You Should Have a Thing

This blog turned an invisible corner many months ago; the key plot development of my decade is that I've started doing standup comedy and getting paid for it. On June 10th I will be performing at the most famous venue in San Francisco.

You should have a Thing. A Thing you do that you have complete control over.

Things are what you use to fill the spaces left by shit-ungiving women and absentee senses of self. They insulate your mind against the Moment, which if untended by a Thing, will tell you that everything is futile and ugly and sweeping along an arc of decay.

I recommend you have a Thing.

The Most Moving Thing I've Ever Read

What will my last words be?

Those who die in combat often call for their mothers. From one account in Vietnam: "I didn't really speak the language. I could understand a few phrases, though. One day during a firefight, for the first time in my life, I heard the cries of the Vietnamese wounded, they call out for their mothers, their wives, their girlfriends. There I was listening to the VC cry for the same things."


From "What Every Person Should Know About War," by Chris Hedges

Terms

The feeling undergirding everything, for me, for everyone maybe: waves of nauseating, terrifying, debilitating fear of death.

Brushing my teeth, "Your life is a cobblestone in a road leading either to the edge of an apocalyptic cliff or an emerald city populated by strangers who will never know your name or hold gratitude in their hearts for the sacrifices you made on their behalf."

How have we been convinced not to feel anger that our worlds must end?

Weird pride, filling my heart with passion against this moment of national self-annihilation. Samurai partisanship. The Tea Party one drop in a sea of historical insult. I want your heads on pikes before I disappear.

Long road. Long, bumpy road.

Light Lies the Crown

I look at your photo and wonder how many dark ages could fit in the enchantment-space between your lipstick and your fishnets. I wonder what it would be like to possess a magic body, with its capability to legitimize any attitude, any artifact or trinket.

You are a ship, afloat on a sea of equivalencies, up whose sides a million and one inherited gestures clamber to escape the depths of obsolescence. The tattoo. The rings. The lolita skirt.

A hammer, hung from chicken wire, would become an article of cultural gravity if bracketed in your cleavage. A sneer of your beautiful mouth would justify a Hitler moustache drawn above it. Today, Led Zeppelin mariachi Baudelaire electro-hookerism. Tomorrow, S&M post-punk Eskimo archaeology.

You are our laureate - we, a generation without art. A poetry of ornaments. You are a ransom note, written with fragments of ancestral wreckage. Give us back our ability to be more than beautiful. Give us back to the ocean.

A piñata hanging in the darkness. It would be a relief even to be hit. But instead, string and space. String and space.

Then I Woke Up

I rarely have nightmares, but when I do, they come in sagas. A couple nights ago it was dusk and I was paddling on a surfboard towards an island half a mile away. The water was oily, yellow with the sunset. I could feel the sharks swimming enormously below me.

Last night, the world was gripped by an amazing plague. Profound orgies of violence, everyone's faces mutant, horselike. Flesh unbounded, warping capriciously and arbitrarily, consuming itself in fountains of gore as I watched. A taste of Hell.

The only part that really disturbed me was my resignation to it, its feeling of inevitability. Because in the dream the horror was the unseen, inherent consequence of living on the planet for as long as we have.

An enormous part of me thinks the normative force of the universe is holocaust; tracks, unblinkingly, the monsters circling beneath the surface. Sometimes I am very, very afraid of the next twenty years.

I wandered away into "the Infected Forest," vertical pillars of wood in engulfing darkness. Silent. Alone.

Lease

Everybody has a few indelible moments in their lives. Game changers. A few of mine: being shown my first Playboy by the neighborhood kids, saying goodbye to my family on the first day of college, recognizing that I am going to die.

A few months ago I announced on Facebook that I am an Atheist. I guess it was narcissistic of me to expect a reaction, even some subterranean snark rattle.

This silence is instructive to me. It tells me what I already know in the part of my brain that has grown up - nobody's really keeping score. Not amongst us, really, in a way that matters. And, as suggested before, not in the stars, either.

This means that I am alone with my life. And, appraising it now, I have been very narcissistic, very lazy. My narcissism suggests that clutching to resentments wins me points in some cosmic Taste ledger. It recommends elaborate rationalizations for why social misgivings lie at others' feet and not my own. Its sneers buttress the glass walls, goad me to ridicule, seduce into complacency.

It is easy to stand in front of a dairy aisle and smell blood on the wind. From behind, history's deathstench, permanent, like the ghost of a murderous uncle blowing out birthday candles. And from a distance, the annihilating nothingness of the last moment.

How small these feelings of inadequacy and hatred are. How unworthy to occupy the tiny, thrumming engine of my brief machine.

I can't say it enough. I am alone with the contents of my heart. We are alone. We choose our tenants.

And how, how, how do you evict the delinquent ones?

Night Terrors

Another cancer dream. My only recurring nightmare, emergent in bi-annual cycles. Last time, I was a child in the dream, and woke up in tears, and my heart went hollow when I realized that it is not a dream for many real children.

Strangely, they are my only mundane dreams. No phantasmagoria. High detail, intense realism, no fraction of awareness of the waking self.

In this one, I learned I had a year to live. Weeping, I told my mother all of my secrets. Overwhelmed and hopeless, I felt the permanent incompleteness of my now unreachable hopes.

And all day, I was on the verge of crying. I am almost crying now. Because I have a horrible talent for understanding death. Everywhere, I hear the tinkle of shattered glass.

Consciousness is too heavy a burden for something as fragile as an animal body. What indignity to have a mind to refute the godless unsympathy of physics and causality. What grand injustice to cleave self-awareness to a form ruled by entropy, subject to a million upon a million frailties.

We deserve a life unshadowed by death. We deserve so much more than evolution has given us.

Prole

The feeling of adulthood, heavy in the gut: is: 1:1; action/reaction, everything being exactly what it is, resting where placed.

As a child I showed more mercy to injured birds, comforting them in their inevitable deaths, shoebox upon shoebox, than I do to my own life. My own precious life, finite, unguaranteed. My own precious life. My own small and precious life. Frail thing. Untended. Unguarded. Exposed.

Horror Vacuui

Southbound 5 at around 4:30, top a crest and the city looms. Downtown is lit eerily by the setting sun. A wash of the magic ochre found mostly in my own dreams. Overwhelmed. I am not looking at the road. I am still not looking at the road. It is so awful and lonely and moving. It all looks like ruins. How do all the cars not crash from awe.

Canon

"There's this tea place in Hillcrest. It would be a great place for you to bring one of your many books."

I had told my new friend about my spontaneous collection of 200-odd literary classics. I had told him about my favorite book, The Magic Mountain, that it was set in a sanatorium in Switzerland before the outbreak of World War I, that it was an allegory for the intellectual milieu of prewar Europe, that it was seven or eight hundred pages long, that well it sounded pretty dull but it was, uh, great. I had offered a self-conscious little silence.

I had told him about something very important, this bookshelf, that fills me with many shades of trembling.

The blonde, a month before - she seemed too pretty for Thomas Mann. She said vague things about him over the music of the bar. Then she pummeled a guy in a wifebeater with her ass.

What to do with this strange impulse, to hear voices removed by centuries and oceans, to make sure others do as well.

Apocrypha

In 2005, I started writing posts that I never published. Some were too specific and remain so. Others were abandoned because for a now unknown reason I was embarrassed to admit that I was in love on the occasions when I was, or because I did not want to betray my own unhappiness, or because I did not want to appear judgmental. In retrospect, these things do not seem so important to me. Here are a few favorites, in chronological order.

~~~

It often takes an hour of wallowing in the dry heat of Kaloustian's class to motivate myself to make a blog entry.

"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" proclaims Massoud from the back of the class. Substitute does nothing.

School is ugly. It's like your underwear after a hot day at school. GOD, it's hot and gross and my head hurts and "Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" Soulless myrmidons patrolling the campus looking for children to bully, grades, grades, grades, the dumb nauseating pulse of the top forty at lunch, the smell of cheese everywhere, hot sun, I VOMIT YOU OUT, I EXPEL YOU FROM MY BODY LIKE A SICKNESS. I reclaim dominion over my life, they get no more anger, no more floorspace in my head.

"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!"

~~~

Late-night drunken thoughts of far-away places:

• Stepping in front of the car, brushing off sixty years or more like so many irritating flies, breaking down in the sunshine walk home listening to Eminem, of all things, fucking Eminem, Mockingbird, and I have to stop and just wait and cry because this man cares about his daughter and I care about my friend and it's as simple as that, because there's something worth caring about. You fill my heart even though you filled my life with pain.

• Confessionals. I miss you miss you miss you miss you and am not afraid to telegraph it secretly over underground internet wires.

• Hallelujah! Hallelujah anyway. There is something to miss and something to fill.

~~~

Crumble, beast. Disappear into the aether and take my hunching with you. Take the peering, the late-night safaris through wanting, illusion, the vertebrae falling one-two-three to your hypnosis. Gather up your hallucinations, your beekeeper's implements, your commerce of make-believe attitudes. Collect them back into yourself and go away forever.

When I first heard the rumor that Facebook was engaged in a lawsuit that might result in its dissolution, I was anxious - I don't like having my social crutch threatened. Then I started thinking about what would happen if it did implode. Not pandemonium, not any kind of lasting malaise, just a few flashes of anger and panic and then resignation; an exodus back into the world of living mouths, or a collective relapse into MySpace.

I liked the idea. I wanted the spell broken for me. When I realized that Facebook is a millions-dollar enterprise that will probably never be unseated from its privileged position in our lives as young Americans, that nobody was going to come and pluck me up out of my glazy-eyed stupor for me, I considered deleting my account. But then I didn't. Because it's hard to turn away from the promise.

Which is communion. Which is stray comments on pictures from girls of varying degrees of familiarity. One provocation, two provocation, three provocation, then the strike, the set, the reeling-in of new mates and allies. But it doesn't work that way. What happens is the thousand-yard stare, across a virtual horizon where forms move lethargically in silhouette, at the exact geometries of your virility.

So I'm done. I have just deactivated. I'm tired of feeling like a fly drawn to seductive death-glow.

This is not to scold anyone for continuing to use it, though I think on some fundamental level we recognize that it's all bad for us in some way (this coming from the guy who has wasted more than a few hundred breaths defending the whole thing to the 40+ crowd as a breakthrough in communication). It is not enough to touch only the most controllable parts of our lives together. It is not adequate to rifle through the digital laundries of others, hoping for accidental deposits of sincerity. It is not acceptable to me anymore to dwell in cardboard galleries and call it friendship.

This has been a fantasy, a mutually condoned imagining.

So crumble, dreamspace. Crumble away.

~~~

There is lead in between their hands, all over their faces, dormant in the crevices. There is lead in the pavement on which they sit outside the house with the party inside. There is lead all over everybody's hearts, it seeps. See it seep.

~~~

Sometimes you must confront the question: do I love you? Or do I look at you to keep myself feeling broken?

Do I love you? Or do I pound on the seat in front of me as we drive past you sitting on the curb speaking with another guy because I don't know how not to want to pound on seats?

~~~

When they put me under to have my wisdom teeth removed, it went blank. It did not go black, there was no color involved. No anything. Just sudden nothing. A cookie cut out of time's dough. Then I was awake, groggy, adrift in the stimulus-response neverland you reach after enough alcohol. I was laying on a table, my mom was sitting next to me. When my head began to stir, pivoting around to orient itself, she leaned forward. I couldn't speak because my mouth was full of gauze, so she handed me a piece of paper and a pen. Suddenly, I needed very badly to communicate to her just how in love with ______ I was, above and beyond anything else. My hand moved to write, "I am in love with ______," and then my self-censoring reason came back online.

~~~

Olympia, you make me feel like a paper cup caught in a dead bush on the side of the freeway.

Your hush is keeping me awake.

Menagerie

The old language of mystery and mystification is slipping. I came here in narrow hours to try to find it. There is only a lack of light and a lack of sleep.

Remains: jumble of inadequate metaphors straining to describe the harrowing moment of lucidity when there is no longer an institution dangling vulgar carrots in front of your face. Bubbles, rumbling, volcanic tectonic rage: sitting at desks. Waiting. Everything ordained, everything comfortable, everything wrong. Can I go to the bathroom please? (I don't know, CAN you?) No adults left in the world. Nobody to break the bells in half, to draw the curtain just inches aside. Students, wards, anonymous phalanxes, all we have for you to imbibe are shards of fragments of incomplete ideologies. May you lack the faculties to arrange them into any kind of legitimate mosaic-language and may you never escape the maze of equivocation that renders you intellectual adolescents and our culture a true obscenity and disappointment. May you be forever content with the trinkets you have inherited in place of masterpieces. Before all else, may you keep our jobs easy - may you uphold unwavering deference to the power of scheduling and standard-fulfillment. And thank us for the kidnapping. Say thank you. You will be called an ingrate if you don't.

I have graduated and I possess: dreams, jumbled, too much for patchwork? A head full of conflicting, mutually-contradictory, socially reinforced and unshakable truisms, maxims, clichés, parables, proverbs, analogies, metaphors, plots, tropes, slogans, catchphrases that guide to nowhere but exasperation. Deep sickness at the realization that our world is driven by just such idiot semantics. I possess: one very large glass house. But my heart knows what my heart knows. I possess: enough desperation to consider dreams real things and to cradle their fragility in soft and careful fingers.

Vernacular

I have not written much of any importance in the past few months. My energies have been devoted to a subtle metamorphosis into Pretentious Upperclassman Seminar Blowhard Asshole, an event that would have chilled a younger me. A couple weeks ago I found myself expounding upon the "absence of moral substance in wildlife documentaries," interrupted by the snickering of a classmate who had lowered and begun shaking his head in exasperation. Shit. Oh well. I guess it was inevitable that I would become the thing I hated. Being pedantic is better than leaving every class with a stress headache.

I am not yet prepared to write a summary of my time here, nor to attempt to comment upon what I have really learned, but I can say with very little ambivalence that I regard it as three years of harried disequilibrium, conviction assailed on all sides by various fictions - cultural, social, institutional - that have evidenced worthlessness in their effect upon my intelligence and my happiness. The myth of the manufactured World Citizen, prepared for life's trials by exposure to rarified knowledge: this is a fiction. The myth that success in our society is expedited by intimacy with the classical canon: complete lie. The myth of the pleasure child undaunted in the pursuit of bacchanalia: this is also a fiction. The myth of provincial specialness, of "alternativeness" generalized and self-consciously broadcasted as a means of providing ballast to an unbalanced political reality: the most fatuous story of them all. The bars are filled with emptiness. The campus, lurching creature, wobbles on legs of half-imagined narratives, fragments of sentences, ideas about ideas about itself. It lunges blindly at its adversaries, often unable or unwilling to tell the dragons from the windmills.

But I do believe that to live in America (and I use this proper noun only for sake of experience) is to participate in this commerce of the soul's poor grammar. It is different elsewhere, but not much. Maybe it is the trying, the sometimes optimistic but usually smug assurance with which people here settle for these myths, these incompletenesses, that unnerves me.

I anticipate my Summer in the wilderness with great thrill and equal trepidation. It will be a big, immovable mass in my life's progression. I cherish its circumference, imagined.

Wings

I woke up today at four in the morning instead of going to sleep at four in the morning, a small triumph after weeks of insomnia. I enjoyed the early morning light instead of staring at it with bleary, defeated eyes through my blinds. I am home and I feel wonderful.

The sun is out. I am looking out at my back yard full of singing birds and I just remembered that I can open the window to feel the breeze.

Earlier, I walked to the pond where I spent most of my childhood fishing. There was a die-off last year, and it is still recovering. The water seemed barren of significant fish; I managed three small bluegill on a fly. Part of me feels very sad that the ecosystem I knew so intimately is probably altered permanently (many clues suggest the crayfish have grown to lobster proportions in the absence of predators). Most of me knows that, at least for a while, there will always be fish to catch everywhere in the world, and that, in the words of science penis Ian Malcolm, "life finds a way."

One annoying convention of nature writing is authors trying to saturate their experience of wilderness with narrative significance. Our experiences of nature, and the way we think about them, should not be subject to the conventions of plot development, symbolism, or anything else that "teaches" in a linear way. The moment that really moves me is what occurs when I become fascinated by something, and it is purely visceral.

The comic Billy Connolly, who is also a fly fisherman, offered the best description of this phenomenon I've ever heard. "When a fish strikes, it's like making contact, just for a moment, with an alien. I guarantee that the first person to encounter a space alien will have the exact same reaction."

Today I communed with the aliens. I was startled by two birds I now know to be green herons, and a third giant deep-voiced brown thing I still haven't identified. I've been bird watching for almost three years in this neighborhood, and I can identify almost anything I see within seconds. But nature's reserve of surprises is inexhaustible, and so is that perfect moment of humility that overtakes you when you witness something for the first time.

For all the myriad ways to be disillusioned by the world, to be ground down and joyless and suffering, I am filled with such gratitude that that one edge will never dull. I cannot imagine a more effective means of suspending self-awareness than watching a hawk snatch a finch from the air, or hunching in anticipation as a bass scrutinizes a lure with its snout.

Every time I go outside with the intention of observing, something special happens. Specialness is tonic; it transmutes indifference into joy.

I don't know what else to say about it. I'm happy. No plot. Just happy.

Lungs

Some fish walk on land. Like the catfish. One time, we kept one in a cooler for four hours before getting home and finding out it was still breathing. I don't remember how we executed it.

Sometimes living things just suffer without dying.

When I was two I fished a tadpole out of its tank and brought it over to the couch to watch TV with me. I set it on a cushion and forgot about it. When I realized it was dead, I cried. It's probably the most perfectly sad thing that's ever happened to me.

Usually I don't hear the persistent low whine of pain until I am particularly alone and it's very late at night. Lack of air does not come from a place. If you wanted to put your finger in a hole to stop vacuum from leaking into your room, you couldn't do it.

That tadpole would have had a pretty hard time telling me that it wanted me to carry it in my palm back to its little bowl. Maybe it tried.

I have a hard time falling asleep because my bed feels uncomfortable. I guess because I know where it is, and where it isn't. As well as who's in it, and who isn't.

One time a professor who is also a psychologist told me that I "have depression." Can you really possess the absence of a thing? Maybe that catfish "had thirst."

When I find spiders or silverfish in my bathtub, I nudge them so they run onto my hand, and then I put them safely on the bathroom floor.

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping because I am remembering what it feels like to swim.

A Lovely Hallmark Greeting

The Vault has closed its doors. They are out there, lunging at imagined adversaries, bellowing and revving the engines of their giant retarded cars with T.I. cranked to full. And they are winning. They will breed with each other, will satisfy the needs of hearts unmuddled by the trappings of self-consciousness.

Weird, weird weird weird that I miss my dating blog all of a sudden, on the eve of the most colossally platonic and lonely day of the year.

Sick of it. Just sick of it, like my marrow is tying itself in knots. Elaborate hopes crushed in special ways. Her never finding out about my fucking charming idea to spend a night cooking something called "Karen A's Chocolate Dump Cake" together because she pretends she never invited the call she ignored. The deliberately unmet glances, the impregnable efface of anonymity segregating everyone from any kind of easy fun. Being ambiently hurt when a doorman asks for my ID after I stepped out only ten seconds before, and responds to my comments about same with an indignant, "I don't know you, man!" Sick of it. Sick of the weekend's insurmountable requirements here in this town, cardboard city full of half-recognized strangers. Like trying to build a happy life with a tub of incompatible legos and an instruction booklet filled with photos of dogs' assholes. And it's not much better anywhere else.

I don't know how not to be disappointed by this all the time. I have a hard time accepting that anyone does.

Counting Back from Twenty-One

Then again, anger doesn't really do much of anything but beget more anger. Another lesson I have been learning over and over again but have always somehow failed to cleave to my inner parts.

I think all I really want to do when I graduate is run around in the woods and teach kids how to catch fish and maybe fill a couple of sketch books. Just do something that doesn't make me feel like a fifth wheel every day of my life.

I can't deal with the demands of being an urban twentysomething. I don't want to get used to seeing destitute people dancing for change outside of bars, or to stumbling home weekend nights to an empty apartment, yelling at people I've never met. The party is fueled by loneliness, and the certainty with which everyone knows this but still indulge in its untruths makes it even more harrowing.

I require the same thing every person does but may not realize: a real community, contact with quiet goodness, functional relationships, family, trees, water, occasional mischief, mirth, things to learn and people to help.

I guess that chasing a career instead of learning how to nurture happiness without expensive implements is doubly foolish in the face of mounting economic catastrophe of unknown totality. I guess it was never that good of an idea.

What a staggering conceit, Supertramp. But I own it now, and it fits me well.

Fountain Stopping

Right now I am upstairs and eight years old reading Expedition by Wayne Barlowe in my bunk bed that is now dismantled in the garage. I am home sick from school. Right now I am home sick from school becoming in love with elaborate fantasies involving imagined worlds. Right now I am home sick, from school.

I am reading the thing from cover to cover wrapped up in a feeling of warm security that only comes when you have no responsibilities aside from healing in your bed in your house while your mother cooks you meals and your suspicious father furls his eyebrows over concern for your homework. It is full of mystery. My favorite is the painting of the two-legged alien sauntering along the edge of a forest lit up like a hundred bioluminescent Christmases at dusk. I am warm and making these things real in my heart.

And now I am downstairs alone in my underwear with cold legs at five in the morning and there is nobody in the house. His second and third books contained paintings of Hell so vivid that they kept me awake until past sunrise because I could not stop feeling them in my heart, because parts of them were not so unfamiliar. I am home, sick, from school.

Nothing is different here. It is the same moment. Only I have been gone, lost in extended fantasy. Do not tell me to ignore my thousand overscratched itches that tell me that the whole thing has stood like some kind of offending monument before the judgment of reason. I feel every unmeasurable weight of emptiness that fills the promises of this institution, and part of me disagrees but the wick at the center of the waxy myths smolders. This imagining should not be made real. This piece of paper, this fuck fuck fucking badge of universally licensed trudgery and economic segregation. Something is festering and you can't convince me I don't feel real real ill approaching the last rings of the circus. Like it's all making the world so much a better place, devoting years, years, years upon years to begrudging participation in exercises that mean nothing to anyone. And human beauty still finds a way to poke its blossoms out from between the cracks in the lifeless concrete, but that's what human beauty does forever and ever, and FUCK the concrete, here to eternity, because it covers miles of blooming soil. I knew this from the beginning, pacing at the front of my fourth grade classroom during recess, arguing with my teacher about the fallacies of her curricular agenda instead of doing my tardy homework, the whole thing still like some kind of funny joke I could dispel with rhetoric, before it spoiled to fresh anger, disappointment, loneliness. Before I carried unshakable rage through middle school, until I learned how to quiet it and play the game. And now I'm on the other side looking in, and fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck school. Talk about privilege until your lungs collapse. I don't care. This has been very crippling to some unnamable thing that is precious to me. I am a middle-class white male with a competent mind. I am standing at the top of the mountain. And I am surrounded by broken things, boredom, listlessness, addiction, limitless potential defaulted upon in every crucial way.

The technology, the very fun rap videos, the cars, the everything, I'd give it up in the blink of the eye just to be able to believe in my community and its founding myths for once in my life. This hunger has no bottom.

You tell me I am better, that I am educated because I have learned to sit in a chair for eight hours a day. I am sorry that I hate the things you have mandated me to endure. I am sorry that I have never been able to believe anything you say. You did not keep me warm when I was cold, and you did not keep me close when I was sick. Thank you for encouraging me to thwart my own youth every day of my life. I didn't need your help.

Now I'm going back upstairs to read about sightless aliens hunting with sonar across invented landscapes. And it will be made real. Because it fills my heart with wonder and I am home, sick, from school.

Elegy

Two days ago I wrote this as a final submission for my class:


Right now I'm staring at the spine of a book, The Devil's Teeth, that's sitting on a shelf at the foot of my bed. It's a narrative about great white shark researchers who live on the Farralon Islands in California. They spend every waking hour observing the sharks devour elephant seals. I told my dad I would read this book. I have not.

The things I have learned this quarter are things that have momentarily lifted me out of the dangerous waters, onto the privileged vantage of dry ground. I am sure that at some point in the book, the author draws a parallel between the jagged, volcanic geography of the islands and the serrated horror of a shark's jaws. But the mountains on my island are molar. Flat, reassuring. My footing there feels so sure. Then I'm slipping, have slipped, am once again shivering and terrified, surrounded by vague symmetries of monsters half-perceived in the murk.

I have learned that I have to start swimming, that rogue waves issued from the chance physics of the deep are not enough to keep me safe. I have learned that some people swim better than others. I have learned that my form is poor but that it improves with practice. I have also learned that treading water is easy. Easier than swimming.

It is a curiosity of humanness that the fear of challenge can overwhelm the fear of drowning, of great fish come to collect. Curious because it means that we are not indigenous residents in our own souls. The spirit is domitable. This is fact.

So what of the swimmers? What magic fuel combusts in their hearts to compel them forwards?

The answer is secret. It cannot be contained in self-help books, analogies, stories, therapies with names. The answer is unspeakable and holy and precious. But I have a feeling it has to do with selflessness. They must know that those of us content to bob listlessly in the tide are disturbed by their wakes. They must be more awake to the fear, because they remember more vividly the feeling of earth under the feet. They must be frenzied with self-preservation.

Some of them come back. Out they swim, to smack the blood into our faces, to coax our reluctant bodies into motion. And they do it again and again, for the rest of their lives. They become faster, more agile than the monsters. This is the definition of heroism.

In the past weeks, I have been touched by wakes. All I can do now is put one arm in front of the other, flutter the legs and start swallowing water until I'm strong enough to swim, dive, porpoise away from snapping maws. I hope I will make the return plunge if I am lucky enough to face it.

Here's a prayer, we floaters. Move.



This morning I found out that my friend Mathew has died. A fellow floater, lying on my floor at two in the morning, both of us drunk, both of us lost in morose reveries over girls not paying enough attention. I hope he felt something beautiful before he went. I hope that if he can still know, he knows that his rings will never really settle in my waters.

He seemed to know that he didn't belong. I can say of him what he maybe couldn't of himself: he was better. Smarter. Blessed and cursed with disappointment because his imagination was strong enough to make him know that there was more. Anger, America. He never got his chance. He felt the sting of your lifelessness deep in his heart. Anger for my dead friend with the big soul. He was better than you.