All of a sudden she disappears
just yesterday she was here
somebody tell me if I am sleeping
someone should be with me here
cause I don’t wanna be alone

As already indicated, it’s been a crazy last few days. The way things are going, almost everything is becoming believable at this point. But before I knew the extent of the damage to the apartment here or the extent of damage my body had suddenly started taking, I decided to go to a Counting Crows show in Montclair, New Jersey, since they had extra tickets for the 18 August show. And since I’d missed the show I was scheduled to attend on July 31st. And since I needed an emotional bloodletting, of which Counting Crows shows are the best kind I know. And since I don’t care what happens to me anymore. And since I just need to find a way to get through the next eight days, likely in many ways to be the most painful of my life thus far. Those of you who know what’s going on know exactly why that is.

I wanna be the knife
that cuts into my hand
and I wanna be scattered
from here in this catapult
what a big baby
won’t somebody save me please?
won’t find nobody home

I found Montclair, New Jersey to be something of a dying small-town community feel nestled in the midst of an industrial wasteland. This probably sounds a little worse than it is, but I haven’t exactly been in the most flattering of moods lately about anything. Everything looks dead or dying, everything seems to be atrophying, everything has the stench of broken dreams. The miniature downtown of Montclair seems to be built around the newly reopened and revitalized Wellmont Theatre, a pretty nifty little venue long fallen into disrepair and recently rescued. If the fellow line-waiting front-row patrons are to be believed, the ceiling is still in danger of collapse and they have a thin excuse for netting up there to make sure no one takes a direct plaster hit if so. Against the odds, the building remained intact not only while I bought tickets, waited an hour or so in line, and jetted up to the second row on the floor, but even through the duration of the emotional turmoil unleashed when CC and their friends took the stage.

All of these quiet battered voices
wait for the hunger to come
we’ve got little revolvers
and stupid choices
no one to say when we’re done
well I don’t wanna bring you down

This is part of their summer tour and their summer tours lately have been subheaded The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show, an innovative amalgam of whatever three bands they have grouped together, all switching out songs and sets and playing two acts with an encore like a seamless 20-piece band. It’s not exactly my favorite incarnation of the Crows, but it works pretty well most of the time, even when they have an angry joke of a white rapper as the third piece in their triage. There’s a rockabilly sensibility to this manifestation of their live act, but this particular show lacked most of the boisterous highs one would typically expect to come along with that. Adam Duritz seemed more dazed than I felt, often staring into space and almost muttering lyrics in a dejected haze. It wasn’t sloppy or misdelivered in any way, though – it was deliberate, calculated, crafted. It spoke of a person whose life has whizzed past him, leaving him to contemplate the rubble. It spoke to me.

I wanna be the light
that burns out your eyes
cause I know there’s little things about me
that would sing in the silence of
so much rejection in every connection I make
can’t find nobody home

I wept, literally, through six of the songs. Having been to something like ten Counting Crows shows, I have long come to expect that they will move me, that I will find them religious experiences, that the poetry and pathos of the live delivery will shake my foundations and reignite the core of my soul, for both good and for sad. What I am often not prepared for is that even my expectations of transcendence will be exceeded and surpassed. That the phrase “Awareness is Never Enough – It Must Always Be Wonder” is so frequently made corporeal in those unexpected moments of a CC show. What song will they build into what other song? What meaning will be encompassed or recalculated in such a way as to render the entire deepest voice of a song bare in a new and scintillating light? What will cut so hard and so fast to the quick that one’s heart will bleed anew, pouring forth a whole new reason for pouring? This is the emotional breakdown and rebuild, the evisceration and glinting hope, that these shows offer.

I wanna be the light
that burns out your eyes
cause I know there’s little things about me
that would sing in the silence of
so much rejection in every connection I make
I wanna be the last thing that you hear when you’re falling asleep

It was actually Augustana who offered me one of the most painful and beautiful moments when they stuck “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” in the middle of “Boston”. I openly bled tears, taken back to both a moment on a bus in Scotland convinced I was going to die when that song came blaring over the speakers to give me hope and also to the understanding of the song’s original purpose: an open letter to a suicide, committed to voice too late to make any difference for that one but submitted all the same in hopes of saving others. Suddenly the fact that “you don’t know me and you don’t even care” was cut back by the fact that we’re all “stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it”. It was at that moment, after a long soliloquy on growing up in light of “Up All Night” and two songs before “Catapult” that the song selection stopped speaking to me and started being for me, about me, through me. By the time “Time and Time Again” was paired back-to-back with “Richard Manuel is Dead” near the open of the second act, I was slayed and begging for more.

I wanna be the knife
that cuts into my hand
and I wanna be scattered
from here in this catapult
what a big baby
won’t somebody take me please?
can’t find nobody home

It’s impossible to explain everything I’m feeling or thinking or going through now, or was then. It’s impossible to explain the importance of “Richard Manuel is Dead”, Emily’s favorite Crows song, or the precise implications of the way Adam sang “A Murder of One”, centering on a to-me-unprecedented line of “I need to change,” observing and reflecting on the painful nature of growing up through things one shouldn’t have to experience. By the time “Rain King” was offering hope “With a Little Help from My Friends”, I’d already settled in a numb fuzzy-faced coma of crying to the point of catharsis. It was no wonder that I stumbled home to find a dumpster overturned by the storm in the parking space normally reserved for the Prius and would be in the Emergency Room within a few hours, dealing with the extraction of kidney stones. Every day, hour, minute, is its own special trial. And like the singing of a song or the passing of a kidney stone, the pain embedded deep in each moment makes the overall picture impossible to even grasp. No wonder Emily seems capable of such callous calculation and diffident distance. No one could hope to understand what’s happening without living through each second. Even me.

Caravan
Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby
Omaha
[NOTAR]
Up All Night
Stars and Boulevards
Boston (with Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of)
Steal Your Heart Away
Twenty Years
Catapult
[NOTAR]
Why Should You Come When I Call?
You Ain’t Going Nowhere
—
Four White Stallions
Time and Time Again
Richard Manuel is Dead
Safe and Sound
A Murder of One (with Doris Day)
[NOTAR x2]
Just Like a Woman
Dust
Shot in the Dark
Sweet and Low
Come Around
A Long December (with A Murder of One)
Hanginaround
—
Rain King (with With a Little Help from My Friends)
This Land is Your Land

(Augustana songs in italics; NOTAR songs not named)

It’s amazing how important titles are to my work. I have almost never written a post for this blog without knowing the title in advance of laying down a single word. One of the very few counterexamples was my last post, in which I wrote the title between the last words and the hitting of the slightly pretentious “Publish” button at the bottom of the screen. I didn’t know what the theme was for that post until I finished it. Ironically, the theme was themes themselves, or “threads”.

The theme for this post is “Summer Chill”. There are many possible interpretations of that phrase and I would hazard that all of them are relevant to the intended scope of this post. Read closely, pay attention. You may be surprised what you see. Or you may find the theme trite and blase, which it probably is in some ways, and go off to read about Lady Gaga.

I have discerned that Americans very much don’t like to be hot. This is probably because Americans, as a rule and general practice, are overweight. The precise coordination between weight and heat aversion took me a long time to figure out, but has become in the last few years one of those obvious and universal truths, like “donuts are tasty” or “parents have a lot of both direct and indirect influence on their offspring”. It took me longer to figure out this particular truth because it is generally considered impolite in this society to discuss the weight of other people. Thus conversations like this are unwelcome:

“I’m hot.”
“Really? I think it’s rather pleasant.”
“Well I think it’s too hot.”
“Hm. I guess you are a little pudgy.”

Comments on weight are especially unwelcome from people like me who, despite a two-year period of being somewhat overweight in the middle part of this decade, have otherwise been rail-thin. Since I rekindled my metabolism after its premature death at 27, I’ve gone back to being cold everywhere relative to every other human being, including even those who normally serve the role of being the coldest person they know. Ha ha!

Never is this phenomenon more apparent or frustrating than eating out during the summer in the United States. A phenomenon that I swear was predominantly limited to Florida during my youth has since gone nationwide, and now I must never leave my house without a jacket in summer if there’s even the slightest chance I will be asked to dine somewhere before returning home. In LA, in Albuquerque, in Philadelphia, I relied on my Mariners jacket to save me from hypothermic expiration in the bitterly frigid confines of restaurant after restaurant. After the third one, I stopped asking if I needed to bring my jacket. I would hit the swinging-door threshold, feel the blood harden in my veins, and suit up.

What’s ridiculous about the whole thing is that people keep restaurants at temperatures that no one would enjoy at any other time of year. Two in particular, Waffle House in Albuquerque and Los Segundos in Philadelphia, had the thermostat well below 68 degrees. Imagine going from a crisp November night into a restaurant kept in that meteorological condition. There would be literally no business. No one would go. So why does it being summer make it more acceptable? Why does everyone get to presume that all patrons have just run a marathon in their fat suits before entering their building?

Yes, this is part of an absurd class of things rapidly becoming known as “First World Problems” – the complaints only the spoiled of our species could possibly imagine worrying about, the offshoot of a pampered instant-gratification culture centered on the self. A waste of time, probably, but one that is both alienating to experience and hopefully a bit humorous to relate. And also, perhaps, emblematic of that selfsame pampered spoiled society itself, that we have created expensive, energy-wasting cultural standards and practices designed to cater further to our own self-centered obesity. It’s like the whole thing spirals on itself into the stratosphere to the point where to even observe or complain about our society’s missteps has itself become a misstep that presumes caring about the fate of that society. Paragraph summary: we’re in a fine mess indeed.

I’m reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise and it’s done something that Golding, Tolstoy, Foucault, and Calvino have failed to do in the last month or so: hold my attention. Granted that Tolstoy held my attention about four times as long as DeLillo’s even trying to, so maybe it’s a weak comparison. But he’s also done something else that the other four never approached: scare me. Not because his 1985 vision of the present or the future comes across much like all those movies I’ve seen lately (”Koyaanisqatsi”, “My Dinner with Andre”, “Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y”, “Double Take”) in its prescient understanding of the incredibly insular self-absorption and chaos to come (it does), but because it reminds me of my own book just finished and nearly fully edited, The Best of All Possible Worlds. Not in whole, not overall (yet), but in certain scenes and themes and focal points. And it not only predates the book by 25 years, but I had never read one word or heard one thing about it before finishing my own tome.

This is at once highly problematic and a little relieving. It’s the former for obvious reasons – on a planet of seven-billion willed agents, I constantly fear accidentally rewriting another person’s book that I’ve never had contact with, just because there are only so many ideas or thoughts out there. As a writer whose greatest asset is originality of ideas, this could lead to unmitigated disaster. At the same time, it’s relieving because the publishing world seems very focused on “comps” – equivalent books to the one being pitched to them that they can in turn use to pitch to potential readers, writing such ridiculous drivel on the back of books as “…with the rich landscape of John Steinbeck, the emotional insight of Sigmund Freud, and the quick-paced action of Dashiell Hammett…” I made that up, but you get the point. No one is allowed to be themselves, at least not at first. Everything has to be derivative. And since I’ve never read anything remotely like The Best of All Possible Worlds, it’s encouraging to run across DeLillo just in time to be able to put a comp in my cover letter.

But also scary. Really, really scary, depending on where it all ends up.

I’m back in Tiny House, by the way, mostly just to block everything else out and finish editing before departing again for roadtrips that will lead up to my series of flights to Africa. The editing is about 70% complete, though there’s the second round of it that comes when I transcribe my red-lined notes into the electronic file that contains the work. It’ll take a while, maybe up to five days. But as an only child, I sometimes just need to be alone, especially to buckle down and do work. Once the work is done, really done, I’ll be sending it out to friends and the one agent who wanted first crack at it, then probably hit the road once more.

So, uh, public service announcement: This is your open call to let me know if you want to read The Best of All Possible Worlds. Your odds are better if you’ve already read and commented on American Dream On, though it would be absurdly self-indulgent of me to require this. Honestly, if you’re my friend and want to see it, that’s enough. Send me an e-mail.

And to leave you on a fun fact for the day, so that we can all laugh about the past and be awed by the present, here’s your news: The girl who said she couldn’t be friends with someone who had a blog had a blog. Far more fascinating than that is what she’s spent the last nine years doing, forsaking some of the first-world concerns she seemed to have in 2001 for time in the Peace Corps in Mauritania and working in Sri Lanka before coming back stateside to work for a really cool organization. I would say I’m proud of her, but that sounds really weird and probably obnoxious since I may have had nothing at all to do with it, especially given the way things ended. So, uh, I don’t have anything to say. Yeah.

I’ve summed up homecomings of all sorts with the following lyrical quotation throughout much of my life. It always has this way of being more transcendentally accurate and true than even all the times I’ve utilized it before. Guess what, “Awareness is Never Enough – It Must Always Be Wonder”? You just got to be the sixth category for this post!

“Looking all around the room
I see the clutter and the gloom
I’m not only back
I’m not only numb”
-Gin Blossoms, “Not Only Numb”

The moon was crazy full tonight, approaching the kind of round perfection we are taught is never quite achieved in our mortal understanding. It stood as a stalwart reminder of why the energy seemed a little strange, overcharged perhaps. Enough to drive normally friendly rabbits into corners or normally social men into caves. After all, the depiction on the orb is one or the other.

As stated earlier, it was laundry night for me (miraculously, I seem to have not gotten a migraine). I normally sort of dread laundry in the way that I negatively anticipate most chores. They are monotonous, imminently predictable, and often require disproportionate energy and concentration relative to their ultimate value in one’s life. More aggravating than many household chores, laundry cannot be done while listening to a baseball game or music. I mean, sure, one could put a portable music device on and walk around listening, but the only point in having music on during chores is so one can loudly sing along and actively distract oneself. Being unable to do this would just augment the initial frustration of being concentratedly bored in the first place. And Mariners games aren’t exactly on while I tend to do laundry. Doing laundry in primetime is most unrewarding in Princeton’s Butler Apartments, especially at the volume that we accumulate.

Which is why I set out to do laundry at around 1:00 this morning. Normally there are at least a handful of other people around at most hours, but tonight there was just a lone soul packing up the last of his load as I arrived. I recognized the exhausted frustration on his face, the look of the last few items that one knows one should fold thoroughly, but one is becoming sloppy as real fear sets in that one might not be able to finish the laundry before needing to retire to bed. One starts bargaining with oneself about the safe and friendly patrons of the campus neighborhood laundry room, how no one would disturb the clothes if the last of them were just left in a neat unfolded pile, if just… one… more… shirt.

And I started to haul bag after bag into the room, unloading each completely before trudging to the car for the next one (I usually walk between our apartment and the laundry room with each independent bag, but I didn’t feel like traversing the distance for all five bags at a surprisingly cold 1:15 AM, so I drove the Prius circuitously around the complex to a prime parking spot in front of the fluorescent palace). The guy’s eyebrows were raising by the time I’d retrieved the third bag, but he was just about on his way at that point. Thus he missed the fact that my dirty clothes filled all eleven functioning washing machines in the room.

I mused at what might happen were the one other person in the complex who had been clever enough to wait till the middle of a Tuesday/Wednesday night to do their massive laundry to waltz in and drop their jaw at the row of churning tumblers. But said individual never showed, the product of academia demanding at least some sleep from those trawling toward finals. I noted that I had forgotten my book, jogged home for it and a few insurance quarters, and returned to settle in for the work that was barely underway.

The real pain of laundry, of course, doesn’t hit until the dryers stop spinning in their slow, tilty dying drones. At that point, it’s time to make an effort at folding and sorting, lest the five bags sit in hopeless mussed clumps at home, waiting for the cat to separate Emily’s shirts from my socks (we’ve done this before and it’s not worth it, trust me). This is what takes the real energy, mind-numbing and unsophisticated as it may be, and it comes when the enthusiasm for the project is at its lowest ebb. There will be no more time for reading, because no matter how fast one sorts, each dryer will stop before the last dryer’s load is sorted. There will only be time to try to think about something less dull than a catalog of all your doggone clothes, while still maintaining the focus to fold each neatly and sort them efficiently.

What I noticed tonight, amidst all this mental wrangling, is how much more relaxed about the whole thing I was than I am when I choose more popular hours for the task. Granted, I’m almost never there when it’s packed, but only once have I done the overnight thing and it was earlier in the night and closer to a weekend, ensuring that others at least darted in and out throughout my time in the room. There was something remarkably freeing about knowing that no one else was going to walk in, no one would eye my underwear or try to make awkward conversation (though this never happens in Jersey, frankly, despite being a staple of doing laundry in, say, the Bay Area) or give me a sort of abrupt head-nod if I said so much as “hi” (this is more the Jersey way) or create otherwise vague unpleasantries.

And then, of course, I started mentally composing parts of this post, pondering what details to retell of the laundry scene and how to convey my precise perspective on the chore. And I came back full circle to this bizarre conclusion that I couldn’t wait to tell a bunch of other people how much better I felt when I was alone.

And yet I relished the telling and the knowing that lots of other people would read this. Every bit as much as I dreaded the possibility of another person walking in.

Was this some grand contradiction in my perspective? Was I a hypocrite, or merely crazy? Could I really be thinking and believing both of these things simultaneously?

The answer struck me relatively quickly, to my general emotional relief. It’s not that the people coming in would be strangers and those reading generally aren’t – after all, some strangers do read this blog and I’m happy for the fact. And theoretically someone I know could’ve entered the bright hall of cleanliness and I’d still be less than enthused.

It was about free will.

See, every time you come read this blog (unless you’re subject to some Clockwork Orangeian experiment involving my impact on the unlidded human psyche, in which case my apologies), you do so voluntarily. And not just voluntarily in the way that people pledge money for their co-worker’s daughter’s fundraiser run, but legitimately of your own volition. You have chosen this activity over any other you could do with your time.

Granted, you might be bored or on Internet-autopilot or whatever, but your choice to interact with my perspective is about as unfettered as they come. You’re reading because you want to.

Meanwhile, entrants to the laundry room are certainly signing up for a date with Maytag’s finest, but by no means is my presence part of the equation. Sure, they understand that other people could be there and probably will, but it is no part of what they are volunteering for (again, unless – and this scenario is slightly less outlandish than the Clockwork Orange thing – they secretly seek out human contact in every trip to clean their clothing). Any interaction they have with me is functionally involuntary. A byproduct at best, but most likely an annoyance.

And that’s all there is to it. There’s something fundamental in my perspective that has always dreaded interactions with people who in some way do not desire that interaction, however casual or essential it might be. It’s not some secret desire to be liked or to have everyone want to interact with me, either, because I do nothing to try to bend these interactions into something enjoyable for others. In fact, I usually end up (less so than in my school years, but still at an alarming rate) making the interaction remarkably awkward, sometimes even by tearing up uncontrollably. This used to be a serious problem of mine in late high school and early college, usually manifesting with convenience store clerks and gas station attendants. These were not people I feared rejection from. I just felt intensely, a priori uncomfortable with the idea that I was abridging their free will so they could interact with me. That they felt obliged to interact with me, but clearly had no interest in doing so.

And I think, de facto, that’s how I see most public interactions with strangers. Obviously there are pleasant surprises sometimes, but generally it’s safe to assume that I’m part of the scenery. And I’d just as soon avoid any pretense or awkward attempts to bridge a divide based on a perception of polite obligation. This is why I got so excited the other day about the opportunity to order pizza online instead of calling someone in person, or why I opt for self-check-out kiosks in stores or movie theaters.

I know the arguments. In the latter cases, I’m helping put people out of work and destroying jobs, thereby eliminating livelihoods! But I would argue no one should have such jobs, and any system that makes us choose between people having jobs that are the functional equivalent of doing obnoxious chores all the time or starving might as well employ no one so it collapses immediately. And in the former, aren’t I making too much out of this whole free will thing? I mean, does anyone really choose anything?

I think this argument, more and more prevalent the more I talk to people, is what I find most disturbing. The idea that our wills are either chemically determined or otherwise imminently influenced to the point of predictability. While my deconstruction of this alleged reality is worthy of another entire, much longer (and less tired) post, I will stab wildly at the concept and accuse it of being one of the greatest threats to our humanity and hope on this planet. And as part of my evidence, I use this Kantian sensation I have about interactions with other people’s free will on a daily basis.

I stress that despite waxing on endlessly about free will for much of my life and being well aware of this phenomenon about my personal interactions, I don’t think I’ve ever linked the two concepts or labeled their connection until tonight in the laundry room. Which means that the reason I was feeling uncomfortable all those years was truly a priori, something I felt and intuitively understood, but could not articulate and was not really cogitating about.

Although the argument now occurs that making this discovery and connection in such a situation is exactly what makes mundane ridiculous chores like doing laundry all worth it. David Foster Wallace would be proud.

Rarely do I feel as inspired in my life as when I’m just starting out on a car trip (of almost any length), looking forward to where I’m going, with music blasting. Life is just good under those conditions, but there’s more to it than that. Like taking a shower or playing certain kinds of puzzle games (e.g. Tetris), the process of embarking under these circumstances precipitates an extra uncanny layer of inspiration. My mind works in a slightly different way, one that’s quite simply much better than everyday functionality.

I have known this for most of my driving life, especially since I got a car (post the ‘51 Buick era) that could play music. I remember driving out in the Kia the first few times, blasting Counting Crows, realizing that not only could I conquer the world but I had the thoughts in mind right then that would do it. I don’t recall exactly how many of the novel ideas I’ve developed were composed at the outset of music-blasting trips, but I can tell you exactly how many short stories I wrote tonight were.

One. And it might just be the best story I’ve ever written, a 3,200 word gem called “Haywire” that I could not feel more euphoric about. I came up with the idea on the outset of my journey to New Brunswick tonight for debate, letting the concept play in my mind for about two and a half songs before I let myself believe I was really on to something. Then it was time to grab the flowpad at stoplights and jot down as much as I could, just in case the idea simulated some inspirations I’ve developed in dreams and fled as soon as I had a grasp on the real thrust of its direction. But I needn’t have worried and I needn’t have written. Until I got home, of course.

Which I did, promptly, spending the 2.5 hours since arriving crafting the thing. And then I started celebrating, as much as I could pump my fists in the air and jump up and down without waking Emily. No, seriously. I really did this. I feel that euphoric right now.

It’s not just about the quality of this story, which may be inflated in my perception – I will have to read it tomorrow to really know for sure. It’s about being able to come up with a story I feel this confident about, start to finish, in six hours, three of which I spent at debate. That the stories are supplying the fiction to breathe life into my months designated for writing non-fiction, just as I hoped they would. There’s a part of me, sure, that looks at all this euphoria with an eye to the past and considers that this might be the last short story I write for months. That this might all be a lot of sound and no fury. That this is an exception, an anomaly.

But God, I hope not.

I once joked with Emily, noting the phenomenon of how this inspiration struck, that I should just go for short drives with music every time I wanted to get jump-started on writing something. But I surmised, shortly thereafter, that this somehow wouldn’t work. That it might be cheating. That I couldn’t trick my brain into getting in the state where the world slows down and opens itself up to a new idea.

But at this point, I’m ready to try. Bring on the showers and the Tetris and the driving with music. Bring on the life that I am living. Everything I’ve done has gotten me to this point and it’s all been worth it. Thank you, thank you God for letting me get to this point right here right now.

Gee, I really hope this story is up to all this swagger.

I have been having a tough time the past 60 hours. Not really bad, just weird. It’s mostly the result of trying to figure out how to approach the next writing project, Good God. As my first non-fiction effort longer than a college paper, it’s a daunting task. And with five novel ideas queued up behind it, in widely varied states of readiness, there’s a big part of me that wants to just stick with the fiction. Fiction, after all, is fun. And I feel that American Dream On was a profound success, the book that will ultimately, some way or another, probably put me on some sort of map. So why shift gears?

Well for one, it’s due up next. I was trying to explain the other day that the book ideas have been coming at about the pace one might expect them to over the last several years of not writing, despite the fact that I haven’t written the old ideas. American Dream On was the real gorilla on my back, having been a pretty well formed idea since early 2002. But the next few books are old-timers as well, all dating back to at least 2005. Chronologically, Good God is the oldest unwritten book. So it should be up next.

But that’s probably not good enough reason all by itself. There’s also the issue of my trip to India and the religious experience I had there in a boat on the Ganges in Varanasi. Wherein I felt called, more than anything else, to write this book which I have just re-embarked on tonight. And though the book is not the product of literal divine revelation, my life would seem pretty empty without its many religious experiences. I feel impelled – deeply impelled – to write this book.

There’s also probably the matter of hope. I find American Dream On to be an ultimately hopeful book, but I doubt many will agree with me. For the most part, people have found it somewhere between bleak and Kafkaesque… and it is those things, too. Good God, on the other hand, is a legitimately and unequivocally hopeful book, perhaps the only one I will ever write. And it may be the only non-fiction, unless I decide to tackle my theory of dinosaur extinction or the book earns enough refutations to warrant a defense publication. It’s a unique book, even for all the differences I see among the many novel plots I am contemplating. So maybe I want to write it next to prove I can, to show the breadth of my versatility. Em and I were joking a few hours ago about how anyone excited about publishing ADO would be utterly baffled by my description of Good God as the follow-up work.

But as I embark on it, writing 7-8 pages tonight to accompany the paltry 14-page headstart I brought to New Jersey, more questions than answers loom. What sort of tone can one maintain for a largely second-person conversational non-fiction work on God? Is this just going to be too experimental? How do I balance philosophical exploration with straightforward personal appeals? And how do I get the target audience to want to read whatever this looks like?

Tonight, though, I remembered that these questions are pretty thin and unimportant when the process of writing is afoot. I have come up with six book ideas yet unwritten and I have developed them because I believe in them. There will be questions of form and plenty of time to second-guess and to doubt. That time is not amidst the two years I’ve set aside to churn out the ideas full-time, to make good the promise of my inspiration. It’s time to churn, to chunk out the pages and let them do the talking. It might not work.

But it doesn’t matter. I must work and the rest will follow.

My day was spent differently than I originally envisioned it.

It started with an afternoon trip to the pumpkin patch with friends, as expected. This was a prelude to tomorrow’s 4th Annual (1st on the East Coast) Pumpkin Carving Extravaganza. We were preparing to acquire a bunch of pumpkins and then head out to do party shopping and come home to decorate.

Everything was going pretty well up through being on our way to go shopping. We had plenty of pumpkins and had really enjoyed our time at the pumpkin patch/farm/market place where we’d gone. We were in high spirits and already anticipating the day to come.

I stopped at the first red light after the patch, and was looking to my left to see when I might have an opening to make a right turn. I thought there might be enough of an opening, then hesitated and decided to wait for the next cars to pass. A black pickup truck was coming toward me and then threw on its turn signal to go right. I thought this would possibly make an opening, so I looked behind the pickup to make sure the trailing car was slowing down enough to give me time. I noted with alarm that they were actually accelerating toward the truck. I expected them to start to veer left around the truck at their increasing speed, but instead they drifted right, picking up speed while climbing the grassy shoulder. Then they suddenly took out the corner street sign and I turned away to brace for impact.

It came.

They smashed into the back part of the right side of the pickup, which had almost fully completed its turn, sending the pickup straight into the front corner of our car. I didn’t see what happened to the out-of-control car next, but it somehow ended up crossing the opposite lane of traffic, taking out a mailbox, and winding up crashed into a tree.

I felt for any major damage to myself and noted none, then turned to Emily and asked “Are you alive?” She was, and largely unhurt, and then I looked up to the driver of the pickup. He opened his eyes and looked at me dazedly. Emily and I discussed what had just transpired and I explained it to her since she had seen none of it coming. We left the vehicle, talked to the pickup driver, who proved to be mostly all right, then tried to assess what had happened. A couple of bystanders went over to see if the person in the out-of-control car was okay.

She attested to blacking out and having no memory from seeing a green light in front of her to seeing the tree in front of her on the other side of the road. Somehow she too was generally unharmed. All three vehicles were in really bad shape and everyone had some neck pain and such, but it was a generally amazing survival of the worst situation I’ve ever faced in a motor vehicle.

The thing that’ll stay with me most, assuming that the negative x-rays were accurate and my soreness eventually fades, is that split-second between seeing the street sign go down and the cessation of the impact. In that moment, which was both slow and fast just like you’ve heard (or felt) such moments to be, I had to prepare to die. That feeling of resigning, of yielding the fate of one’s life, is not one I’ll forget soon, or perhaps ever. I was completely out of options – there were cars behind, on my left, and in front. There was no where to go that would not increase the danger of the situation. There was no time to react. All I could do was cede control to the forces already in motion and hope for the best.

There’s no telling the fate of the car, which was towed and will be dealt with by insurance companies and the dealership. I was surprised at how late I got concerned with and upset about the fate of the car – it had been several minutes before I thought about it being unfortunate that our car may be totaled. I was probably more concerned with it catching fire or blowing up and creating a new round of jeopardy well before I thought to be upset that the car was wrecked. It was enough to have spent a second preparing to leave the planet and reopening my eyes to find I was still here.

I have a feeling this pumpkin-carving party is going to be even sweeter than normal.

As bad as I felt last night at this time is as good as I feel tonight. What a difference, as they say, a day makes.

I have just rattled off over 3,000 words (~12 pages) tonight, in a remarkably fast and focused session that has yielded what I am convinced is some of the best work of the whole novel so far. This brings American Dream On over the 70,000 word threshold (71,408 words/~285 pages) with just under two months to go and helps offset the fact that there will be no writing tomorrow night. It’s kind of too bad, because I’m in one of those grooves where baseball players find the ball looks as big as a grapefruit. Suddenly, after a week of angst, the dam has burst and things are flowing once more. (Though it probably doesn’t hurt that I’m on to a different chapter entirely, one that did not carry with it some consternating problems from the get-go.)

And Vassar pulled back on their threat to only break to semis, once again going with quarters, joining the ranks of virtually all modern tournaments. And it looks like I will be participating in the APDA Cup, thus getting a chance to compete in rounds that are adjudicated and are not demo rounds for the first time since 2006. (Yeah, I guess I thanked the BU Finals panel for judging my “last round ever”. Oops. We all know I’d debate professionally for a lifetime if I could.) And while I knew that this time yesterday too, it seems a lot more exciting today for some reason. Probably because the whole world does. And I’m almost short of breath and insanely full of energy for quarter till five in the morning, when I should be lapsing and a little tired. And given that the alarm’s set for 9:00 tomorrow, the earliest I’ve been up in weeks, to get ready to go to Vassar, this is all looking a little problematic.

But I don’t care that much, mostly because I’m in the throes of a manic phase of the sine-curve lifestyle. And the mania may be seen as problematic for some people, but I don’t know who those people could be. Being on the upswing of a roller-coaster, sailing upward on a high-energy high-productivity euphoria, this is about as good as it gets in this lifetime. I mean, yeah, the super-contemplative revelations are perhaps a little better, but this is a darn fine second place. I feel like running out into the middle of the early morning rain, whooping with joy at the fact that I get to be alive to see this kind of mood. I wish everyone could be here to feel this. I feel I’ve known people who never get this excited their whole lives.

I don’t know how I’m possibly going to sleep. It may end up an all-nighter and I’ll crash hard after round three at the tournament. But I should try all the same. Try to walk away from the euphoria to get a little shut-eye that’ll ultimately serve me well tomorrow. In the meantime, I leave you with this:

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

This post is an antidote, a message in a bottle, a documentation of a sensation and a perception about the world that is here and irrevocable. It’s something that I may lose, but no one can take away from me. And this is me, planting my flag, staking my ground, putting forth my chronicle of feeling this way and knowing these things at this time.

It all makes sense. All of it. What happens, what doesn’t, when, why, how. We are all so blessed and so privileged to be able to participate, to take part in this experiment with free will and this existence that is at once driven by our own whims and yet interminably destined to make itself work. It is punctuated by tremendous pain, yes, and tremendous anxiety, but it is all so very worth it. And I can see the pain and see the past and I know that every bit of it is worth it for everything.

To have a planet so well designed as to bless us not only with our own will, but others’ perspectives, with the discourse and dialogue that distill into reasoned perspective and more holistic understanding – this is all amazing. That we can spend so much time lamenting our various fates is at once a testament to our urges to push forward and improve what we have been given and yet also an unfortunate lack of full appreciation. I think the sacrifice of appreciation is often worth the spurs of exhortation to future greatness, but I wonder sometimes if we (I) temper ourselves (myself) sufficiently with sheer appreciation.

Tonight, I have it. I feel it. I have traveled and talked and walked and watched and I am aware of it all and it is overwhelming and beautiful and perfect and in need of appreciation.

This is not the first time I have felt this way, nor, God willing, will it be the last. But it seems, at a point where so much of my life is coming together in ways that I have made for myself, among the most important. It feels like this time around, the profundity has a greater likelihood to infiltrate the rest of daily life, for daily life itself is more deliberate and attuned to the realities that matter.

Ultimately, all I can really say is that I’m happy. Without reservation or qualification, I bask in the offerings of life. And that, my friends, is not something I say or feel very often.

Twice a week, I drive to New Brunswick from Princeton, a 16-mile jaunt that usually takes over half an hour to complete because of the nature of driving in New Jersey. I head up there in the 8:00 hour to arrive at 9:00 for meetings of the Rutgers debate team, usually returning around midnight as they’ve wrapped up.

There are two ways I can make this trip that are almost identical in mileage:

One is to take US Route 1, a literal straight line road that hearkens back to legends of the tsar drawing plans for a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow. While straight as an arrow, the route runs south of both my origin and my destination, adding a bit of time. More importantly, Route 1 (in Jersey, at least) is perhaps the worst four-lane road in America, a bizarre combination of highway lane structures and traffic with endless stoplights. Despite the lights, left turns are strictly forbidden, requiring “jug-handles” where one exits to the right to then turn onto a crossover lane. There are no conventional exits, just jug-handles. And the thing is filled with trucks and Jersey drivers, who remain the only people worse than drunk New Mexicans, murderous Manhattanites, and raging Massachusetts drivers, somehow blending the worst aspects of all three.

The alternative is NJ Route 27, a pastoral winding road whose frequent elevation shifts are outnumbered only by the number of times the speed limit changes between Princeton and New Brunswick. If Route 1 is the express (or tries to be), Route 27 is the local, plowing through the center of random townships and dropping the limit from 50 to 25 with almost no warning. This is a two-laner (one in each direction) and is frequented by these aging gray buses that seem to run local routes in this thickly settled part of the state. There are no trucks, however, and very little traffic at all late at night, when all the lights are green. There are lights, but probably fewer than on the “highway” counterpart.

After doing round-trips on each, I’ve settled into a vague pattern of taking Route 1 up to New Brunswick in the evening and returning on Route 27 in the middle of the night. Route 1 seems to have a stagnant amount of traffic 24/7, which is more palatable in comparison to the fairly heavy traffic on 27 at around 8:30, but less palatable compared to the emptiness of same past midnight. But more than anything, there’s just something peaceful and rewarding about taking 27 home, soaring through empty silent communities like a high-schooler the night after graduation.

Tonight, however, the road was deader than ever. It was ghostly, the kind of night that inspired Ray Bradbury’s story “Night Meeting”, where a Martian and an Earthling colonist cross paths through the midst of time on desolate night roads. The first leaves were covering the road in some places, sent sailing as I would race through in an effort to stay ever 5 miles an hour above the mercurial legal maximum. I think I passed all of two cars going my direction the whole time, both fairly close to New Brunswick, and maybe 5-7 in the other direction the whole way. In 25 minutes.

There is much time to ponder in such settings, though they have a way of dominating the mental space with their own unique offering. We spend so much time surrounded by people, their structures, the possibility of interaction. To be moving swiftly through a voided landscape is at once solipsistic and comforting, calling attention to one’s place in the universe and focus to the significance of each passing minute. The more I noticed my aloneness, the more I felt both isolated and somehow unified with a larger presence and could feel the awareness of the moment pile upon itself.

I had a CD to keep me company, but its significance was only to underscore the larger reality around, not to take center stage. Like Kitaro on a road to Jewell that suddenly became endless and transcendent, with my Dad so many years ago. The songs were like leaves, like the occasional droplet collected on the windshield, to be considered and passed like most days on the wind.

And then, as Princeton approached faster than normal, and cars six and seven northbound, Dave Matthews Band’s “Christmas Song” came on the disc. And the world of silence, of sleepy village churches and big box brand name signs illuminated for overnight advertising of empty stores, shifted. It transformed to a seventeen-year-old kid who made the decision to buy his first-ever CD (after years of accumulating cassette tapes) because it was the only way he could acquire this song he’d heard just once on the radio that had captivated his feelings about Christmas in a way he could handle as a no-longer-Christian. Who had looked everywhere for a tape, knowing that he already had one DMB tape, finally settling ironically for the older album on CD only and wondering how to deal with the technological shift. Who came home and skipped right to the last track, wondered at the trail of lightning sounds that followed the track, played it on repeat most of the night. It was a cold night, beckoning to Christmas still a couple months out, a night not unlike this one. Then there was a play to direct, a year to get through, somehow, colleges and a future to seek (up). Tonight, not so different perhaps, a novel in place of a play, colleges behind but not forgotten, a year to be savored instead of endured. Perhaps life really does get easier over time, after all.

I listened to the last three recitations of the closing chorus in the stopped car in front of my current residence, smiling at the yellow porch light and the barely visible Christmas lights within, decking the top corner of the living room walls. “And the blood of our children all around.” The last fade of notes, the car switched off, and a gathering of paper for the trek inside. Crossing the threshold, I felt the wind swirl behind me and wondered what message it carried from what past or future self. I am never (and always) alone. But tonight, oh tonight, it all seems to make sense.

I went inside to find Pandora staring at me as though she’d been waiting this whole time.

Today (defined loosely as from noon yesterday till right now), I:

• Took delivery on a flat-screen television, which will hopefully never have network or cable TV thereon.
• Spoke to my parents on the phone.
• Listened to Barack Obama’s speech and…
• …Decided that I am against the current incarnation of “healthcare reform”.  (More on this later!)
• Spoke to Em’s mom in person.
• Welcomed Pandora back into our home.
• Ate a bunch of fried food.
• Had a soda for the first time in weeks.
• Wrote Chapter 21 of American Dream On, weighing in around that magic 2,000 words.
• Played “Hero” by Regina Spektor on repeat for some time.

The only difference between these days and the old days is that these days matter. I am writing and that changes everything. My whole outlook on life can be determined through the filter of how much control I have over what I do on a given day and how much of that links to what I feel I was put here to do.

Daily fulfillment is not about the space in between, the margins, even most of the time spent. It’s about intentionality, living deliberately, and whether what is done is part of what should be done. Not on the path there, or some esoteric larger vision of being there, but actually a PART of what is intended overall.

This makes all the difference. And I am grateful, eternally grateful, for every day on this side of things.

There is a quiet communion about the world as it is meant to be. I write this while sitting in a pasture, llamas in the distance, gentle winds overwhelming the wheaty grasses of the Central Valley of California. Not connected to anything, even the Internet (I will upload this later), my back against a metal fence that is just the right balance of sturdy and sufficiently comfortable. There are bird sounds and trees reacting to winds, the sun bearing down under mixed clouds that threaten an eventual sullying of this dried landscape. Bugs hover and dive amongst the grasses, perhaps subtly aware that they have just a few hours until rains will temper fulfillment of their tasks.

Today, they tell us that the oceans are so full of garbage that there are spare airplane seats in the flight-paths of missing jets that are not from those jets. That it’s perfectly reasonable to expect all kinds of discarded material to show up in the sea, since we’ve been leaving it there as long as we can remember. Our species has so blatantly disregarded the gifts we have been given that we don’t consider them gifts anymore – the only gifts we can accept are those we give ourselves. We have lost a sense of perspective, of balance, of harmony. We don’t sit in pastures anymore, trying to describe what we’re missing. We think everything we’re missing is on the Internet.

And yes, I’m aware of how both (1) unoriginal my comments are and (2) how ironic it is that they are appearing on the Internet. The Internet offers us wonderful things as well, like the ability to connect with others from a field with just the minimum of time-delay.

Nonetheless, I have to think that we lost our way, collectively, when science split from religion. Or vice versa. Surely there were crimes committed on both sides, as there always are in human disputes. Conflict is nothing if not mutually assured on my home planet. But when the scientists stopped being interested in God and the religious stopped being interested in solving mysteries, then surely something was irrevocably torn asunder. How anyone can accept the answers offered by one group in total ignorance of the other eludes me daily.

(As though to taunt me, a wireless network has just been found by this laptop. Or maybe a metaphor about ability to make connections from remoteness or the seeming lack of connection? You decide.)

In any event, we can all look to extreme examples and see the absurdity. Science reducing all human existence to a collapse of uncontrolled synapses, eliminating free will and indicating that all human existence and creation is a lie, while pleading endless randomness in the face of the most wondrously perfect system ever built or discovered. Religion claiming that God will decide all and answer all, that those who die are meant to, while those who are afflicted should not fight but simply resign themselves to a fate larger than themself. A similar abdication of free will, a similar destruction of meaning, a similar breakdown in the purpose that ought drive human existence, both on a macro scale and the individual level. How are these examples not sufficient to get everyone to attempt to strike a middle-ground? Even atheist scientist friends are uncomfortable with the elimination of free will altogether, and certainly don’t live their lives like they believe it’s true. Even religious zealots seem to assert themselves as though they have the ability to change something around them. So why all the trouble seeing across the divide?

Surely the closest society to holding these interests in balance was the first society to settle on my home continent. Or series of societies. There was wide-scale recognition of higher powers behind every aspect of the universe they saw, as well as interest in developing and advancing to higher levels of understanding of that universe. The respect that was afforded each of these concepts led to the development of a minimally invasive culture, with much time for contemplation and communion.

But it was not a culture designed to particularly assert control or dominion, and it is a telling lesson about my species that this is one of the few cultures upon which an all-but-complete genocide has been visited in recorded history. The very idea of trying to learn more from the land than one was taught was so reprehensible that its adherants were forced to either change or die.

My wife, Emily, is not particularly spiritual, not much of a believer. About half of our conflicts for the more recent half of our marriage so far have evolved from some sort of discussion about this topic. I struggle with reconciling my love of Emily and my respect for her intellect with the fact that she not only doesn’t overtly believe in God, but finds the question to not be fundamental to existence on the planet. It should be noted that most of my friends feel this way as well, and while this also concerns me, one’s identity is far more wrapped up in a spouse than a friend. It feels like more of a reflection of oneself when one’s own life partner rejects something so fundamental to one’s own perspective.

And yet, Emily says that she feels something whenever she is isolated out in nature. That connecting with animals, with the basic forces of the natural world (wind, water, flora), simply being “out there” is enough to get her thinking about the bigger picture and often feeling some conviction that there is something greater afoot. She often remarks, either in nature or when confronted by amazing constructions of human hand that she finds less impressive, that she has never seen something made by humanity that can measure up to the lowliest product of nature. While this sometimes surprises me, grandson of an engineer who learned about bridge-building and to differentiate styles of columns before most anything, I think she has a telling route map to those who are otherwise disinclined to believe. What makes us (collectively, as a species) think we’re so great? Why do we even bother scarring the Earth’s surface with our contributions when nearly everything impressive is already there?

It’s a competition, in part, or even an offering as an aprentice. That we have something to contribute which can hope to allude to the grandeur and beauty of what we already found when we first opened our eyes. Look ma, no nature. I did it all by myself. Like a crude reflection of the world around us for taping on the refrigerator with a quietly pitying love. And just as high-quality, just as worthwhile in the face of the real thing, as a four-year-old’s lazy finger-painting.

Which is not to say that there’s nothing worthwhile in the Pyramids, the Internet, language, or art. But compared to the systems and understanding implicit in your average field, your average patch of non-garbage-infested ocean, your average rainforest? I think the metaphor flies.

Part of what I’ve never understood about the pitched battle between science and religion is the respect that each have for order. Science even calls the discoveries it makes about the universe’s order of operations “laws”, the same word religion uses to indicate its principles and guidelines for living. Science interprets the world around it with a presumption towards order, towards compacting what it finds into a series of laws that are never abridged, or at least never contravened except where another identifiable law overrides. And indeed this bears out – we hardly see gravity working some of the time in Iowa and then failing to at random times. But somehow, science is disinterested in a source of all this order and law and perfectly behaved matter, insisting that all order came from one moment of complete chaos. This theory itself fails to stand up to science’s own presumptions and policies of rigorous study – were it about anything other than something in impenetrable pre-history, it would be rejected on face. But because there’s no other explanation available without resorting to the three-letter no-no, it is offered as fact. How can science not feel that every additional law that holds up, every extra consistency and element of order that is found, how are these not evidence for God?

The only explanation is that religion has mangled God into seeming arbitrary, somehow the opposite of order. Because in its rejection of scientific practice, many religions have tried to ascribe unending magic and mystery to the figure of God. Mysterious ways, inexplicable methods, something that cannot and should not be known. This idea is just as dangerous and worthless as atheism. Perhaps moreso, for it rends people’s conception of the most important aspect of the universe from the reality of that aspect, thus nullifying it for the interpreter far more thoroughly than mere denial would. This resorting to inexplicability is just as senseless as resorting to the Big Bang – for wont of explanations, those who expect themselves to seamlessly explain everything appeal to something wholly inconsistent with the rest of their theory. And then wave the crutch of paradox or the rest of their intellect about to try to fend off naysayers.

The truth, of course, is that science can prove God with all of its order, and thus God is knowable. God is not mysterious and inaccessible and hopelessly oblique – God is in the systems that work every day to maintain life in its countless manifestations. God is the laws and rules and policies and structures that keep it all just so in ways that humanity fails laughably to imitate. How is it that humans have never made a computer that can’t break down, and yet life on the planet persists from well before humanity to (likely) long after it?

But perhaps this would rend the people who pursue science and religion from what they’re really after – power. If they were not maintaining some sort of supremacy in their ability to properly interpret God or the laws of the universe (truly the same thing), what use would there be in the respect they are accorded in our hierarchies? And if they did not do battle, how could they build their power by tearing each other’s down, by fighting for followers, by bringing the urgency of a following and extreme loyalty out because of the urgency of a false conflict? You think nation-states are the only ones that can raise a false-flag to ask unthinkable sacrifices of their minions? No, only by mystifying and cloaking the fundamental and simple realities of their alleged domains can scienctists and religious leaders exert their authority over those they attempt to mislead.

Perhaps not always with such a nefarious intent, I’ll grant. But certainly with that level of nefarious effect.

So what is to be done? How do we get to a place where people recognize the order in the universe as the signifier of something greater than themselves rather than the converse? How do we make peace between scientist and religious leader before it is too late to fish the garbage from the ocean, or worse, before it is after anyone cares about such things? Like all of the important realizations, it cannot be forced or likely even persuaded. It must be found within each person, of their own volition.

In the meantime, I spend time in the pasture, contemplating a day I have long dubbed Mortality Day, a reflection of a larger scientific/religious order I find in the planet’s course of movement through the same space every 365 days. A day laden with symbols (6), the memory of an unbelievably significant mass-murder (D-Day), the steady approach of a day when the planet is held in balanced opposition to itself. It is vital to neither dwell in the anticipation of death nor to ignore its daily possibility, but for me, setting aside a holiday of sorts to recognize the mortality of myself and others, has worked well. Eighteen years to the day after the death of my mother’s father, I continue this personal tradition, sometimes to the fear of those around me. But fear not for me in the context of death, for I have conviction that it would be merely a step, and probably ultimately a relieving one. I have not felt less that way than now for some time (about the relief), and yet I still can recognize that no matter how much I personally desire to cling to this planet and help it out, there are wonders beyond my imagining ahead, other planets and other learning to be had.

And whenever this faith wavers in the slightest, as it sometimes trembles like the trees in the wind, bending with the difficulty of a given circumstance or a cold black fear, I come back out to nature. And the wind itself reassures me, reminds me of what I know even in the worst challenging moments. How can you look upon the world, upon an “ecosystem” or a “valley” (whichever you prefer to call the same thing) and not be awed by the presence of God? How can you understand the depths of human understanding and think this is all for the purpose of one isolated planet, 60 or 80 years only?

Go out into the fields. Walk. And then come tell me it’s all random, happened for no reason, that there’s no purpose to anything we do or try or contemplate. Tell me all these rules are either figments or coincidence. And tell me that, somehow, the pursuit of a means of exchange or sheer hubris is worth destroying it all.

A plane tears through the sky, close enough to hear but not to see. Through the clouds that are darkening the sky and escalating the threat of rain. Rain that will not be enough to wash it all away.

Last night, I had one of the most transparent dreams of my entire life. Fresh from some emotional goodbyes at Glide in real life, I dreamt that a bunch of people I knew in my life, consisting primarily of Glide folks, but also including friends from throughout my time on Earth, were all staying at this big lodge. It was this labyrinthine place with crooked staircases and random working fireplaces and shmancy parts – as though the spirit of the La Fonda were infused into five different hotel styles that were all then jammed together.

In the dream, it was the fifth or seventh year of all of us coming together for some unofficial but very expected regular gathering, that was basically a big pajama party of everyone running around this crazy lodge and hanging out for a long weekend. And while the dream eventually insisted on becoming a bit of a nightmare (I got into some major argument with a stranger in the lobby restaurant, was threatened, and eventually had to leave in fear), the message of the heart of the dream was all too clear. I’m going to miss these people and I am adding to the tally of scattered people who I will be missing in the future. Deep in my heart, I just want us all to hang out somewhere relaxed and without responsibility where we can just be.

Life affords us few chances like this (my dream was clearly partially referencing my wedding, the last time when so many from so many walks of life were so assembled) and they are profoundly important to treasure. In the meantime, all we can do is say meaningful goodbyes and promise to not lose sight of these people. Ironically, of course, I attribute much of my trouble with staying in touch with people to working. But working has brought me more people. Such is the way of the world, the nature of life in an age that has advanced beyond the feudal farm.

This morning, waking from that dream and starting my typical morning routine that will be exceptional from here on out, everything really started to hit me broadside. This is it. After counting down and contemplating, planning a transition and carefully ensuring that my work goes on, it all ends today. Freedom and loss. Joy and sadness. The old emotional gobstopper, more moving for all I’ve been too busy to notice it creeping up on me. Glide is one of the very few places (college debate is the only other I can think of for sure) where I have felt thoroughly in my element, where I have felt at home and comfortable in the environment, among the people, navigating through its twists and turns. Where I feel I’ve “figured it out” and been able to capitalize on that to be successful, to make friends, to find a home. (And what does it say about this phenomenon that I’m returning to a college debate setting, coaching at Rutgers for the next two years?)

Walking away from that home is incredibly difficult. I don’t even realize how much so yet. The crazy place on the corner of Ellis and Taylor with the throngs of people in need has been my place. And starting tomorrow, it won’t be anymore. It will be a place that I was, where I loved and worked and tried. It will be a place of memory and the past. I am tearing up as I write this, for the second time in a young morning. This is life. And it’s all worth it, if only for the departures and losses that make one understand how important the pieces of one’s life really are.

This is it. This is it.

Give me a moment to hang on to, to hold forever, plunging into the future.

I finished a book tonight that would’ve been more fitting to finish on my last day of work and it was all I could really think about as I was walking home from the train doing one of those walking stutter-step things you do when you haven’t quite timed the completion of your book correctly but you can’t simply let it linger over the overnight and somehow it doesn’t seem right to finish such a roadbound book in the confines of the house at six o’clock PM when the world is just darkening and everything seems at its most depressing and anger inducing but I’m not there yet I’m swinging my backpack around my shoulder to deposit book and sunglasses and contemplate the end of Oscar Wao and his world and whether it all came to a satisfactory end or not and all these tourists are staring just past me over the overslung shoulder at Godzilla or nothing at all and I don’t bother to contemplate for the storm is blowing in hard and I really can’t wait to be out of it before the rain that was supposed to be here earlier but isn’t yet and I’m suddenly rooted to the ground despite my rush by the vision of this pile of books that’s just strewn out on the sidewalk and one would normally think abandoned with a free sign that blew away but somehow this looks different worse much worse like something that was punitive and there are CD’s too and just enough peripheral stuff that it looks like someone flew away in a hurry or said you want your books huh THERE have your books how do you like them now and it was clear that they hadn’t quite been rained on yet but they would be soon and always the eternal dilemma that somehow gets to me of whether to scoop and salvage or whether the offended would be back for them soon and sometimes it’s even more complicated because there are times I think someone is meant to lose something they leave behind and another to find it and any intervention from me sometimes feels like its just abridging free will almost like I don’t think I can be a participant in the lives of others at least of strangers at least of those who seem to be on a predestined course that I should do my careful level best with not to interfere like picking up the books which just feels wrong despite the droplets I can see envisioning somehow it would be like picking up a dead body or something it just seems a monument to things I am not meant to interact with and I’m stumbling back across the Abbey Road crosswalk almost before I think of looking up to see if anyone is stopping because I’ve already burned time looking at the books and the rotting banana on the cardboard just after that seemed to tie so perfectly to the book just finished and rumbling back around in my head and I wonder how much agency he felt he had and how it compares to mine and what if you were stuck in a really beautiful prison with guards and fellow inmates who treated you well and you somehow intellectually knew it was a prison but still were so comforted by so much of it that it felt somehow strange to leave after a sentence of say three years and maybe it’s good to have rotten-to-the-core days like today because they remind you that it is a prison and there’s not even the hint of doubt about what you should be doing even though there’s times that what you think you really need IS a prison but no metaphor so much as a real prison with walls and guards and no computers or games or recreation or friends just you and just enough access to pen and paper to appreciate it enough to make it work after all you’ve talked about a hospital before or something similar but pain can be exhausting and makes for unreflective drivel like you’re barely able to chunk out now between the moments of startling exhaustion things that your father would call self-indulgent and you recognize as mental chaff but think it’s helpful too for the writing or for you or for something anyway maybe but it doesn’t matter you’re almost falling asleep on your feet falling through the gate and thinking about the dark dreary insides of the house and your one-hour no-contact foul mood and the unsatisfying release of a video game and whether the Mariners can do something today and there’s a package you weren’t expecting and an invitation you definitely weren’t expecting and you realize for the thousandth time this year how badly you’ve neglected everything that matters while in prison and the thought of nine nine nine nine nine nine nine sings you through the door like some trippy Beatles song and you know you must capture this moment and express it to yourself for one two three years hence when you’re on the brink and ask yourself like Oscar Wao flying back to the Dominican Republic goddammit is this ever going to be worth it again do you really want to live like a zombie can you ever get through this and so close to the edge that all you can do is see the walls and bars anew and wonder if you’re really going to make it or if you’re too broken down to even care and you realize that all these debates are why you haven’t been able to write anything or codify what you’re feeling and there are all the people who you do care about and believe in what they’re doing in prison and how can you explain that their paradise is your prison and your prison is still better than anyone else’s prison and now you’ve gone and upset everyone else and this is a hard lonely road to talk about with people who almost all feel differently and nine days away is just no time to make final seminal statements when you’re still in the thick of it and you have to wonder how long after nine how long after zero will you still feel in the thick how many dreams of stress and nightmare will you awaken to like this fruitless spoiled morning when you had something really due that day that then wasn’t as opposed to the school assignments the debate rounds the Seneca kids all the past things and you know that you will be haunted by this forever and somehow God please somehow let this all have been worth it.

One month ago tomorrow, Emily and I were driving up from Fresno and talking about life and her family. We’d just spent a restful New Year’s weekend with a partial incarnation of the Garin Clan and noticed that her Mom seemed to be finally accepting aspects of aging and the need to slow down a little. Both her Mom and my Dad have always been people who push themselves to the brink and it’s always unsettling to have a parent who doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on their limits as they get older.

The next day, we got a phone call which revealed that the routine colonoscopy she’d been scheduled for had justified the practice of getting periodic colonoscopies. She had colon cancer.

We reeled. For a long time, we had little or no information – not because anyone was concealing anything, but because the information would simply take time to discern. How long had she had cancer? What stage was it in? Had it metastasized? Would she need chemo? What was the general outlook?

We chose not to share most of these questions and dilemmas with others outside the family, mostly because we daily dealt with how miserable it was to wonder and not to know. By roughly half-weekly installments from additional doctor’s visits, we got a few tiles to throw into our mostly empty mosaic. About two years. Probably not metastasized, but inconclusive. Surgery was the immediate course of action and then we’ll see.

More waiting. An effort to keep life on an even keel, to not cower in the wake of this visceral confronting of mortality and larger questions and something that, in cliché but nevertheless essential fashion, eviscerated all the importance that had illusorily appeared in prior concerns.

Emily went down to Fresno last Monday night.

A week ago today, her mother went into surgery to remove the cancer. The surgery took about 90 minutes and a third of her large intestine. And apparently, as a two-day wait revealed thereafter, all of the cancer. The biopsy was clean. There will be routine monitoring and she had to spend a week in the hospital, but it looks like not even a little chemo will be necessary. Early detection saves lives.

The relief at such a diagnosis is indescribable. Guarded, surely, because nothing is ever 100%, but guarded euphoria is euphoria nonetheless. The surgery recovery has gone smoothly and all indications are that something like normal life will be back very soon.

One month later.

As someone who years ago started predicting that everyone in my generation who makes it to sixty will get several cancers, representing massive increases in both the incidence and survival rates of the disease, I guess this whole experience shouldn’t be as stunning as it feels. But even for someone living on a sine curve, this kind of roller coaster is overwhelming. There may be no more widely feared word in the language than “cancer” (perhaps “terrorist”) – the word seems to connote a death sentence no matter what the options wind up being. And to get cancer without needing any chemo at all is transcendently remarkable.

Of course the initial fear was tempered with a little hope, just as the current relief is tempered with a little concern. Such is how quickly things change these days and how much of every emotion and experience seems to be mixed. It’s hard to find a more unassailably positive thing to cling to than a wildly successful cancer surgery, though.

May this relief last. And may all your cancers go as well.

Coming up from the train this morning, I walked my usual path through Powell Street Station, winding to the right and up the mini-escalator to a little landing before the second mini-escalator. On said landing were two orange cones, pretty much squarely in the middle of the walkway. Splaying out in all directions from the cones was spilled coffee, heavily whited with milk.

I almost actually paused mid-stride, no doubt causing a chain-reaction of commuters walking inattentively ahead, already trying to dodge conical orange obstacles. But I proceeded, while craning my neck and trying to figure out if that had really been what it looked like.

Someone had taken the time and energy to place not one, but two cones over the top of a large coffee spill, but not to make any effort to clean it up.

Sure, I may have been watching it in a twenty-second window between placement of the cones and running to the janitorial closet to procure a mop and bucket. I considered sticking around atop the second escalator to determine whether this was an especially inopportune period of time or really a telling phenomenon. The fact that I considered such a dalliance would (or might) make me late for work (and I was about 10 minutes ahead of schedule) was sufficient answer in my own mind to the possibility that this was just a brief phenomenon.

Besides, wouldn’t one normally keep the cones and the mop in the same place?

It struck me, of course, that this whole incident was The Metaphor for the current state of things, at least in America and possibly on a larger scale. There’s only time, energy, inclination to throw up caution flags, to do the absolute minimum to warn people of the danger without the slightest effort at containment. You have been warned. But no one is even going to attempt to actually ameliorate the harms. Navigating is only safer by the slimmest of technical margins, in that you know that you’re navigating something dangerous.

Don’t fall.

———

Postscript — I write an awful lot about BART and situations that take place on the trains and in the stations. To the point where it’s sort of amazing that I have yet to create an official category for posts about BART. I should do that, but that would require retroactive categorization, which is sort of a gargantuan pain (especially when I’m so far behind on other, seemingly more meaningful projects).

It does make me wonder, though, about what I would have to post about if I didn’t take a train regularly. My ideal life involves writing full-time, but I’ve always been very aware of how crazily isolating that could become, to the point where inspiration and life events were much less available, thus diminishing much of the point of writing full-time in the first place. The paradox never troubles me so much as when I think about my observations on public transportation and how I would rarely be on it without this kind of routine. I think the summation remains that a full-time writing life would require enough small, enjoyable trappings of routine (e.g. clubs/activities, volunteering, etc.) as to keep a finger on the pulse of the “real world.”

There’s this great scene in a recent great movie (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) about timing and the house-of-cards nature of our worlds. One thing bounces just the wrong way, leading to another thing bouncing just the wrong way, leading to another… and eventually, collapse.

It’s very much akin, though just slightly different in tenor, to the story of the horeshoe-nail that lost the kingdom, which I’ve discussed before and more recently. Not unlike what I consider to be a pivotal scene in Loosely Based. Not dissimilar from another scene in another movie, about the irretrievability of scattered feathers. Which, hey, my Dad just blogged about too.

Last night, I was deciding between playing poker online and playing another game on the computer. I hadn’t played poker online in ages, but I had just done really well in a live tournament in New Mexico (7th out of 40 when Afsheen, who joined me was 9th [cash at 5th]). On a whim, I decided I felt like testing the waters again. I didn’t see any poker tourneys I liked open for registration, but thought to check for any in late registration, with only a few seconds left to register. Amazingly, there was a $2 multi-table tournament that was just my speed for adjusting back to online play.

I got in just in time to play this tournament. And it turned out I played it for several hours, till about 2 in the morning. I finished 26th (out of over 2,000) and made a ridiculously low sum of money for the efforts of that kind of time, but I at least proved to myself that New Mexico wasn’t a fluke and I’ve been playing good, disciplined poker lately. But this was way later than I had been planning on staying up, especially since I had an important 8:30 meeting the next morning.

Because I stayed up late, I got up late. Everything was running a little behind. I considered, at 7:20, skipping a shower to ensure that I’d make the meeting in plenty of time, but it occurred to me that this would have consequences just as impolite as being late to the meeting. It dawned on me that I could just punt sitting down on the train this morning and take the Fremont to MacArthur and transfer to something between the early train (that gets me to work at 8:15) and the late train (that gets me to work right at 8:30 or closer to 8:35 if anything goes wrong). There’s a middle train that doesn’t stop in Berkeley (comes from a different line) that would put me in about 8:22.

Because this occurred to me, I took a shower. And because I was feeling confident in this plan, I dallied a little. And because I dallied a little, I was just a little behind for the Fremont train when I left. And because of that, I could hear the train just as I was hitting the first audible grate at the station. And I knew it was the Fremont train. And I thought that I could make the train, but I’d be running a small risk of running so fast I tripped on a step and smacked my face on concrete. And something about that image stuck in my mind and I didn’t want to risk it. Even with lateness on the line (you have no idea what my punctuality record is like at work, especially for meetings), I just didn’t like my chances. Even without face-smacking, it was mathematically most likely that I would end up nose-to-plexiglass with a subway door, disheartened and completely winded as I watched it scoot away.

Because of this decision, I strolled into the station. And as I got down to the platform, I confirmed that those were the red rear lights of the Fremont train, slouching toward Ashby. And so I took up my post standing in front of the yellow safety strip’s contrasting black section that indicates where the doors would open in 7 minutes for the San Francisco (late) train.

And I started reading The Idiot. And was soon immersed in the book.

Until five minutes later, when I heard a thudding sound and a chorus of shrieks and gasps. About twenty feet away, a set of legs was suddenly visible on the tracks, with hints of a torso attached.

Not just twenty feet away, it should be noted, but twenty feet closer to the mouth of the tunnel through which the San Francisco-bound train was about to barrel. Just one black-door-marker shy of said mouth.

There were more gasps and whispered explanations of an arbitrary and unpredictable fall (the person was on the near track, as though having fallen straight down into the track well, as opposed to jumping or flinging toward the far track or the fatal third rail). The legs didn’t move. There were rising yells, calling for someone to stop the train or call to stop the train or tell the agent to stop the train or do something to just stop. The. Train. 90 seconds and counting. And then the heartrending polished announcer voice: “Nine-car San Francisco train now approaching, platform two.”

I had briefly considered jumping down to help the person up, but now there just wasn’t time. One imagines scenarios like this and the person is always either conscious and able to be helped up without jumping down with them (an active participant in their own rescue) or times their jump to coincide with the train’s arrival and only a truly psychic shoulder-grab can be of use. This unconsciousness on the tracks now 80 seconds short of the train is unimaginable. Someone is on the white courtesy phone, bleating that the train must be stopped because someone is on the tracks.

Suddenly, the legs move, stretching up in obvious pain, but demonstrating consciousness. I do the only thing I can think of, yelling to the person that they need to get up, that they need to get up now and we’ll help.

The legs collapse again. They do not twitch. The train can be heard loud and rolling down the tunnel.

And then… then… a squeaking. A squealing. A… stopping.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Everything thereafter seemed a bit of a muddle, a bit of a mess. I learned just how long it takes emergency personnel to get to a point where they can deal with someone who is passed out on train tracks. I learned a lot about crowd behavior, how some people just will not give space to a possibly dying person no matter what. I learned about how rumors spread and eyewitness reports become almost instantly corruptible. I learned that BART spokespeople are no more reliable in the newspaper than anyone else. (Although I guess technically “no train was about to arrive as the woman fell” – it was at least a full minute from the fall to the approach of the train, but that’s how long it takes to stop a BART train without an attendant standing by. Maybe this comment was just intended to make it clear that this was not a suicide attempt.)

Most of all, though, it’s about timing. The person could not have fallen so much as 15 seconds later and lived. Though if the person had fallen at the other mouth of the tunnel, there may have been hope to flag down the train as it was going through the station. Had the person fallen a minute earlier, people probably would’ve hopped down and helped her (most people thought it was a guy at the time and I never saw her face) out, though there’s always the risk that this causes injuries too.

And that meeting? I was thirty minutes late. I put in a payphone call to the meeting organizer and she passed on the word that it was all beyond my control.

Thankfully, this moment wasn’t more powerful for me today. The images from this morning’s scene are stark enough without a more damaging punctuation. Just imagining it in that adrenaline-filled second-cum-lifetime was plenty for me.

What are you doing right now that will impact everything you experience from here on out?

Turns out, everything.

While in line at Chipotle today, I read their sign announcing early closure on New Year’s Eve and complete closure on New Year’s Day.

The final sentence read:

We sincerely hope you can survive waiting a couple days for your first burrito of 2009.

And it immediately hit me that someone out there won’t survive to see that first burrito of 2009. Even now, midday on the next-to-last day of the year, someone was reading that sign in Chipotle and chuckling mildly at the witty sarcasm and imagining the first of many burritos they’d be chowing down in the bright shiny new annum to come. And they were sure that those burritos, like so many of their presupposed plans, would unfold like an infinite accordion before them to build a bridge to an unforeseeable but infinitely remote future.

And they will die before the year.

And they have no idea.

The moral of this moment may be “be careful what you’re sarcastic about.” Or perhaps just “be careful.” Or even, given how most of you are probably reacting to the tenor of this post, “the most basic and predictable realities of life are soul-crushingly depressing when truly considered beyond a passing whim.”

Bon appetit.

I have been sick for nigh on a week now. Since first thing this work-week. I went to work Monday, stayed home Tuesday, went to work Wednesday, stayed home Thursday, and went to week Friday. This is probably not atypical for me. Or this little piggie, come to think of it.

I wasn’t really being piggy on Wednesday – I had three crucial meetings scheduled and just couldn’t see how the week would work out without me going. The first meeting was no-show de facto cancelled and the third meeting was cancelled as a statement to me about coming into work when sick. So it goes.

Lesson learned: stay home when sick, no matter the circumstances.

Of course I probably should’ve stayed home Friday, too, with the weather outside being frightful, but my costume (gecko) was too delightful to bung away for a full year. At least the suit was warm, the crazy gecko-head especially, functioning like an all-weather fabric helmet. Lots of people dressed up at work, somewhat surprising and at least partly attributable (maybe) to my clamoring for everyone to join me in the effort. Lots of people no-showed to work, too, or left early. So it goes.

Regardless, I think I’ve made another stride in detecting the purposeful fabric of the universe. By having a cold. Neat, huh?

The problem of evil is always put out there as the major counterargument to belief in God. Even calling it the “problem of evil” is, well, problematic, because I think it automatically gives it a weight the argument doesn’t deserve. It would be like calling the recent attempted scandal the “Bill Ayers Setback”. Who says it’s a setback? Isn’t the whole thing kind of silly? Can’t we move on already?

But, to humor the uncanny number of people who really do think it’s a problem, the problem of evil asks how a benevolent God can stand idly by while bad things happen. As though the point of life were somehow to have all good outcomes at all times because people learn so much when they are fat and happy. But there I go not giving the argument any weight again. This is a problem.

(Incidentally, it’s downright shocking to me how frequently this problem is depicted as the turning point on the plunge into atheism or desertion from various faiths in people’s lives. Depicted mostly in fictitious accounts, though also a fair bit in history. And it’s normally exacerbated by being an individual’s first direct encounter with a particular form of evil that prior they understood very well happened to other people. I just guess it’s hard to understand how narrow-minded, self-centered, and myopic people are depicted as being and/or are. Wow, am I in an adversarial mindset tonight.)

For some reason, most people tend to be most bothered by the evil that is controlled by the free will decisions of other people. This honestly accounts for something like 80-90% of “problem of evil” claims, which again demonstrates short-sightedness. Without going into the whole rigmarole, free will = meaning. With no free will, no one actually has any decisions, thus their lives, thoughts, and existence have no meaning, thus there are no theological underpinnings that matter anyway. The only way to prevent people from doing harm to each other is to abridge their free will, thus undermining any possible meaning to morality, thus undermining any semblance of meaning. Get it? Got it? Good.

But the stickier (and less utilized) aspect of the problem of evil, almost warranting its label, consists of natural disasters, ranging from weather events (colloquially called “acts of God” – we’ve really got it in for God, don’t we?) to illnesses, plagues, and the like. And frankly, my responses on this one aren’t as crisply satisfying as the need for free will to make the whole “sentient beings experiment” viable.

Mostly, my arguments have boiled down to the need for collective action and societal structure. People do worst in the face of natural disasters alone and the best in well prepared and coordinated groups. Our first clue that life was meant to be lived communally was not being born on our own individual planet, but natural disasters and disease give a good second clue. They also, conveniently, require social banding that has absolutely no violent aspects (and, in fact, requires healing instead). They also ensure that life will remain challenging (and thus provide learning) even when humans have learned to use their free will only for good (and not to commit violence). Eventually, we will get over our baser natures, but there still needs to be struggle and progress.

But this illness, this time around I’ve (re?-)discovered a key reason for illness specifically. And it’s not just the “fragility of life” mortality-awareness mumbo-jumbo, though it is related to that and that’s at least a tolerable argument anyway.

Anyway.

One of the points is that we are meant to realize just how much control and time we do have. This seems more obviously relevant in 2008 than it might’ve in 2008 BC, though we actually have a lot more free time than our ancestors 4,016 years prior – we just appreciate it and understand it less.

Most everyone these days goes around assuming they have no time for just a minute extra of anything – they may have some structured recreational time built in, but their schedule is packed to the gills just as they need it to be. There’s no possible room for variation or alleviation.

And then they get sick and – wham – there has to be time. Unless they’re one of these people who goes around trying to pretend they’re not sick and they can just fight through it… in which case, they get a pre-lesson about humility and how much more suffering they’re causing themselves via this route. (I know, there are also people who, by the economic laws governing this society hopefully not much longer, are forced to choose between toughing it out and facing economic disaster… this is why I support universal healthcare.) Anyway, in the end, one may be frustrated and suffering and discombobulated by the illness that removed one from one’s routine, but one also can suddenly see the cracks in the schedule and rejoin the routine fully understanding exactly how the component time is constructed.

So, next time you’re sick, appreciate the time off you’re being given and use it to evaluate whether your life might not be better structured another way.

Hey, if I preach doom and disaster in so many other walks of my life, why can’t I package theological understandings in chintzy greeting card-sounding lines?

I miss October already.

So there may be rocket fuel on Mars. It’s in our drinking water and now it’s on the Red Planet.

What would we be more likely to find as the remains of a past civilization, a past effort, than this explosive ingredient? Maybe from the rockets that left when things got too bad. Maybe from the rockets whose red glare signaled the end. Maybe from other explosives. Maybe from fireworks to celebrate on the way down.

Could there be a more profound time in our species’ history to discover the remains of Mars? To give us just enough clues of past life now departed, past trappings of destructive civilization now broken down into dust? Sure, October 1962. Maybe even August 1945, now just 63 years in the rearview mirror. People said it was a miracle that we discovered space travel just after, made it happen on the vision of the same President who nearly ended it all before we got the chance.

Maybe it was a miracle. Maybe it’s time.

Humans have a hard enough time paying attention to their own history. Even though the species is the same and the people sometimes occupy the same land or speak the same language, something seems wholly irrelevant about time long past. That was then and this is now.

But what could be more now than space discoveries? What could make history more relevant than it being brand-new? What could make experience more powerful than it being experienced by those we can only imagine, those we never met, those who killed themselves before we began to be?

It’s far too early and already, since this post idea came to mind, the internet has run away with the idea of life and been lambasted for it. NASA is trying to reign in science fiction imaginations with cold hard science. Water isn’t life. Perchlorate isn’t rockets. Conjecture isn’t evidence.

We have to dig deeper, further. We have to excavate. We will probably need to send our own species to look for the last one. We will probably need samples and endless debate, theorizing until one piece of evidence stands so irrefutable that it changes our view of the universe overnight.

But make no mistake, it’s there. We have never been less alone. We have never been closer to the edge of our collective ego. With apologies to Jake, the space program has never seemed more relevant.

In time, we will likely find that our obligation, our debt of gratitude to the long-gone beings of Mars, is to not repeat their mistakes.

If we have time.

Authorities revealed Tuesday that a man carrying a loaded shotgun was arrested in January near the U.S. Capitol, and explosives left in his truck nearby went undetected for three weeks.
-CNN/AP, 26 March 2008

If we all comprehended all that goes into the decisions that impact our lives, we might never be able to sit still again. Let alone sleep. Two people are anticipating such a decision that I’m supposed to be making… it’s entirely out of their hands. It’s one of those many seeming coinflip decisions we make in life. Eventually I’ll find a way to make it a rationally reasoned decision, but I wouldn’t count on others to do the same in my shoes. This one’s for a job as I end a less than 2-month stint of not being a supervisor anymore. How many college admissions decisions, or college matriculation decisions, or moves, or debate judgments, or responses to date requests, came down to the same kind of coinflip? And who here would say they haven’t been deeply affected by one of those kinds of decisions?

I try to remember everything.
Try to remember so you don’t disappear.
-Counting Crows, “Sundays”

Maybe life’s not so hard to predict. We all have free will, but we all tend to make these ridiculously logical decisions. Maybe that’s the only reason that the coinflips feel so dangerous or scary. It’s where our free will really has to ride a gut feeling, or take a chance, or do something out of the comfort zone. Maybe where it lets itself be influenced by some larger benevolent wave. My Dad might call it “mind at large”. Others would go with destiny or fate. Everyone above would agree God’s gotta have something to do with it. Just about. But who has the faith that their contributed portion of the cacophony of wills is always allocated to benevolence? And wouldn’t resting on that faith somehow violate the bargain and undo the magic? Magic. Maybe that’s another word for it.

This is a list of what I should’ve been, but I’m not.
-Counting Crows, “Cowboys”

I used to make tapes, back in late high school and throughout college. I clung to a dying technological medium in large part because I liked the rhythms of 60- and 90-minute intervals, and especially loved having two opposing sides of something. No one was really ever able to record their own vinyl records, and CD’s don’t have sides. The tape was the perfect homemade medium. I made two tapes that come to mind this week… “Poetry in Stagnation” and “Chaos Theory”. The last of these had sides called “Butterfly Wings” and “Consequences” and was probably my most artistically made mix. The latest Counting Crows album, “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings”, is clearly written with sides in mind. It’s a bit of a concept album with each half of that phrase parsed into its own side. The CD cover is a vinyl album, just in case we missed the point. Like all new albums (these days at least), it sounds godawful the first time one listens to it. The second time through, I’m not sure I’ve heard anything more relevant in my life. Nothing will ever measure up to “This Desert Life”, the album that started my traditions with Counting Crows releases, perhaps the only album that sounded perfect the first time through too. I’ve always felt a special kinship with Adam Duritz (really, what CC fan doesn’t?), but you can hear in this one that maybe it’s gone too far. Maybe he pushed his own opportunities too long and wonders how much of this ends up being his own doing. There comes a time when it’s time to stop blaming the cacophony of wills and start examining one’s own coinflips.

It’s okay, I’m angry,
but you’ll never understand…
And I can’t see why you want to talk to me
when your vision of America is crystalline and clean.
-Counting Crows, “When I Dream of Michelangelo”

Despite all the coinflips, the cacophony, the difficult decisions, there often come times when one can attune oneself to the universe (God, mind at large, fate, destiny, magic) sufficiently where such things no longer seem scary. One still has to play by the rules, to agonize and try. To make the best decision possible for the best reasons possible. As Brandzy would say, to do the right thing for the right reasons. But this attunement, this awareness, this getting in sync seems to take the edge off the decisions. It takes the really vicious teeth out, leaving them more smile and less bared fangs. Some mornings, maybe even a morning like this, it’s not enough for reassurance. Is that the Cheshire cat I’m seeing? What does finding your place look like?

Would you eat a Honduran melon without fear of salmonella contamination?
-CNN’s QuickVote poll for 26 March 2008

Walking out the door to go to Chipotle, checking the mail on the way, and getting a certificate for free tacos therein. The unending awareness that terrorism would be unstoppable and is thus, by its absence, demonstrated to be nonexistent. A friend’s ability to achieve what one has always wanted, while one is doing what said friend is most interested in for his own achievement. Full moons and eclipses. Butterflies flapping their wings. Earthquakes. Timing timing timing.

Life makes its own excitement.