Crazy Ideas 2020

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This post is not about New Year’s Resolutions.

Those always strike me as a little grim, carrying a note of hungover disappointment at the self for having done this or that wrong in the past year, turning that disappointment into a kind of disciplinary fervor to just do better. And, at least for me, that kind of thing never works, no matter how hard I try. No amount of gritting the teeth is enough to magically create different results.

(Your mileage may vary. I understand that some people have the force of will and are able to deny themselves pleasure, or delay it, and get to their tasks or avoid their vices, by just deciding to. I am not this person.)

So, for me, a more interesting way to go into a new year is just to decide what to look for. To look for something isn’t necessarily to find it—but it does mean that you’re more likely to see it when it comes your way.

Some things I’m going to be looking for in 2020:

  • Crazy ideas. When something rolls across my brain and amuses or excites me, I’m going to pull up a chair and let it chat to me for a bit. Whether I then set it on its way or make it up a guest room is another matter.
  • Doubt. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I want to pay attention. Rather than assuming I’m missing something that everyone else understands, I want to entertain the possibility that there’s something I’m understanding that no one else has noticed yet. These often turn into the best ideas, the ones I really should be bringing into the world.
  • Desire. What do I want to do, with this moment or with my day or week or month or life? This is not the same thing as what I want to want to do.
  • Control. Am I trying to control other people, or the future? If so, how’s that working out for me?
  • Joy. There is almost always a clutch of large and small joys to be had, right before me, if I take even half a second to notice them. Stitch by stitch, these are the things that make memories, and memories make a life.

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follow your fear.

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What will you be looking for in 2020? Whatever it is, I wish you good health and good cheer in the year of perfect clarity.

History of words, words about history…

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Still on the subject of podcasts in the midst of a Busy Holiday Season®️, there’s another one I feel completely compelled to share, even if absolutely none of you will be interested in joining me: The History of English podcast (recently misheard rather intriguingly as the “History of English Podcasts”) is completely wonderful.

The show, running since 2012, appears to be an extracurricular passion project of a solo practitioner lawyer from North Carolina, who says absolutely nothing about himself on the show. But he has quite a lot to say: he presents the history of English in meticulous hourlong increments, starting from the absolute dawn of the knowable history of human speech all the way up to—God knows, because seven years in, he’s only gotten a little beyond Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a few hundred momentous years shy of Shakespeare.

Anyone interested in etymology or English history or both would almost certainly enjoy the show. One thing I find tremendously charming is the way that Kevin (for that is the host’s name) delivers etymological facts by theme as he marches forward in time. An episode documenting the messy bloodline of King Alfred the Great, for example, provides him an opportunity to talk about Old English words for family and inheritance. But just when it veers close to feeling like a lengthy fact dump, the show manages to keep moving along narratively.

But anyway, enough about the show. Let’s talk about me.

I’ve had a long-simmering interest in the history of languages. Before the internet, I remember staying up late with my parents’ encyclopedia, reading the cross-references to work out how languages are related to and descended from each other. I briefly flirted with the idea of majoring in linguistics, before realizing that (at my university, at least) the subject was a great deal more medical, more wetly throaty, than I’d anticipated.

But there’s no shame in being a dilettante, I hope, and Kevin from the podcast gives me hope about even the prospect of being a devoted learner and teacher in one’s spare time around a busy lawyer’s schedule.

Okay, actually, enough about me. Back to the show.

The early episodes of the podcast go way, way back. By episode 7, we’re still in the land of Proto-Indo-European, which is the language that gave birth to most European and some Asian languages. It was spoken so long ago, by people who did not write, that all we know about it has been reconstructed by linguists working backward from modern languages like forensic analysts, finding traces of ancient words in the similarities and gaps between current words.

This absolutely blows my mind, and always has. Not only do linguists figure out little clues about dead languages by finding commonalities between their daughter languages; they also bring in geography and botany and biology and genetics to connect the dots. For example, we find some clues about where these Proto-Indo-Europeans lived by analyzing which words they had, and didn’t have, to describe the world around them—no words for “monkey” or “palm tree,” so not the jungle, and none for “olive” or “grape,” so a colder climate. Words for certain kinds of sheep only, which tells us something about what kinds of animals they could have raised, and that in turn tells us something about what their world looked like.

This kind of thing is completely bananas to me: can you imagine doing this as a job? Can you imagine tracing the spoken words of people who died five thousand years ago, and also getting to learn a lot about sheep in the process? Goals, I tell ya.

Anyway.

Something I find so fascinating about the history of words is that it traces the history of thought, and the history of sound. These are things that don’t tend to leave impressions in the archaeological record, and they can be obfuscated in written histories. But words can’t help but shift and change with use, like a well-worn pair of jeans thinning around the wearer’s knees.

And one thing that language doesn’t lie about is the thought process that goes into the mundane everyday choices of words that average people make. Despite the best intentions of grammarians and usage experts everywhere, language never has been primarily about perfection. It’s about communication. It does its job to the extent that people can understand what others want to say, and can make themselves understood in the process.

People of all stripes are natural geniuses at inventing new, easier, and more nuanced ways of saying what they mean. Sometimes they borrow and break old words to do so. Sometimes, this way, words come to mean their opposite: pairs like “guest” and “host,” “give” and “take,” and “black” and “white” come from the same Indo-European root word. Through the messy process of speech occurring over generations of people delicately navigating their societies, these words took on seemingly nonsensical new meanings. And just like we’re all writers now, we’re all the masters of how to communicate our meaning, our humor, and our nuances exactly how we please.

Okay, now back to me.

In Book One, I indulged myself by writing a little sub-subplot about linguistic history. (This is the pleasure of writing a book: no one can stop you). I imagined a pair of late-Victorian scholars chasing a theory about how one might get to know the ancient inhabitants of Europe by looking at the words they borrowed from each other. As it happens, I think the theory as presented in the book is wrong, but the great thing about fiction is that, again, no one can stop you. I can do that on purpose and no one is allowed to criticize me!

I imagine most of you are either long gone or reading out of mere politeness by this point. But to sum it all up: I think there’s something tremendously beautiful about how language can pry open our deep history. Every time we open our mouths to speak, we’re not only articulating our own present thoughts—we’re also building upon the feelings and frustrations and joys and creativity of millions of people over thousands of generations. All the people that came before us still live through us in this little way, carved into our bodies in our DNA and carved into our brains with the words we keep shifting and borrowing and laughing and shouting.

Further recommended reading if you are interested: John McWhorter’s piece, which includes a fascinating idea that the weird way English uses the verb “to do” (as in: “do you like me?” Where every other self-respecting language would say: “Like you me?”) actually comes from Celtic languages.

And on that note, Merry Christmas to all!

Still sun

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Today is the winter solstice: the least amount of light, the most amount of dark.

We don’t like dark terribly much as a species, any more than we like waiting. The winter solstice is a bit of a relief, then, because at least we know this is as bad as it gets. Even if it gets colder and it sleets from now through March, at least there will be a little more light at the edges of the day to see us through it.

(Perhaps if we were nocturnal, we’d have this same sense of relief at the summer solstice? We might be panting with relief in our stuffy underground burrow at the thought that the light will at least stop growing longer, forcing us these long dull listless days without a respite from the searching sun.)

The word “solstice” comes from two Latin roots: “Sol” (sun) and “stit-” (stationary). People who had been tracking the sunset’s journey south along the horizon were watching for the time when it would pause—pause, and then reverse its track. The solstice is that noticeable pause.

Like a deep breath that has been let out. The empty feeling in the lungs, like a rattle in the ribcage, the belly like a bag pressed flat. A sense of desolation, they say, but also a definite glow of opportunity. Possibility. The inhale is inevitable.

Soon (not too soon, don’t get ahead of yourself!) but soon, it will be spring. There is, at least, the reassurance that the mechanism hasn’t broken; the sun isn’t going to decline indefinitely. The gears are still turning, or the sun is still at its proper axial tilt and the orbit is stable, or what have you. The clock is still ticking.

But all that future possibility is to come. For now, we’re in the pause.

And we may as well enjoy the dark, for now. The reassurance that it is all temporary, that the breath will be let back in momentarily, should all give us a chance to befriend the dark, even if we wouldn’t have chosen it.

Years ago I heard a quote I can’t now find about a room used for scientific experiments that needed to be kept completely, totally dark. Even a bit of light from a door opened too soon would ruin it. Signs posted on the door warned people to keep the dark in.

What phrasing: not keep the light out, but keep the dark in. It belongs to itself. Let it be. It’s not just the absence of light, although it’s hard not to see it this way.

It’s become a pattern here for me to talk about time and the seasons as heavyhanded metaphors for phases of life. Maybe it’s my brand, who knows. But in this construct, solstices are times of change when the change can’t be seen yet. The winter solstice in our lives is the time when things have been getting worse, and darker, and it’s become harder to see a way out of hard times (see? I cannot untangle myself from disliking dark). The solstice is the moment where we notice it’s stopped, and it will turn around.

But because human lives and human circumstances are not tied to the axial tilt of the Earth, there’s no telling when things start getting better. The solstice pause is invisible, isn’t it, when it’s in your life? It’s like hitting rock bottom, which can only be confirmed when you’ve started to rise again.

On this note, I heard an interesting tidbit from Alexander Shaia about the timing of Christmas. It’s not smack-dab on the winter solstice; it’s three or four days later. Three or four days is enough time to start really noticing that the sun is scooting the other way now, back up the horizon, which means the days are just a tiny bit longer. And that’s when Christmas happens: when you can actually see the beginnings of the increase of light.

The solstice is the mysterious point of stillness before change. We can’t always notice it when it’s there; it’s only in the rearview mirror, when things are really beginning to shift, that we can pinpoint the longest night of the year. Meanwhile, that moment of deepest darkness, which marked the beginning of the increase of the light, was set silently, imperceptibly, into motion.

If the days are dark for you right now, I wish you the best. I hope the reversal is coming soon.

Audio fiction podcasts for long drives.

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In addition to living in the Golden Age of Television, we also appear to have the great fortune to also be living in the Golden Age of Podcasting. (How can a medium that didn’t exist 20 years ago have a Golden Age? I’m not entirely sure, but it sure feels like there will never be a time with more podcasts than there are now. I mean, how…?)

All this Content can make some of us (me) feel a little overwhelmed. Thoughts and prayers. We’ll get through this together.

But not before I recommend some Content.

The podcast world is full of all manner of shows to listen to: political analysis, news updates, science and history and pop-culture informers, emotional shows about hidden and unknown things that, one surmises, couldn’t be revealed outside the secretive world of the podcast. And then there’s a whole lot of random people swapping jokes with their friends for public consumption, which I’ll admit is a genre I really don’t get.

Due to my strong innate inclination to FOMO, I’ve become a heavy user of this medium. Shocking though it may be to you few, you happy few, you band of readers, the world of written Content like blogs is long gone, and the age of video and audio is at hand. Therefore, people whose ideas I want to hear are saying their ideas out loud in this format, rather than writing them down. And I do get a lot of insights this way, but unfortunately, one must listen to the whole damn thing to wait for a few morsels of wisdom to fall. This makes podcasts rather more difficult to skim than a printed article, and a lot more time-consuming.

So I listen at 2x speed. Then I wonder why I tend to feel a little manic and overstimulated.

But that’s a problem for another time.

After this wordy intro, all I’m really here to say is that one of my favorite genres of podcast lately is fiction. It’s a rich field, and because the podcast medium is cheaper to produce and has lower barriers to entry than film/TV and traditional book publishing, there are a lot of small producers making great audio fiction that you can access all for free.

This time of year, a lot of us are traveling, and I think some of these podcasts make a great short alternative to an audiobook if you like to listen to a story while you drive, or while you take a break from whatever you need to take a break from this season.

All of these shows make the most of the limitations and the opportunities of audio-only, whether they have a single narrator or a whole cast.

So, below are some of my favorites in different genres, in no particular order:

  • Surreal: Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires: Two shows from the same writing team at Night Vale Presents. Welcome to Night Vale is in the form of bizarre, hilarious community-radio broadcasts from a town in the desert where all conspiracies are true. Listen basically in any order, except for episodes marked as multi-part. For more of an ongoing story, each season of Within the Wires is presented as found audiocassettes of various kinds (relaxation tapes, museum audio guides, dictation tapes, and voicemail) from an alternate history of the 20th century. It’s slow but so creative and beautiful.
  • Parody: A Very Fatal Murder from The Onion perfectly parodies investigative reporting shows like Serial, wherein the host has boundary issues. The first season stands alone very well.
  • Action: Carrier has excellent performances. It follows a woman who takes over her father’s job as a trucker, only to find that there’s something very wrong with her deliveries. Also, Passenger List tells the story of a young woman trying to find out what really happened to a plane that disappeared in midair with her brother on board. These are both miniseries, so there’s an ending!
  • Eco-Thriller (?!): Forest 404 from the BBC was a great sci-fi adventure set in the far future, when the world has entirely forgotten nature. The feed also includes ambient nature sounds and brief talks with scientists about topics related to the story. It’s also a miniseries (as Tahani knows, you can trust the BBC to exhaust itself rather quickly), so there’s an ending.
  • Drama: Motherhacker and Sandra (both from Big Podcast company Gimlet; both miniseries (do you see a pattern here? I love an ending)) are comic dramas with great acting that live in our world of spam calls and Amazon Alexas, but with unnerving twists.
  • Suspense/Horror: Video Palace was a truly creepy story of a man investigating a mysterious VHS tape that haunts him.
  • Sci-Fi: Steal the Stars has government alien conspiracies, forbidden love, and a main female character with a captivating, deep voice. What’s not to like?
  • Immersive: The Walk, written by novelist Naomi Alderman of The Power, is controversial in terms of quality, but I liked it and would recommend it if you’re down to have a weird, maybe dissatisfying narrative experience. This is immersive audio, meaning you the listener find yourself spoken directly to by the cast. You are tasked with walking from Scotland to London to deliver a mysterious package as the world goes to pieces around you. It’s weird, and it doesn’t necessarily entirely work as a story, but I listened to it with some friends on a long drive and it was absorbing and made the drive feel eventful, rather than merely distracting me from the tedium. So give it a try.

Are there others you like that I left out? Leave a comment or let me know on Facebook or Instagram.

The dark wait.

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The season of advent started today in the Christian church. It’s the new year, liturgically, and here’s how I rang it in so far: I drove my boyfriend to the airport in a long pre-dawn dark that my body couldn’t decipher from bedtime. Hours later, I went with my parents to their church in Sacramento in a blustery atmospheric river that festooned the streets with bright-yellow leaves in deep gutter puddles. Now it’s not quite five, a roast is in progress, family is coming over, and night is already falling.

It’s all extremely cozy, for me, but for so many without easy access to comfort, it’s simply dark and wet and cold. Some of our ancestors were rather direct about this fact:

Advent is that blackness. It’s the waiting, the longing for something. Advent will end with the incarnation on Christmas Day. In the meantime, for many centuries it’s been a time of darkness, and reflection, and sobriety, and even a fair dose of sadness.

But just like the apocalypse we were recently reminded of, this isn’t just about a one-time event on a religious timeline. Waiting is a recurring season in our lives. Waiting for medical news, resolution to a quarrel, feedback from a job interview, a grade on a math assignment, a pot to boil, the alarm to go off, spring to come, the next season of The Crown to be released. And just like December nights in northern latitudes, all this waiting can feel so long.

And, being human, we’d rather…not.

Advent, therefore, becomes time for Christmas carols, which the dour keepers of church time remind us is terribly premature. Advent is time for displays of Christmas excess of all kinds, electrical and musical and commercial and gastronomical and sartorial, which begin basically in October and come down with a disgusted, ashamed crash precisely on December 26th (when the dour timekeepers, looking rather pleased with themselves, are settling into their mere second day of Christmas).

We can’t tolerate the wait, whether it’s for Christmas or anything. We would do anything to avoid the cold and dark, and the uncertainty.

On Wednesday, we drove to my grandma’s house (happy birthday, by the way!) to celebrate Thanksgiving. But a precursor to today’s storm tore through the area, and the power was out from lunchtime until long after bedtime, while the wind lashed and buckled the windows, and the rain and hail made it hard to hear each other speak. We sat and ate and played cards by candlelight, ate soup warmed by the gas stove (#blessed), and let our phones die.

It felt like such a long wait, even though precisely none of my actual needs, or even really my desires, were impacted. With our dying phone batteries and cell data we refreshed the PG&E outage page for updates on the repairs. And then the indicator lights all blinked on at 2:30 am, and immediately, normality resumed. The waiting was entirely forgotten.

“Why not now?”

This question has been orbiting me lately, articulated in a few different ways. I’m waiting on a few things, myself, all of which (I’m continually disappointed to realize) are my own responsibility to create. So, why not now?

The answer within comes quietly: “because it’s not yet time.”

As the wonderful Henri Nouwen wrote:

So, for us and many people, waiting is a dry desert between were we are and where we want to be. We do not enjoy such a place. We want to move out of it and so something worthwhile. Dear Lord, help me be patient as I await your arrival.

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#AdventWord #Unexpected⠀ “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Advent reminds us that accountability (this is what the second coming represents) will be unexpected. It might be the cosmic intervention or it might just be the passing from this life into the next. Either way, the point is simple: Life is precious and short. Are we using the gift of time well? We should treat every second as an opportunity to grow, to forgive, to support someone in need, and to love.⠀ ***⠀ #Inesperado⠀ “El Hijo del hombre vendrá cuando menos lo esperen." El Adviento nos recuerda que esa responsibilidad (eso es lo que significa la segunda venida) será inesperada. Pueda ser una intervención cósmica, o pueda ser solamente el pasar de esta vida a la próxima. En cualquier caso, el punto es sencillo: la vida es preciosa y corta. ¿Estamos usando el don del tiempo de manera responsable? Debemos de tratar cada segundo como oportunidad para crecer, perdonar, dar apoyo a los que necesitan, y amar.⠀ ***⠀ #Sanzatann⠀ “Moun Bondye voye nan lachè a ap vini lè nou pa ta kwè." Tan Lavan an raple nou ke responsabilite pou nou rann kont de sa nou fè (se sa retou Jezi a represante) ap vini nan yon le ke nou pat atann. Li ka vini tankou yon gwo fenomèn natirèl oswa li ta ka jis yon pasaj soti nan lavi saa ale nan lòt lavi tou nèf la. Nenpòt fason sa fèt, ide a se senp: Lavi kout e li koute chè. Tan nou genyen, se yon kado, èske nou itilize kado sa a byen? Nou ta dwe konsidere chak segond tankou yon opòtinite pou nou grandi, padonnen moun, sipòte yon moun ki nan bezwen, epi renmen.⠀ ⠀ –The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, PhD

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Story bias; also, the apocalypse.

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I’ve been thinking about stories: how ubiquitous they are, and how terribly important to making it through the winter.

The flip side of this innate bias toward stories is that we turn everything into a story, don’t we? When we’re telling loved ones about our day, we try hard to turn it into a proper narrative with a rise and fall. And especially when we go further back, the episodes we recall the most from our deep pasts are those that have some great punchline or a deep emotional resonance, using the same language and tugging at the same feelings as a good fictional story do.

Is this why I am often fighting my own anxiety about the future? I’m seeing my own future in the same terms as I see the unread bulk of a novel I’m just beginning. In that novel, in those pages that fit in my hand, something is going to happen. Someone made it happen, and it’s only going to go one way. It’s going to turn out one way or another, and then it will be over.

Plus, any novel worth its salt will lay out all the threads of that story early on, and they will twist and braid until they come to an appropriate conclusion.

That isn’t at all what life is. It’s not foreordained to turn out one way or another. It’s not even foreordained to turn out at all, except in the certainty of eventual death ? (Oh God, it’s turning dark, stay with me). But until then, there’s never a final word.

So this difference between real life and story life—the fact that one has an author and an arc and a tidy ending, and the other has—who knows what?—it makes it hard for me to remember that stories can actually taint our own view of our lives. It can make us overinterpret the past, picking through like story weavers for the threads that prove why the path we’re on now is the right one and always has been, or was never the right one from the start, or finding proof that so-and-so has always been trustworthy or has always been a rat.

And we overpredict the future, or at least I do: we get a thread going about how it’s set to work out, and then we just think all we have to do is follow that thread until we reach the end of the spool.

And we see signs everywhere along the way, like mystery readers looking for the keys planted by the author about whodunnit.

But life is episodic, not advancing toward anything in particular. It waxes and wanes, and some things happen for no apparent reason at all. To the extent there’s meaning, it’s earned through reflection and by applying lessons learned to our future behavior.

This Sunday marks the end of the liturgical year, for those who use the Christian Lectionary. At the end of the year, right before we go into advent, the readings get into the Apocalypse. They are the terrifying prophetic visions of the prophet Daniel, and a bit from Revelation.

The word “apocalypse” itself, in Greek, means something like “revealing” (and this is why the book “Revelation” is called that: in Greek, it’s “apokalipsis.”) It’s when the curtain is drawn back, and we can see the truth that has always been present, waiting for our attention. Apocalypses can happen in our own lives whenever our patterns are disrupted, whenever tragedies (large or small) strike and shake us. Whenever something forces us to reckon with truths we hadn’t wanted to face.

In ordinary speech, “The Apocalypse” is a single event that some people think will happen, just like an earthquake or a war may happen. But there’s another way to look at it, and it’s one that makes quite a lot of sense along with the fact that the lectionary has us read about it every year at the end of the church year: it’s episodic. It’s repeating. Like the seasons, it recurs regularly.

But recurrence isn’t enough to destroy surprise. Every winter we’re surprised by the cold and dark, and we remark about it in conversation: “I can’t believe how dark it is so early!” Every year, literally like clockwork it happens, and yet we never remember how it feels. It never loses the capacity to shock. It’s just like watching a show over and over. Even though we know the characters will eventually fall in love, say, some part of us can still be on the edge of our emotional seats not knowing if they will-or-won’t.

Likewise the Apocalypse is something we can feel in our own lives all the time. It would be one thing to wait for a single event, a cataclysm that will happen once in time, in someone else’s distant future. But don’t we all feel the rise and fall of our own story lines of our own expectations that are met or not met, or are met in surprising and possibly mindbending new ways? When thing are revealed, and the curtain is drawn back, and we can be so surprised by our own lives. That is apocalypse.

Our lives are all a craving for story, because we crave for it all to make sense. And the beautiful thing about stories is—they do make sense, more than basically anything else. They survive so long, long after the linear events are over. They thrive, and take on new meaning, and keep us warm even in the surprising dark of the longest nights of the year. They remind us of the promise of the recurrence of longer days, of spring, of rebirth, of respite. Of revelation.

A story for the night.

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Mural by @jasjyotjasjyot, Metropolitan Branch Trail, 2019

It’s that time in late fall where most of the leaves have fully given up any pretense of hanging on. The ginkgos near me never even bothered to turn yellow this year, but simply shrugged and tossed all their green onto the ground last week. It’s that time of year when the sidewalks are red and yellow and brown and make a satisfying crunch, but the view overhead is of the spindly claws of trees and the dim winter sky. Night comes at 5. Christmas decorations are up. It’s almost, basically, winter.

And especially in winter, there is an impulse to stay in, get cozy, and hear a story. In the vast imagined past, this is what we did when it was cold and the night was long and the outdoor work was done. We sat and listened to a bard, or a skald, or our grandmother, tell the old ballads. Now we tend to rely more on video stories passed on to us by strangers, and books written by strangers. But the impulse is the same. There is something comforting and necessary about a story.

In fact, when was the last time you went a week or even a day without consuming a story, whether on TV or through a book, or from gossip, or from the news? Perish the thought, honestly. It’s almost as essential as eating.

I’ve always been a huge consumer of fiction, both in print and in video. I’m a glutton for stories. But in the past few years, I’ve been focusing on writing my own, too. It turns out that story creation sometimes feels altogether bizarre. If one follows the instructions from writing guides about story arc and plot points, it begins to feel a bit like painting by numbers. This is especially true in fiction with any particular constraints, such as genre requirements (in Romance, for example, each story must have a happily-ever-after, unless the author would rather avoid the hassle of being published) or length requirements (a 22-minute comedy episode for TV can’t go on until the story comes to a natural conclusion, unless of course the natural conclusion happens after 22 minutes). So instead of just following the heroic imagination wherever she may wander, a fiction producer must make sure that there is, for example, a reversal of an expectation somewhere about ⅔ of the way through, just in time for the all-is-lost moment and the final battle.

I couldn’t help but wonder: is every story just random decoration on a formulaic foundation? If I want to write a book with a “proper” story line, am I doomed just to spin a wheel and pick some settings, some character traits, and some quirky plot details, and tape them to a shape someone else made? What would be the point of that? Why would anyone want it?

But I never stopped consuming stories. And after I’d gotten my little education in the thou-shalts of story structure, I started being able to see them so clearly in what I was consuming. The grid marks of the A-plot, the B-plot, the arc, all became more visible.

To my surprise, that has done exactly nothing to diminish my hunger for stories. I still get caught up in whatever magic it is that makes me care about characters. I can still even feel the magic the second or tenth time through a beloved story. I still get pulled into the suspense or get tense at the will-they-won’t-they even when I know for sure that they will, and no one will die.

It’s not just paint by numbers. It’s not just the same thing in different clothing, different settings, with a fistful of clever jokes or some strokes of soaring prose. And that makes no logical sense, really.

At the end of the day, we must be hard-wired for it. It’s like what fetch is for a dog: an activity with no apparent rational value, except the deep joy it instills, and the chance it gives us to connect with others. In the dog’s case, it is communication with the beloved humans. In the humans’ case, following a story is a chance to connect with both the people in the story, who may or may not be real but who are human nevertheless, and with the people who made the story and those beside us on the couch or in the rest of the world who also enjoy it.

Next time, I’ll be exploring the idea of story when it comes to the absolutely true, apparently one-direction movement of life. So stay tuned.

November writing update.

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It’s November, as you might have noticed. As a writer who exists on the Internet, I know that November can be a time of great pressure and great disappointment. November is “National Novel Writing Month,” abbreviated to NaNoWriMo, and many hundreds of thousands or maybe billions of people (who knows, really?) participate by pledging to write a full novel in a month. For NaNoWriMo purposes, a full novel is anything 50,000 words or longer. It does not have to be, and indeed is probably not even supposed to be, “good.” It’s just supposed to get us out of our perfectionistic delay and onto the keyboard.

Several times, including his year, I’ve half-committed to doing NaNoWriMo. This has produced a few stunted partial novels in previous years, books I had semi-planned but which I didn’t have nearly enough juice to complete, especially when there’s a target of at least 1,667 words every day to stay on track. If you skip a day or two, the writing debt piles up and the lure of a blurry, Thanksgiving-induced tryptophan oblivion becomes too much to resist.

1,667 words a day is a lot. When I was writing Book One, a good day was 500, and an incredibly good day was 1,000. So 1,667 is basically inconceivable, like an ultramarathon or a layer cake. A blinding effort that’s just going to make me sleepy to consider.

Copyright 2019

Nevertheless, I’ve been trying (until the last few days, when things have gotten away from me, as they have a tendency to do). Sometimes it’s good to push toward a difficult goal, and other times it is good to relax into enjoying what’s already present, and maybe the real work is in figuring out which times are which.

Anyway. I’m thinking about writing again, so here’s an update:

Book One is sitting in limbo at the moment, but at some point in the not-too-distant future I think I’ll do another round of edits on it and then start shopping it around to various literary agents. People on the writing internet call this upcoming stage the “trenches,” which feels a tad overdramatic even as someone who wrote a book involving a higher-than-average amount of literal trench warfare (and, after all, it’s Veteran’s/Armistice Day, to boot). But I haven’t been there yet, so what do I know?

Seeking publication, whether through the traditional course (finding an agent who sells to editors and publishers) or self-publishing, is inherently about self-promotion. So this, shoving my words into the world, is practice. Thank you for being present as I practice.

Speaking of which, here I am—writing. Over the past three or so months, I’ve written something north of 25,000 words here, which basically means if I keep this up for a year I’ll have written 100,000 words—a hefty novel’s length. What is this blog? Why is it? We’re still not sure. But that’s okay for now. Whatever it is I’m heading for, I’m practicing for it, I suppose.

And then there’s Book Two, the one I’m sort of trying to NaNoWriMo my way through. Until a few days ago, despite the gremlin who had been plaguing me previously, the draft was flowing fast out of me. I was writing a ton of words without terribly much wailing and gnashing of teeth, which is pretty ideal. It’s a low-stakes, low-drama endeavor, and it’s something I don’t really ever expect to do anything with. So that makes it easy to go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and just keep at it (which, coincidentally, is as close as I have to a life philosophy at the moment).

Copyright 2019

There are times when I get a little tipsy on self-pity during my commute or my work day and I wish I could just be a book person all the time. But then I shake myself and realize: I am. Through tremendous fortune, I am able to read and write constantly, both for leisure and at my day job. And I go home in the evening and work on my novels and write this blog. In what way am I not a book person? It’s so easy to see the lack, even in the midst of abundance. Ain’t that always the way.

And here’s the thing: you’re probably a writer, too. Compared to any of your ancestors, even as recently as your parents, you write all the time. You write emails, and texts, and maybe tweets and Facebook comments, and Google reviews and who knows what all else? As linguist Gretchen McCulloch writes in the very worthwhile examination of online language Because Internet, we’re all writers now. We’re all experts in tone and nuance, learning together in a worldwide, real-time experiment when periods are passive-aggressive and when lowercase letters are ironic. We are all creative, producing brand-new combinations of words all the time, fresh additions to the English corpus. (McCulloch suggests an experiment: Google the last text message you sent containing more than ten words, and put quote marks around the whole thing. You’ll likely find no results, meaning you more or less invented that particular sentence).

Any one of us can coin a word or compose a sentence that has never been said before, and it now exists in the language as soon as we utter it, whether it winks in and out for a single moment or whether it catches on and endures in the minds of people yet unborn.

McCulloch, “Because Internet,” 269

So say it with me: you’re a writer. I’m a writer. We’re all doing it.

Time, as a symptom.

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(Pair this post, if you dare, with a listen to my absolute queen Joanna Newsom’s album Divers, which is all a meditation on time and what it means to love another person in the face of the temporary span of a life. It’s a ton of fun. Here’s a sample:)

And what lies under now the city is gone. Look, and despair.

“Sapokanikan,” Joanna Newsom

I recently spent a week with my parents in some of the National Parks of the Southwest. We went to the Grand Canyon (very grand indeed), Zion, and Bryce Canyon. These are all fantastic places to spend time, and I would highly recommend them. The views, man.

Of my parents and me, two of us arrived in a new decade in the last year. We thought, in not quite so many words, that a trip to the parks would be a good opportunity to mark the passage of time. Our trip also happened to coincide with All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows’,) and All Souls’ Day, when quite a lot of people are considering all those who have come before us.

So that’s fun.

But you don’t have to be in landscapes like these long to understand that the kind of time you can count in birthdays, or even in entire human civilizations, is nothing in comparison with the kind of time that is cleaved open and on display in a canyon.

You learn at the Grand Canyon that, even though you’re looking a mile down into a few billion years of rock history, which the river has carved through in the last five million years (give or take!), there are a casual 270 million years of rock history that eroded clean away before the river had a chance to cut into them. Just—270 million missing years, and what you’re looking at is the rest.

You see these amazing landforms that basically defy logic. It’s rock behaving as rock has no business behaving. You know better (because you watched the video in the rangers’ station and you read the plaques) but it looks like rocks are growing like trees. It looks like rocks are flowing like molasses. It looks like rocks are flopping like pancakes, one on top of the other.

The whole thing is just time and mutation. Volcanoes beget flatlands. Marshes give way to oceans, which give way to deserts, which rise thousands of feet to become mountains, and then rivers file them down into chasms, revealing the history from within. This happens not at all silently, but wordlessly.

And even though it all took a few million or billion years, depending on how you count, it’s also changing every year. The spooky hoodoos of Bryce Canyon are inherently temporary. Every winter, ice pushes them apart more, and every summer their rocks fall. I saw it happen: a dozen or so rocks the size of my fist tumbled quite mundanely off a cliff as I hiked below. This, day after day, is how plateaus become walls, walls become windowed, windowed walls become towers, and towers crumble into hillocks, then into flatness. The high land will erode, 1-4 feet every century, who knows how far back? Until the infrastructure of the park, which sits atop the plateau looking down over the canyon, will be eaten away and gone.

We happen to be able to see it now, but it’s anything but permanent.

It’s enough to make you wonder what “conservation” is all about. We wouldn’t be wise to attempt to conserve a hoodoo. We’d do more damage to the park by trying to freeze it in time than by letting it be. What it is is something that exists for a time, maybe a few decades, and then collapses. It wouldn’t be conservation to turn it into something else entirely—something that lasts forever. That would be transformation. (Appropriate for Halloween, perhaps, when zombies and monsters of all kinds roam, but not for All Saints’ Day, when we peacefully remember those who have come and gone before us.)

Maybe conservation is, instead, giving all the entities that make up the Earth a chance to make their own story, in rock or tree or fur or desert.

So it would seem to be true:

when cruel birth debases, we forget.

When cruel death debases,

we believe it erases all the rest

that precedes.

But stand brave, life-liver,

bleeding out your days

in the river of time.

Stand brave:

time moves both ways,

“Time, As a Symptom,” Joanna Newsom

On long walks out there, I started to think about sandstone. You’re surrounded by it in that environment. Sand is everything: it’s the desert, and it’s the ocean floor, and now it’s the canyon. But it’s just sand. Walking along the canyon bottom you feel it underneath your boots, just as slow and yielding as a beach. What’s beneath your feet used to be the canyon walls above you. It’s the bits that have disintegrated lately.

If you touch the walls as you pass, you might rub off some sand. It comes easily, when it’s ready. But underneath the loosened part, there’s hard sandstone. It’s not ready, not yet. But give it a year or a thousand and it will blow away too.

That’s stone, and we’re people. We live on different time frames, by a factor of many zeroes. But like rock we always change, even until we die. That’s the wonderful thing about being alive. The change doesn’t all happen at once, and it doesn’t happen in an orderly way. We’ll find that there are places that are a little looser, a little more ready to give. We can be grateful for those. The rest might be a little tougher. That’s okay. Give it time. Because the loosening of what’s easy, the letting go of the stone that’s ready to be sand already, makes room for more change. And the loosening of that loose sand is what slowly, imperceptibly, loosens the hard stuff.

And Time, in our camp, is moving

as you’d anticipate it to.

But what is this sample proving?

Anecdotes cannot say what Time may do.

“Anecdotes,” Joanna Newsom

I’m every type. It’s all in me.

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Credit for the inspiration for the title goes to this fantastic tweet:

Something I find interesting about the Enneagram is that it’s not—and doesn’t claim to be—just a diagnosis of what you are and always will be. The Enneagram isn’t there to tell you that you are only, say, a 9. It’s dynamic, instead.

Allow me to be your guide on a little trip through the features:

On any given day, even at any given hour, a person of any type might be at a given “level of health.” Each type has 9 levels of health, ranging from 1 (total debilitation) to 9 (inhabiting the very best qualities of the type). For my type, 9, the highest level of health looks like actually earning the peace I seek—not by avoiding conflict by making myself small, but by using my gifts to unite opposing points of view within myself and for those around me.

This might be an answer to anyone who looks at the Enneagram skeptically: how could there only be 9 types of people? Well, there aren’t. Everyone is a unique combination of their innate nature, their experiences, their adaptations to those experiences, and the complexities of the Enneagram might get us close to having language for quite a lot of this variation.

But wait, there’s more: there are wings. Being a 9 means I have two wings: 1 and 8, the two numbers on either side of my number. These are the rules: your wings are only the numbers next to you. (Address your complaints to Oscar Ichazo). I, personally, have a much stronger 1 wing, but my 8 wing is making itself known more and more.

On top of that, we have our “arrows:” the lines connecting the numbers on the Enneagram diagram represent how we take on aspects of other types in times of stress and security. For me, when I am in stress I access certain characteristics of 6, which looks like becoming increasingly anxious and suspicious. By contrast, when I’m feeling more secure, I access certain characteristics of 3, which looks like becoming more aware of my gifts and sharing them with the world.

It gets even more complex, depending on who you read (remember, the Enneagram is a work in progress). Some say that our wings also move along their arrows of stress and security. So let’s look at my 1 wing: in a time of stress, my 1 wing would begin to look a lot more like 4, focusing on perceived missing pieces in my life. In strength, my 1 wing would go to 7, more able to relax and feel joy. Same for my 8 wing: it would move to 5 in stress, growing withdrawn and stingy, and to 2 in security, able to give freely and joyfully to others.

Are you still with me? On top of that, we add subtypes. This is the theory that there are three main existential drives: self-preservation (survival), sexuality (reproduction), and social (group bonding). We need all three of these to make it at the species level, and even at the individual level. But each of us is going to be motivated more or less by each of these at different times. Applying this theory to the 9 types results in 27 subtypes, representing each basic Enneagram type’s three subtypes depending on the individual’s focus. For example, there are “self-preservation 9s.” This means that the basic 9 type (focused on peace, fearful of separation) collides with the desire to be comfortable and provisioned. A self-preservation type might be a homebody’s homebody, creating a cozy lair full of comfort food and entertainment where there is little to bother them. On the other hand, a “self-preservation 8” would respond to the basic desire for physical provision differently: they might be prickly, spoiling for a fight if anyone threatens their satisfaction, attuned to any threat to their autonomy.

So take a look at all of this: 9 basic types; the levels of health; the possibility of having one of two wings or equally balanced wings; the arrows; the wings’ arrows; the subtypes. If you tried, and God bless you if you did, you might be able to create hundreds of types out of this. We might, in doing this, create a Byzantine description of who we are. I, for example, am a social 9 with a dominant 1 wing who is currently in a season of security, making me look a good deal like a 3 a lot of the time. Nice to meet you.

When it gets this complex, and you insist on a hyper-detailed profile for each person wherein the system can explain literally everything, all you’re saying is that we’re all different. If that’s the case, you might not be getting any value out of consulting the system in the first place. So returning a bit to the simplicity of the basic types, even if it feels reductive, makes sense.

Even though all models are wrong, some are helpful, and a lot of us have found the Enneagram helpful. It’s a tool to help us understand why we might do what we do. What drives us? And why do others do different things than we’d do? Because they, too, are living with their own motivators. It’s at once overly simplistic and terribly complicated. I think those of us who get into learning about it are sometimes at risk of overdetermining it, finding several Enneagram explanations for every little thing. If we can’t find the explanation in our basic type, we can find it in our arrows or our wings’ arrows or our subtype stack or what have you.

But on the other hand, the Enneagram is not here just to make us a nice little custom description in Enneaspeak for why we do all the things we do. It’s here to give us compassion for ourselves and each other when we don’t understand why we’re stuck in behaviors or feelings that are causing us to stumble. And it’s here to show us the way out: give us a model of what it might look like to grow (the “security” arrow is shorthand for this.) And it’s here to show us what the warning signs of when we might need support and grace (the “stress” arrow).

At the end of the day, it’s all shorthand, and we’re all people. For me, all 9 of the types are tremendously sympathetic. In fact, I’ve thought I was all of the types at some time or other (except for 8. That one has been easy to rule out since day 1). I strongly identify with the following aspects of each of the types:

  1. Judgmental inner critic voice. The word “should” is in frequent rotation.
  2. Needing approval from others, and sometimes giving what I don’t want to give in order to get it.
  3. Striving for recognition, doubting my self-worth if I don’t do something impressive.
  4. Craving the elusive “missing piece.” Settling into melancholy. Looking at negative emotions as authenticity. An intense need for personal space.
  5. Craving deep and unconventional understanding of concepts.
  6. Worst case scenario thinking. A push/pull relationship to authority.
  7. Attraction to big thinking and novelty, gluttony, trouble with focus and follow-through.
  8. Contempt for lazy thinking. Contrarianism as a way to avoid being trapped.
  9. Pretty much everything: the conflict aversion, peace-seeking, vacillation, comfort focus, inner fuzziness, attunement to nature, difficulty identifying myself. I don’t really see myself as lazy but I do find being vertical extremely challenging. #horizontallife

What does this mean, the fact that I can identify with all of them? Two things: it means I’m definitely a 9, because we notoriously see everyone’s perspective easily except our own. A typical 9 experience is going down the type lists and thinking “that’s me!” eight times until you get to 9 and go “…oh. I get it now.”

But I think it also points to the fact that these types are just archetypes. We tend to get stuck into one of them more strongly than the others, but we all contain all of them. The work, for all of us, is to move out of our ruts and explore new ways of showing up in the world that don’t rely on the old stories that we thought protected us from pain. This lets us create new stories that are a little closer to true.