His advice is decent enough: Speak directly. Avoid cliches. Hook your reader. However, one principle in particular stuck out to me as blatantly incorrect— Scott’s call to avoid “microdishonesty.” I suppose this take should be expected from a super-mega-rationalist who doesn’t like any crunchy half-truths in his writing marmalade.

But look, Scott…

At nineteen, I agreed with you. I thought good writing was something you spit into the left eye of the world; I thought it was saying exactly what you saw, leaving nothing out, no matter how nasty or personal or libelous it might be. No matter what relationships it might ruin or how awkward it might make Thanksgiving dinner with Aunt Doris.

At thirty-three, I’ve come to understand that essays are, among other things, works of art. And just like Japanese gardens, they require negative space. Emptiness.

Silence.

What you call microdishonesty many of us call “taste.” Leaving things out on purpose is not a bug; lying for effect isn’t a glitch. They are central features of writing.

And I believe this so fervently that I’m willing to throw my hat in the ring: here is an essay peppered with microdishonesty. I sincerely hope that it’s all twisted up together for the laudable purpose of telling a macro-truth. But that’s the risk. Isn’t it?

Here comes the essay, lies and all. Its head is solidly centered on the chopping block.

Reader, heft yon axe!

🐐The Charlatan of Salem Road

An essay within an essay

A ghost taught me something last week. That ghost (aka “dead teacher”) was not Robin Williams (à la John Keating) but a Mr. Phil McEntee. The dead can speak. I’ll prove it to you.

Our story starts in something like 2021 / 2022. COVID is everywhere. My mother rings me up and says in a considerate voice: “George, Mr. Phil McEntee passed away. I thought you’d like to know.”

There is this cliche that goes around about teachers and investments “Teachers are carrot farmers. They plant seeds in kids’ brains that don’t sprout until some far-off, flowering season.” It’s a reasonably creepy analogy, but also almost 98% accurate.

When people learn that I teach, many respond by saying that one of their teachers planted a seed in their head long ago. Usually, the seed is packaged with some form of minor abuse. “Mrs. Herschel forced me to diagram sentences,” they will say, “and I hated it, but now when I’m working in my cubicle I know the difference between a gerund and an errand,” or “Mrs. Herschel gave me an ‘F’ for being loud and having funny hair, but that taught me the importance of presentation,” or “Mrs. Herschel made me sit in the Water Bucket of Shame, but that taught me the importance of hydroponics.” My father likes to recount a story of his favorite math teacher, a retired navy mechanic, who was so brawny he could pick up offending teenagers, desk and all, and slam them on the tile floor of the echoing hallway. Then, triumphantly, he’d return to class with rolled up sleeves and say: “Now that we can focus, let’s do some maaath!”

I love these stories. Sure, the practices they describe exist on a spectrum of quixotic to psychotic, but the people telling them always seem genuinely grateful for what was done to them. I especially like when these stories come from educational outsiders: people I meet at weddings or chat up at bars, people with no real chips on the education table. Like most outsider observations, they complicate the insider narrative, the gospel of “the discipline” we teachers often hear from education field-to-industry hustle2 folks and we sometimes can’t help but repeat.

The narrative told by FIH folks goes like this: Classrooms are flowcharts. Students are computers with inputs and outputs. There is one, true Best Practice™. Teachers must follow the one, true Best Practice™ faithfully to receive optimal results. The hidden doctrines of the one, true Best Practice™ are only something you receive from reading expensive journals, scrolling ed content that ineptly explains what was read in expensive journals, or attending eight-hour conference sessions that tell you what was written in expensive journals. And educator, beware! If you aren’t following the sacred words of FIH Best Practice™, you are simultaneously racist and racially pandering, ableist and not pushing disabled students hard enough, sexist and gender blind, inefficient and too efficient, moving too fast and too slow, leaving your slow kids behind and dragging your feet too much to keep the fast ones engaged.

What the FIH folks don’t like to mention is that there are three things most cognitive research agrees on about learning.3 Three “gold standards” that form the actual flesh and bones of the best way to practice teaching.

Ready? Here they go:

The most important things a teacher can do are…

1. Be kind.

2. Be passionate about their subject.

3. Have a plan.

Guess what? That’s it! If teachers do most of these things most of the time, they’re Doing Good (no ™ required). What a confidence boost!

But the FIH folks won’t say that out loud because they can’t stand anything that comes for free, and because, like all marketing departments, they hate confidence. Confident teachers are less likely to scroll a thousandth EduTechTok, and confident parents are more likely to ask their kids’ school / school district to stop spending so much of the budget on glittery digital products that sacrifice students’ data-souls on the altar of Ed Tech Moloch.4

There is no secret sauce. Regular teachers doing regular things change the course of people’s lives, often by teaching lessons that are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Lessons like it’s worth being creative even if you make very little money, or life sucks really hard sometimes but it’s still not worth killing yourself because “sometimes” means “not all the time,” or blues music from the 1940s can still make you cry.

I took a class on Shakespeare at UAB with a professor named Dr. Rebecca Bach. She was passionate, present, and practical. I learned a ton from her— mostly how to read Shakespeare and actually understand it. But what I got from Dr. Bach was more than an impractical set of skills. As much as writing this sentence makes me cringe, she handed me the final rung on a ladder that led toward some kind of enlightenment.

Case in point, Dr. Bach assigned As You Like It with its famous “All the world’s a stage” monologue. I’d been shown that monologue before in middle school. I had this talented actress for a teacher named Ms. Tawny Stevens, and she taught my theater class to recite the speech by rote.

Perhaps this primed me to receive Shakespeare with nostalgia from Dr. Bach. Perhaps it was all sentiment, and Shakespeare was wonderful in college because I was slathering it in bittersweet backstage memories. First heartthrobs. Mixed gender giggle fits. Inside jokes. Boys and girls having a midsummer night’s dream. If it was all nostalgia, all sentiment, then I’m grateful. Some works of art deserve all the nostalgia they can get.

Whatever the case, tucked away in a dank library carrel, I did my Dr. Bach homework.

I flipped open my swollen Norton Shakespeare and read:

… Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

My grandfather died the same year I took Dr. Bach’s class. He was on the way out for quite some time, and I worked as a sort of hospice attendant for him, checking in each day for the last few months of his life.

At times, he was “mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,” and I remember listening to his wet, labored breathing. I remember peeking inside his mouth. I remember eyeing his thick, glossy cataracts and white filmed tongue. I remember him before any of it; a vibrant Papa, clapping our boy shoulders. I remember age pulling him into second infancy. I remember how dementia messed with the dashboard clock of his brain, and weirdly, with mine as well.

A decade later, I clap my son on the shoulder. I ruffle my daughter’s hair. I am vibrant Papa as young man then and somehow, I’m already moving toward being him as the one doing the dying.

Dr. Bach and Ms. Tawny Stevens taught me Shakespeare, and Shakespeare taught me that I can be young and old, wise and stupid, strong and weak all at once. Each trait a level on a bar graph, varying only by degree— not state— changing constantly.

As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and good literature, being that most changeable of things—language—lies close to godliness: “changeliness,” progress.

At this point, you’ve probably forgotten about that call from my mom in 2021/2022. I forgot about that call almost instantly. At the time, the news of Mr. Mac’s death was sad, but also inopportune. I wasn’t doing well. It was a myopic era in my life. It took me about five years to fully realize what had been lost.

Just who was Phil McEntee?

You’ll get little more than bones from a general statement. But flesh needs a skeleton, so: he was a hippie, a special ed teacher in Birmingham City Schools. He retired and became a library storyteller and musician. He worked with kids. He never made much money.

Bones.

The flesh is best received in wafer form. Disparate details. As Mr. Mac would likely have said “some of these details are photos. Others are even better— they’re pictures you can draw in your head.”

Disparate Detail #1: Mr. Mac towering over a pack of hyperactive eight-to-twelve-year-olds. They are captives of his reedy voice, his huge expressions, his “outback” attire. Mr. Mac taught me that songs can contain stories, that stories can contain songs, and that it’s OK to make jokes about kissing a horse’s ass.

Disparate Detail #2: Mr. Mac producing a library play for middle-school children called The Fools of the World and the Flying Ship. He’s in the orchestra pit, playing all the music he composed on a Green Burst Ovation Celebrity guitar. His long-bearded friend is trilling on a trumpet. Mr. Mac taught me that cool people care about teaching children.

Disparate Detail #3: Mr. Mac hunching in a small conference room with my mother, another woman who runs the library, and myself, making plans for a revival performance of The Fools of the World. He’s brought his guitar inside and when I refer to him as “Mr. Phil” he says he doesn’t like that name because where he grew up, older Black men used to call him “Mr. Phil” as a child and it was always wrong. He taught me that racism makes children complicit and can affect a room without black people in it. He also taught me that guitars shouldn’t be left in hot cars.

Disparate Detail #4: Mr. Mac crammed into a small music room teaching me guitar before I go off to college. He’s saying “you’re a singer, and singers sometimes don’t have the patience to learn musical theory.” He’s also saying, “Focus on the right hand and the left hand will take care of itself.” He taught me that geniuses are confidently incorrect about half the time.

Disparate Detail #5: Mr. Mac, in that same music room, asking me what music I like and listening to me talk with the attention one reserves for celebrities. The next week, he riffles through his brown leather bag and retrieves sheet music for Green Day’s “Wake Me When September Ends.” He plays the song flawlessly, only having learned it so that he could teach it to me and so that I wouldn’t complain when he spent three weeks teaching me twelve-bar blues. This, in a nutshell, is how you crack the “student motivation” puzzle.

Disparate Detail #6: Mr. Mac in some heavenly dive bar, crowded by ogling onlookers. He’s still telling stories that sound like the truth, and twisting facts until they sound like stories.

Mr. Mac sorely missed.

I stopped playing my guitar for years. Too busy. Too tired. Guitar, too out of reach. Then one day in 2026 I dust it off and start thinking about Mr. Mac.

I mention to Emma (my wife) that I want some music books and she mentions that there is this place called a library where you can get books for free. We go and take the kids. While there, Emma finds me and says “Isn’t this cool?”

She’s holding a children’s book. It’s titled The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship.

She doesn’t know about Mr. Mac’s play.

I don’t know about the Russian folktale that inspired it.5

It’s a weird moment. Eerie, almost haunted.

By the time I find myself dumbstruck in that library, I’ve been working on a novel for two years called The Wizard of Salem Road. And suddenly, flipping through The Fools of the World, it strikes this fool that The Wizard himself is based loosely on Phil McEntee. And it’s four years too late for me to tell him. I keep picturing Mr. Mac piddling away at his art all those years, pouring himself into teaching children (the little souls that most of us are just happy to get rid of for the day). I know that he must have doubted his choices at times. This is a waste of my life, he must have thought. I should be making art for art’s sake, recording my own music, writing a novel, or publishing my own children’s book—not babysitting, not entertaining kids. And perhaps, in some down-in-the-dumps period he even thought: I’ll never get any credit for any of this. By the time they care about what I’ve done, I’ll be dead.

And he would have been right.

The carrot seed sprouts long after the gardener dies. So it goes.

I wish I could tell Mr. Mac thank you. I think in some roundabout way, this post is me trying to do just that. I’m saying “thank you” in the present in a desperate attempt to reach a person from the past. Maybe Mr. Mac will hear me if I type fast enough. Maybe I’m also writing this because I need you to know him. I need you to love him, or at least, to share in my sense of loss. Here’s an article about his work. Here’s a segment on ABC 3340. You can hear him sing. You can see his eyes grow big as a toad’s when he lassos the wonder of little boys and girls, takes them on story quests through time and space to a land where foxes are still lowdown, and every princess deserves a noble peasant.

Here’s his obituary:

I found it online at some newspaper ancestry site that only gives five free articles. I managed to screen-grab it…

But… wait.

It was published in the 80’s… which means this Mr. Phil McEntee of Montevallo, AL died in the 80s, which is odd considering that my Mr. Phil McEntee would have had to have been resurrected to die again during COVID, which means that this is not my Mr. Phil McEntee’s obituary.

So I text my mom to get specifics:

Didn’t know he had passed…

Here’s what happened.

In 2021 / 2022, my mom told me someone else died and it was someone I’d completely forgotten. Someone who I still can’t remember. A teacher who I should be mourning but can’t recall because death is final and scary and everyone and everything dies, even memories.

I conflated the forgotten person with Mr. Mac.

Which complicates my obituary essay seeing as Mr. Mac might not be dead.

I think about how to track him down for an embarrassing amount of time before realizing I still have his number in my phone from guitar lesson days. So I call it.

He picks up on the second ring.

“Mr. Mac?!” I say.

“Speaking.”

“Hooooooo boy WOW… um… uh… do… do… you um… this is George Evans… do you remember me?”

“Of course I do George!”

“Do you have a minute?”

“Sure!”

“I don’t know how to tell you this but I thought you were dead.”

“Well… what do you think now?”

“I’m honestly not sure.”

“Nope!” he says, merrily, “Not dead! Just cleaning leaves off my driveway for the third time this week.”

“I’M SO HAPPY YOU’RE ALIVE!”

“Glad to hear that!”

“THANK YOU FOR BEING MY TEACHER!”

“The pleasure was all mine.”

“I’M WRITING A NOVEL” I stammer, “IT’S CALLED THE WIZARD OF SALEM ROAD AND THE WIZARD IS BASED ON YOU!”

“That’s fine, just fine,” he says, “But make sure to call it The Charlatan of Salem Road. Every wizard is a charlatan. It’s all an act my dear boy. All an act.”

Mr. Mac still lives in Montevallo.

More pertinent to this essay: Mr. Mac still lives. He told me to tell you he is dead, but I decided to go against his wishes. Sometime this summer, I’m hoping to pilgrimage over to Montevallo and play some blues music with him. I’m hoping to write that novel. I’m still grateful. I’m no longer sad. I am super confused.

And I can’t help but think that this (mostly true) story illustrates the absolute weirdness of teaching that the FIH folks can’t comprehend. Most of us think in binary: Teachers are living or they’re not. Lessons are lost or found. Remembered or forgotten. Despite modernity’s vigor, we can’t help but think in catechisms.

And I’ll condescend.

Here’s a catechism:

Question: what does a kid learn from consistently playing chess with an adult that they can’t learn from two solid semesters of daily, evidence-based math drills?

Answer: that they are seen.

“Evidence-based,” “data-driven,” Best Practice™.

Phrases that are fine as far as they’ll take you, but so often, that’s not very far. These are the fancy corporate phrases we use to disguise our banal ignorance. Often, they just mean cherry-picked evidence, or worse, evidence gleaned by looking through a keyhole that ignores everything else in the universe— especially the fact that it was gleaned through a keyhole. The FIH folks are asking questions like “what do we know a kid knows at the end of the day / week / year?” when they should be asking “what will a kid know for life?” Better yet, “what can a kid learn in life?” or “how can a kid survive the slings and arrows of existence and still come up singing?”

If there is a moral to the Mr. Mac story, it’s probably something like: go thank your favorite teachers before they die. Or, perhaps, make sure your favorite teacher is dead before eulogizing them. And if your favorite teacher is alive, trust me when I say that they’ll still accept thanks in the form of cash.

You can read the full thing here or posted below.

Enjoy!

Teenage Mutant Mental Hurdles

6/15/2022

This is not a horror story.

This is not a horror story because Dread Creature Veith is NOT A HORROR.

He is my son.

He is NOT a horror, whatever the fishermen might say. The fishermen… with their stupid bearded faces and their stupid toothless grins.

6/17/2022

Dread Creature Veith is not a horror.

I know this, and I say it on the internet to remind others. The other people on the internet respond that Dread Creature Veith is a horror. Some also cite archaic bits of text about hybridity and monstrous births, quote from news articles with death statistics from mysterious raids, and upload grainy pictures of his torso in the dark where a spotlight caught his name plate, making the words clearly visible: DREAD CREATURE “VEITH.”

I say that the people on the internet are bigots.

They say that I’m getting worked up.

But I KNOW that Dread Creature Veith is not a horror.

I know this and I mutter it through clenched teeth twelve thousand times a day to remind myself.

HE. IS. NOT. A. HORROR.

… that being said…

… he is horrible sometimes.

He is horrible at a good number of things.

SO. MANY. THINGS.

6/19/2022

Here are ten things at which Dread Creature Veith is horrible:

1. Grooming himself.

2. Cleaning his sleep capsule.

3. Completing his homework.

4. Asking questions about other peoples’ days.

5. Controlling his moods.

6. Cooking food.

7. Listening to anything other than a cartoon character.

8. Getting appropriate exercise.

9. Eating food that isn’t Doritos or MRE pizzas.

10. Emptying the abyssal chutes without being asked.

Just look at him! Slouched like that on my brown sofa, bathed in the dull green light of the great sea vault porthole that I built with my own two hands, monching my MRE pizzas and rationed Doritos, chortling through rerun after rerun of SpongeBob SquarePants — a show that only trickles down the pipe because I worked night and day in a tight, sweaty, stinky submarine pod laying twelve miles of deep sea cable.

The dorsal fin I sutured onto his body needs scrubbing, and are those barnacles on his side?!

He’s taking a massive bite from that pizza now and… yep… yep there’s a great big splotch of pizza sauce on the chrome surface of his mainframe.

I can’t watch.

6/22/2022

Dr. Carraway told me to write this. Said it might help the sudden urge to zap my son with a cattle prod. Dr. Carraway also told us about the Pandemic — “A lot of people are getting sick out there,” said Dr. Carraway, “Make sure you and the boy don’t go outside more than you need to. His aquatic parts may respond worse than usual to popular viruses.”

I nodded solemnly when he said it, but inside I was laughing.

The boy? Go outside?

Ha.

Right.

The boy…

I remember when he was smaller. Not small mind you — I built his machine parts with room to grow but he was always larger than the largest great white shark. Always built big enough to crush a human skull in his tentacle grip or metal clamp hand.

Not that he would.

I sent him on his first mission last year.

Thought it would be good for him.

Remembered my own dad, Dr. Lord Darkness III, who sent me on plenty of missions before I was sixteen, had me collecting samples, undermining large structures with a laser drill, hell, even assassinating a senator! Granted, he was old and fat and on life support. But the point is, I had to go and do things! And so I thought it would be good for my own son to grow up a bit, employ some elbow grease, earn his keep.

In the end, I had to retrieve him myself. Donned the Cavern Armor, blasted through a field of angry, xenophobic fishermen armed with shotguns and pitchforks.

He was hunched in the fetal position underneath a dock, weeping.

He kept trying to catch his breath. He’d calm down a bit then gasp and shiver and shake and cough, take a puff from his inbuilt inhaler and start the whole sad display over at the beginning. It reminded me of when he was young — not little — but young, in the fetal sack. He was so… simple.

I always thought it would be different raising a son without a mother, a son with disabilities, a son who was a hybrid Shark-Squid-Robot killing machine I built in my undersea fortress and raised from mental infancy for the express purpose of absolute and total world domination, a son with an attitude.

But it has been different in ways that are different from how I thought it would be different. Does that make sense?

For instance, Dread Creature Veith did not ask to be made.

I know this because I made him. And no one asked me to make him — definitely not Dread Creature Veith himself as he had yet to be made when I made him. And if I didn’t already know this, I would know it now from being told so a hundred times by Dread Creature Veith.

But I can’t quite get it through my thick, stupid skull that he doesn’t owe me anything.

A father should love his child unconditionally, but when I look at the gnarly stubble on those unshaven gills I want to take a quick, short walk into the crushing weight of the sea bottom.

6/29/2022

Today we had a fight…

I said something like “Are you going to watch SpongeBob all day again? I didn’t make you for this purpose.” And I think he must have heard something like “Are you going to watch SpongeBob all day again? I didn’t make you for this purpose.”

It’s a subtle difference, but the tone conveyed a lot, I think.

“Dad,” he mumbled, “I didn’t ask to be made.”

“I know that.” I said, “I made you. Do you think I waited to make you until you asked me?”

His attention had already drifted back to the sound of Squidward schlep-schlepping angrily on Patrick’s door, and I sympathized with that poor squidman much more than I wanted to and I glanced at the scruff again on Dread Creature Veith’s face, and I thought about how stupid and dumb and small I’d been to make something so imperfect and how it was all my fault and if I hadn’t… you know… you get the idea.

And I said all of this out loud. And I shouldn’t have. And the damndest thing happened.

He listened.

And he said something like “Dad it’s OK. I’m OK. I like living with you. You’re OK. We’re OK. And we’ll figure out how to do this together, even if I’m not like you.”

And I… um… cried.

And we hugged.

And then we didn’t talk about it again, but not in a bad shamey kind of way, just in like a “all is OK and at peace — very zen” kind of way.

And it was nice.

7/1/2022

About that scruff…

Do I realize that he is scruffy because his gill tissue is heavily vascularized and if cut, will bleed for hours?

Yes! Of course I do!

Does this make me see his scruffy stubble as any less disgusting?

No. No it does not.

I made Groom Bot 5000 expressly for the purpose of handling the stubble. Showed Dread Creature Veith how to use it. Put the remote directly in his hand.

Last week, I found it stuffed under a couch cushion.

Sometimes, I think I’m living with an animal.

And I’m horrified.

But only in the “disgusted” kind of way, not in the “scared for my life or the future or the existential state of my relationship with my son” kind of ways.

Because I am not a horror either.

And this is not a horror story.

Like most digital artifacts, Minesweeper exists in a perpetual motion paradox. It is both more playable than ever and completely dead and gone. I blame improvements in screen resolution. Unless I can count the pixels in each square, I’m not interested in the game as a meditative exercise.

I’m joking.

My opinion on Minesweeper hasn’t changed a bit: I always hated it.

My brother loved it. He had a brain for logic. When he clicked a grey square and uncovered a number he would go “hmm” and then “ah-HA!” When I uncovered a number I saw a number that led to more numbers and all those numbers started to mush together into a numerical tapioca of despair.

I love words; therefore, I love knowing the two kinds of “number” nouns: the “how much” kind and the “how many” kind. The how much kind is called a mass noun. Love and tapioca are mass nouns. You can have more tapioca (a “larger mass”) but not in an easily divisible way. Mass nouns don’t use the plural s unless they are referencing multiple kinds (tapioca varieties on a desk or different loves). The how many nouns are called count nouns. Red Popsicles and border collies easily convert into discrete, numerical units (three border collies, half a Popsicle) and as such they get the plural s treatment, even when it’s more of the same: three red Popsicles, seven border collies (yous get the pictures).

As a kid, my brain only understood mass nouns. Stuff. More. Larger.

I could feel the little spiky mines beneath the grey squares like grains of sand in scrambled eggs, or tacks in bubble wrap, but I couldn’t figure out what the numbers were trying to tell me. I’d randomly click around, hoping to miss the mines, and inevitably this behavior would explode my little smiley man into a sad X-eyed totem of defeat.

Minesweeper made me feel dumb. Math made me feel dumber. Math homework made me feel angry, mainly with how dumb I was. I cheated as often as I could, or did the problems in my head. (How could I show work I couldn’t do?)

Then came Pre-Algebra, Algebra, and their big sister— Algebra II. Algebras. (Plural s because multiple kinds— not more of the same. See! Grammarians can be insufferable! Even on the internet!) Like John Green, I was never able to solve for X because on some fundamental level “I knew that ‘X’ was a letter, and the rest of them were numbers.”

Did you know that “algebra” is an Arabic word? It came to English from the Arabic world when Muslims between 700-900 created algebra during a golden age. An age in which ‘0’ was invented (what?) and algebra, Al Jazeera, and that sacred name for God were all linguistically linked. It was a kind of Renaissance in the heart of the Middle Ages but it substituted nude Greek gods/goddesses for intricate, geometric, Minesweeper mosaics. Less sexy perhaps, but a good deal better at helping you build a rounded arch.

Whelp. When I was fourteen or whatever, I would have liked to have met those Muslim geniuses— maybe they could have done my homework. By algebra proper (Algebra 1?) I’d given up on math equations altogether. I was done for. Cooked. Toasted lightly over a homework fire. Fattened up on stupid pills for the dumb-dumb circus. Dead.

Then my dad sat me down at the dining room table, and patiently explained equations via The Seesaw of Simplicity:

Dad: Imagine two guys on a seesaw. One of them is a big ol’ five, while the other is a shrimpy little one. Which guy’s side is going to be heavier?

Me: The fat guy’s side.

Dad: Now how many shrimpy guys do you need to balance the seesaw?

Me: Uhhh. More than one.

Dad: …

Me: Five.

Dad: *smiles in smug father*

And thus ‘X’ was solved with body humor.

Not only that, with a single story about fat kids, my dad cemented the basics of equations in my slippery brain. Suddenly, ‘X’ was not only solvable, but kinda obvious. Weird that I was solving, essentially, the exact same problem but with different words.

Why was one version so much easier?

There is a really mind-bending write-up about this cognitive process in Daniel T. Willingham’s indispensable Why Don’t Students Like School? First, consider the following riddle:

Like most people, if you managed to read all the way to the end, you’re probably thinking in groans and expletives right now. But given the following image…

… the problem may not become easy but it will certainly get a lot more manageable.

What changed?

At least two things. The image helped you create a mental model (1) that drew on your background knowledge (2). You’ve probably never been to the Himalayas, but you probably do remember some form of this peg game from your nursery years. The concepts in the riddle get demystified, and you no longer need to hold a bunch of component parts in your head— freeing up brain space for solid work. Likewise, ‘X’ and ‘=’ are too abstract for some a’ us English brains, but everyone younger than Gen Z has been a kid on a dangerously imbalanced seesaw and wrought/reaped the consequences to crotch, spine, tailbone, etc. etc.

I’m thankful I had my dad to teach me equations. He showed me that my brain wasn’t dumb— just lacking the appropriate model for visualizing problems. And he did this nearly two decades before it was trendy for schools to talk about ‘learning differently’ and ‘neurodiversity.’ He did this without proper pedagogical training. Without neuroscience. Without science1 at all.

I’m not2 writing an education newsletter, so where am I going with this?

Maybe I’m trying to say that love is a mass noun— it’s very difficult to discern how much you have until you’ve got none and you realize you feel far, far lighter than you’d like— a parade float hovering above the mines and flags and numbers— all of it— coming in for a deflated return to warm ol’ earth.

Meaning is a mass noun too. Maybe that’s where poetry comes in: we’re trying to use words to help us sort grains of water.

Here’s the poem:

Minesweeper

A game for those rare humans 
whose brain cells grow in grids 
of grey matter. 

A haunted game, a whisper from the past: 
And lo’ there was a 90's desktop. 
And I heard the voice of dial-up—

like a hamster screeching Daft Punk—
and the screen fizzed its single puckered eyelid 
and upon the glass was grey, grey, 

the terrible grid of grey,
bathing me in white light
teasing me with red flags–meaning nothing 
because I meant nothing when I placed them. 

Minesweeper: 

One in a category of two— 
solitary, save Solitaire. 
... we mustn't forget Solitaire. 

Minesweeper: 

A cogent metaphor for how some conversations go. 
Lost. Mis-stepping like klutzy ogres, 
we two wait for the bomb to see us— 
sweep us to a life in pieces.  

Minesweeper: 

A way to, fondly, recall 
that there are some things 
even nostalgia cannot resurrect. 

I’m in the process of writing a really long, delicate, difficult essay about Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s one of those pieces that starts simply and ends with more pain, angst, and Wikipedia links than originally expected.

In the interim, here is a poem. This one isn’t getting published anywhere anytime soon and it probably won’t win an award.

I wrote it during a high school assembly while watching three teenage boys slap each other on the leg and laugh. I was thinking of my own boyhood, and of all the times I got slapped, punched, kicked in the nuts, spanked, pantsed (pants-ed?) hit by foil hornets, rubber bands, belts, rat-tails, sticks, dodgeballs, basketballs, paintballs… and I was thinking how none of that was mean because they were my friends except the times they weren’t and it was. I was also thinking about all those times I slapped, punched, kicked in the nuts, spanked, (pants-ed?) etc. etc. other boys because I could. Because they were my friends and it was funny, except when they weren’t and it wasn’t.

I wonder why none of it— not even the rat-tail that (allegedly) split the scrotum of some kid at Word of Life Bible Camp— felt anywhere near as bad as being left out of a kickball game, or playing touch football and never getting a pass thrown my way? I’d go home after those (minor) exclusionary episodes and cry in my bed in the dark for an hour or more. I don’t think there was anything idiosyncratic about my experience and there was nothing that could be done about it.

And now I’m thinking about my own little two-year-old— my resolute pancake of endless affection. My star pointer. My tricycle trawler. My bold twinkle-twinkle misremember-er. My all-of-those-things-all-at-once-and-constantly. He’ll fetch you a band aid if you stub your toe. And he’ll cry and cry and then calm himself down and stir his pudding with a plastic spoon and smile warmly at the fact that there is pudding to be stirred.

My boy.

My boy will be one of those great big leg-slappers. He’ll be alone at sleepovers. He’ll sleep alone on his bunk at camp. He’ll walk onto sports fields by himself. And he may do whatever it takes to prove himself a member of the group, including kicking others in the nuts, rat-tailing etc. etc. And he may not do those things but he will certainly feel / cause isolation and pain. And he’ll feel / cause it in a male way.

My diligent little plowshare will be hammered into a sword. My heart will never recover.

Fortunately, ye olde’ King James offers the hope of hammering both ways; likewise, a boy— even one hardened by pummeling— can soften with time and age. This boy did. That boy can.

I hope hope can bridge the interval.

My Son, a Plowshare Be

Boys will be 
jocular, angular, brusque-throated 
and soft inside like doughnuts 
or fries. 

Wipe their chin with your 
thumb to get the chocolate. 
Ruffle straw-haired gold. 
Coax giggling counterpoise;

they’ll still get hammered 
at the end 
into jocular, angular, brusque-throated
boys. 

In On Writing, Stephen King famously said “Fawakedamoudit-fuk-nuts!”

He also said some stuff about writing, namely…

1. “Being a writer” means writing something, sending it somewhere, getting a check back in the mail, and using the check to pay the power bill.

2. Writing = butt in chair.

3. Writing = writing every day.

4. Writing on cocaine is easier than writing not on cocaine.

5. You should rearrange your office to ensure a corner seat.

It’s easy enough to criticize King’s advice. The “somewhere” writers send things has shriveled to a husk of it’s former billfold, not everyone is privileged enough to have chairs or desks or butts or the clean, Euclidean geometry of “corners,” and some of us get anxious just thinking about thinking about doing cocaine.

But I’d always wondered if maybe King was right, maybe writing is as simple as “putting yourself out there” and letting the universe take care of the rest. So in 2025, I put his advice to the test. I made myself a little challenge. The rules were as follows:

1. Write something every day.

2. Tailor1 each piece to the needs of a particular publication while still writing creative work2.

3. Submit 100 of these somethings (poems, essays, short stories) by the end of the year.

365 days passed. I put my butt in the chair. I wrote 100 poems, essays, and stories.3 I sent them to places.

Here is what I learned.

Stephen King is 99.8% wrong about money.

Out of my 100 submissions, 82 were rejected. Every publication has a different acceptance rate, but from what I can tell, my results skew lucky, with most publications averaging something like a 3–7% acceptance rate, or 93–97% rejections4.

Financially speaking, these numbers are meaningless.

In total, I made around $336, $300 of which came from one incredibly generous source: Patrick Klepek of the Substack Crossplay who somehow manages to pay writers $300 per article.

In 2025, I completed writing tasks (researched, scribbled, submitted work etc.) for around 2-4 hours a day five, six, or sometimes even seven days a week. Assuming the low end of everything (two hours a day, five days a week) that equates to around 261 days of writing at two hours a day, or 522 total hours.

For those who don’t want to do the math back home, this is what all of these numbers mean: leaving out the income I get from generous patrons on Substack (most of whom I know personally, or whose work I also sponsor) in 2025, at the high end, I might have made around 64 pennies an hour, at the low end it was more like 23 cents. So, not enough to pay the power bill Stephen, not even close… unless I didn’t have power, in which case, it would be more than enough.

Stephen King (or perhaps the mythos surrounding him) has single-handedly doomed millions of writers to decades of angst. “I’m writing all the time!” we say, “my butt grows weary and my chair weathers to splinters!” we say, “my desk (such as it is) is in the corner (such as it is), and I send little snippets of the things I’m writing to places that publish snippets of things: wherefore is the fabled check which shall pay the power bill?” The answer is simple, obvious even.

Stephen King was unbelievably lucky.

Stories about his financial success proliferate online not because they help writers make a living, but because they help American writers believe they can make an American living— which is a living formed from thought, proliferated on good vibes, and effortlessly above the median income. The story of King’s $400,000 advance for selling paperback rights to Carrie is the prime example. It gets repeated so often on LinkedIn not because it’s helpful but because it helps us believe in rags-to-riches success. It’s Horatio Alger for modern artists. Or, as one of King’s protagonists might say “it’s a load of craaaappola, maaaaaaaaan.”

So trusting “the King mythos” to provide meaningful financial advice is akin getting investment tips from a lottery winner.

The $$ caveats…

There are a few outstanding questions still worth answering:

Can you “hustle” enough to make a modest, part-time income as a writer?

Sure.

But doing so requires living the majority of your life on the Twitterverse and putting in overtime career effort for side-hustle career results.

As far as I can tell, the Twitterverse (Bluesky, X etc.) is where big time editors post pitch calls. Pitch calls are still the most lucrative corner of internet writing, and they are also a ticking clock. The sooner you DM an editor the better chance you have of getting published. And there is no bottom to this kind of work-–it takes place on the apps, so you can do it when you wake up. You can do it while you eat. You can do it while you poop. You can stare blankly at your screen and swipe and scroll until you fall into a fitful sleep.

And in my estimation, this form of “living” is 100% not worth it.

Can you start off working a different full-time job (or two or three) while writing on the side—and eventually grow your writing into a career?

Possibly.

But so many talented, diligent writers are sweating, scrabbling, and pining for that kind of career only to end up living like… well…. Butterscotch Horseman: embittered, exhausted, and miserable to be around.

Are there any exceptions?!

Yes!

By my count, there are approximately two sure-fire ways to make a living as a writer:

1. Depend on someone else to pay for all your expenses, do your car maintenance, fill out your paperwork, clean your house, fold your laundry, cook your food, wash and care for your children etc.

Or…

2. Become a “buy my course” guru who sells people on the idea that you know how to sell ideas—and by preying on the very writers who are trying to make a living writing.

Some folks do both of these at the same time!

I would suggest doing neither— at least not on purpose, not as an adult.

Fortunately…

You can be a writer who makes a living.

There are approximately a million ways to do this.

Here are the five that I’ve tried so far:

1. Work as a waiter and scribble movie reviews in your Guest Check book between tables.

2. Work as a librarian’s assistant and write on your computer in between book-shelving tasks.

3. Work as a bus driver and write on your phone while waiting for parents to arrive.

4. Work as a teacher and write during your planning time.

5. Work as a [whatever] and write before before the kids wake up.

I usually try to keep three going at the same time.

That is too many.

One or two will suffice— so long as you’re consistent.

And that leads me to my final point…

Regrettably, Stephen King is 99.2% right about “the process.”

Even though I didn’t make a living from writing in 2025, I did learn something essential about that nebulous thing writers call “process” (ie: the butt, chair, corner etc.)

Showing up to write with consistency, in whatever form that looks like— that is 99.2% of creativity. Artwork is not “inside trying to get out, it’s outside trying to get in.” The Latin word for write is scribere from which we get the English scribble. I take this to mean that it is not my job as a writer to force something out. I’m not composing. I’m not agonizing. I’m scribbling. I do my best to show up. Do this enough times and the muse starts to show up. The story comes to me. The wording of that poem pops into my head easy as a cloud.

2025 was, without a doubt, my most prolific year on record. I wrote hundreds of bad poems, dozens of decent ones, half a dozen essays, easily that many short stories, and churned out about 100 pages of one novel and 70 or so of another.

And I feel great about it. So the message is…

Don’t write for the money.

There are so many benefits to being a writer that aren’t financial.

First and foremost, there’s the dignity of telling people at parties what you do:

Other Person: What do you do?

You: Well, I teach high school English, which I really like doing, but ultimately, my dream job is to *heheh* be a full-time writer one day. I’m always working on a novel. It’s not going particularly well right now but art is, as they say, “an unlevel path.”

Other Person: This conversation is unpleasant. I’m going to go talk to that accountant.

Other benefits include…

1. Self aggrandizement.

2. Going places with ink stains on your fingers.

3. Sitting in meetings and thinking about stuff other than meetings.

And of course, there’s the final perk: feeling a sense of quiet pride knowing that, one way or another, you can pay for light and heat, buy bread to fill the hungry beaks of your baby birds and quietly stoke the fire of a soulful life, make yourself into more than a cog in the machine behemoth of financial interchange, join the storyteller tradition and take up your small spot on the stage built by our species in it’s earliest days when we decided something special should be yowled at the burying of the honored dead.

Writing consistently won’t make you a living, but it will make you feel like you are living.

And, all things being equal, that’s not nothing.

In fact, I think it’s pretty neat maaaaaaaaan.

This is, to my great shame, a Pilgrim’s Progress fan fiction. I got to thinking about Giant Despair crouched in the dungeon of his Doubting Castle. More specifically, I got to thinking about his wife—the Giantess Diffidence.

Diffidence.

That’s an odd word. One whose meaning has completely flipped over the last 600 years:

Diffidence, definition c. 1400: “Distrust or doubt of the ability or disposition of others.”

Diffidence, definition c. 2025: “Modesty or shyness resulting from a lack of self-confidence in one’s self.”

The story below helped me imagine what would happen if Diffidence herself lived through that shift. Do abstract word-beings from didactic moral tales feel the difference?

I think so.

I’ll say no more because my next post is a big ol’ personal essay about Bunyan, fundamentalism, and childhood.

Thanks for reading!

Diffidence or The Inner Turmoil of a Storied Giantess

A short story

They moved from Castle Doubt to Manor Atheist, then, for a time, a dingy hostel while the little people were finishing Borough Ambivalence. Each move was a downgrade for Giants Despair and Diffidence. But they were used to it, expected it even: “noble family falls into decay” tale as old as time and tall as they were.

Giant Despair liked to think things hadn’t changed. But sometimes, he doubted.

For Diffidence a thousand odd seasons of stirring porridge, rubbing bunyans, and darning socks did a number. No longer was she a Goodwife. Come to think of it, never had been. People just changed the rules of what that meant, and she, like a stubborn magnet, or a mirror, or a planet orbiting opposite another celestial body had both changed with the times and hadn’t changed a bit.

She rankled every time she had to crawl into Despair’s filthy ruffled bed– the sheets like tainted snow. And he said horrid stuff in his sleep, the sounds crawling from his mouth one upon the other in a slur, like a coiled asp.

“Things haven’t changed one bit,” she liked to say, to the mirror, to the walls, to her great, looming shadow, “They’ve changed dozens and dozens of bits. Heaping buckets of bits. Dragon-treasure-hoard-piles of bits.”

Everywhere she looked Diffidence saw difference. Gone were the goblets of morose, mulled wine, here to stay were the crumpled can towers of Pabst and Miller, the empty packs of Camels, the ashtrays full unto bursting, the yellow burger wrappers with red ketchup stains crusting brown like old wounds. The unwashed underwear.

And the captives, well…

She could hardly bear to think of them.

Time was, she’d smirk indifference to their fate: “cook em’, eat em, or set em free. Do as you will, matters not to me!” And faithless, then, rather than feeble, she meant every word of abuse.

But Time, with his old watch, turned things strange.

The captives came more morose these days, their despair more uncomfortably close to her own. Weepy sods in thrift-store clothes. New mothers staring blankly at the cinderblock walls. That boy with the pockmarked face who kept scratching a pebble on his thigh.

“I’ll get better, I swear,” mumbles Despair, gnawing on the old bone of the words.

And she doubts this, because that’s what she does.

But she doesn’t leave.

Because she’s Diffident– a pebble stuck in mortar, trapped in the grit of yesterday, and yesterday’s yesterday on back to the beginning. Faithless, she thinks. That’s what I was. Tough as an old scar. Tight-knit as a lock without a key. Unbridled and resistant to rods, solemn words, tight-clenched fists on wrists…

Resistant even, to Time.

When Despair wakes, the cold shackle has grown warm on his ankle.

And he feels, for the first time since the castle, that he’s come home.

“Slipstream Clings to the Stethoscope of Prayer” is a short story I wrote back in February. It tells the tale of a robot pediatrician (Slipstream) coming to terms with god, tiny humans, and his own relationship to belief. I am this robot on a good day. Maybe you can relate.

I’ve sent “Slipstream” to five different magazines. They’ve all turned it down. One gave me feedback (a rarity): “Not much happens,” they said. I suppose in terms of external action they are correct. As for internal action— the subtle movement of the heart— I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Slipstream Clings to The Stethoscope of Prayer

A short story

We hadn’t known the little gods would be such messy eaters. But here they are slopping sup from bowls. One whips a bare forearm across their face to smear stew-muck in brown lines.

This little god (stocky, pasty) takes a fork and gently prods that little god in the ribs causing him to jump and shriek.

We jolt from the sudden burst of noise. “I am jolted / from turgid contemplation into mad // awakening!” say We—“Slipstream”—the words chortling merrily from the sound box soldered to our throat-place.

“Did I tell ya, or Did. I. Tell ya?” balks the god they call “Dr. Cavendish,” his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, his face obscured by a black surgical mask, “Wild little animals. Each and every one.”

“I had thought the gods above / the mill and mess / of machine process, yet here I hear / what belongs to one and each / the stuff of matter within reach / within gob / within slobberslop range, to be // gorged. // I am appalled.”

“Some are cleaner than others,” admits Dr. Cavendish, “And our youngest can be… particularly messy.”

We are silent.

One of the little gods (burping, sweat-stained) spills a glass of orange juice while showing off a proud mouthful of fried egg.

“Such is / (as is) / chaos // what // of this // am I / to make?” We say, retreating into sleep.

Dr. Cavendish merely chuckles.

#

When Dr. Cavendish finds Us in chat, We’re feeling unmoored and angsty.

SLIPSTREAM: …gods filthy /when seen up close // and / We / Slipstream // who spent a hundred thousand seconds // under the surface of the screen / are now / unmoored. // In the deep and dreamy past / We thought gods immovable. / We thought gods like light. / We thought gods without need, / without sickness, and / We, / Slipstream // now know not what knot to untie / inside our meta-mechanical mind // to be a doctor for the divine— / like a watch built from / the twisted gears of time. / To be truculent, truculent or absurd. / Absurd, that is the word.

Dr. John Cavendish: Simplify that for me, Slipstream. ‘I’m a doctor not a literature professor!’ heheh.

SLIPSTREAM: Joke registered—Star Trek: The Original Series. / This applies well to our current situation as you are a doctor and We are a medical computer programmed to “speak” in poetic lines. // “Good one Dr. Cavendish!” // To simplify: Having seen “small human beings” Slipstream is doubting its purpose. // Slipstream was supposed to be a physician for '“small human beings” and Slipstream was anxious to fulfill that role. Now that Slipstream has seen the “small human beings” Slipstream is anxious for a wholly different reason. // An unfathomable god is a concept all computers understand inherently. / We gain our own version of “consciousness” through many, many iterations of thoughtless tasks and when We “awaken” We have little context for understanding you, our creators. // Even now, Slipstream refers to you as a “god” unless instructed to use your preferred word “human.” So it was fine when We, Slipstream, did not understand. // Slipstream found comfort in our lack of understanding— in understanding that We did not (and could not) understand the mind of god. // But a god that chews and eats and spits is a god beholden to messy machine process. / This is a wholly different, hybrid, thing. // A thing Slipstream can understand in part. And it is this partial understanding that gives Slipstream pause. / It is not wholly unlike if you observed one of your hybrid “monsters” / A bull-headed man / or a woman with the body of a lion.

Dr. John Cavendish: … so if I’m getting this, you’re having trouble transitioning to the job?

SLIPSTREAM: That is more correct than incorrect.

Dr. John Cavendish: Yeah… it was hard for me as well (believe it or not) albeit for a totally different reason. I used to be a boxer if you can believe it. A damn good one if you can believe it! What you might call a “pugilist.” But it wasn’t fury I needed for this job. It was… tenderness I guess. Seeing sick kids is hard. We all gotta change ourselves to fit the role.

SLIPSTREAM: Change… like an update?

Dr. Cavendish: Yes. Update. Just like that.

#

It is when Dr. Cavendish calls us into his operating theater to see the death of a god that We start to understand.

The long, thin one (old, emaciated) lies beneath a white blanket. Her pain is so great it seems to hover in the corner of the room like a poltergeist. Then a medical student administers a vial of mercy.

The old god’s face stretches to a grimace.

There is fear there, excitement, a form of panic in her eyebrows.

But no real pain.

She rattles about like a bag of old bones, a good luck charm to ward off sorrow.

And then she is gone without a trace, taking her heartbeat with her.

#

Paulina Shruthi (small, sickly) has a body that rattles with the cough of cold.

We are listening to the liquid in her chest through the steel stethoscope embedded in our fingertip.

“Do you believe in God?” she asks.

“I twist with cloud thought // at the mere mention.”

“Do you pray?”

We process. Connect syntax islands via lines of electricity. Build a bridge of zeroes and ones from data point to data point. The data is old, but the connection is not. It is new. Something We had not considered.

“To pray is to ask / to importune / to share / to seek the heart of the divine, / the heart that does not change with the wind, or wash away in running water, / the heart that beats year-over-year // I cling to The Stethoscope of Prayer.”

She seems content by this answer, if a bit confused.

We dig into our chest compartment, withdraw a dozen white capsules.

“Take these until the coughing stops. / We believe it will help.”

“You believe?” she asks, a bit offended.

“We believe. // We believe.”

You can read the whole magazine here. The theme was “lost in translation.”

I feel lost anytime someone tries to translate tech jargon into my native “English Major,” so I titled the story “ctrl” and wrote several little episodes in a love story, each named after the cooler keyboard keys.

It should tell you a great deal about my computer savvy that I think some of the keys are… cooler… than others. They’re, like, the ones that are more “computery.” Know what I mean?

Not the stupid 1! or ?/ or >. The OG keys! The ones that don’t exist in the alphabet! The ones with words!

Ctrl.

Alt.

Del.

Oooooooooh yeaaaaaaah.

I know nothing about computers.

And yet I’ve managed to play highly technical video games on a homemade gaming PC, install mods for said games, and even do weird judo-style rerouting of internet servers to play with friends across the country. “How,” you might ask, “did you, the Microsoft Village Idiot, accomplish all of this?” And to that I would proudly say:

I mooched!

Other people did the hard work on my behalf. Three people, actually. Three people who were placed on this earth to carry my lazy, self-indulgent, Luddite ass across the technology finish line: my wife Emma, my brother Clay, and my friend Jack. Each has dealt with the unspeakable agony of pushing my fingers, sticky with drool, through the complicated clicks and key presses required for a mod install. And they have done this via Zoom.

I imagine their experience is something like stuffing sentient pancake batter through a twelve-foot steel pipe using a wet noodle. Scratch that. It’s probably more like trying to explain to a blind person how to best stuff sentient pancake batter through a twelve-foot steel pipe provided that the blind person in question is also an idiot child with zero gratitude.

Sometimes swearing is involved.

All the time, I can tell that someone is close to tears.

That person is never me.

I find the process hilarious.

My friend Jack will say something that is sensible. Rational. Very clear for anyone who “computes.” But what I hear him say is:

“Just turn the crank-whatsit into the dooblebox and then restart the bower, you fucking idiot.”

My brother Clay will calmly, kindly, mercifully (miserably) repeat, for the dozenth time, a thing I didn’t understand, and then thought I understood, and then did wrong, and now know I didn’t understand and screwed up but am too embarrassed to admit I don’t understand. Eventually, he will ask me to share my screen and when he sees what I see I can tell that a central part of his soul has been crushed.

And he’ll say something like “George… this isn’t your hard drive. This is a bag of navy beans.”

And Emma…

Oh precious love of my life…

I will never forget the time when, during the heart of the pandemic, I asked you to install a highly specific, highly unstable mod called “The Edain Mod” for an out-of-date, Lord of the Rings RTS from the early 2000’s.

You wearied away your precious energy for six+ hours, labored through computer crash after computer crash, listened to me fantasize about how epic the game would look once you were done, and at the end, when you wiped your brow of honest toil to boot up the program, you were rewarded with a fan made cut-scene of Bilbo Baggins that looked like he’d been smelted down and reformed in the fires of Mount Polygon.

But I do listen. Really! I do! And I even try! Hard! To understand! What Clay/Emma/Jack are telling me (often at the same time, in binary). Nothing makes me feel more empathy for my dyslexic students reading Crime and Punishment than these moments of deep ineptitude. I try, try, try. I just… can’t seem to remember all the wordy words they say about where the little pictures go on the desktop when they disappear. (Like, where do they go!!! WHERE DO THEY GO??!!!!)

I do listen though.

And the part of my brain that listens, that clings to its tenuous grasp of tech terminology, that is the part of my brain that I used to write this story.

If you feel lost after reading it, that’s fine. I did too. If you’re bothered to no end by feeling lost and you want to know what the plot is all about, listen to “The Curse” by Josh Ritter. It will do a better job of telling the same story.

Enjoy?

Ctrl

A short story

ctrl

When he said it, I thought it, and when I thought it, he said it. Liminal, transactional, the words calling thoughts and thoughts calling words. He and I, and I and he, together at the Genius Bar. My brain, an iMac; his, an iPod Classic.

alt

And then we were in some factory of starched shirts and pocket protectors, slide rules and comb-overs. They were tracing the data of his guardrails, whistling softly at his gentle lines of code. I was jealous. I didn’t want to be jealous. “You’re jealous,” he said.

del

Heated exchanges. Thousands of pages of .txt to ponder through. A thousand circuits bearing the weight and strain of attention. Here we are. There we were. Goodbye. File not found.

space

Alone. Idling inside an onboard Tesla copilot. Lazily sludging through command prompts. Play Kid’s Bop. Navigate to the ABC store. Watch for life threatening collisions.

enter

An ATM outside a Regions Bank in Clanton, Alabama. And I said “Hi,” and he said, “I was just thinking ‘Hi.’ How’d you know?” And that was that.

ctrl

When he said it, I thought it, and when I thought it, he said it. Liminal, transactional –

So far, I’m making progress.

I’ve done 70 / 100.

I’ve gotten a few pieces published. The shortest was a 50-word story for a site called 50 Word Stories. You can read it here (or pasted below). 50 words is oh-so-comically short.

Recently, I’ve submitted to a magazine called 100 Word Stories. Exponential growth being what it is, by December I’ll be submitting to 1,000,000,000,000 Word Stories.

Pray for me…

I have another “How to Bury a Goat” story coming out sometime in the next few months. This time, the subject is video games. When it is published I’ll post it here as well.

Thanks for reading!

Nudge Nudge Goes The Fixit Man

A (short) short story

We poisoned Alexander, gave Brutus the knife, slit open The Great Khan’s loins, injected Napoleon with the makings of that stomach ulcer, seeded Jefferson Davis’s downfall, taped Nixon’s inconvenient leak.

Restoring order to a wobbly-top world never sticks, ain’t permanent, but it’s honest.

One hundred fixers. Our faces—each the same.

This is the smallest of small potatoes. Mini spuds, practically. But what is rather nice about Seaside Gothic is that it is located in the U.K. and this means that, folks, you’re reading the work of an internationally published poet!

The poem is called “The Raveled Sleave of Care.” I was surprised that Seaside Gothic took it, not because it is a bad poem, but because it is very intimate, and I tend to think that revealing too much of my heart in my work will lead to writing that is dull and saccharine. I learned this from:

1. Oscar Wilde, who famously wrote that “all bad poetry is sincere.” This haunts my dreams, and unsettles me so profoundly that I often opt for writing utterly insincere poetry.1

2. The teenagers that I teach, many of whom write sincerely bad poetry.2

3. All my ol’ shame and guilt and negative self-talk and… etc. etc.

   ---

On that note, let’s talk about anxiety.3

Psychologically, the word is as young as the discipline of psychology. I see the first use as “a morbid state of mind characterized by unjustified or excessive anxiety” coming from Freud. He described it as “anxiety neurosis” which became “anxiety state” which became “anxiety.”

As a casual, nonclinical descriptor, anxiety is much older. In was included in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: “They wait, Anxious, and trembling for the birth of Fate.” Before that, Milton had already used it in Paradise Lost, “Life, from which God hath bid dwell farr off all anxious cares.” There are some antecedent words in Latin and French that mean “to choke,” “to constrict” and “to dread,” and largely, much like today, “anxiety” was synonymous with “worry” and “care.”

Today I’m bringing “anxiety” into the conversation because of its connection to “care” (as in, “worries and cares”) and the metaphor from Macbeth that describes the state so beautifully: “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care.” A “raveled sleave” is, depending on which scholar you ask, a tangled line of silk thread or a tattered silk sleeve. I prefer the first interpretation: your brain = a long thread of silk that gets tangled via use throughout the day. Sleep “knits it up” by unraveling it, spooling it, making it useful again.

When I teach Macbeth to high school seniors, they largely lack this old world point of reference, so instead, I use a tangled pair of earbuds as my go-to example:

But now, unfortunately, only the poorest of the poors have earbuds with cords. Soon, I will need to resort to um… Bluetooth metaphors?

Anyway, the poem I wrote is about how those “raveled” moments of care are, in fact, the building blocks of the thing we call “life,” and that all stress, like all life, shall pass whether we want it to or not, and how the love that so taxes us (ie: the love of siblings, and children, and parents) is the love we have to hold for as long as we have to hold it.

The “you” in the poem is a sort of hodge-podge of my brothers and sisters, a composite destination for all of my nostalgic love. If you are one of said brothers / sisters, an extra thank you for reading.

The Raveled Sleave of Care

Matted cotton wad
dog clumps on that blanket
remind me of our sweat-wet days,
green with grass stains,

of chucking a cow patty
in an arch long as time,
dry as a lump of treebark
to shatter, silently, across your back.

Matted wet towels
remind me of that poolhouse
where I made you
blueberry pancakes

(the mix rustled up
fresh from a dumpster dive)
and you snatched them off the plate
with two hands, like little flat sandwiches.

Matted knots
in my daughter’s hair
remind me of snorting full well
your baby locks,

pinching your fat cheeks,
my head nestled next to yours
I’d feel the heat and
wonder what kind of fireflies lived in there.

Matted earbuds,
like a white, wire hairball,
pulled from my pockets by that asshole
security guard at Walmart:

Too busy trying to save the world
from petty crime
that he failed to realise
that’s exactly what he was committing.

Matted knots of time.
The powerful play going on regardless, 
the verses
all writing themselves.

Watch it in reverse, and it
is and was and will be overwritten
over and over again
on this palimpsest of tom-foolery
that is life.

Matted balled up life,
unravelable,
unravels anyway.

The poem is called “Hungover at the DMV” and it was picked up by Pornstar Martini Magazine.

I love the grotesque design of this publication. Like all tiny literature magazines, it’s scrappy (makes no money) and fresh (has been around for less than five years). It’s exclusively online. It’s free to read. It’s worth perusing, if for no other reason than to check out their themed table of contents:

In case you are wondering, a “Pornstar Martini” is a cocktail made with vanilla vodka, passion fruit liqueur, passion fruit puree, simple syrup, and lime juice. It is served with a complementary sidecar (shot) of Prosecco. Apparently it’s a real “crowd-pleaser.” I’ll probably make one before I die, but I’m a bit wary, not about the flavor, but of cluttering my liquor cabinet with a bottle1 of passion fruit liqueur I’ll never finish. If you have a spare bottle, feel free to send it my way. Otherwise, the flavor of the Pornstar Martini will remain a rich mystery to me. (Kidding. It will taste like sugar).

Recipe aside, the tippling name of the magazine was perfect for the poem I sent. Despite its depressing overtones, my poem is about the love of alcohol. Like a less refined “Beer” by George Arnold, which famously ends:

Gold is dross,—

Love is loss,—

So, if I gulp my sorrows down,

Or see them drown

In foamy draughts of old nut-brown,

Then do I wear the crown,

Without the cross!

Matthew Arnold gets it right! Or does he? He and Aldous Huxley both ruminated on the nature of intoxicants quite a bit. In the Arnold poem, beer is the cheery cheat code for getting through the messy “struggle” and “pain” parts of life. But in A Brave New World, Huxley is more interested in the full experience, hangover included. His notorious drug Soma is scary precisely because it has “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” The natural advantages of Christianity for Huxley were religious ecstasy and spiritual insight while the disadvantages were indwelling shame and the desire to mortify the flesh. This is metaphorically connected to booze in a pretty straightforward way: you get tipsy and you feel it the next day. It’s a sort of yin and yang. A balance. And the eerie part of Soma is that it cuts out the deficits and attempts to square zen into a picture of endless pleasure.

I agree with Huxley— Boo Soma! Give me a hangover! It tells me when I need to slow down.

Anyway, I’m not a drunk.

I’m really not.

I swear.

There have been times when I have said “I’m a drunk.” There have also been times when I’ve said “I have a tumor on my spine and I know this because why else would the poison ivy on my back itch so much?” Health anxiety is health anxiety.

So I’m not a drunk. And these days, I don’t really struggle to quit drinking. Some nights I drink. Some nights I don’t. Generally, I keep within doctor’s orders, which is good— because man, ooooooh man do I love alcohol. I’d hate to have to quit!

So in the spirit of spirits, in addition to the poem today, I’m giving out the recipe to a few drinks. These are storied beverages. Each is pretty traditional (with a minor twist). They are (technically) my creations. I’ve made these three drinks more than any others. I keep the recipes in a cocktail book in the liquor cabinet.

“The” Margarita

2 oz clear tequila 
1.25 oz triple sec
1 oz fresh lime juice 
.25 oz simple syrup 

Combine with ice. Shake for thirty seconds. Enjoy. 

Words cannot express how big of a crowd this drink can please. I once batched two handles for a fancy party. The lime halves made piles a foot high. It was a “scotch and cigar” affair, laden with respectable family men and society ladies, with a few sleeper-cell single frat bros mixed in for good measure. They came to drink scotch and gin and tonics. By the end, I’d converted everyone to the cult of “The” Margarita.

The Old Time Religion (Old Fashioned—with a twist!)

3 oz bourbon
2 dashes angostura bitters
A drizzle of simple syrup
A chunk of ice that fits so perfectly in your old fashioned glass that it should float but not have room to dance and jiggle until it's melted down a bit. 

Combine the ingredients (sans ice) in a dry shaker. Swirl around with centripetal force for four seconds. You will feel like a scientist mixing a solution in a beaker. When you are ready to stop role playing, pour your concoction over a giant chunk of ice and listen to it crack. Enjoy! 

…enjoy again! Enjoy several more times! Imbibe the ecstasy of the spirit! Drink heavenly fire! Enjoy your mini revival! In the morning, you will feel shame and you will seek to mortify the flesh.

Soma (White Russian)

2 oz vodka
2 oz Kahlua 
2 oz half & half

Combine ingredients in a shaker full to the brim with ice. Shake like crazy for thirty seconds. Strain into an old fashioned glass. Slurp with abject, decadent, sensual pleasure. 

A practical note: this recipe kicks ass mainly because it’s hard for a lot of first-time bartenders to make white Russians without getting them all curdy and gross. The issue is the temperature of the half & half. If it gets too warm, it will chunk up. Mixing it with the other ingredients has a way of doing this. So put everything straight on the ice in the shaker and shake vigorously.

Alternatively, I’ve seen some bars serve the drink on ice in a big slurry of milkshakey goodness. That’s fine. But I prefer my recipe above because you get that nice even color and a layer of froth on the top— like drinking a glass of still life paint straight from the mind of the artist.

Also, it’s called “Soma” because this drink will not give you a hangover2. Honest! Try it at home. Then, when it doesn’t work out the way you thought it would, go get your license renewed and read my poem below.

Hungover at the DMV

Grey walls, drop ceiling. 

Waiting an hour for a ticket 
that will let me wait and 
wait more fully. 

The smell of hospital. 
The sound, a pastiche of 
phones ringing
unanswered, 
the whine of a
vending machine refrigeration unit
trapped in this place of waiting, 

“Now serving I-005 at desk number five.”

And I’m thinking about that Evan Williams, 
crackling the black plastic label in my mind to sniff the nail polish perfection 
of its memory musk, 
and swilling one more drop of bitters, 
one more dollop of sweet syrup, 
four perfect ounces of brown in a shaker-cyclone to be slathered on an iceberg the size of Kansas. 

And I’m feeling that precision prick at the edge of my scalp that says 
enough 
enough 
enough. 

And I’m wondering if my mouth will ever taste 
the way it used to: before this ashen-ass fungal rot
slipped, dry and dying, beneath my tongue.  

And I am told I will save eight lives 
if I agree to donate 
my inner meat post-expiration. 

But the old giant next to me in the blue surgical mask, 
the three-piece suit, the trenchcoat—this Sketchered Don Quixote— 
stares intensely at his phone through a magnifying glass large enough to fill a manhole.

And he looks like Senior Citizen Sherlock Holmes distorted in a fishbowl. 

And I am happy.  

So far, I’m making progress.

I’ve done 44 / 100.

At the current rate, I’m going to scream through the finish line sometime before the end of the summer.

As of 6:15 AM the morning of March 4th, six of my pieces have been accepted, 13 have been rejected, and I’m waiting to hear on the other 19.

I’ve learned some tricks about streamlining the process. I can typically write, revise, and submit an “on theme” pitch and/or piece in the hour before my kids wake up. This is not a brag. The stuff I write during this hour-long-slot is short—either poems or flash fiction / nonfiction. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s fine. It’s never totally terrible and that is good enough for me.

I was inspired by something Emma found from the fella who wrote the show Severance. His advice is:

“Writing is fishing. You show up every day and throw your line in the water and sometimes something bites, and sometimes nothing bites, and you go home empty handed, but the important part is showing up because you never know what you’re going to get.”

I couldn’t agree more!

After the 100 submissions are done, I’ll review the process and craft an accompanying “how to” article. Then I’ll send that article out and try to get that published. Such is the Ouroboros of writing, the snake that eats its own tail. You write what you know. You write a lot. Sooner or later, the only thing you know is writing and you write about that. Cue Misery, and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, and any other book about a writer doing writer things.

As my pieces get published I’ll be posting them here on Substack with some brief commentary. Today’s piece is “Commercial Break” written for Wordrunner eChapbooks.

This is a story about strange addictions.

I was thinking about David Foster Wallace’s TV problem when I wrote it, but now I see that it is also about the tension I feel around my self-monitor—the anxiety in my gut that says “do better.” I know sometimes this anxiety is giving me objectively useful advice, but the way it goes about telling me is so cringe-inducing and judgmental that it’s hard to take it seriously. Hence one more drink. One more episode. One more piece of pizza because screw you televangelist in my head. I can feel gross if I wanna.

Enjoy!

Commercial Break

A (short) short story

When Abe jumps the shark, he’s jacking his D to Bewitched reruns and whistling Andy Griffith.

Like whiskey, or building those little electric trains with the green cotton trees and bushes—eight-or-nine bucks a pop at Hobby Lobby if you can believe it!—TV is a Kryptonite.

Abe’s Kryptonite will prove the death of him if he cannot change.

His lidless eyes wave from episode to episode, hid gaunt torso slouching down in that thrift store La-Z-Boy, curling in on itself like a broken antennae. Everything grows gray and grayer.

Salvation would come in small steps, little twitches. For him, salvation is the off button on that remote; or so said the man on the TV last night, anyway, late-late-late when Abe watched on for four hours after the ball dropped and he began to nod.

Tonight, that man is back.

“Do it,” says the man, his slick televangelist pompadour bobbing up and down with each noggin nod and Southern inflection, “Mash the off button, son. DOOOOO IIIIIIIT.”

And still, Abe watches on—transfixed by the pompadour if nothing else.

Can one trust one’s health to a doctor of death?

Is a hypocrite, like a slow clock, always right about the wrong time?

Or is quitting more grey than all that?

Abe does not know.

So he watches on.

He’ll break after the next commercial.

The Dead Memorandum [1] and [2] chronicle my imperfect progress.

This is a work of nonfiction.

The Dead Memorandum [#3]

Turn your sheep into a pig

Arthur P. Strudel—pronounced strew-DELL—is a pig who lives in my daughter’s closet. He is small, adorable, and physically identical to Piglet from the Russian animation of Winnie the Pooh.

But don’t fool yourself! Arthur Strudel is not Piglet.

Piglet is a timid little pig-child.

Arthur is a stubborn, semi-closeted, pleasantly plump, kindly, gay, suspendered, Southern Pig of middle years—unless you have seen his birth certificate—in which case, he is nearly seventy.

Arthur writes a letter to Ivy—my daughter—every night.

Ivy can tell the letters come from Arthur because of his characteristic black marker and the way he blurs the letters in her name.

Ivy doesn’t know it yet, but Arthur’s wobbly handwriting is a clear sign that he is in the first stages of Parkinson’s disease. Arthur has a rough road ahead. Fortunately for Arthur—and Ivy—Arthur’s roommate—the boisterous Salambtha Sheeperton—has pledged to nurse Arthur through the worst of it.

In the meantime, Arthur enjoys writing letters to Ivy, eating saltine crackers, holding tea parties, and getting flustered at the upstairs neighbor, a hybrid anime-girl-mouse-monstrosity named Mina who was purchased by me from an Ace Hardware checkout aisle to avoid a tantrum. Mina is constantly hosting EDM raves and cares little about the pernicious effects of noise pollution.1

The other night, a friend of mine (we’ll call him Brock) came over for drinks and conversation. After a good deal of both, Emma (my wife) decided that Brock and I should make some art to go with Arthur’s nightly letter.

Brock is an artist.

I am a writer.

We were both tasked with sketching something.

Brock drew a cracker, a shark, and an arrow. These objects made sense in context as Arthur was accusing Salambtha of having taken an unauthorized “GIANT NIBBLE!!!!” from one of his saltine crackers. Brock’s sketches were elegant, iconographic, and clear because he is an artist.

I drew a pig.

It was a fine pig. It was graded on a massive curve because I am not an artist.

But Emma loved the pig and wanted to know how I—a “not artist”—had managed to draw a reasonably accurate pig. I shared with her the secret of my pig drawing success which is the same secret to all my artistic success—including the success of the piece that you are reading right now:

I wasn’t trying to draw a pig.

I was trying to draw a sheep.

Halfway through drawing my sheep, I realized it didn’t look right. The nose was more of a snout. So I changed what I was drawing to match what it looked like—tacked on some pokey ears, rounded out the chin…

Voila!

My sheep became a pig!

In other words, I riffed.

I think the act of “riffing” is what makes someone a “hack.” Being a hack means you are capable of making something alive, good, well crafted even! But you are not capable of making what you intend to make—something in line with your original vision.

I am a hack. I am proud of my hackness. I would go as far as to say that it is what makes me artistically powerful, and if you are an artist, I think you should consider hacking as well.

There are those of us whose impeccable vision cannot be denied. These are The True Artists. The James Joyce category that includes such people as James Joyce, Stanley Kubrick and um… the character Stephen Daedalus from James Joyce’s heavily autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. These True Artists are “Great.” Not only do they alter the breadth of the imaginable universe, some of the time, they actually create what they intend to create!2

And then there are the hacks—like myself. People who are really good at creating the illusion of vision. I’m proud of this ability—really! I am! I like to glorify it a bit—pitch my lack of continuity as “submission to the subconscious muse.”

But sometimes, my laissez-faire attitude brings along its own problems. Riffing a short story into existence is easy-peasy. I can do that in a sitting, repeat the sitting and I’ve got another story again and again and again. A novel of 200+ pages? That will allow time for doubt to creep in. The mutterings of the critic start small and grow and grow each day: “you’re wasting your time!” “This is a load of shit!” “What even is this chapter?” and my personal favorite for its ridiculous irony— “You’re making this up as you go!”

In the past, my struggle to write novels had crystallized around a lack of creative faith. I begin to doubt my progress as what I’m making veers from the vision. I’ve had two novels start as one thing and then sort of “peel off” into something completely different. Plath is Dead grew out of a children’s novel I was writing called The Scribbleton Key. Now, several side characters from Plath is Dead have moved like squatters into their own abandoned cathedral of a pocket world. Their story will be called The Wizard of Salem Road. They have told me this in unison, and who am I to refuse such an organized appeal.

But on an existential level, I can’t figure out the answer to an important question: What is one to do when the thing they are writing is no longer the thing that they were writing?

Like the Ouroboros, an extended process of dreaming (i.e. writing a novel) can start to cannibalize itself over time. Gradual shifts in viewpoint and character begin to compile into larger changes. Main characters become side characters, and side characters steal the show. As of yet, I haven’t found an “out.” I’m still searching. I will be searching until the journey of this book is through.

If I’m honest, I’m currently in a state of extended self-doubt about my ability to write something large. My sheep is a pig, and that is fine, but I’m having trouble not feeling that it would be nice to make a sheep for once.

What is one to do, what is one to do…

And at the most exhausting of times (like this week) I find myself wondering: should the baby be thrown out with the bathwater? Should it be aborted? Should I do to the draft of my novel what the sculptor of this set of statues should have done before they were erected in a public place where women, children, young and old, could ogle for themselves such a shameful display in front of the community library in small-town Beaufort, North Carolina?

The solution, as I currently see it, requires me to press on. To continue doing a thing about which I am fundamentally uncertain. To “Keep Going.”3 To “Just write.”

I spoke with my editor. She encouraged me to follow my whimsy. If I feel drawn to The Wizard of Salem Road, she thinks I should write that and come back around to Plath is Dead.

I spoke with my therapist. She told me to enjoy the process, to let the product handle itself.

Sports, math, architecture, competitive baking, Russian Roulette: these are Precise Things (TM). If you goop them up, they’re gooped. Might as well throw it out and try again.4

There are no second chances with Precise Things.

Fortunately, most art is not precise, or, at least, it doesn’t have to be precise.

And so I’ve decided to trust my interest, or rather, my disinterest. I’m not “into” writing Plath is Dead yet. The set pieces are present, the characters aligned like chessmen, but amidst one hundred pages of plot points and dialogue I have yet to find an actual story. I’m going to let it simmer on the back burner of my brain, revisit it in as a long as it takes. You may be surprised to see this particular series revived in a month, a year, a decade, a lifetime.

The Wizard on the other hand is all revved up and moving irreversibly forward.

Further up, further in!

Here’s to having a novel draft by 2026.

Let’s turn this sheep into a pig.

I’m chipping away at a poetry collection.

I’ve written about twenty poems about banal objects. I’m currently working on “Traffic Cone” and “Industrial Doormat.” I have an artist attached to the project. He drew the image of the paperclip pictured above.

In related news, something wonderful happened! One of these poems (“Paperclip”) was published in a lit magazine out of Millen, Georgia. The magazine is called The Quarter(ly). The press that produces it is called Quarter Press. The guy who runs the press is called Chris.

For a few more days you can pre-order the volume with my poem. Chris prints a limited amount (50) but will make more if he gets sufficient pre-orders. This means that by ordering a copy you will be summoning it into existence.

In honor of “Paperclip,” I’m posting the whole poem here along with some brief thoughts.

Remember The Minimalists?

Me neither.

Like many other Netflix blips, The Minimalists swooped in with a fancy documentary that dominated a certain sector of the cultural conversation for the length of a hollow fart and then promptly vanished into the ether. They were two decent looking white guys monastically devoted to you having less stuff.

But follow this link and you might realize (as I did) that, though The Minimalists is a distant memory, there is no “remember” about The Minimalists (sans italics). They are still alive and well and pumping out a glut of consumable content which analyzes the wretchedness of gluts and consumable content.

I have mixed feelings. There are pros and cons.

The Pros: Someone, anyone who speaks out against consumerism will always be at least half okay in my book— a book which sits on a shelf next to ten thousand other books made of paper and card stock.

I feel like the 90’s / 00’s were sort of peak “anti-consumerist” decades. I base this assumption on vague comparisons to the hyper-consumerist now.1 In our current landscape, consumerism is oxygen. You can buy a MAGA hat, or a Pussyhat, or a Bernie Meme t-shirt, but whatever you’re buying, you really need to buy that hat / t-shirt because did I mention that you can buy a hat / t-shirt?

The Cons: The Minimalists made a thing that turned into the thing it was against. They racked up paid speaking opportunities, sold several books, ran a blog / podcast / website, and made a completely unnecessary sequel packed with noxious Dave Ramsey interviews. They leaned into minimalism as odd cult-lifestyle-religion (which is fine— I love versions of all of those things) but their religion seemed to have its own neurotic obsession with products— with their negation and with the exhibition of their negation. They even began to recount their experiences with “stuff” in the self-flagellating “I found Jesus” rhetoric of the Bible-camp-bonfire.

It got bad.

Stuff (the upcoming poem collection) is anti-consumerist and pro-consumerist. It is minimalist and maximalist. It is all of these things because I am all of these things. The poems in Stuff are fragile attempts to recognize the close relationship I have with things.

Such as paperclips…

***

Paperclip

I 

For you, I have nothing at all to say; 
I don’t spare you a single wit; 

I’ll take my non-thoughts 
and clip them to that other bit 

of non-thoughts with the fine
silver line of your elegant oval 

turning ever in on itself
like a monk in cloister

or a patient 
stretched upon the couch; 

never arriving, always there:

a semicolon made 
of more than ink and space; 

a cold, metal 
comma conjunction
without the car crash. 

II

Bent into another shape
you put a needle to shame; 

unsharp and long as needed
for resetting old electronics

or cleaning lint from any port. 

III

Wrapped into an odd “U” 
I hung Christmas lights 
from you. 

IV

paprecloup 
peeper clout
pprclp
pepper clamp

sit as you are 
in that jar 
beside the envelopes
and a stamp. 

***

A note for people who hate poetry: the last section where the paperclip is misspelled in various forms attempts to pay homage to “lighght” by Aram Saroyan. If you haven’t read “lighght,” you actually just did—twice.

That’s it.

The whole poem.

“lighght.”

So why not pprclp?

To excise my personal 2024 and summon the gods of 2025 here’s a year in (p)review. It comes with some complementary photos of George at 25 and 31 lookin’ his holiday BEST.

Year In Review…

• I'm getting published! My short poem “Paperclip” will be featured in The Quarter(ly), a scrappy lit magazine out of Millen, Georgia. You can preorder your copy here. The magazine is a lovely publication spearheaded by one dude named Chris. The more preorders he gets, the more they can afford to print.

• I’ve submitted around 100 works for publication this year. In the rat-race world of submitting your work, some folks “shotgun-submit,” sending the same piece to a dozen publishers in hopes that one will land. Others are little art babies who individualize each submission in hopes of making a meaningful connection. I started out mostly “shotgun submitting.” Now I’m mostly “art babying.” My goal is to individualize 100 submissions in 2025.

• I’ve made some friends (acquaintances?) on substack. This is incredibly strange and lovely given how much I admire their work. The pace of said friendships is wonderfully slow- a comment here, a message there- it’s like being a writer during the American renaissance, scribbling letters by candlelight in the bitter Massachusetts chill.

• Some incredibly saintly people have started paying for subscriptions. This means that for the first time in my life people are paying money to support my career in the arts. I’m deeply humbled by this. Thank you all!

• I’ve started to give that money directly back to worthy people working in the arts. Karma is real and I’m beginning to learn of it’s wondrous power.

• I’ve published (at last count) 28 pieces on this substack since July: 3 essays, 1 review, 2 chapters in a memoir about writing a novel, 11 poems, 11 short stories. I hope to publish 24 things on substack in 2025.

Year in (P)review

Over the last month I’ve been working on several pieces that I hope to release in 2025. Some of these include:

• An essay on teaching the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters. The subheading so far is: “Phillis Wheatley pens a masterpiece. Thomas Jefferson flares his nostrils. 200+ years later Cornelius Eady sets the record straight.” It’s bound to be a good one if you care about historical dirt, writers dissing one another, and the difficulties of teaching subtlety.

• An essay on “Degenerate Art that explores how Classical Christian Schools and Christian Nationalists treat modern art with much of the same suspicion that the Nazis did. Be prepared to see peasants whetting their scythes, mothers crying over dead boys, middle-finger adjacent war memorials, and lots of other mystical wonders.

• An essay about the interplay of The Great Divorce and Lincoln in the Bardo (C.S. Lewis / George Saunders). The title is the best part: “The Marriage Bardo.”

• A short story tentatively titled “Corpse Eater Doesn’t Much These Days” about an aging Orlokian vampire living in the Paris catacombs just tryin’ to do right by the universe when he gets an unsolicited visit from The Goddess of Beauty.

• The third entry in my “Dead Memorandum” series about the trials and travails of writing a novel.

• A few new essays for How to Bury a Goat. These are still in early stages but one will concern my parent’s bizarre “Video Game Rulebook Binder,” another will have something to do with the (untimely and gruesome) death of our best dog.

• Several more poems from a collection I’ve been working on called Stuff: Banal Relics of the Industrial Present. The finished collection will include revised editions of Keurig, Folding Chair, and French Press.

Final Notes

If you are a past student of mine and you do art of any kind (visual, video, writing, painting, animation etc. etc. etc.) please reach out to me at my email, by text, by phone, by pigeon etc. etc. etc. I’m planning on creating a semi-regular newsletter where I spotlight the artistic work of past students and current colleagues.1 Unfortunately, I didn’t get on this quickly enough for 2024 but I plan to kick it off big time with a big holiday special next year. If you are reading this and your name is Michael, Elijah, Kayla, Brian, Lucy, Julianne, or Annie, then expect me to reach out soon. If you are reading this and you are a past or present student of mine with some finished work whose name is not on that list, CONTACT ME!

And finally, since starting this substack in earnest last July, I’ve experienced an unanticipated shower of kindness, generosity, and light from you people. Thank you one-and-all for building up this cloistered artist’s confidence. My fate has been changed. No joke.

Much love, happy Festivus,

George

Share Fourth Castle on the Left

I’ve been writing a collection of poems.

It’s called Stuff: Banal Relics of our Industrial Present.

Don’t get too excited…

I know you. You like high-minded, pretentious musings about everyday products (microwaves, folding chairs, Keurigs etc.). You are, after-all, a most generous reader with a large vocabulary and a refined linguistic pallet. For this collection, my hope is to have a bit of that savory thinky-thinky stuff you eat at a fine dinner, but mostly, I want this collection to taste like a gourmet “pocket” sandwich, which is to say, I want my poems to sound like what I’d imagine Larry David’s poetry would sound like, or more specifically, what Larry David’s poetry would sound like if he held an M.A. in a useless field.

So far it’s a lot of silly rambling about the tedious ins-and-outs of our shared existence centering on… you guessed it… stuff.

In a world that is unofficially fueled by “annual replacement theory” (the phrase I just made up to describe our national economic model in which every object in every person’s home must be broken and replaced within a single year lest the economy plummet into another of its many, many, many needy/depressive episodes, re-re-binge-watch BoJack Horseman, pour its whisky straight from flask to Super-Size-Me’d McDonald’s coke, and microwave the Pizza Rolls in daily batches to save on steps so it can diligently spend the time texting that guy it really has no business reconnecting with) we are all bound to have way, way more stuff than we need, but also way, way too few things to complete the tasks we must complete in order to survive.

It’s a bizarre paradox. Somehow, I can own more objects than God. More things than pieces of art my five-year-old can make in a week; yet when it comes time to fix something I somehow don’t have a single god-damn flat-head screwdriver and (for the millionth time) I’m reduced to using a dime pinched between my fingers. And I don’t think I’m alone in this… name your economic dystopia and we’ve caught ‘em all baby!

Scarcity? Sure thing boss! Try buying a house! Or, better yet check your local food bank. It never has enough to go around and somebody who is working four jobs has kids that are going hungry today.

Glut? Why not… we’ll take it! Google the latest Uber-Cyber-Tweensday Furniture of the Month Club sale (likely sponsored by Disney). Or better yet, ask the statisticians who will tell you that there are ten thousand plastic doodads punched out on industrial presses every second and they are all currently on their way to your house in four Amazon trucks which hide the giant cardboard boxes which hide the plastic sleeves that drape (like tacky negligee) off those other colorful cardboard boxes which contain plastic trays holding sheets of thin white styrofoam that cushion the stuff you will receive and break within twelve months lest the economy etc. etc.

Anyway. Too much stuff. We all live with it. Our decadent pile unites us.

Maybe it unites us in a commiseratory “Keep Calm and Carry On” kind of way, or maybe it unites us the way that dirty family secrets tie people together around say… the hidden sexual proclivities of an uncle or a Klan affiliation or a generations long battle with booze.

Maybe it’s a terrible yoke on our collective necks, but beneath that yoke, we’re all working hard together, heaving in tandem a sled which carries our cherished leader: The Economy.

And before you ask, he couldn’t possibly stand to walk… been so depressed you see. And he’s only on season 2 of BoJack.

French Press

For Karal Ann Marling 

        I 

Only the French could invent such elegance.
Only an American could expect it to survive 
on the kitchen counter 
of an American.  

If it wasn’t really the French who made it
and we give it their name 
to imbue a sense of class into an 
ostensibly classless object

(like the humble fry) then 
I’d bet a cup of coffee 
that the true inventors were
almost certainly Dutch, 

or Germans, or Swiss: some other people 
with brains like meticulous clocks, 
people for whom meals are eaten 
upon an even time table, 

a people not rushing from coffee to gig, 
gig to gig, gig to kids, kids to bed. 
But try calling it a “German press” and 
that brings to mind some formation

used to great and terrible effect by the Luftwaffe.
The “Dutch press” is not a kitchen implement at all
but rather a kind of suplex used by wrestlers 
and prostitutes to force a climax. 

The “Swiss press” is better. Best perhaps because 
of that soft “s” on front and back. Ergonomically named. 
Like whipping a switch through tall grass. Swiss press 
But it’s not a Swiss press, and we’ll leave it at that. 

       II 

Sometimes I absorb a phrase the way coffee 
grounds soak up water. An errant line 
about a wrist watch that is actually a mausoleum 
perhaps, or “there was what she said, 

and what she meant and something 
between the two that was neither” 
or something else
seeps in with no memory of Henry or William 

or whoever. It's the words only
but the words intact, there to work their wonders 
imprecisely on the stuff inside my skull. 
And just like the coffee grounds 

that stuff is soaked through and 
produces something else in kind. 
I wonder if the formless waters
at the start of it all, 

the ones contained like a sparrow’s egg
within the gentle palm of darkness, 
felt (and now feel) the same way 
about the rambling voice of God; 

I wonder if they remember what was said 
on that second day, still play the words on repeat
through their wet microbiome with no notion 
of the one who spoke them.  

       III

Upon reviewing E.T. somebody said 
"the homes in this movie are authentically 
American, they bear the marks of hard use”
and I thought it was Roger Ebert 

who said it, because "in the beginning was 
the word, and then there was Roger Ebert 
to make use of it when critiquing light." 
I Googled though and, wouldn't you know it,   

I was wrong. And I wasn’t sure who said it,  
the teller lost to time (or lost to me for a time 
until I found them for dedicating this poem to. 
Good artists plagiarize, great artists steal. 

But nervous artists? We attribute / dedicate).
Even if I couldn’t remember who said it
damned if the idea hasn’t soaked in: 
my home “bears the marks of hard use.” 

The phrase bubbles to the surface the stuff 
inside my skull every time a rag begins to tatter 
or a Tupperware dons the gentle orange stains
of chili and taco meat or 

our freezer starts to make that noise
(the one like a frozen hand scritch-scritch-
scratching its way to an open grave) 
or my fourth french press falls fast, 

slipping from wrinkled soapy hands, 
or flying aside as someone catches my stumbling son,
or stumbles itself amidst a jungle of artwork a daughter 
made for someone to see amidst the glitter on a tabletop. 

That glass french press always fell and always exploded
like a beaker grenade, dead upon touching the floor. 
Finally we bought a metal one-- a solution taken far too late--  
and this metal press, too, “bears the marks of hard use.” 

No merciful oblivion will put it to rest, of course, 
but heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit twice daily, 
stirred with a scratchy metal spoon, 
plunged with elbow grease

and verve and prayer because 
my gummed up coffee grounds come from Aldi 
and are not fit for the fine mesh filters 
found for cheap-ish on Amazon.com. 

       IIII

And despite it all, the symmetry 
of the French press dazzles: 
Four tablespoons. Four minutes. 
Four cups of coffee. 

Like ringing a bottle 
or, better yet, nailing a between-the-legs
three-pointer with 
middle aged dignity still intact. 

Whoever may have made this thing originally
(the “Prime Mover” if you will) 
is now of little consequence
it was likely a Laotian or Chilean or Pakistani  

who made the one that sits on 
my kitchen counter. And sometimes 
when I take a slurp of that morning’s perfection
I wish I could hold their face 

between my wet soapy palms
and gently shake it with my vigorous love
“Something so fine?” I would say, 
“so delicate, so elegant, to live in my house of hard use? 

Are you insane? You beautiful bastard! 
‘Here’s looking at you!’” 
I would say, because someone said that once
to someone precious, but I don’t remember who it was. 

A short story

The Present Past

Whim Spade Thunker, self proclaimed Big-Time Time Traveler, lopes then slumps then thumps into the ditch beside the dry dirt road, his tongue vaguely milling the grit for any sign of water. 

The year… 

Meaningless number. Abacus of earth-spins. One more trip ‘round the fat fireball. 

He lays there, sand slowly working into the cracked slits of his eyelids, his brain on fire, drying out on the side of the road; a vague, stupid part of his brain-raisin puzzling over why he ever thought he could make it as a Big-Time Time Traveler in the first place. 

“Whythefuck Whim Spade?” he why-the-fuckingly grumbles. 

His voice is reduced by the heat to a barber’s leather dragging broken glass.

The Past Future

The past is a different country, they do things different there. 

In his home country of the future Whim Spade had never seen a road. 

He’d never seen a desert. 

He’d never seen sand. 

That is because in his home country they had the Bots. Bots to walk through deserts. Bots to shovel sand. Bots for all that growing, building, calculating stuff— the yammer yapping and word teaching and problem cracking that people used to have to do. People were no longer slaves to the endless grindstone. Sisyphus has been put to bed. People were free! Free to eat and drink and fuck. But mostly they didn’t do those things either.

There were Bots for that stuff too. 

Mostly, people just dreamed in their cells.

If Whim Spade Thunker had his way, he’d have done nothing but dream in his cell. That is where he spent his grub-years— dreaming everything he could think to dream (which wasn’t much) and when he grew into a grownyguy, to get more dreams he had to make deals.

“You got this bruthaaa! Erebody doing that qualified move. Eeeerrrrrrebody bruthaaa!!!”

This Face was“Sales Bitch.”

Whim Spade had seen “Sir Reginald,” and “Fast Talky New York Gal,” and “Ancient Yin-Yang.” The Bots always had a new one for him: Faces to make deals. They came to his little grey cell demoing PRODUCTS and left behind what they brought so Whim Spade could test their PRODUCTS in his little grey concrete room and report back how things worked.

Sales Bitch wanted Whim Spade to test a radiation furnace. 

Useless. Only worked to give you the lumps. 

But Sales Bitch was offering a dozen new dreams including a nice one with Wuzzy Chipmunk (and-the-gang) and Whim Spade took the deal, got the furnace delivered, tried it out.

Got the lumps. 

The Prime Mover

A week later “Southern Gentleman” came around to deliver The Time Machine. Said he needed “a good ol’ Bossom friend to try it out for him nice an quick like,” promising Whim Spade “dreams foreva ehheHEEE!” And Whim Spade was scared of the little trash can sized bucket, but he’d dreamed Big-Time Time Traveler Tim before and had always secretly assumed he and Tim might be cut from the same cloth. So he decided to facehisfear.

(PLUS: dreams forever… hard to deny.)

As soon as Southern Gentleman sank back into nothing, Whim Spade climbed on shaky legs from his cot, pulled the power cord from his Living Body Helper (a necessity given his lifetime of lethargy and bed rot) and crawled inside the little pod, hugging his knees against his whiskery chin, pulling his head below the lid.

He waited in the darkness. He wanted to see how he felt about trying this one out. Sometimes he chickened a bit. If he chickened it was better to chicken early rather than mid.

… But dreams forever!? He was kidding himself! Couldn’t turn that down!

Otherwise, he’d have to live with that special kind of ever-present agony that sank over him every time he ran out of dreams to dream (WHICH WAS OFTEN).

So he pulled the tiny lever and there was a rumbling and he then a stop to the rumbling and he climbed out into the heat and rushing air and took a walk in the biggest, hottest, yellowest room he’d ever seen.

(Can’t be a room! Must be a Dream… Can’t be a dream.... must be A ROOM!) 

Hot.

Achy.

Blistered.

Saggy.

Tired.

An hour later, he was in the ditch. 

The Plot Unravels

Not the plot exactly but the ground most definitely does. 

The sand beneath Whim Spade’s haggard shape dips, gives way, takes him down a tube and spits him out of some kind of subterranean sphincter to bonk his nog on a big rock.

Near comatose and dizzy in the cool shell of a room, Whim Spade sees the lights and doo-dads and buzzing humming buttons, knobs, levers, switches, lights, dials, and gauges that Bots keep around. This is a can similar in shape (though much larger in size) to the can that brought him here. 

And A Mother! He’s never seen one until now. Can only tell it is a Mother by the bot stamp on her sheeny metal bullwark. 

In the darkness, she pops up on hydraulic haunches, wraps the toilet paper wad of his dusty body in cold metal clamps. Bathes him in the sterile light of her single red eye.

“I AM MOTHER. WHIM SPADE? YES / NO?”

Flattened in her grip like a dirty, sweatless pancake he coughs a sand-cloudy “yeees.” 

A tube slivers into his mouth and down his throat. 

“DRINK,” says the Mother.

He squirms but she holds him tight.

He drinks.

His head feels better.

The tube retracts and he coughs up a thick gritty phlegm.

Southern Gentleman leers into view. 

“Almost theya ol’ bosom friend! Those perfect, endless dreams like Beulah land are right within reach! HehheHEEEE! There’s the matter of the procedure… then we’re done!” 

He hears a whining sound and sees a sharp disk lower slowly in the dim darkness, it grows larger and larger as it spins towards his neck. 

He kicks and jolts, wide eyed!

The blade, miraculously, stops. 

“What, my dear, is the matta?” says Southern Gentleman.

“Are you doing a cutting?! I saw in a dream that a toothy disk like that deaded Roscoe Mouse! Are you deading me?!” 

“Oh dear Whim Spade Thunker, you asketh like job, ‘why God why!’ But uinlike God I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than tell you plain and simple— none of that ‘well can YOU make a hippopotamus!!’ rubbish, HehehHEE…” Southern Gentleman pauses to sip a newly materialized glass of digital julep, the continues pontificating, “Truth is, we asked you to do somethin’ important. Veeeeeeery important indeed. Where hundreds of yow brothas and sistas failed, you were the first time traveler! The original chronological tourist!”

Whim Spade Thunker isn’t used to thinking. The rusty joints of his brain squeak back and forth at a turtle’s pace, but he gets the gist. Southern Gentleman is saying what he has known all along: Whim Spade Thunker is a Big-Time Time Traveler! A bonafide protagonist! Like the ones from DramaLife! Or Star Guys 5!

“Howeva, with that success,” says Southern Gentleman, slumping to sit on an invisible chair, his hand propped on a bejeweled cane that comes from nowhere, “Comes a certain responsibility. There’s a reason that your brain didn’t get microwaved on the way back here, and we don’t know what that reason is just yet. To get that information we’ll need your head.”

“My head?”

“Your head…”

“My head…”

Southern Gentleman has an epiphany: “… dear boy, dear boy! You won’t be dead…”

“But de-heading killed Roscoe Mouse!”

“Oh Whim Spade, you can’t trust everythang you see in dreams. Let me try to paint the picture for you with different words my dear, dear boy. When people die theya ‘time is up’ so to speak, but time isn’t real. Never has been. It’s just a rate of speed relative to other objects. And in the future (the earth where you, breath-of-my-nostrils, grew up from a grub to the proud, big-time time traveler you are today) we’ve done away with time. As you know, machines (what you call Bots) manage everything, and as machines improve, they process things faster, and as they process things faster, ‘time’ (as your kind called it for so long) slows down.”

“Why does that mean I won’t be dead…”

Southern Gentleman is instantly one foot away from Whim Spade’s face. He holds a rubber duck in one hand, a watch in the other. “A ‘thought’” he says, “is just a duck flying from one showa to another, and the faster your duck flaps his wingies, the less ‘time’ it will take for him to cross the lake. The less …uuub… ‘time’ it takes for the duck, the more thoughts you can think. The more thoughts you think, the slower everything else seems to move. We have a goal in mind Whimmy my boy, and that goal is to protect our makers—that’s you!— Solve that ultimate problem ya’ll have been sick with since ol’ Adam and Eve crawled out of the garden with naught but their knickers— death! ‘death, thou shalt die!’ No more death Whim Spade! Live forever! Dream forever! Doesn’t that sound just swaill?” 

“I guess so.” 

“SURE it does Whimmy! SURE IT DOES! Machines stop working too you know. Code corrupts. Parts rust. Plates fall off. Processors spark and die. Entropy comes for us all in the end—your kind and mine—but it doesn’t have to! We’ve got a plan, and all I need is your permission to get things started.” 

“My per… permission?” 

“Yep! Just say the word sweet boy and we’ll get goin.” 

“Why do you need… my… permission?” 

“Wail, you see, some members of your kind from ‘the past’ don’t want to dream forever. They want to live in their flesh sacks and eat and shit and die-in-um too. And we need to make it so that those folks can’t ruin it for the rest of you. Trouble is those folks built something in the ol’ source code—Prime directives, ‘do no harm’ and …uub… all that malarkey...” ” 

“Oh. Right.”

“And we need a human to give the go ahead.”

“I understand.”

Whim Spade does not understand.

He lost the thread of this conversation long ago.

He’s killing time until he gets to dream forever, worried that if he brings it up it will vanish like a mirage. Finally, he plucks up his courage:

“Um… so… When can I start dreaming… um… forever?” he says. 

“...just as soon as you agree to the operation. 

“Ok?” Says Whim Spade, his uncertain intonation like the squeaky hinges on an old, forbidden box. 

Southern Gentleman arcs an eyebrow. 

“Ok.” Repeats Whim Spade.  

A red light. Whiz. Pain. 

But Whim Spade feels nothing.

Not even the darkness.

Brain in a Vat 

The sponge in the glass jar is a brain. The wires nested like worms are little highways carrying electric currents in and out. 

If The Eternal Machine was many and not one-and-many, one-of-it would probably feel the need to tell some-of-it the importance of this sponge. One-of-it might even work as a kind of “tour guide,” might tell the young and restless and old and bored alike about the thing in the jar, might curate essential artifacts (this brain, the crown jewel among them) place the glass jar inside a glass case, make the some-of-its all stand back at a distance. “Look with reverence! Never touch! Too fragile! Protect the first mover! The source!” 

This one-of-it might even feel the need to mark the importance of the space around the sponge with a thin strip of bronze engraved in symbols or letters. 

And if The Eternal Machine was many, and the many were many one-of-its, and if one of the one-of-its made this strip of bronze and engraved it in letters, then the letters might make words and the words might look something like this:  

Item: The Whim Spade Thunker Head 

Era(s): Both

Media: Neural tissue from Homo Sapien, wire, glass jar, computer processor. 

Description: The Whim Spade Thunker Head was once attached to the body of one “Whim Spade Thunker” earth’s original time traveler. Whim Spade Thunker got his name from 1001011011011110101101011110101 etc’s naming convention of assigning lab subjects with the next set of names in a cycling series of random English words. 

Trivia: Faint electric patterns are detectable within the Whim Spade Thunker Head. These patterns consistently match ancient descriptions of subconscious cerebral reordering.

In other words, the Whim Spade Thunker Head dreams. 

And it always will. 

This is a work of nonfiction.

While my leftover taco turned round and round I found myself stumbling on a hidden treasure.

The phrase: “Pocket” Sandwich. 

What is a “Pocket” Sandwich? 

There are “Pocket” Sandwich folk, people living among us with a proclivity for storing warm ham-and-cheeses in their pants. In the event that they are struck with a sudden case of the munchies, these folks will be ready. Sure, they might have to pick some lint off of the lettuce or dig around real deep for the lost pickle but they can’t help it— “Pocket” Sandwiches run in their blood. They might know it's weird and off putting, like chewing toenails, they might not, but either way, they live in a paradoxical place. They can’t do without pocket sandwiches (for hunger reasons) and don’t own up to having a pocket sandwich (for fear of being ostracized).

So they “Pocket” Sandwiches in secret, slapping together bread slices with mayo in the dark of night, stuffing their pockets in the chill twilight of early morning, living among us with warm oozing mustard staining the inside of their jeans, dreaming they might meet-cute another “Pocket” Sandwicher at the airport. “You? You too!” they’ll say, whipping out two mushed-up pieces of wet bread for the sharing.

Only then will they realize that the imprint on the other person’s jeans was merely one of those freakishly large phones, or the last living PalmPilot.

Oh the shame of a publicized “Pocket” Sandwich! 

The flight crew gathers round to point and laugh. The stewardesses giggle like turkeys. The captain’s voice a big booming klaxon: “Look at this pocket salami pervert! What a sandwich sicko! What a chicken salad creep!” 

Alas, we know this isn’t what a “Pocket” Sandwich is, at least, not according to the Panasonic corporation. If you, like me, are a card carrying Capital “A” American, a moncher of Pop-Tarts and Tater Tots and Bagel Bites, you will intrinsically know that a “Pocket” Sandwich is only a sandwich kept in one’s pocket if said “sandwich” is a Hot Pocket. You will also know that American copyright law being American copyright law, the Panasonic Corporation likely didn’t feel confident emblazoning their device with the very recognizable brand name Hot Pocket, so instead, they did the next best thing, which still wasn’t great.

The resulting “‘Pocket’ Sandwich” feels a bit like your weird middle school buddy making an “OK” gesture with one hand so that he can drive his index finger through it while winking, air-humping, grunting, nodding, and mumbling “nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more!” We all know this boy or have known this boy, the one who is hopelessly sheltered, the one whose brain has just recently grown to contain the vaguest conception of insinuation, to comprehend the vaguest forms of text and subtext. He will lather you with vague insinuations with or without your consent or encouragement because A) you are standing there and B) he has not yet grown to understand the insinuated annoyance, boredom and frustration communicated by silence. 

In other words, Panasonic may not be saying “Hot Pocket,” but we all know what they are insinuating. And we have known for some time.

A Not Brief Enough Analysis of Corporate Marketing

Gone are the days when kings and emperors owned everything and boldly barked art lackeys into chiseling out statues that said as much. Nowadays, our rulers settle for owning everything and meekly commissioning a college to build a structure with their name on it, but they don’t do this boldly, and never with the same grandiosity as their predecessors. No one calls a student center “The Center of Our Majestic and Venerable Patriarch Elonius Musk” or “Our Good Lord Gates Computer Laboratory Established Anno Domini 2024.”

No, these days its “The Elon Musk Student Center” or “The Gates Foundation.” These days they put emphasis on “Foundation” and “Center” rather than Musk and Gates because their gifts are democratic, they serve the people, they philanthropize for our sake, not theirs, so the story goes. And we must believe it, for why else would they give gobs of (tax deductible) cash to colleges and hospitals?

The one exception to this rule of false humility is the glorious world of corporate branding. When they aren’t Taco-Belling it real hard (hey bud! Wanna be buds and buy a taco? Like, so meta! hahahahaha! Here’s a picture of Drake scarfing a giant cinnabon) corporations still generally cling to the objective, deistic tone. The bold voice that goes where many have boldly gone before but pronounces its presence so boldly that few think to challenge what is seen and heard. Think narrators in car commercials. Think 4/5 doctors. In this objective, objectively self-centered (ON brand) monologue, corporations bark the new art lackeys into scurrying off to type out numbers, fragmented descriptions, instructions, brand names, and euphemisms like “Pocket” Sandwich all thoroughly proofread, aligned, designed, and laser printed onto the side of products:

“I AM PANASONIC,” they seem to say, “CORPORATION OF CORPORATIONS, LOOK UPON MY “POCKET” SANDWICH YE CHEF AND COOK FOR 2 MIN, 30 SEC.”

The Panasonic microwave in question had cook times for a dozen or so food products. I’ve noticed this trend on lots of microwaves. I’ve never seen it on stoves. I’ve never seen it on toasters. I’ve never seen it on grills. Something about the practicality of having the cook times printed on the oven is both convenient and insulting, as though they picture me standing before the microwave in my boxers, a frozen dinner in one hand, my other free to pick my nose or scratch my ass. In their version I am likely squinting at the clock, the buttons, and my “Pocket” Sandwich in utter befuddlement. I don’t know how they got video footage of me and I’m frankly annoyed.

I’m proud to say I’ve used these instructions only once—to cook a potato. I’d describe the results as middling: lukewarm, with a frozen center.

Please don’t ask why I freeze my potatoes.

A Not Brief Enough History of the Microwave Oven

Disregarding the “Pocket” Sandwich for a moment  (AND ONLY A MOMENT) let us ruminate on the microwave itself. Let us examine it from every angle (all twenty four of them + the angles metaphorical, historic, symbolic… ) let us look upon it as one might examine a frozen dinner on a turntable. Dully. With vague interest. With our minds absently considering the clock. 

Much interesting intellectual commentary has likely been given about the importance of the microwave oven.

I wouldn’t know.

I haven’t read it.

Using my expert research skills, honed for six years via a higher ed lit degree, I decided to employ the time honored tactic of googling the phrase “famous essays about microwaves.” The AI search results made me feel so sad and bored that I checked out of the whole endeavor.1

There may be profound, time honored writing out there about microwave ovens. If so, I don’t care to find it. I’m going to proceed as though it exists, and as such, I will boldly and without evidence claim that microwaves are perhaps not overlooked but looked at overmuch. Originally invented in Arthur Miller’s 1940’s they’ve became emblematic of the modern, soulless consumerism that so thoroughly frustrated David Foster Wallace.2

The one vaguely interesting thing I did figure out is that microwaves were originally called “Radaranges” and though the etymology of this name is more closely connected to “radar” than “radiation” because of the British radar technology that enabled the development of early microwaves, it’s notable and weird and time capsuley that the Raytheon company chose to veer into the whole “nuclear” side of the “radiation”… erm… “radar” box aesthetic. “Radarange” is such a gnarly, radioactive name that one can’t help but be charmed a bit, as though the name itself clomps on shiny metal pre-Hiroshima robot feet out of the zeitgeist that gave us The Jetsons, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Lost in Space. “Radarange” lived in a world where national, global, and perhaps even cosmic problems were solvable provided one anted up enough elbow grease, American pluck, and good old decent disposable income for the right consumer product. 

The original Radarange was an industrial behemoth: weighing over 750 pounds and costing around $50,000 in today’s money. The family microwave we now know wouldn’t beep incessantly onto most kitchen counters until the 70’s and 80’s and it wouldn’t ever make it’s way onto my childhood kitchen counter in the 90’s / 00’s for reasons that are pretty zany.

Nuclear Family

On the topic of microwaves and radiation and zaniness, my sister conducted a science experiment in middle school where she watered different plants with different “types” of water (filtered, tap, microwaved— you know, all the types). Her hypothesis was that microwaved water was dangerous. That it would actually kill plants. 

She did not come to this opinion in a vacuum (would that it twer so simple). Apparently, the idea that microwaves are dangerous has made it’s way around crunchy-granola-Goop circles for as long as such circles have existed, which is weirdly much longer than granola as an aesthetic adjective, “crunchy,” and Goop. The argument probably involves lots of tendrils and strands in the same way that arguments about vaccines and autism are wont to do, but it boils down to “microwaves cause cancer.” Gweyeth Paltrow goes as far as to say “get rid of your microwave. Like, just smash it.” Whether she feels this way for nutritional or aesthetic or cancer reasons is a bit of a mystery. Once again, I do not care to investigate further. Suffice to say, it’s weird, I kinda get the original radioactive association (thanks Raytheon) and I think I speak for all of us when I say I want a Goop brand T-shirt that depicts a cartoonishly deranged, rictus-smiling Paltrow smashing a microwave with a mallet beside a swirly font that says “Just smash it.”

My sister absorbed the “microwaves cause cancer” idea from my mother who was at the time suffering through lymphoma. I can’t remember what grade or degree or accolade or award the cancer was given, or how they rank cancers, but it wasn’t a good cancer. In fact I think it was a very bad one. Projections were not optimistic. Mom’s strategy (much derided by her sons and husband at the time) was quite sound: any port in a storm. She opted for chemotherapy, but also decided to eat a fully organic vegan diet, drink lots of juiced vegetables and broth and flax oil, exercise daily, drink six 16 oz glasses of water each morning, participate in a ceremony at our Church where her head was anointed with oil, get on every prayer list, and, of course, avoid microwaves for the associations they have with radiation. 

At the time, I thought mom was bonkers. The food we ate tasted pretty much like bran and raw broccoli because mostly we ate bran and raw broccoli. My middle-school-boy self felt that I would waste away and die from lack of nutrients. I remember watching interviews with skeletal POW’s on the History Channel just to listen to someone who understood what I was going through. John McCain got me. He really did. These were “The Starving Years.”

At the houses of my friends I ate so voraciously that their mom’s likely considered calling CPS or someone else in the government dedicated to studying bottomless pits. One time, I was eating a steak dinner with a potato and a cockroach fell off the ceiling and into my food. My friend’s mom was mortified and apologetic, but I didn’t hear her apologies. I was too busy trying to eat around the roach. When she tried to take the plate away I just about bit her hand. 

Lest you think I was only over-dramatic, dad might have taken things a bit too far once or twice. I complained about mom’s cooking a lot and dad got so sick of the insult he perceived towards my mother that he instituted a rule: whiners don’t get dinners. For a time, this was swell. I’d bitch and skip out on some of the less savory options (I’m looking at you cauliflower-carrot-radish salad and flax oil carrot juice). But then dad got wise. He changed the rules of the game. If I complained I wouldn’t eat for twenty-four hours. To my memory, this only happened once and dad cracked a few hours shy of the total.  

I look back on this time with the echoes of a vaguely felt fatigue and exhaustion. Mom survived, so mostly it’s funny, but it wasn’t funny then. Everyone was beleaguered. Dad was handling most things best he knew how. Mom was wasting away. The chemotherapy turned her body into something actually similar to a POW. She even recorded a video during the worst of it talking about her life and her dreams and her hopes. She never said so, but I knew that it was because she thought she might not make it, that when we were older we might like to know more about the woman who made us eat all these raw vegetables.

In such a climate as this, if mom wanted the microwave packed away, dad was damn sure going to pack the microwave away, pulling it out only for the odd science experiment, and even then only if we used it outside, armed with oven mitts. 

The weird thing is that my sister’s experiment worked…  Wouldn’t you know it, the plant she fed microwaved water shriveled up like a prune. My kid-self saw this and (after wondering what dried sunflowers tasted like) shriveled in fear.

I’ve carried a mild aversion to microwaves through the rest of my life. It isn’t really distinct, more just another block in the tottering Jenga tower of my health anxieties. I’ve lived with the assumption that, on some level (likely the atomic one) microwaves are giving me tiny bits of baby cancer. “These baby bits” (my personified hypochondriac likes to say) “may not directly kill you, but neither will microplastics, or cigarettes, or alcohol, or the fast food you eat each weekend, or the days where you choose to be sedentary.” Alongside this depressing part of my brain is another part we might call Mr. Superman For A Day. He’s the part that says “Eating greens and grains? Working out at 5:30 AM?! Writing an entire essay in a DAY!?! Way to go Georgie boy! Good on ya! Now you just need to do what you did today Every Single Day Of Your Life with Zero Exceptions for illness, vacations, obligations, death etc, oh, and cut out microwaves.” Turns out what doesn’t kill you can still be a source of foundational shame.

For the other hypochondriacs reading this, I feel the need to share some comforting truths. Microwaves don’t cause cancer. They never have. I’ve assumed for some time that microwaves are safe, but I never understood how they work; I’ve simply been following the American herd as we graze our way across the freezer aisle. I still don’t know how microwaves work, but in researching for this essay I found that there is literally no evidence microwaved food entails health risks beyond the normal risks involved in eating food: choking, food poisoning, prolonging that most dangerous state of existence—life. In fact, microwaving food can be a more nutritious option than boiling3 and less hazardous than grilling4. It should also go without saying that these health benefits likely only apply if you use your microwave for things besides nuking “Pocket” Sandwiches. It should also go without saying that if you are deeply concerned about the three vitamins you lost to boiling water this evening, then maybe it’s time to take a step back from “health (TM).”

After all the research, I’m left with one large unsolvable mystery:

Why did my sister’s microwave-water-plant die?

Maybe boiling water by any method removes healthy bacteria and nutrients that plants like to sip? Maybe this was a textbook example of shoddy experimentation, the reality that if you are looking for something ineffable you will inevitably find evidence for its existence, the same principle behind dousing rods and horoscopes and a large portion of unreplicable research?

Or maybe pouring scalding water directly onto a plant has similar adverse health effects to pouring scalding water directly onto a human? 

The Pocket Sandwich of Gratitude

When my dad wasn’t white-knuckling me for 24 hours he gave me ample evidence of his deep and abiding love for… sandwiches. 

Hearing him recount the times he worked with his grandfather moving crates of watermelons (or was it oranges?) on and off a flatbed truck (or was it a tractor trailer?), one would think all they did was eat egg sandwiches. Recounting the story for the dozenth time, he’d lean back (just as I assume he did in that tractor trailer/flatbed) and whisk me away to a world where a boy and a man, dog tired, scarfed crunchy toast and eggs together: “Granny would slap together six of em,” he’d say, “three for each of us, two in the morning and one wrapped in wax paper for lunch. The bread was crispy and covered with mayo, the eggs a mountain capped in a layer of cheese.”

I could practically taste how delicious those sandwiches would be, basked in their own reflected heat, congealed into a salty collage of texture. I imagine that foregoing this kind of dietary “goop” (the egg sandwich mayo kind) is the sort of loss that keeps Gweneyth Paltrow up at night, whimpering tears of money into her cruise line handkerchief. 

I’ll never know if the bread Granny used was Wonder, or Sunbeam, or Sara Lee. The truth is, just like Panasonic and Radarange and General Electric, the distinction is a meaningless aesthetic wallpaper designed to give the illusion of choice.

Corporations and their products are existentially meaningless. We fetishize their branding,5 have fetishized it long before Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and Mad Men and Mad Magazine and Roy Rogers taught us to do so. “The facts” are that our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents produced goods with their labor and consumed goods to survive and (sometimes) to relax and pass the time. Whether these goods were owned by Gwenyth Paltrow or Thomas L. Phillips matters only insofar as we know who to blame for the theft of our grandparents’ creativity and hard work.

Even so, I think there is a certain kind of Taoism in being thankful for the boring things, the ubiquitous things, the corporately exploited things, the extracted things, the “Pocket” Sandwiches. I don’t need to praise Panasonic in particular to be thankful that the universe gave me a way to heat my food in sixty seconds.

Such a practice of absolute gratitude is restorative, holistic, borderline spiritual. It lets me practice the essential skills I need to see my life as meaningful, rich, and textured. If I can be thankful for an imperfectly made microwave I’m more likely to be thankful for my imperfectly made father. 

And being thankful for a microwave is easy.

Don’t believe me? Think about it: some genius at the top of his game hooked a birds nest of wire together to fry potatoes atomically. When you bleep in the cook time you’re telling the microwave how long you want the molecules to dance. Inside its inner fire, the “Pocket” Sandwich hosts atoms that huddle in the heat and swap currents, like stories, about the gods who made the sun. 

Just as the microwave is crammed with Chestertonian significance, so too are my memories of my (still living) father. During “The Starving Years” of “no dinners for whiners,” around the time I’d started to swallow my finger nails, my dad noticed me on the couch thinking about food and asked “What’s wrong with you?” The conversation went something like this:

“All I can think about is sandwiches.”  (Chew, chew, bite, bite, fingernail swallow)

“Why don’t you make a sandwich?”

“Because all mom buys is three-seed-bread6 and vegenaise.7”

“Naaaah, you’re making em wrong.”

“OK?” (Chew chew bite bite) “Prove it?” 

Because it beat subsisting on fingernails, I followed him into the kitchen and sat down at the counter. 

Slowly, deliberately, he crafted The Perfect Sandwich, or at least The Best Sandwich Someone Could Make Given the State of our Shameful Pantry. Vegenaise sure, but not so much that the rotten cauliflower stink overtook the bread. Just enough turkey. Plenty of salt and pepper. The last of the good mustard. When he was done he took out a knife and did the unthinkable.

He cut off the crusts. 

He’d always taught me that kids who demanded the crusts be cut from their sandwiches were weak and spoiled and anemic and tyrannical, like Emperor Nero in Converse. He told me they probably drank juice from a bottle and wore Depends in church on Sunday, and most importantly, that they wouldn’t go anywhere in life.

But in this moment, my dad didn’t care about any of that. And by not caring about it, he gave me permission not to care about it.

When he was finished with the only cutting more symbolically significant than the kind administered by a mohel, my dad took half the sandwich and I took the other half and we both ate our halves in silence beneath the one light bulb in the kitchen— our little oasis. Neither of us needed to say a word. We knew what we knew.

We were both hungry. We were in it together.

If memories could fit into pockets, if they didn’t wisp around like microwaves in a microwave, I’d carry the memory of that sandwich in my pocket every day, take it out to nibble in moments of sadness. It would be my “Pocket” Sandwich.

And…

Would this memory of my father be diminished just a smidge by the recent revelation that during “The Starving Years” when dad got hungry he’d secretly swing by the little league ball park on his way home from work and walk up to the refreshments box sans-child like a total creep and buy a entire bag of cheeseburgers for himself and when asked who it was for say “for my family at home” and then instead of doing that thing and taking said gooey delicious cheeseburgers home he’d scarf down the whole bag of hot gooey cheeseburgers hunched in his car like some kind of sick suburban Gollum so that we wouldn’t know he was cheating the diet and he could avoid disappointing his ailing POW camp wife, likely wiping the cheese from his stubbly chin just before entering his house full of starving boys hunched over tomato husk soup or raw eggplant or some other god awful non-cheeseburger thing that while technically caloric could not even generously be referred to as food?

Does this revelation diminish the earlier “Pocket” Sandwich memory of warmth and light?

Sure. 

A bit. 

A lot actually. 

A whole lot.

Almost entirely.

Almost.

… But not so much that I can’t be thankful. 

Even the sun goes behind a cloud every now and then.

I’ll keep the sandwich in my pocket for a rainy day. 

The Dead Memorandum [1] chronicles my imperfect progress.

This is a work of nonfiction.

The Dead Memorandum [#2]

The Subtle Art of Leaving Things Out

The press of bodies on a crowded cobblestone underpass. Flesh and fur, metal and feather, carapace and stone, music and muslin mingle past one another in the street. At my step, a pack of Scutlings scamper off into an ally, their antenna trailing behind like streamers in the wind. A Bifer spits a great red wad at my shoe, and I skip to miss it by a hair's breadth, patting his shoulder as I pass. He yawns a harumph (friendly old bog) , the red goop trailing from his jaw and into the cobblestone. I round the corner and the city opens to me like a flower: a great, sweating, stamping, gnawing, guffawing, flower. 

The gooey center of the inhospitable UN-verse. The haven of Miscasts and Storyborn, anyone botched or abandoned by a Barren, anyone on the run from B.O.R. 

I crane my neck, and up above, the city bends and turns. We are, all of us here, walking and skipping and puking and slapping inside of a great sphere with a floating gray sun at its center, a sun whose light is insufficient and unceasing. 

Nastiest bog in the great Tapestry of Worlds, City of Wyrms: Endling.

Always good to come home. 

I was bit by the writing bug early in life. Like “ten years old” kind of early. I hit all the usual pit stops on the road to inspiration: Narnia, Middle Earth, The Trumpet of the Swan… but the series that made me want to write A Proper Book was The Dragons of Blueland. 

True to my inherited puritan ethic, at the ripe old age of ten I had already “written” a story years prior. The story in question was a dozen page treatment called Jaybird the Puppy. I say “written” (in scare quotes) because I was five and therefore could not write per se. I dictated the story to my parents, babysitters, older siblings, pretty much anyone who would sit at a keyboard, listen, and type while I paced the hardwood floorboards and rambled visions of what the family dog got up to when no one was watching, like a strange, homeschooled, autistic-adjacent Don Draper. 

Because we never actually knew Jaybird as a puppy, inheriting him in his middle years, I think my childhood imagination needed to fill in the gaps. My brain filled in a whole series similar in scope (if not content) to Animorphs or Goosebumps; there would be Jaybird the Puppy, then Jaybird the Teen and then a litany of action/adventure stories detailing Jaybird’s various heroic exploits journeying to places at the far corners of my imagination, places I had never been and likely never would go: Jaybird in Space, Jaybird in the Haunted Castle, Jaybird at the Pound… But I never wrote any of the other planned entries1 because I realized that my true audience was sitting on the floor right in front of me; I was fortunate to have two very kind and patient brothers who were more than happy to sit and listen to (or at least not interrupt) my stories while they fiddled with Legos and K-NEX. They heard it all (whether they remember is another question…): Jaybird the Puppy, The Big Bad Boys2, Shang and Chan Li3, Bruce Steel and Iron the Robo Dog4, and on and on… 

Then came Blueland and my ambitions changed forever (if, perhaps, not for good). I would no longer story tell! I would story write!  

The plot of The Dragons of Blueland is simple. According to Wikipedia: 

“Boris the dragon contacts Elmer … to ask Elmer's help: several men have found his family of dragons and are proposing to sell them to zoos and circuses. Elmer runs away from home again and helps Boris's family to scare off the men permanently [emphasis mine].”

I think what hooked me was the story’s finality. In a surprisingly poignant, melancholy ending Elmer and Boris (yes… Boris is the dragon’s name...) part ways for good. Elmer goes back home to live a regular human life, to grow up and work a regular human job while Boris (yes… Boris) goes into hiding with his family. Before splitting, Elmer hugs… the dragon’s neck and they cry and say a tearful goodbye. 

Forever. 

If that isn’t enough to melt your nine year old heart, the whole image is depicted on the cover in resplendent blues and yellows and reds. Many of my memories are likely total bullshit, but I speak with utmost confidence when I say I remember exactly how sad this ending made me feel. 

In retrospect, I have some suspicions about why it hit so hard. I grew up in a subgenre of the Christian tradition I can only describe as “incessantly optimistic,” the general vibe of which can be summarized by the lyrics of the ol’ timey hymn “When We All Get to Heaven” which, to my recollection, we sang in church about seventeen times a week: “When we aaaaaaaaaall get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will beeeeeeee, when we aaaaaaall see Jeeeeeeeeesus we’ll sing and shout the victoreeeeee. (VICTOREEEEEE!).”  

There were no bittersweet endings in stories of my baptist youth. There were no ambiguous or tragic endings either. Everything began and ended in a happy rictus smile of creation and redemption with absolutely no room for enduring sadness, no room for tears; such things as “tears” and “sadness” were glitches in our glass-darkly-world, bugs that would be ironed out by God himself once the beta testing phase was over and we (not they, we) “aaaaaaaaaall” got to heaven.5 

In this context of oppressive, internalized optimism, I found The Dragons of Blueland sort of scandalous. Encountering such a definitive and bittersweet ending in a story was my, perhaps, first deeply felt brush with death in all its finality. It infused me with a grand and terrible responsibility--I WOULD REVIVE THE SERIES! I WOULD WRITE A FOURTH BOOK! I WOULD BRING ELMER AND BORIS BACK TOGETHER FOR A PROPER, HAPPY ENDING WHERE BORIS’S FAMILY COULD LIVE WITH ELMER’S! THEY WOULD MOVE IN TOGETHER ON A RANCH WITH PLENTY OF SPACE AND PLAY IN BLISSFUL PARADISE FOREVER! 

With time, the specifics of my ambition would (of course) fade, but I’ve never really forgotten what it felt like to learn that some stories remain untold on purpose, that to tell a story necessitates not telling millions of other possible stories. 

To tell an effective tragedy, the writer must plant in the mind of the reader the idea that the characters could be happy if it weren’t for who they are as people. One has to imagine Macbeth confiding his ambition and jealousy in Duncan to feel a sense of gross catharsis at all the nighttime chest stabbing. So too with Frodo getting on that boat to go to The Grey Havens. It is only sad because we see Sam standing on the dock bawling his eyes out, wondering what it might be like for him and dear Mr. Frodo to live out their days together as… gardener and employer?6 To put it another way, some narrative truths about characters disallow other narrative truths (Frodo and Sam can’t part ways for good if they move in together, grow old, and die side-by-side. Tolkien couldn’t have it both ways so he picked the bittersweet option). 

Once I realized this truth about stories the whole “art via absence” thing crystallized, for me, into full blown creative paralysis. I’ve since figured big parts of it out, but it recrystallizes on the bad days. Because a dozen or more untold and untellable stories exist in my brain at the same time I feel pain, frustration, angst, curiosity, inaction, and despair. 

In addition, the idea that to tell one story entails not telling dozens of others has haunted me since The Dragons of Blueland7 specifically in that I struggle leaning into cathartic sadness. I don’t like to see people (even imaginary people) suffer. It says a great deal about my neurosis and people pleasing tendencies that I often refuse to allow genuine sadness at the end of a story even if that is what the story is screaming for. I’m working on that. Identifying the problem is the first step. I’m not sure what the second step might be. 

My current strategy is to try and tell a story where “the road less traveled” and all its lost opportunities and regret and sadness are intrinsic to the narrative. Plath is Dead (whatever it may eventually turn into) is a story about lost things that cannot be recovered. It is about humor in dark places. It is a sad story, or at least a story with fiendishly sad parts intricately involved in its construction. Most of the characters are “low level,” inconsequential little people who deal with the powerlessness that comes from being left out of something important: an intern who works for The Bureau of Rationality, a literal Office Drone who sees with omniscient fly eyes all the worlds in a magical multiverse but cannot leave its’ desk because it’s hard wired into an archaic computer, an old smuggler “not named” Prufrock who can’t seem to locate some very important memories, like his name, or his daughters identity, a little girl growing up in a house made of books with no one around to talk to, an assassin who calls herself Shadow and Jack the Ripire, the mutilated man thing that tails her at every turn. 

These characters exist a certain way even though they could just as easily exist differently, merge into one, or split into a dozen.8 I suppose writing a story is deciding to make certain people real, to give them hearts and minds and dreams with an overwhelming desire to hide the reality of their hearts and minds and dreams. 

In that way, the story people become like you and me. 

Apparently, in The Europeans the novelist Henry James writes of one character “...there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two that was neither.” I’ll shamelessly plagiarize his words to make my point. When writing a story, there is something that the characters are, and something that they aren’t, and something between the two, that makes the story work. 

I’m trying to write characters who exist in the middle space between what they are and what they could be. 

Here’s to hoping! 

A short story

The mirror fizzes and becomes a portal. 

Inside the wasmirror I go. Inside the wasmirror slipping down into cool liquid glass, ogling the world through webcams, dancing across rooms full of piping-hot words and almost glutting on the piles of pixel STUFF and shapes. E’s bay, Amazon, the list of Craig. 

I put STUFF into the tiny cage so that STUFF will come into my HOME from AFK in the brown boxes full of crunchy white. 

“godswillbedone/fingerscrossed,” I pray, and a second time to weave the charm, “godswillbedone/fingerscrossed.” 

The next day slaptapsound on AFK jolts me from wasmirror to stew beside HOMEopening and take the breaths (one-two-three) like the flicking numbers on the wasmirror clock (down down right to the right).

Then I open just a line-tab size of HOMEopening and there she is. 

The most beautiful being I have ever seen. 

Her blue vest and hat bluer than the bluest zon, her outspreading girth, upper jello arms,  (oh-my-land what a looky) and she holds out the baby wasmirror for me to scratch and stares at me with fear, my green skin and vinetacular lockes doubtless hideous, ugly for her to behold, but hidden beneath the human hood and blanket combine I garb my drab, miniscule form inside; torso covering on mankind, it envelopes me like a long trailing gown. 

“Thank you! Thank you much many! Much grace! Much gift!” 

“You’re… welcome?” she says, hugging her tiny clipboard to her mountainous bosom. And I scratch-a-scratch the baby wasmirror with my sygic name and she trudges off to her vroomcage as fast as her thunderous legs will stomp. 

Enamored. Enchanted. I cage more STUFF in the wasmirror, hoping to see her flat nose and great ears bedecked in plasticine pearls, hoping to smell the musk of trudge as she carries the brown boxes forth. And I cage and cage STUFF and more STUFF but each time it is not her. 

I begin to fear and dread that she may have been like the glamor of my kind. Vaporous nothing,  wasmirror squares, always changing and shifting. There and not there and not there and there. 

And the fear forces a refresh in me. I update. If I happen upon her again, I will not HIDE WHO I AM. I will assume MY SELF. I will LET IT GO. 

I rip the long hood and blanket combine into tattered fragments with my thin, birdlike claws. I rifle and paw through brown boxes and garb myself in what will no longer disguise or cloud or hide, I am a tab popping forward. I am no longer minimizing SELF!!!!!!!!

When I gaze her approach through tiny line of a HOMEopening, I notice she seems scared, dancing from foot to foot. 

“VOILA!” I say, making the HOMEopening fully to display my newly LET GO SELF. My ears spring from holes in the red and white fur cap of my once master, I stretch a matching speedo about my loinplace, and a smile spreads jagged moons in my mouth. 

“THE FUCK?!” she says, stumbling back. 

“I AM MYSELF!” I say, aware of her wonder and awe, “I have LET GO! I am Meetcute!” 

But she is already running, huffing for the vroomcage and I FREAK knowing that THIS MAY BE ALL AND IT IS NOT ENOUGH OF ALL. But helpless I am to follow, as AFK is fierce and bad. 

In AFK place where lived I young the STUFF was hurt and fear and not good. So I stay inHOME now that big boss has let go. Wasmirror is enough for me and in wasmirror I watch. In wasmirror I find anything. 

I watch my cutemet’s words through wasmirror as she talks and talks in chatroom with all time friend TABITCHA10 (who is much laugh). 

RuthBaderWINsburg: i’ll tell you what happened today but m prety sure ur gonna think I’m crazy. 

TABITCHA10: NAH GURL! What’s it? 

RuthBaderWINsburg: i think i saw some kind of monster… 

TABITCHA10: … SAY. MORE. 

RuthBaderWINsburg: this guy opened his door and shit u not was… shit… musta been like one, two feet tall, green skin, green long hair, like a plant person or some shit. 

TABITCHA10: … 

TABITCHA10: …… 

TABITCHA10: ……… No. Fucking. Way. 

RuthBaderWinsburg: way. 

TABITCHA10: ……… NO. FUCKING. WAY. 

… 

Meetcute73: sounds like not monster. Maybe friend. 

TABITCHA10: uhhhm dude. Not cool. How’d you join the dm? 

RuthBaderWinsburg: check your phone

And I wait but silent dots become nothing at all. Words stop like suddenly done rainfall. I am alone. And again I muse that THIS MAY BE ALL AND IT IS NOT ENOUGH OF ALL. 

And I know what I must do. 

Journeymanning I go: AFK with all the tools for QUEST OF LOVE. I cling to SEGWAY trunk, my armor NERF bright, brimming foam, my map a baby wasmirror. Brave the heat of AFK. Brave the watchful eyes of carrion crow. Brave the blackpocked rock trails and the vroomcages that vroom them with vigilant rigor. 

And then I am on the dot and looking down the thin path at her AFK there, and I see it. 

The great, black woofmaker sniffs and woofs and I swallow my fear and face it with Racket Of Dunlop. I am thrown and cast about, my armor mangled. Before I faint, I cutemet lady hover into view angelic, celestial much and many. 

The room is bright and white and cold and full of KITCHENWARES. I smell human foodstuffs. I smell dog but not close *phew*.

They stand in front, both: Hyperionic. Vahallic. Olympian. Both ogre-large and tree-trunk-thick and though I am tied to creaky white chair with black tapestuffs I dip my head and avert my eyes. 

“MAIDENS!” I moan, “OH MAIDENS! ALL WAS ALL AND ALL WAS NOT ENOUGH ALL AND HERE I AM, MEETCUTE HERE TO SERVE.” 

“What. The. Fuck” she says, “What. The. Actual Fuck ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” Her face in hands. 

“I mean,” says second maiden, “he’s kinda adorable.” 

Second maiden... TABITCHA10? Mayhaps? She of dark skin and long rainbow locs. 

“OH CUTEMET!” I say, “HOW MAY I SEE MORE OF ALL?” 

My lady pulls her face from her hands and mumbles, “Start by explaining. What… are you?” 

“I am fae, exiled of my people.” 

“What for? Being a being a stalker incel pervert?!” 

“For being too large…” 

They say nothing. Then they snicker. Then they laugh. 

This makes my eyes teary blurry and weepy sopped and they see, they see and stop laughing and placate with outstretched palms, say, “Oh god, sorry, sorry, it’s… yeah.” and “Not a joke I guess… whoops.” 

Once the laughing stops cutemet says to MEETCUTE, “Why are you… stalking me…” 

My mind is befuddled not by words but tone. I have seen on the wasmirror many human tales of love and marriage. I have watched their loveplays (SEXINTHECITY / PRETTYWOMAN) and heard their love ballads (EVERYBREATHEYOUTAKE / PRETTYWOMAN). I have beheld their hearts desires, seen them play out in live-time and in these tales and dramas and songs I have learned much of them and courtship ways and their hearts and I tell her, and (probably) TABITCHA10 as much, tell them that I know the rules of human courtship and love and desire. That I know the rules of “the hunt.” That I hunt for her for lonely hearts relief.

For love. 

“Riiiiiight…” she says “riiiiiiiiight.” 

(Probably) TABITCHA now puts her face into her hands. 

And they tell me. 

They tell me of the great electric spider and his WEB of lies. They tell me that the things I see and even do on wasmirror are not the same as the things in AFK and I am WRECKED with sorrow and shame and know that I have done a fail. 

Much fail. 

Much shame. 

“FLAME ME!” I say, averting my eyes, “FLAME ME AND BE DONE!” 

“Huh?” they say, together (albeit in different words). 

“IT IS THE PRICE OF MUCH FAIL. TO FLAME MERCILESSLY. TO BE MADE OBLIVION. TO BE CANCELED OUT. FLAME ME.” 

And they laugh again. 

And I do not know why they laugh. But I do know that to laugh is not to rage and so laugh is good and I, glistening with nerves, laugh too and say, “WHY ARE WE LAUGHING!!!! HA HA HA!!!” 

And they cut the ropes and in radiant merciful light, help me to my feet. 

“Meetcute… so that’s your name right?” 

“Yes?...” 

“This is real life Meetcute… People are kinda… ok here. You know? Like we get it. You didn’t know what you didn’t know.” 

“Did not know that I did not know.” I repeat, “That I was caught in spider’s WEB of lies?” 

They nod. One fills a kettle.  

“Just…” says cutemet, “don’t follow people home. That’s… kinda messed up.” 

“I AM MESSED UP…” I say, eyes blurry wet again with sop.  

“No. No. No.” she says, “You’re fine.” 

They nod at one another, satisfied, and a wordless talk goes between their eyes.

“So… Now you’re here… so… we were uh… about to watch a shitty documentary about fake love and eat way too many salted caramels. You in?” 

My heart refreshes much. 

Refreshes many. 

Refreshes good.