing the next one: and there’s always another opportunity.

No, what I want is this: I want to take back all the terrible things I have thought and said about myself, all the times I called myself lazy, or a coward, or a failure. I want to see myself as positively and as optimistically and as admiringly as I see almost everyone else: because humans amaze me, yet somehow, I’ve always thought that I came up short of the mark. I don’t. I surpass all expectations. At least some of the time.

I want to be proud of myself for who I am, and never regret the things that made me, me.

Even the cigarettes.

This Afternoon

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I quite literally forgot to write.

I’ve been busy trying to get ready to move, and also to do all the things that pile up during the school year which I save for the summer: I have books to read and books to write, shows to binge watch, movies to re-watch, and of course I have to lose twenty pounds and go visit Las Vegas.

In no particular order.

No, actually: the books are first, after the move. All the rest of it can wait or simply not happen.

But while I was thinking about moving, I thought about the Sims. And I wished that moving in real life could be as simple as moving in the Sims: you click on all of your possessions and put them into your inventory; then you click on the house, click Move Family Out, and then go to the new house and click Move In, and BOOM! Done. Then you just move the furniture back out of your personal inventory, and everything is perfect.

The only realistic touch in moving in the game is that it is absurdly expensive. Though again, point and click and you can instantly make money, by selling furniture that magically vanishes into thin air once you make the decision to sell, without a single awkward phone call or visit from somebody from the depths of Craig’s List. You can even sell the paint off of your walls.

That’s another thing I’d like for real life to be like the Sims: money. First, I’d like to get paid every day; I’d like to get promotions basically every week; I’d like to have increasingly nice vehicles come to pick me up for work every day, ending with either a limo or a helicopter. Though I’d hate getting those phone calls from your boss when you miss work; that would be a pain. I’d like to get hired for every single job I ever asked for, and to be able to go back to an old career at exactly the same spot where I left it. I’d like job searching to comprise between three and seven possibilities every day, every single one of them at least potentially appropriate to me and my needs.

I’d like to be able to gain or lose weight in a matter of hours with a treadmill or a refrigerator. I’d like the refrigerator to supply all the materials of a meal, with only a little chopping and mixing for meal prep. I’d like the food to be cooked in seconds, and I’d like to be able to store leftovers in the fridge simply by picking up the plate of food and shoving it in the ol’ Frigidaire. I’d also really like to be able to pull leftovers out of the fridge and set them on the table exactly as they were when last served: and also steaming hot the second I put them on a plate.

I’d like to be able to learn important and complicated skills like machine repair and cooking with a few hours and a book. I’d like to know what all of my needs are, and how to fulfill them in simple, straightforward ways, and I’d like to reach any of those reward-type events that come from satisfying all of my needs: I’d like to enter the Zone, or turn all gold and sparkly. I’d like to dance with happiness, spontaneously and often.

I’d like to be able to leave my life — though it had better stay on pause when I do; the console version of Sims 3 was an atrocity for that reason — and go visit other people’s. I’d like to be able to manipulate both my own story and other people’s, though I’d like to be able to say that I would only do it benevolently. I’d like that to be true. But I know perfectly well that my Sims play has not shown me to be a benevolent master: I am far more likely to torment than to guide, to debase rather than uplift. What can I say? It’s more fun. Besides, I’m not talking about whether I should be allowed to run the world like a massive game of Sims: clearly I should not, as my long history of Sims serial killers should show; I’m just talking about what I would like.

I would really like to control Donald Trump.

There are certainly aspects of the Sims I would not want to reproduce in my life. First is the time frame: Sims don’t live long. I would not want my life to be measured in days, no matter how efficiently run those days could be. The Sims are always more interested in socializing than I am; my Sims’ social interactions are inevitably rote and reluctant, stuck in between more interesting tasks (where they are not strange and warped as part of my more diabolical plans), and I am always annoyed by their constant need for other Sims in their lives. I do indeed need other people in my life, specifically my wife and my pets, but I don’t suffer the Sims’ rapid disintegration of mood in their momentary absence, and I don’t want to change that. Sims are much too materialistic for me: they are made instantly happier by buying slightly more expensive versions of the stuff they already have, and I have very little interest in that. And, of course, I want to be able to open a door even if someone did leave a plate in front of it — and I would really hate it if I left a puddle on the floor just because someone was standing in front of the door to the bathroom when I had to go.

I’d kinda like it if there were actual fireworks in the sky every time I WooHooed.

Anyway: I guess the point is that I wish I had more control over my life, that every thing I did could be intentional and a valuable use of my time. (Clearly I also want rewards without effort, but hey, who doesn’t?) My Sims play is marked by efficiency: I love nothing more than lining up a dozen tasks for my Sims, and then letting them run through their entire day while I watch and intervene as needed. My life is very much the opposite of that: as you can tell by my rapid decline in posting a This Morning post every morning, as soon as my school year ends. I am nothing if not inefficient. But also, I don’t want to do what would be needed to become more efficient: because it’s my inefficiency, my wasted time, that allows me to be the one thing my Sims can never, ever be:

Me.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am happy. My senior students graduated yesterday; I was the MC for the ceremony, which meant I was nervous and uncomfortable all day leading up to it — because regardless of how much time I spend in front of a classroom full of students, it doesn’t take away my stage fright or my introversion. And also, a classroom full of students is quite different from a gymnasium filled with probably 500 people, including parents and grandparents and all of my fellow teachers and my administrators and my wife. Much more nerve-wracking.

But it went well, my speech was well-received, I made my former students cry. Here, for the sake of those who did hear it and want to remember, is my speech; it won’t mean a whole lot to people who don’t know these kids, but these kids aren’t the only ones who suit these words, so feel free to substitute your own children or students for the ones I was talking to and about.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, students, teachers, administrators – and, of course, graduates.

Welcome to the Graduation Ceremony for the Class of 2019!

(to the grads) I bet some of you thought you wouldn’t make it here today. But you did it. All of you: you did it.

You had help – parents, siblings, relatives; teachers, and friends – and all your online friends, YouTube, Khan Academy, Quizlet, Yahoo answers, Wikipedia, Sparknotes, Slader, 123HelpMe.com.

But the point is: you did the real work. You spent the late nights, and the all-nights; the early mornings, the lunchtimes and the passing periods, cramming and studying and reviewing and furiously finishing assignments. You’ve gone through thousands of sheets of paper, hundreds of pencils and pens, gallons of energy drinks, an average of fourteen Hydroflasks each, and a literal ton of hot Cheetos. You sweated through the tests, the essays, the labs, the presentations. You fought through the despair, and stress, anxiety and depression, fear and anger and sadness and happiness – because honestly, nothing makes it harder to sit down to a test than when you’re having a really good day.

You did all of that. All of it. Make no mistake: if anyone tries to minimize this accomplishment, to tell you that this was easy, that it is not impressive – don’t listen. This is impressive. You are impressive. You made it. High school – all school – is rough. And you’ve made it.

And I only have one thing to say to you: don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

Seriously – and I say it with love – get out. Go away and don’t come back. We’re all as tired of you as you are of us, and we’re all going to breathe a huge sigh of relief when you all have left. This is one of the most – let’s say “challenging” – classes I think this school has ever seen.

Want to know why?

You’re one of the smartest classes this school has ever seen.

You’re so smart, all of you, that it has been impossible to keep up with you. Impossible to consistently challenge you. Impossible to control you. Speaking from my experience, trying to run a discussion with all of you was insane: too many of you had things to say, and if you didn’t get to say them to the class, you would say them to each other, all at once. It was chaos.

You all burn so brightly that you draw all the air from the room – and because this school, these rooms, are so small, there wasn’t that much air to begin with. I honestly think that’s why you fought so much with each other: too many lions in too small a cage. It was a daily struggle to be on top, to stand out, to show how good you are individually, among all these other amazing people.

So. Now’s your chance.

You’ve been held in this small space, like a flower in a too-small pot, for too. Long. Now – you are free. Free to grow as tall and as grand and as glorious as you can. You will overshadow this place. You will tower over us, spread far beyond us.

I cannot wait to see what you all become.

So get out.

There was a keynote speaker, of course, a NASA scientist and actor who happens to be related to one of our newest alumni. I thought he did a great job with his speech — but I couldn’t help noticing that he leaned pretty heavily on clichés. He was actually quite up front about it: part of his theme was using Google (or technology in general) to find what you need, which was fine since he was talking to a STEM school; but the Commencement Speeches he Googled were apparently pretty generic. It was good and useful advice, but — generic.

So I thought I would write some of my own advice. Here, then, is something like what I would say if I were to be the keynote speaker at a graduation. This is what I would tell a group of students who were about to leave high school and embark on the adult part of their lives — also known as “the good part.”

 

Speeches like this are always full of clichés. Now, I don’t dislike clichés; I think most of them are true, and have genuinely useful things to say. Clever sayings don’t become clichés if they aren’t true, and truth isn’t talked about unless it is cleverly worded; so pay attention to clichés. At the same time, though, be aware of when the overuse of clichés clouds the message: because it’s a rarely known biological fact that people’s ears go deaf while that person is rolling their eyes. Think of them like memes: they are great, they make you laugh and make you think; then you get tired of them; then they’re dead. Clichés are like your favorite food: you can fall back on them when you have nothing new that sounds good; but you can also get tired of even your very favorite food, and that is a sad day.

I think one of the best things we can do is examine clichés, and reimagine them. Deconstruct them. Critique them. Because then we’re actually thinking about things we normally just swallow whole, without any consideration’ and that is no way to live, nor any good way to eat. You’ve got to chew your food: and your clichés, as well.

Ready? Here we go.

“All you need is love.” One of my favorite songs, and one of my favorite cliches. Also true — kinda. It’s not true that love is ALL you need; but it is true that love is one of the most important things you can have.

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The first piece of advice I want to give you is this: find love. True love, if you can; genuine and lasting love, at the least. I did, and there is not a day that goes by that I am not shaken to my core by gratitude and happiness because of it. And though I think I am extraordinarily lucky in love, I am entirely sure that all of you can find love, too. Make it a priority: make time for it, time for the looking and then time for the love once you find it. It doesn’t have to be romantic love, if that’s not what you’re after; it can certainly be love for family, for a parent, for a sibling, for a child; it can definitely be love for your best friend, or for a beloved pet — although, as much as I love my pets, I would recommend finding a human person to love. Because human persons talk back to you, and because pet persons die too soon. But it doesn’t have to be a spouse-type person, and it doesn’t have to be only one person. But in all the years I have spent with my wife, nothing has mattered to me as much as going home to her, as having her support and her companionship, as loving her and being loved by her. Don’t settle for something less than that: keep looking until you find it, because a half-measure of happiness will keep you from the full measure, and it isn’t worth it. If you think you’ve found it, and then you turn out to be wrong, don’t stay: divorce that person, leave that person, kill that person and stuff them in a sack.

Okay, don’t do that last one. But definitely leave the relationship and look for something better. Don’t give up on love. Not ever. And if you lose love, unless the memories of that love are enough for you, go out and find more love, find new love. Always. Life is better with love than without: and I truly believe everyone can find someone to love.

Next: “Never give up on your dreams. Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

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Okay, once again, there’s truth to this. You should have some kind of ambition in life, and it is better if it is grand; but if it is grand, it will also be, for the vast majority of us, unachievable. Which means you will have two options: give up, or keep working for something you may never accomplish. (Whatever you do, don’t look at the affirmational quotations for this one. As someone who has tried for twenty years to be a published author, and who is still a high school teacher, it both amuses and disturbs me to hear celebrities who caught their lucky break telling people to never give up. Sure, if I had been handed my dreams when I was 17, I’d believe that anyone could accomplish anything they wanted to do — if I was arrogant enough to think that luck came to me because of my talent. I’m not bitter.)

Personally, I would recommend not giving up. Not because of this landing among the stars nonsense; that’s neither true nor meaningful — I mean, if my “moon shot” is to be a published author, what does it mean to land among the stars? I can certainly imagine a second-level success — say, I sell some pleasing number of books which I self-publish, or I get to a pleasing number of followers on this blog, both of which are secondary goals I’m working towards and would be happy to achieve — but how does that fit the metaphor? The moon is infinitesimal compared to the stars, which are infinitely farther away; so what does that mean? Nothing, that’s what. But that’s okay: the point is really that working towards your dreams is a good thing to do regardless of whether or not you achieve the original dream. I really prefer this quote to the cliché, because I think this captures my experience and a lot of other people’s, as well. (Makes sense that it came from an actress whose best-known role came when she was 36.)

“As long as you keep going, you’ll keep getting better. And as you get better, you gain more confidence. That alone is success.” –Tamara Taylor

That’s why I say it is worthwhile to have a grand ambition, even if it is one you will never achieve.

But that takes me, in a roundabout way, to what may be the most important advice I have to give you; though it is also probably the most vague. It is this: there are two kinds of people in this world, and two kinds of experiences.

(There are a bunch of these memes…

 

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But this one’s my favorite:)

Image result for there are two types of people

 

Here are my two kinds: One is the kind of person, and the kind of experience, that limits your future choices, your freedom, your ability to control your life; the other is the kind that expands those choices, that freedom, that ability to make up your own mind and to control your own life. Look always for the second kind of person, the second kind of experience. There will be many choices you will make in life, and many of them will limit your future freedom: and those are the choices you have to be most careful of. You have to make them at the right time, and for the right reason. Choices like what to study in college — after you decide whether or not to go to college. Like what job to take. Where to live. When, and if, you will marry; when, and if, you will have children. These are the defining choices in life, and if you are not yet ready to be defined, don’t make them.

More importantly, don’t EVER let someone else make those choices for you. Don’t let someone pick you for marriage unless you pick them, too. Don’t let someone pick your time to have children, or with whom. Don’t let anyone push you into a career path, and don’t push yourself into one unless you want that career to define you. Until you are ready to make that choice, and lose the freedom to choose again later. (Though here’s a secret, and another cliché I won’t deconstruct: it is never too late to change your mind. Though it does get harder as time passes and you get more settled in your place in the world.)

Let me say one more thing about work: this one?

Image result for do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life

Complete bullshit. (You can tell by the background. What the hell kind of job does this image represent? Forest ranger? Have fun chasing poachers and meth cooks all over those mountains, in between rescuing dumbass dayhikers who thought they could just take a jaunt through those woods without equipment because they were in the Brownies. Also have fun getting furloughed when the government shuts down the next time.) Jobs are work. There is always work, or else nobody pays you for it; and the aspects that are work are not going to be fun. Jobs are always difficult, even if you love them, because you can’t possibly love every aspect of them (unless you’re on a whooooooole lotta drugs, and that has its own drawbacks.). I love some things about teaching, I really do — but I HATE the paperwork, and the grades, and indifferent students and overbearing parents, and a few other things as well. I love writing — but I HATE promoting myself. Even if I achieve my dreams of being a professional published author, I will need to write to very strict deadlines, and I will have to worry about my next book being a failure and sending me into the oblivion of Used-To-Be’s. I will have to travel, and speak publically, and participate in conventions and panel discussions and incessant insipid interviews, and I’ll have to be positive ALL THE TIME. I will hate that.

Honestly, I think the best way to view a job is to refuse to let it define you, unless you choose to define yourself that way. Back to the idea of limiting or expanding your freedom: if somebody wants to tell you that you are a teacher, and therefore you can’t be, say, a stripper on the weekends, don’t listen to them; you can be a stripper who teaches during the week. If you don’t care what you do for money because your passion is elsewhere, is in your avocation or your craft or your art or your family, then good: somebody asks what you do, you tell them that you make kayaks in your garage. They don’t need to know — they probably don’t really care — that you deliver pizzas for money; the kayak-building is FAR more interesting and important. So the point is, define yourself by your passion, not by your job; don’t expect your job to BE your passion, though it is certainly nice when they coincide. As much as I hate parts of teaching, I love, so much, that I get to spend all day every day with words, with literature, with reading and writing.

 

There are some other, smaller pieces of advice I would like to give, but they don’t come from clichés and they don’t have their own memes (Advice from a writer and a teacher: stick with a theme only as long as it makes sense; when it’s not working any more, drop it.). One is to take advantage of opportunities when they come up. Saving things for a later day is too often saving them for never; freedom to choose in life hits an early peak and then steadily decreases — until the very end, when you gain the freedom that comes with loss. That is, once you have a house and pets and a family and a career you want to keep, it becomes much harder to travel the world — until you lose all of those things. So if you have the chance to travel, do it.

Another is to pay attention: look around you. Take your time: you actually have quite a lot of it, and it will feel like more if you pay attention. I recommend walking, often, with your eyes and ears open to your surroundings.

Another is to read, and to keep learning. Doesn’t matter what you read, doesn’t matter what you learn; if you read the conspiracy theory websites that show how the Rothschilds are behind the measles outbreak, at least you’ll learn how crazy people are — and if you believe what you read, then the rest of us can learn to avoid talking to you, which is really for the best.

An important habit related to both of those is to always question. Question yourself, question your world, question your assumptions. You have to be careful not to take this to the point of permanent uncertainty and anxiety, but that has more to do with knowing when to trust the answers you get or the answers you make, and to move on to a different question; you can always come back to this question later. (Example: should I have written this blog? Is this too long? Is it a terrible topic, that everyone will find boring? Do I seem too arrogant, giving everyone advice? Well, I’ve written this much, and I don’t have a better idea, so — here it is. If I lose readers because of it, so be it. I’ll write something short and pleasant tomorrow. Also, I’ll hopefully get some feedback on this, which will help me know if it was the right thing to do. Also, please comment and Like content you enjoy, always. One of the best things to happen to me in the last few months was when someone read my book and sent me a comment telling me how much they liked it. I’m still floating from that one.)

Actually, that’s a real piece of advice: speak up. Do it in writing, do it anonymously if you are uncomfortable with direct conversation and confrontation; I certainly do, and I do almost all of my talking through a computer keyboard. I even write letters to my students when I want to chew them out, and you know what? INCREDIBLY effective. Feels much more formal and serious when I tell them in a letter that I’m sick of their bad behavior. Highly recommend it. But: speak. Up. Always. Positive and negative. When you are grateful that someone did something nice, say it — not just “Thank you,” but “I appreciate the way you gave me that/helped out with that/did that nice thing.” Tell your loved ones not only that you love them, but also what you love about them. As often as you think of it, say it. When someone angers you or upsets you, say something. When someone makes you uncomfortable, say something. Don’t suffer in silence: say it. Always. The worst case scenario is that you’ll be a pathetic whiny sniveler, and this way, the rest of us will know that and avoid you: so then everyone wins.

Well, except you.

But that’s what you get for being a whiny sniveler.

Last thing, and it’s not cheerful, but it’s true, and it’s important: people love telling younger people that life gets harder, that high school is nothing compared to college, and that college is nothing compared to the real world. I heard that all through school — “When you get to high school, it’s going to be MUCH harder . . . When you get to college, that’s when school/professors/assignments/grades get REALLY hard . . . When you get out into “the real world,” you’ll see how much better you had it while you were still a student!” — and I’m sure you’ve heard it too.

Well, here’s your last truth from me: it’s all bullshit.

Every stage of life is hard. And every stage of life has rewards that make it bearable. College is harder than high school academically; but the freedom you gain, the agency and control over your own life, makes it worthwhile. Also, you get to meet much better people. That same combined difficulty and reward comes with moving out of school and into the world of jobs and such — whether you make that transition after high school or after college doesn’t matter, it’s always the same — you gain more responsibilities, but also more power. The power gives you more freedom and more agency — you earn your own money and you can spend it how you want, for instance — but the responsibilities reduce that freedom, as well.

It’s always like that. When you are older you will probably have more financial security, but your health will probably be worse, and you’ll be aware of your dwindling years to enjoy your life. When you are young, you have all the time in the world — and too much of it has to be spent struggling.

I’m not saying this to depress you, just to let you know: it doesn’t get worse. In most ways, it gets better, because even though there are troubles to weigh down your joys, there is something else that happens as you go through life: you get stronger. Whatever does not kill you, right? It’s true: you get stronger every single day you are alive. It doesn’t make the troubles you face less — but it means you have an easier time handling them. And as long as you keep your eyes open, and take the time to recognize what you have, your happinesses will seem greater. I am happier now than I have been at any time in my past. Last year I would have said the same thing. Ten years ago I would have said the same thing. (Not nine years ago, though. That was a shitty year. But you can’t avoid those, so don’t worry about them. Try to get through them, that’s the best you can do.)

I’m going to end this with my attempt to make my own cliché — but because I thought of it, I actually find it much too annoying to just say; so I’m going to say it with memes. (Another piece of writer’s and teacher’s advice: know your audience.)

They tell us to never give up — but sometimes, giving up means you can walk away, and go find something better to try. So the best way to look at this is:

Image result for picard make it so

or

Image result for let it go frozen

 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about my midlife crisis.

I think I’ll skip it.

I am,with luck, just about midlife now. I’m 44, my grandparents lived to be 87 and 88  –the two that lived past their 60s. And I’m aware that time is passing, and the door is closing on certain opportunities: I’m not as hot as I once was, and I won’t be hot at all before too much more time passes; soon I won’t be capable of picking up women in bars.

Which is too bad, because I was never capable of picking up women in bars. I mean, I never tried it, because I met my wife before I could legally go to bars; but up until that point, I was staggeringly bad at picking up women, so I have to assume that the application of alcohol would not have improved my game. Fortunately, I have literally zero interest in picking up women anywhere, with alcohol or not; my wife is the finest and most wonderful woman who ever existed, to me, so I already won this game: I can retire undisputed champion, right now.

Speaking of champions and retirement, I’m not as physically fit as I once was: I’m now in the age where I heal slower, where exercise offers less positive result, and what there is comes slower. I grunt when I stand up, and often when I sit down. I have aches and pains that don’t go away — I have had more than one bout with plantar fasciitis, which sounds like a villain from the original Star Trek series. Soon I won’t be able to do all those physical things I meant to do: master a martial art (and KICK SOMEONE’S ASS), climb a mountain, learn to surf, to ski, to skydive.

Oh wait, that’s right: I never meant to do those things. Never wanted to skydive, nor ski; and I’m afraid of drowning and of sharks, so I think surfing is right out. I would like to climb a mountain, but really, I’m most interested in the kind you can walk up: and I can still walk. I admit I kinda do want to kick someone’s ass. Maybe I can look into martial arts lessons.

The main thing is, I don’t want to feel old. I don’t want to feel like my life is over, or the good part is over, or I’m running out of time to do young things. Maybe I should buy a sports car, get a body part pierced; maybe I should go to some all-day rock festival with all of my students.

Wait a second: I don’t want to hang out with my students. I don’t want to be like my students. I don’t envy them; I don’t miss being a teenager; I hated being a teenager. I hated being in high school, hated being condescended to and instructed as to what my life would be and what it should be and what I needed to do in order to get there. I hated having people tell me that what I wanted  to do was right or wrong, when it wouldn’t have bothered anyone to just let me do what I want. (For the most part. There were a couple of things I genuinely shouldn’t have done, shouldn’t have been allowed to do, things which did indeed hurt other people. But other than those, and there weren’t many of them, I could have been given free rein and nothing would have gone wrong.) I much prefer being an adult.

Hell, I prefer being middle-aged. And I don’t want to do anything new, don’t want to catch up on the experiences I missed out on; certainly not with any urgency. I mean, I’d love to have a nice car — though I’d prefer some enormous boat of a car, a Cadillac or a Lincoln or one of those 1950’s five-ton Detroit rolling steel behemoths, rather than a sports car; I hate going fast, but I kinda like the idea of taking up the entire road, the entire parking lot — but I don’t see anything wrong with getting that car when I’m 80. I’d rather have it now, I guess, but I don’t need to hurry. I do want to travel the world, and I’d like to experiment with some different careers; but again, I don’t need to do that before some arbitrary deadline when I imagine time runs out. I’d like to do it soon, I can wait, and whatever I don’t get to, oh well.

You know what I really want? I want the second half of my life  to be as good as the first half has been. I’ve been quite lucky, and I’ve done pretty well, and I’d like to have more of the same. I expect the last fifteen or twenty years to mostly suck, but the first fifteen or twenty mostly sucked  too, so it’s a wash. But even if I don’t get that wish, here’s the truth: I’ve had a good life. Not a perfect life, but nobody has that. For not perfect, I’m  quite happy with what I’ve had. So even if every subsequent year is less pleasant from here on out, I’ve already had a good run.

No crisis for me, thank you. I’ll just take more life.

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.

What It Means to Be a Writer

Dusty Leave a comment

Scrolling through my Twitter feed when I found a link to this piece.

I walk by accident into one of London’s über-bookstores to be taken over by a very familiar type of sadness—as a child I used to feel this way when thinking about the cosmos and my own insignificant place in it. This is London’s biggest bookshop: 6.5 km of shelves, the website proudly tells us, as if this particular length and not another were a reason to rejoice. Book after book after book thrown into this worded jungle—a hoard that could be a waking counterpart to a Borgesian wet dream. Fiction books and books on writing fiction. Photography and art books and books on photography and art. And so on: most forms of expression and myriad words of meta-dialogue, some of them even justified or at least nicely edited and with colourful covers. Nothing escapes this total library: no corner of the universe or the mind is left unaccounted for. It is a hideous totality for it is an ordered totality, filtered through the minds of who knows how many marketing specialists; it is effective as a selling platform but it is a desert of anonymity for the diminished names on the shelves. Were I ever to be asked for a writing tip, something born out of this experience would be my choice: walk into any gigantic bookshop and think whether you can face being one more name lost in this desert of words. If that ideal situation proves too much to bear do something else with your time (it is of course highly likely that if you go around asking for writing tips you will never make it on print).

Okay, first of all, that parenthetical comment at the end gets you a punch in your snooty little snoot with a fist labeled Fuck You. I presume you mean that true poetry, great writing, emerges from the soul as a fait accompli, like Athena cracking her way out of Zeus’s head fully-grown; if a would-be writer is too naive to recognize this immortal truth, and to think that one could simply ASK for a way to be a better writer, then that person is doomed to less than mediocrity. Or else it is the bourgeois feeling of the “writing tips,” the oversimplified, sanitized, pre-packaged saccharine packets that show up in ten-item numbered lists on the various clickbait websites advertised on Facebook. I am more understanding of contempt for those, as I am contemptuous of people who make a living on the internet by telling people how to make a living on the internet – by running a website telling people how to make a living on the internet, which is done (Spoiler alert!) by getting people who want to make a living on the internet to buy your secret to making a living on the internet; and the people who do this always seem to call themselves “writers.” But my contempt is for the people at the top of the pyramid: not for the people down on the ground, choking on dust and sand, dreaming of a way to climb. Those people who want writing tips because they want to be better writers deserve respect for their courage in trying to find a way to get what they want; and their desire to improve, whether or not they know a good path to improvement, is admirable and not at all an indication of their potential as writers. Fuck you in the snoot, sir.

Now let’s talk about the central issue here. You’ve got two problems with this bookstore and the despair it engenders in you. One is that your words will never be truly unique, because somebody out there will say pretty much the same thing you say – or in Borges’s universe that you reference later, with his infinite Library of Babel that holds all combinations of letters and thus every possible book, one of the other volumes on the shelves will say exactly what you say. And maybe Borges was right and it does repeat in a chaotic pattern for eternity, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right? All the kilometers of fiction books, the books about art and photography and writing; all been done before, nothing is new, nothing is original. Somebody get me a cigarette and a bottle of cheap red wine, and build a Parisian basement cafe around me for a tomb.

The second problem is that you will never be the one person whose words everyone reads, everyone knows, everyone talks about; because there will always be so many others putting words on the page, that it is impossible that your words would be the ones that capture every reader at once. Particularly not if you want to capture every non-reader as well. This problem seems to be the larger one, as you speak more of being lost in the noise than you do about repeating what has already been said.

The futility of writing is something I face up to every time I set pen on paper or hand to keyboard. Why am I doing this? My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words. I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift.

This is a poor proof. Your message in a bottle being surrounded by other messages in a bottle does not make your message pointless. Not even in the metaphor: so long as one person finds your message and reads it, and – I suppose – comes to rescue you from your desert island of despair (Perhaps your bottle message is something entirely different, something like “If you let your eyes go unfocused, a Moen kitchen faucet starts to look like a snobbish sheep with a very long snout. But it’s hard to recapture the magic once your eyes go back to normal and the sheep turns back into a faucet, so don’t waste it.” In that case, you won’t be rescued, but somebody may spend a lot of time squinting at their kitchen sink because of you, which is pretty funny, really. I’d call that success.), then your bottle was a success. You won. You did what you set out to do. You made your point. Wherefore, then, does it become pointless? Is the idea that the thousand bottles around your bottle make it less likely that your bottle will be read? This is not true for the same reason your enormous bookstore should not lead to despair. Ready for the reason? Here it is.

There is more than one person reading. (Shocking, I know. Hold onto your snoot, Buttercup.)

Let’s start with the metaphor. There are a thousand bottles with messages in them, bobbing in the water by the seashore. If there was only one person walking by, and for some reason that person had sworn a sacred vow to read only one bottled message, then your chances of being read are a thousand to one. Agreed, and that would suck. But in the – ahem – “real world” of this fantasy, that one guy wouldn’t stop at one bottle: he’d keep opening bottles. Because if he was doing it out of curiosity, out of a need to see what was written on those messages; or if he was looking for the perfect message, the one that would speak directly to his soul, then reading one message would never be enough. He’d read another, and another, and another. He’d probably try to read them all. I would. Wouldn’t you? If you saw a thousand bottles bobbing in the water with message inside them?

And if it was more than one guy on the shoreline? If it was actually a crowded beach, with tourists, and beachcombers, and dogwalkers, and a tai chi group, and a bunch of hungover teenagers wrapped in sandy blankets and the stench of wet cigarette butts? The bottles would catch all of their interests. They would all want to open their own bottle, be the first to read a message. Then they would share the messages they found with each other. They’d be diving into the water, throwing bottles back onto the shore, shouting and laughing and waving their messages over their heads. The more bottles there were in the water, the bigger the spectacle would be, and the more those people would be drawn to where the bottles were. They might even come back the next day to look for more bottles.

Are you following me, sir? Those bookstores with the kilometers of shelves? They are not only filled with books, they are filled with people. People who read books. And those people never stop at just one book. I know: I used to frequent a very similar establishment, Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. Five floors of twelve-foot-high bookshelves, covering an entire city block. I never expect to see so many books on display in a single place in my life again. I could spend the rest of my life reading (Ah, bliss!) and not finish a single floor’s worth of books. I went there every month for the ten years I lived in Oregon, to buy books, and you know what? That place was always packed with people. With readers. Never mind the kilometers worth of shelves: how many kilometers of people do you think go through those stores on any given day? 3,000 people, on the average. [source] Average front-to-back measurement of a person is approximately ten inches; I’m an American and we’re thicc, so let’s bump that up to a round foot. (Screw the metric system, though I’ll convert for your convenience, sir.) 3,000 feet of human every day, which is very nearly one kilometer of human flesh – around 915 meters, to be precise. And that’s not even lying down head-to-foot. That means that in a week, if the London store has a similar number of visitors, the people looking at those books outdistance the books they are looking at. And I can tell you that the turnover rate for the people looking is far higher than the turnover for the books on the shelves.

There are an enormous number of books in the world, and it grows every day. It is impossible for one person to read them all, and realistically impossible that one of them will be read by all people.

But that doesn’t mean that my book won’t be read. It doesn’t mean that your words will never be seen.

I think about selling my books, which I have not yet succeeded in doing. But let’s imagine that I do so: imagine if my sales, by every measure of the publishing industry, are absymal. Let’s pretend that I only sell one thousand copies of my novel about a time-traveling Irish pirate. So lame, right? I am – what was your phrase? – “lost in this desert of words.”

A thousand people bought my book. Presumably that means a thousand people read it. (Some surely would cast it aside in disgust or disappointment, sure, but I think some of them would like it enough to share with someone else, or else resell it. Let’s just imagine that one sale equals one reading.) Think about that. I have never been in a room with a thousand people who all know me: not in the way that a reader knows at least an aspect of a writer. I have spoken to thousands of people in my life, but I doubt that a full one thousand of them cared about what I had to say: cared enough to sit down, in a quiet room, and spend hours just listening to my words, thinking about my thoughts. Hearing me. If I could sell just one thousand copies of my book, then I could achieve that. So what if at that same time a million people were listening to Stephen King, and ten million were listening to Kim Kardashian? So what if the world is larger than I can speak to at once? So what if all I can have is one small corner –with one thousand people listening to me?

Isn’t that enough?

Think about it in terms of time. I don’t know how many hours it takes me to write a book, but the pirate book was finished in about a year, so let’s use that. It’s a pretty fast read, I think; someone could finish it in maybe ten hours of reading at a leisurely pace, maybe even less. If a thousand people spend ten hours reading my book, then the year of my life spent writing it (And of course the vast majority of that year was spent sleeping, working, eating, singing in the shower, watching TV, playing The Sims, et cetera) has turned into ten thousand hours of other people’s lives spent – on me. There are 8,760 hours in a year (And 525,600 minutes), so even if I had spent every single one of them working on my book, that time spent is balanced by time spent reading my book if only a thousand people were to read it. More than balanced.

So the question is, what more could you possibly want?

If the only thing that would make writing worthwhile, that would give this endeavor a point, is if every single person on Earth read your work, and only your work, then I agree that writing would be pointless. But I can’t fathom a writer, a real writer, being that childish, that selfish, to think that the world must revolve around your work and your work alone. I mean, the only cultural phenomenon with that impact is Wyld Stallyns. Granted, you’re not them, and neither am I. And that stings a bit, I’ll bet. Yeah, it does me too.

I’ll comfort myself just thinking about how easy it would be to get a thousand people in the world to read a decent book. Shit, if all I want is readers, I could offer it for free and get that many readers without even trying. You wrote this obnoxious angsty piece of snobbery, and I read it, and then spent – mmm – more than an hour responding to it. See? The time you spent on this crud then earned for you this time spent out of my life. Time I could have been reading, ya selfish bastard.

And honestly, I think this is enough time spent on you. I am sorry that your life is so empty and meaningless, and sorry that I threw a couple of hours of my life into your black hole of an ego. Do us both a favor: gain some perspective, will you? Thanks.

(I have to say: the rest of the piece has some valid points about marketing on social media, and about the democratization and banalisation [His word] of writing that has occurred through the internet. There is some good thought here. If there hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have read all the way to the end, and then taken the time to write a response. I don’t disagree with everything he says. Just the central premise. I dream of having a thousand readers, and I am absolutely sure that, even in a world inundated with voluminous writers of every imaginable quality and a limited number of readers with a limited number of books they will read, still: I will hit that mark. And it will be worth it.

(Thank you for inspiring me to write this, sir. Now pull up your fucking pants.)

Tied Down at the Edge of a Cliff

Dusty Leave a comment

We say we have to get me out of teaching. We say it often, laying in bed at night before we turn the lights off, when we usually turn to face each other, heads on pillows, and sort of put a punctuation mark on the day – sometimes an exclamation point, sometimes a question mark; but usually just a comma or a semi-colon, because the end of the day is almost never an ending, almost always a brief pause for breath before we go on with the next clause, the next day, separate from the last but still connected – always connected.

My life is a run-on sentence. And I don’t know how to stop it.

No: I know how to stop it. (And I’m going to leave this metaphor behind now, this navel-gazing grammatical pun. Jesus, Dusty. Get a life.) I could change my life quickly if I leave everything behind, including my wife and my pets, a sentence that took me several tries to actually write. I could change everything if I left everything. I do what I do so I can earn what I earn so we can live how we live: as we. But our bed, where we lay at night together, is actually the ground at the top of a cliff. Everywhere I go, I am at the top of this cliff. At night we lay together, our heads heavy on the pillows, and we look into each other’s eyes and I tell her how much I love her and she smiles at me and I love her more, and then we kiss goodnight, and roll over – and I stare off the edge of the cliff.

The cliff is the edge of my world. I don’t mean the end of life; I’m not talking about dying. I’m talking about where the place I am, the place I live, where it ends, abruptly, startlingly, dangerously. Honestly I have pretty much always stayed near that cliff’s edge, in various ways. But never too near: because I am a coward, I think. And though every night I look out into the open air beyond that cliff, to actually jump off that cliff and land somewhere entirely different – or perhaps instead of landing, take flight and sail across the sky, which is how I imagine it would feel to be a writer – I would have to leave behind everything I am now, everything that is this place where I live, this life where I live, where I sleep with my head heavy on my pillow and my eyes straining to look out farther but tired, so very tired, with the looking; but behind me (or no: before me, between me and the cliff, not to protect me but because she is even closer to the edge of that empty space that might hold a new life) is the best woman in the world, and at our feet lies the sweetest dog I’ve ever known, and nearby are a bird and a tortoise who need me, who are tied to me, who are weighing me down. And none of them – not even the bird, sadly – can fly.

Let me be clear: it is not my wife’s fault. She never asked me to get this job, never demanded a larger home, a larger paycheck, health insurance, stability, all the tethers of the modern world that tie me down at the top of the cliff, safe and immobile, able to turn my head and look out to eternity, growing and throbbing out there beyond the fall to the bottom. She doesn’t demand them of me now, never tells me when I talk of leaving teaching that I can’t do that because the family relies on my stable income and health insurance. She has never said that once. She never would. She lies with her head on her pillow, holds my hand, her fingers exploring mine as she imagines drawing my hands (as she imagines drawing everything), and says, with her eyes sad, “We have to get you out of teaching.” Now that she has tethered herself down right next to me – but closer to the edge of the cliff than I am – she says “We have to get ourselves out of this.”

Then we talk about how we can be free, mobile, able to pick and choose what we do with our lives, if we just buckle down and teach for three years and pay off all of our debts. Maybe four years. Maybe five. Tethered down right at the edge of this cliff, looking out into space, lying with our heads heavy on the pillow, holding hands.

I’ve never jumped off a cliff. I jumped off a swing into a river, once, but I landed flat on my back when I tried an ill-advised backflip; it hurt. I don’t remember if I went back on the swing again after that, but probably not; I’m a coward, and I always have been, and that’s why I’m still at the top of this cliff, near the edge but not on the edge. I’m looking out on this vista, this panorama, of wide open space, and I’m – I don’t know, shouting over the edge? Maybe whispering, blowing words like soap bubbles, glittering and evanescent as they drift pointlessly free? But I’m still here, on solid ground, holding on for dear life even though I am nowhere close to falling.

I should be falling. If I was a writer, I’d be falling; if I was falling, I’d be a writer.

Instead I am – yes, I know it. A spider. Remember the tiny ones at the end of Charlotte’s Web, how they spin out a single thread of silk and throw it up into the wind, letting the air lift and carry them away? That’s how I want to go out over the edge of the cliff; not free fall, not dropping down and just hoping that something will catch me, though I’m not sure now if that’s because I’m a coward or just because I don’t care for the thrill, never have, never liked adrenaline, never wanted to feel alive because I almost died. I hate stories that rest on that idea: that life is either risk or boredom, that everything that is lovely or pleasant or simple becomes blasé, because I feel like if I could live forever, I would just read all of the books that I won’t have time to read, and play all the video games, and walk over every inch of the Earth, and why would that get boring? I don’t believe that it would. And so I want to drift over the edge of the cliff, not plummet. So here I lay, throwing out single threads of silk, gossamer words, hoping that one of them will catch the wind and lift me free and sail me away through the sky – and my wife and our family with me.

I’m growing roots. I have been for years, though I frequently pull them out of the ground and let them wither and die. I don’t need the roots, though I don’t hate them; that’s probably why I let them grow, and maybe that’s why I haven’t gone over the cliff, because I don’t mind the slow growth, don’t mind drifting down into the earth instead of up into the sky. Maybe if there was a way to sink below the surface, grow a taproot large enough and deep enough and then pour myself down instead of drawing nutrients up, follow my own growth into the deeps, and then tunnel down through the cliff from behind its face, back behind the bones, down and down and down until I came to the bottom and then slid out from between the teeth, out with the breath of the earth back into the open air. Then I’d be in a new place, and not at the edge of a cliff looking out; then I would have changed, would have moved.

But I would have never flown. Never left the ground. Is that, could that be, what it would mean for me to be a writer? To move through the earth to new ground? Does that metaphor make sense?

Is this the thread that will lift me? Or the one that I can crawl down, like Dante down the leg of Lucifer, crawling down until suddenly he was crawling up, out of the depths of Hell to the mountain of Purgatory? But see, he was carried on that final voyage out. He was on a mission from God. All he had to do was hold on and wait.

I don’t think I can just hold on and wait. I think I need to move. I don’t know if I can fly and take my family with me – and I won’t leave them behind. There is nothing that would be better without them. I don’t even know why I say it, other than I know that most people who jump off the cliff, who make themselves suddenly into writers (or into flattened, shattered remains), go it alone. I don’t want that. I don’t think I ever have, but I know I don’t now. So the question is: do I keep throwing strands of silk into the air? Do I stitch them together into a single sail, and just wait for a wind great enough to lift me, and my wife, and our heavy heads from off of our pillows, and we can grab the bird and the dog and the tortoise in passing and carry them with us? Could there be a wind great enough to lift a sail large enough to carry us all aloft?

Or do I try to find a new way, this magic that will turn the earth beneath me malleable, let me alter the flow and the path of all things so that I grow in the wrong direction, turning the wrong into right? Honestly, I don’t even know what this metaphor means: would I write for the local scene, find local websites, write for the Tucson newspaper? Is that what it means to go down your own taproot, to go deeper into the earth, to become a writer by digging down? I don’t know. I want it to be magical, somehow, to be an alteration of the paradigm, a new path, a new alchemy that turns stone into water, just for me, so that I could swim through something that can’t be swum through – but though I can imagine that, I don’t understand it, I don’t know how I could do that, if it could be done. I don’t know if I’m creative enough to do it, if I have the wizardry to break the laws of nature. But since it took me four tries to actually type the word “wizardry,” I’m going to say the omens are bad.

Maybe I should try to climb down the cliff. Grind it out, slow and steady, keep working, keep writing, keep moving; no magic, just constant effort, every moment testing my strength to the limits, every moment hyperalert, looking for that next ledge, that next handhold.

I don’t know. I’m 42, and I haven’t started climbing yet. I might already be too tired just from lying at the top of the cliff. Lifting my head off that pillow every goddamn morning. Looking out at the expanse of sky and thinking about how wonderful it would be to sail away. Spinning my silken threads, my tenuous sails – watching them break and fall, or vanish off into the ether without me. And here I lie.

I don’t know how to fly.

Update.

Toni read this. We talked about it. And having talked to her about it, the answer is clear: we will be alchemists. We will swim through the Earth, and see where we end up.

I consider the metaphor of flight to represent getting published by a traditional brick-and-mortar company, selling books out of Barnes and Noble, the whole Best-Selling Author bit. I’d still like to fly. I’m going to keep sending up streamers of spidersilk, hoping that one will catch just the right breeze and lift me up into the sky. I would like that. For Toni, the same metaphor probably applies to suddenly hitting it big in the art world: becoming a name, being sold in galleries, getting commissions for public art, all of that. And that would be swell, too.

But that’s not the goal. Neither is the goal a safe and sure and trying descent.

No: the goal is to try something new. We plan to write and illustrate and sell graphic novels, and illustrated novels. I plan to go back to publishing a serial novel, which will be available as enriched and expanded e-books, featuring extra stories, back stories, side characters, and so on. Maybe we’ll run a book store. I will publish my novels, and she will sell her art – and we will see what we are capable of and where we can go. What new places can we discover, and explore? What exactly is down there, underneath us? Could it be even more intriguing, even more wondrous, than the sky above?

We will never jump off the cliff. And we will never leave each other behind. (Nor the pets.)

We choose – magic.