Another public appearance

I thought I was done for good with appearing in public when I participated in a panel at the Washington Writer's Convention last fall, but it turns out I'll have at least one more chance to stand on a stage and talk about writing this afternoon. With the book's official release date now being a year in the past, it's pretty likely this will be the last chance I have like this, at least for this book. If you're in the area, come on out. Maybe I'll figure out a way to say something about writing and the book I haven't already said before.

One of the fun and sometimes funny things about appearing at these things is the array of writers who participate. At the Washington convention in the spring, I was on a panel with: a writer of a wistful, critically acclaimed literary novel on Hannibal, Missouri; the author of a non-fiction book an the experiences of young women right after college; and the author of a history book on a little-known Civil War era civilian chronicler. I was also the only man on the panel then. It made for an interesting discussion.

Today at the Baltimore Book Festival, There will be three of us presenting at an event called "Introducing Writers Who Deserve Their Own Light." The other two are Tyrese Coleman, who, like me, tends to sail in literary fiction waters. However, she seems to focus a lot more on flash fiction. There is also Shakira Rayann. When the presser for this event called her a "teen author," I thought that meant she wrote for teens. She does, but what it really means is that she is literally a teen-aged writer.

It's funny the way writers who are as different as can be get mixed together at these things. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the people who came to hear one of the other writers quietly slip away as soon as I get going. Rayann seems to write inspirational fare for younger women readers. I'm about as far away from inspirational writing as it gets.

I am, however, somewhat inspired to be part of this thing today. I attended the Baltimore Book Festival a few years ago, back when my first story hadn't appeared yet. I really didn't imagine I'd be a presenter at it. As I try to move forward, I keep feeling discouraged about all the things I haven't done yet, but today I think I'm going to let myself enjoy the fact that I have at least gotten somewhere.

In praise of unheralded accomplishments

Mrs. Heretic and I tried to make good use of our summer over the last few months by taking several hikes along nearby portions of the Appalachian Trail. The A/T is one of the things I most love about not just living in Maryland, but living in America. I don't think patriotism is a feeling. I think it's a kind of commitment you show when you do something for your community. But if there is ever a time I feel intense love for the country I live in, it is probably on the trail. I'm in love with the idea I live in a country with such beautiful places in it, and that we as a society cared enough to create a space within all that beauty for everyone to enjoy.

While walking the trail, we occasionally ran into some through-walkers, the people who were trying to walk the entire 2,100-mile or so trail from Georgia to Maine (or vice-versa). Two from this summer stand out in memory. One I ran into while walking with a friend, not Mrs. Heretic. This walker was actually doing a half through-walk. He started in Harper's Ferry, WV, which is the "psychological halfway point" of the trail, to the end in Maine. (The actual halfway point being some miles into Pennsylvania.) The day I ran into him was his second day on the trail. He was sitting down looking like he was going to die. He'd planned poorly. He had only tuna fish to eat, and his body was obviously out of energy. Fortunately, my friend had packed all kinds of high-energy foods in his pack, even though we were only hiking a little under ten miles. He gave them to the guy. We saw him about an hour later when we stopped along the trail to look around and he caught up to us. He looked like a whole different man.

The other guy who stands out was an extremely chatty and friendly fellow we met during one of our early summer and shorter walks. He asked us if we knew how far it was to the next park, and we stopped to answer, and before we knew it, half and hour had gone by. What I remember about him was how overweight he was. I couldn't believe he had made it from Georgia to nearly the halfway point. Especially because after we turned around on our short walk, we passed him again, shooting the breeze with another couple he'd stopped to talk to. I wondered how he had managed to stay on schedule being so social.

As it's getting on into fall, I'm wondering about those two people. Are they getting close to being done? If they do finish, will anyone be there to witness it? It was a massive undertaking for both, one that required putting life on hold for a long time. I don't know what drove either person to try to do it, but it can't be something either chose lightly.

It's also possible that when both get however far they got, nobody will be there to notice. One of the most significant things either man did in his life, in all likelihood, and of of the most difficult, and at the end, it's possible nobody cared much except them. All that might have waited for them at journey's end was an empty and indifferent parking lot, from where they'd have to figure out how to go clean up, then get themselves and their gear home.

That's what it's like for a lot of writers. There are thousands of people writing stories, and a limited number of readers. There's an especially limited number of good readers. The likely outcome of most stories that get written is that maybe, if you're lucky, a few people tied to you by bonds of love that mean they have to read it when you ask them will have seen it. They'll say a few kinds things, and that will be the end of it.

I've said many times that if I knew for sure nobody would read what I wrote, I'd stop writing. But here I am, years after first putting my thoughts down into words. I've had one book published. I've had five stories published individually. That's about 10% of all I've written, and I was lucky to get that published. I know by now how unlikely it is that anyone will every take much note of what I do, but here I am still doing it. So I clearly don't believe my own message.

The truth I'm slowly coming to accept is this: if something is worth celebrating publicly, it is also worth celebrating even if nobody takes notice. Something worth doing is worth doing for the person doing it. To have labored to walk two thousand miles or write a story or learn to play the gayageum is worthwhile, because it makes the person who does those things better. If I cannot love the thing for itself, if I am not willing to write a story that nobody will read, then I don't deserve to have it celebrated in public, because I did it for the wrong reasons.

These may just be my post-summer, artificially optimistic thoughts after soaking up all that sun and fresh air. By November, maybe I'll be back to thinking it's all foolishness. But this is how the world seems to me this rainy September morning at the end of a month when I almost could not stop writing.

The first episode of Breaking Bad and media's mixed messages for men

Anytime you make a claim that it's hard to be a man, you're likely to get pushback. Therefore, I am stating from the outset that the point of this post is not that it's hard to be a man. It's that it's hard to be a good man. Being a good man is made harder by continually shifting cultural narratives, even coming from what seem to be reliable sources, about what it means to be good man. I want to emphasize the "man" part of that last sentence. It's hard to know how to be a good person, but there are added roadblocks in the way of men who want to know if they have some specific responsibility qua men to be good men, as opposed to just good people.

History of masculinity in western stories in four paragraphs

Traditionally, men in cultural narratives were heroes if they could use violence as a means to obtain socially sanctioned ends. Western narratives are filled with heroic men of violent action, from Beowulf to the American Western gunslinger drama. These stories expect their heroes to use violence to some end their surrounding societies approve of. Usually, it is to vanquish an enemy that threatens civilization in some way. Civilization is seen as female in a traditional sense: it is nurturing, yet also passive, and evil actors can, through their negative violence, keep it from existing. The only way to stop negative violence and allow civilization to live is through positive violence, or what critics call redemptive violence. Without the active violence of the hero to stop the destructive violence of the villain, civilization cannot live. In this sense, masculine, active violence is a necessary condition that must exist before female civilization can come forward.

So violence is a necessary antecedent to civilization. But it also cannot long survive the advent of civilization. In Castiglione's 16th Century guide to courtesy for nobles, The Courtier, a man is expected to be fierce in battle, but also graceful in court. He is expected to know poetry and the humanities. Castiglione mocked those who wished to walk around court showing off their martial spirit by wearing their armor when fine clothing was more appropriate. In American stories of righteous violence, the hero isn't even able to change clothes and stay in society. The hero so fully embodies the spirit of masculine righteous violence, he has no place in society. He has to ride off into the sunset. Having made the world safe for civilization, he now has to remove himself from it that it may flourish. The masculine must make room for the feminine. The man who follows his own law must head into the wilderness so that the common law for all can take root. The woman he rescued may pine for him, but she will marry the steady family man who will help her to raise a family. The hero moves on to let her follow her destiny with a different kind of man. At least, until civilization is threatened and needs the righteous outlaw again.

There has, of course, always been a thread of critique of this kind of purifying violence. The Iliad praises the warriors who fight at the gates of Troy, but also has a sense of how all the violence is vanity. The wise Odysseus tried to avoid participating in the war altogether. The fact that there are good people inside the gates as well as trying to knock them down is itself a powerful critique of the narrative of redemptive violence. In the last century, the critique has been more along the lines of noting that those who do the violence on behalf of civilization are, in fact, often favoring one form of civilization over another. They aren't fighting on behalf of civilization against the forces that would destroy it; they're fighting to preserve their preferred form of civilization over another. Rather than fighting monsters, they're simply fighting what they fear and choosing to call that fear monstrous. All of which led to a full-scale deconstruction of the belief in redemptive violence.

Finally, we have come, through as dialectical a process as ever took place in the real world, to a neo-masculinity, an attempt to redeem redemptive violence itself. In this new version, the hero doesn't ride away. Men are expected, as in the Courtier, to be capable of fighting savagely and successfully for good, but then changing out of their armor and coming to the banquet table of civilization. The hero doesn't ride away. He has to attempt, awkwardly, to adapt and become the man who helps to raise a family. He must be both gunslinger and diaper changer. Instead of being merely intellectually well-rounded, as in Castiglione's guide, they are expected to demonstrate emotional well-roundedness. A man should be able to sense the needs of his female partner, gently stroke away the tears of his children, and then, at the flip of on interior switch, reconnect with his savage side in order to fight what our society considers a threat. Often, this threat is to the emotional well-being of its members. The man's man of today generally keeps his savage side hidden, because he's "secure in his masculinity," but can also turn it on on a dime, like Goku turning Super Saiyan. In the words of Mmes Salt-N-Pepa, a real man is both "a lover and a fighter and he'll knock a knucker out."

This is not realistic. Like, at all. 

I'm building, obviously, to a complaint that society expects a balancing act of men that is so difficult, there are probably no men who can achieve it. There is, of course, a similarly paradoxical set of expectations for women, one that no woman in the real world is capable of meeting. This set of expectations, to quote a young, idiot Marine I once knew who was talking about his imaginary future wife, would have all women find a way to be "a wife in the kitchen, a mother in the living room, and a whore in the bedroom." That covers a lot of the unrealistic expectations put on women, but it leaves out how a modern woman is supposed to also be a successful professional. To quote the Enjoli commercial (which I grew up thinking was the real "I'm a Woman W-O-M-A-N" song), this woman can both bring home the bacon (work successfully), cook it up in a pan (nurture), and never let her man forget he's a man (be sexually enticing, which strengthens the underlying feral warrior her man is hiding in the trappings of civilization).

That's an awful lot to ask. In fact, that's the rantings of a manic mindset gone off the rails talking. To summon the energy necessary to be even remotely successful at work, child-rearing, and sexual gratification of a lifelong mate would require full-throttle, round-the-clock effort all day, every day. And even then, most women wouldn't really become CEO, PTA President, and the sexual fantasy of all the other husbands in the local bowling leagues they are part of to make their husbands happy. That's because doing just one of any of those three things is a full-time job, one that even when followed full-time is difficult and not a sure thing to succeed at. Trying to follow all three isn't going to lead to a fully realized woman. It's going to lead to a woman who is worn out. It will lead, in fact, to a woman who is maybe the worst thing, according to our society, that a woman can be: a bitch. She's going to be bitter and short-tempered. Having set out to be the envy of a society that places unrealistic expectations on her, she will end up earning society's scorn when she breaks her psychic self trying to achieve what cannot be achieved.

When I say men have unrealistic expectations put on them as well, I'm not necessarily trying to say those expectations are equally damaging to one's psychic well-being as the ones put on women. (And I'm obviously leaving out considerations of what these expectations do to anyone belonging to the LGBTQ+ world, those who are left to find alternate understandings of how to fit gender with personhood from what is offered to those of us who live in Cisland.) I do not equate the sufferings of men with those of women. I am merely saying that current expectations of perfect masculinity are essentially both unrealistic and paradoxical, and that they have a deleterious effect on how men act in society. These expectations would have men being many clashing selves at once. When men fail, as they will, they become depressed and pathological.

These unrealistic expectations are real. They are easy to see in current cultural narratives of masculinity. I've seldom seen a better example than the first episode of Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad's first season is a myth about becoming a monster 

First, I have to confess something. I've only seen most of the first season of Breaking Bad. Mrs. Heretic and I started it years ago, because everyone was sure it was one of the best shows on television. I found it to be a little bit tedious, because the anti-hero has been done to death in the 21st Century. So it sat there in Netflix recommendations for years, until I recently read this commentary by Eric Thurm on Lit Hug about the show Better Call Saul. It discusses Better Call Saul as one of the four high-points of the Golden Age of American Television, the other three being The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. I found it pretty compelling, and since I'm always telling a friend who doesn't watch TV that to abstain from television during an era that critics are describing as a golden age is like refusing to go to the Globe Theater in the early 1600s to watch Shakespeare. Even if you end up disagreeing with the conclusions that these shows are great, you need to be part of the conversation. So I decided to watch the whole show. This week, we got through most of season one.

I realize that BB is going to go on to have a more complex view of its main character, Walter White, than we get in season one. My overall thoughts on the show will of course eventually have to take all five seasons into consideration. But I think one of the great things about modern television is the way there can be smaller unities within the greater unity of the series. The show has to be considered as a whole, but then each season is also, in a way, something of a finished work. So is each episode. This is particularly true of the show's first episode, which, as the show's opening punch, ought to tell us a lot about the themes the entire show will be exploring.

Those themes in episode one, season one, are entirely about Walter, who has become so civilized he cannot protect his little corner of civilization, and how Walter needs to become monstrous himself in order to fight the monsters that threaten him and his family. Nearly everything about Walter when we meet him is antithetical to savage masculinity, the kind capable of redemptive violence.

Walter's wife feeds him soy bacon, which she cutely cuts up into a "50" to celebrate his 50th birthday, like he is a child. He cannot buy printer paper without his wife scolding him for using the wrong credit card. He is mocked openly by the students in his chemistry class, and, like all teachers, he is impotent to do much about it. He struggles to provide for his family, although he works two jobs. The boss at the second job takes advantage of Walter. His failure to provide opens him up to more scorn, as the same students who mock him at school see him driving a crappy car and performing manual (and therefore menial) labor at the car wash. His wife's sister holds her tongue about the financial situation of Walter's family in a way that says more than just mentioning their hardships would.

Perhaps most notably, Walter is not sexually proficient. His wife has to speak encouragingly to him in order for him to maintain an erection long enough to receive a hand job--a sexual act that is meant for him, not for her. The way she has to talk him through sexual performance (keep going, there you go) is as emasculating for Walter as it is for her disabled, teenage son to have her help him try on clothes at a store in front of his peers from school.

Walter ought to be admired from the standpoint of civilization/society. He sacrifices every day for his family, including his disabled son and his wife who, for some reason, does not work, other than occasionally writing some short stories that don't sell. He works to nurture future generations to become productive members of society. He is extremely intelligent. He is the stuff that holds civilizations together. But nearly everyone on the show--and by extension, the audience--thinks of him with something between pity and scorn. He wears tighty whities above spindly little bird legs. He is only in touch with his civilized, feminine self, which is keeping him from being able to stand up for himself and those he loves. This is contrasted with his brother-in-law, who is a beer-bellied cop, quick with a profane, locker-room joke. The brother-in-law shows the disabled son a gun at Walt's birthday party. It is apparent that if the son is going to learn about redemptive violence--being a "real man"--it will be from his uncle, not from his dad. Although he clearly loves Walt, his brother-in-law is cuckolding him by taking on the role of father to Walt's son.

This all changes when Walt can't take it anymore. He finds out he has cancer, which means that all his sacrifices on behalf of civilization, all his repression of his inner monster for the common good, has been for nothing. He curses out his boss, throws a bunch of merchandise around, and leaves. Then comes the moment the whole first episode turns around. When Walt and his wife are at the store helping their son try on and buy new clothes, they hear some of the kids from the son's school mocking him for needing help from his mother. Walt's wife starts like she is going to walk over and scold the kids, but Walt stops her. He walks out the back of the store. When he has been gone for a moment, the wife tries again to go scold the boys, but Walt re-enters the scene through the front door. He kicks the loudest of the three boys in the back of the knee. When the boy falls, Walter stands on his leg on a pressure point, taunting the boy with words the effect of "How does it feel to have trouble standing?" When he lets the boy up, the boy threatens to hit Walt, but Walt does not flinch. In a classic "if you stand up to bullies they will back down" trope, the boys leave, with the main tormentor limping.

One can see the approval in his wife's face as she watches this. She has seen her husband's inner monster emerge to protect his family, even though she has been instrumental in suppressing that monster. The audience, likely, approves of the change in Walter, too. There are two reasons for this. First, we approve of violence when it is performed to protect the weak in society. Secondly, the myth of redemptive violence has never gone away. We expect men to be able to house a monster inside themselves capable of coming forth and smiting their enemies. We expect men to still be capable of being "real men," even while ninety-nine percent of their time is spent suppressing the real man.

Walt's embrace of his inner monster awakens his slumbering sexual potency as well. At the end of the first show, which then carries over to the beginning of the next episode, he is sexually aggressive with his wife. He does not need to be coaxed. He wants her and he enters her (sort of magically and without any of the gymnastics that usually come with rear-entrance, side-by-side sex). She seems to enjoy it. Violence has made him a real man in the streets and in the sheets.

The series as a whole, I'm sure, is going to examine more of the complexities of this transformation. I believe it's headed for a critique of the notion that men can transform into the monster without the monster taking over. But episode one would leave a lot of people missing that point, and I think many viewers would probably keep the theme of that episode at the front of their minds even when the series later undermines that theme. I'd guess BB is (or was, as it's been off the air for years now) a show with a large fanbase that doesn't get what the show is about, a fanbase that continues to love Walter well past the point when he should be loved.

Society does the same thing

In the real world, men are often subtly encouraged to let the monster out without any consideration of what it means to let the monster out. The winner of a fight is often not the stronger man. It's the more aggressive one. Aggression, by and large, comes from people who are aggressive by nature. Which means it needs to be cultivated. But aggressiveness is often not rewarded by society. In the real world, Walter would have been charged with assault on a minor. That probably would have meant losing his job as a teacher. Fighting comes with all kinds of risks for a man. If you lose, you can get hurt badly enough you can't provide for your family. If you win, you can face criminal and civil penalties that also mean you can't provide for your family. Unless you're in a position where the fight is clearly defensive, it's almost always better to avoid a fight. But if you're in a fight where you're clearly just defending yourself, that's likely because the other guy is aggressive. Which means you're unlikely to win. It's like men are expected to maintain the ability to play tennis well, just in case they ever have to play tennis to defend themselves, but they're strongly discouraged from ever practicing.

Not long ago, I was at a gas station in the early hours of the morning. I don't usually go to this gas station, because it's a little sketchy. But it was 5 AM and I needed gas. My son was with me, because we were on the way to see my parents, who live a long way away. When I pulled up, I sensed something was off, but I got out anyway. There was impossibly loud music playing from a truck. There was yelling. I decided to just get a little gas, enough to get somewhere else, and move on. I saw a white man of average build get into his car in a hurry and drive off. Then, I finally understood that the yelling I heard was from a larger black man who was calling him racial epithets for white people. One of the things he called him was something like a "Donald Trump MAGA motherfucker" or something like that. I figured the guy maybe had a MAGA hat or bumper sticker or something like that. Okay, I figured, maybe that wasn't the best way to conduct political discourse, but since I don't have Trump merch on my car or person, I'm probably good.

But then he started yelling at me. My instinct told me that if a guy is yelling at random white dudes at 5 in the morning at a gas station, he's probably either mentally ill or high. Possibly both. There's no way to win that, so I ignored him, kept my back turned from him, and kept pumping. He kept calling to me to try to get me to look. One of the things he called me, among the slang for white dude, was "fat boy." I think he might have thrown a plastic bottle cap at me. I decided to wrap things up and get in the car. I saw him start to move toward the car, but then he saw my son and backed away. He went off and started talking to (and hugging) a black patron of the station who had just pulled up. I got out of there. I'm not sure why seeing my son made him back away. Maybe he couldn't see well that my son is a 13-year old, and he thought I actually had a second adult in the car who would come to help me out.

I was probably never in any real danger. I did the right thing (other than doing the wrong thing in even going there in the first place, against my better judgment). Ignore and walk away is almost always the right choice, even if it means swallowing your pride. (For hours after, I kept hurting over, of all things, being called "fat." I don't think I'm fat. Was I wearing something that made me look fat? Have I let myself go without knowing it?) 

But a part of me had a hard time accepting that I had done the right thing. A real man, part of me kept feeling, should have been able to take care of business. I should have been able to face him with a cool, confident, and cocky line, at which point the bully either backs down or faces me in battle, which I should be able to win. Everything about that idea is stupid. My son was in the car with me. What if I had been beaten senseless with him there? What if this man had then tried to hurt my son? All of the mathematics of the situation dictated getting the fuck out of there. I had nothing to gain and a lot to lose. But man, there are forty-some years of conditioning that kept telling me I should have done more. Because I'm a man.

I'm writing this at a time when there is a discussion going on about a Supreme Court justice nominee who is accused of having tried to rape a woman while a teenager. That has led to a lot of sidebar conversations about how much of letting boys be boys makes sense. This sidebar over the particulars of maleness in our culture is part of a larger discussion that's been going on for longer, one that seeks to bring the darkness of rape culture into the light. #Metoo is just one incarnation of this discussion. I don't want anything I've written here to be taken as a justification of rape culture or suggesting that we should overlook Kavanaugh's past, even his past as a juvenile. As many women will point out, even if it's difficult to know what society expects of me as a man, I ought to be able to understand the simple rule "don't rape."

I agree. That doesn't change, though, the self-contradictory messages men get about how their man-ness ought to manifest itself. We are told that our aggressive sides have no place in society, and yet, we see aggressiveness rewarded, both in terms of esteem as well as sexually. In fact, the esteem and sexual reward are intricately linked, because we view "real men" as worthy of sexual reward, but also view unleashing one's "real man" as necessary antecedent to sexually gratifying a woman, which in turn, makes one worthy of greater sexual reward.

We even get this message from nuanced messengers, ones we think we ought to be able to trust, like Breaking Bad. Even if the show as a whole deconstructs the notion of redemptive violence as a means to reclaiming lost masculinity, individual parts of it seem to give the opposite message. Sophisticated consumers of cultural texts on masculinity ought, perhaps, to be able to balance these individual messages in support of freeing the beast with other messages that suggest the beast never comes out without a price. But not everyone in society is a sophisticated consumer of texts. In fact, we deal every day with the effects of what you might call culture's toxic fandom.

Submitting to sci-fi journals seems a lot more professional than I expected

For over four years, I've been consistently writing short stories and submitting them to literary journals, the kind that focus on literary fiction. Generally, when you submit to one of these journals, you can expect to wait at least three months for an answer. I've waited over a year several times. Because of this long wait, everyone sends out simultaneous submissions, meaning you are querying more than one journal about a story at the same time. It's just assumed this will be done. Very few journals anymore object to the practice. Prairie Schooner is one journal that comes to mind that specifically says they don't want simultaneous submissions. I know there are a few more, but for the most part, journals know they can't expect you to wait six months in between attempts to get published, so they are fine with simultaneous submissions. (And a lot of writers just ignore the few injunctions against simultaneous submissions that are out there, anyway.) For the most part, if you just let journals know as soon as it gets accepted somewhere else so they don't waste time on it, you're fine.

Also, it's become pretty common for these journals to start charging a nominal fee to submit a story. Three dollars seems to be the going standard. I don't really object to this practice. As the journals will tell you, it's comparable to what writers used to have to spend in the old days to mail manuscripts out. Now that everything is done electronically, meaning it's a lot easier to submit, the number of manuscripts every journal is getting is spiking. Meanwhile, it's not like each of these journals has thousands of subscribers paying to read the journals. The magazines have costs that are usually covered by a small, charitable endowment of some sort, one they can't afford to stretch thin.

If you get published in one of these journals, you typically don't get paid. Some journals will pay you along the lines of about twenty bucks, because the principle of paying writers something for their work is important to the editors, but in general, you're getting paid in exposure and a credit to put on your resume for when you submit work somewhere else.

So it was very strange for me to submit a story to sci-fi journals. For a long time, I've written stories that were on the fringe of literary fiction and something else. I'm a lot more plot-heavy than your average lit fic writer, but overall, I've always thought that my work leaned more toward lit fic than anything else, so I've focused on those journals. I wrote a story this month that was enough sci-fi I decided to try publishing it somewhere other than a literary fiction outlet. (By "enough sci-fi," I mean I can imagine it being made into an episode of Black Mirror.)

I used this list of places to submit speculative short fiction to start with. Early on in the list, I noticed a couple of things. First, there is a stated aversion to simultaneous submissions. Just as I was about to go on the rant all writers go on about how it's impractical to expect any writer to wait this long for a single response, I realized that these sci-fi journals did something I'd never seen before: they told you where you were in the queue to be read and gave you an estimated wait time. For one journal, it was sixteen days. For another, it was ten, unless they liked it enough to send it to the second round.

They also all mentioned something I've seldom seen talked about: money. They all offer to pay somewhere between five and eight cents a word. So, a couple hundred bucks for a story. All of these indicators--a team of readers anxiously plowing through the slush pile, a jealous interest in not wasting anyone's time, and actual discussion of money, leads me to believe that sci-fi is more like a business than lit fic. Meaning they actually have some expectation of making money. That's encouraging. I'm so used to thinking of writing as a dying industry that needs life support from wealthy patrons of the arts to keep it going, it's nice to know that somewhere, there are people who see it as a viable way to make a living.

I don't know if I'm going to keep writing sci-fi. My novel that I've nearly found an agent for a few times is fairly sci-fi, but that's the only other thing I've done so far that I could sell as something other than lit fic. I kind of have to write the stories that occur to me. I'm just enjoying the surprise that there is a model somewhere in the world for something other than an all-volunteer editing team publishing an all-volunteer team of writers.

How to deal with hating your own stories until they're done

I've said before (wayyy back when I first started doing this) I didn't care much for Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream, even though it's one of the most frequently cited books of advice on writing fiction. Essentially, I found Butler's advice rather broad and more pointed at what he thought good writing looked like than how to get there. It had some useful advice, but that advice was punctuated by a lot of Butler's own aesthetics.

Still, I took one thing from reading that book that's stayed with me, which is the notion that writing is akin to a kind of lucid dreaming. You have to try to arrange your life so you can recall your dreams as close to how they happened as possible. Butler advised writing in the morning when the mind was still in a pre-verbal/logical state (sort of akin to having a pad of paper by the bed to dash down notes on your dreams before they fade away).

I've found there is a lot of truth to the idea that writing a story is like wrangling a dream on paper. It's the strongest argument for not having a day job and committing yourself fully to writing; that's the only way to be sure that when the muse hands you a vision, you're able to immediately transfer it onto paper. If you can't afford to quit your day job, though, I don't think you need to despair. There are plenty of ways to deal with muses. I've found my muse to be pretty reasonable about my timeliness in transferring her visions to paper. If I write down a few lines to remind myself what I saw, I can start the real rough draft sometime later. (Usually in the late evening or early morning before work. The best time to work is late Friday night on into Saturday morning.)

Dream hangover

There are more kinds of dream-states than just the ones that visit you during REM sleep. There is day-dreaming. I think most of my stories come to me as day-dreams. There is also that manic kind of late-night thought where you feel you've suddenly found all the answers to everything. Writing, especially first-draft writing, feels a lot like this 3 AM kind of thinking (not surprising, since often, at least for me, I literally am writing at 3 AM).

3 AM thinking feels very powerful when you're in the middle of it. Maybe because the brain thinks it should be dreaming at that time, you're in a place where dreams and the real world collide, and suddenly, the obstacles that were blocking your thought are obliterated. It's a very creative time. 3 AM thinking is free-write, first-draft thinking, when you're just going with the visions or voices in your head.

Of course, 3 AM thinking doesn't always seem so sound the next day. We've all been where Jerry Maguire was, wishing to God the next day we hadn't listened so much to the 3 AM voices in our heads.

When writing a story, the advice generally goes to just get the first draft on paper. It doesn't matter if it's garbage; at least you can work with garbage. You can't work with nothing. So write something. Write drunk, edit sober--that kind of advice.

It's not bad advice, but there's a point where it can be problematic for a writer. In fact, it's the point where I'd say most of my story ideas die. It's rare I can write even a short story all in one go. If an average short story is, say, 5,000 words or so, then it's going to have at least a couple of acts. Usually, the muse-given vision that got me sitting at my desk in the first place only covers one of those acts. After that, I need to wait for more inspiration.

The problem comes when I'm waiting to figure out how to continue the story from one act to the next. Often, I have to wait a while. In order to keep my brain working on the problem of how to continue the story, I have to go back and re-read what I have so far. And that's when my logical, analytic brain seizes up in horror at the mess I've got going so far. My whole brain shuts down--both the logical and the imaginative parts--because I've got such a pile of shit going on, and I don't want to just keep piling more shit on top of it.

Two ways to deal with the horror of your own partial rough drafts

There are two ways you can deal with this. You can try, as much as possible, to avoid looking at your work as you go. I do this sometimes. Even if it takes me five or six different sessions at the computer to write a story, each time I start a new one, I won't read much more than the last few sentences of where I left off. The advantage of doing this is that your critically-oriented mind doesn't slow you down. You can keep plodding forward until you've at least got something you can work with. The idea is that you write the rough draft uncritically, then look at the whole thing critically when it's done. At that point, you do some major work to re-imagine the thing, at which point the non-critical, creative side comes back in to make a new draft, but one that's got some stricter limits to it imposed by the critical brain. You keep going back and forth between these two until you get a draft that's polished.

The problem with this is that by the time you've written 5,000 words in dreamland, you can sometimes have such a mess that the whole thing was a waste of time. It's very demoralizing to write 5,000 words for no reason. I know writers will tell you that this is normal, or that maybe those 5,000 words weren't really a waste and you might reuse them somewhere down the line, but the fact is that there in the moment, it's a very sobering thing to realize your brilliant dream thoughts were gibberish.

So you can try another approach, which is kind of the opposite of the first one. You can overload yourself with reading and re-reading the drafts you've created. While you're waiting to figure out how you want to proceed, you can just keep going over and over the rough draft. Edit it. Whack at it. Or don't. The important thing is to just keep immersing yourself in it, because what it will do is make you somewhat immune to the gut feeling of how bad parts of it are. It's like getting used to a smell. Not that you want that smell to stay in your writing when you're finally done with the whole thing, but you do want to have developed the ability to at least work around the smell without getting sick to your stomach.

I tried both approaches this month with two new stories I wrote that I'm pretty excited about. Both approaches worked. I used the second approach with the longer of the two stories, because the length of the story meant there was no way to get around needing to go back over and over again to earlier passages so I could keep it all straight. Since I had to keep looking back anyway, I figured I would just keep re-reading what I'd done so far. After a while, it started to feel like I was working on someone else's work. I had distance from it, which meant I could be more objective. The shorter of the two stories, I just kept leaving myself an unfinished sentence as I wrapped up each session at the computer so I'd have an easy thing to get me going next time. The result was that I ended up getting through the story quickly, so at least the dream-feel of the entire story's first draft felt somewhat consistent.

I think either extreme will work. You'll have to try both yourself and see what works with your temperament. Either way, the goal is to get past your own "this is shit" sensors, at least until you've had enough of a chance to give those sensors a complete story to complain about. 

Something between a semantic quibble and the end of the world

"I'd like to punch out that cocksure, know-it-all, holier than thou..."
"Why, exactly, Ellie? Aren't ignorance and error painful enough?"
"Yes, if he'd shut up. But he's corrupting millions."
"Sweetheart, he thinks the same about you."  

-From Contact, by Carl Sagan

I read the novel from which I took that epigraph in 1997, as I was just finally deciding for good that I was no longer an evangelical Christian, and probably not a theist at all. Looking back on it now, I'm really glad I happened to read a novel by this particular atheist right about that time. By emphasizing throughout the novel how important it was to imagine what your words sound like to someone who disagrees with you--even when you are certain that person is wrong--Sagan probably saved me years of becoming an obnoxious former-evangelical-turned-agnostic, thereby reducing the number of fedora-wearing Reddit atheists in the world by one.

I found myself thinking back to that passage a few weeks ago when a friend on social media posted a link to a story. I generally ignore the onslaught of news stories that revel in how some celebrity "trolled" or "owned" or "destroyed" a mean fan or another celebrity with a Tweet or comment. Media outlets whipping readers/viewers into a voyeuristic, masturbatory frenzy over a relatively minor and stupid fight using short words and short sentences just doesn't appeal to me. But a friend posted this story the other day, and I clicked:

First, a minor semantic note millions of others have already made

The short story is that a Cubs player, Daniel Murphy, has stated before he has objections, based in his Christian faith, to homosexuality. At a road game, the organist played songs celebrating diversity when he came to the plate.

The article often refers to Cubs player Daniel Murphy as homophobic. I realize many other people have made this point before, but homophobic isn't really an etymologically correct term. I don't think Daniel Murphy fears gay people. Here's a meme I've seen many times on social media making this point:

To be clear, Morgan Freeman never said this. He's one of the most misquoted people on the Internet. 

So if even the people who are angry at alleged "homophobes" realize they are using an inaccurate term, why do they keep using it?

My guess is that it's hard to come up with an alternative. The equivalent bias against women is referred to as "misogyny," coming from Greek roots for "hatred" and "women." I've tried to come up with a way to make a term like this for homosexuality, but "misohomo" and the other variations I've tried have not seemed likely to catch on. I think anti-gay would do. But like a lot of terms of this kind, we seem determined to avoid bluntly naming the thing being discriminated against. Still, I think it's worth trying to raise this point every now and again, in the hope that we'll eventually get to a more accurate term.

I know some have argued that the word doesn't mean "fear" of homosexuality, but "aversion" to it. But I can't think of another word in the English language where we use "phobia" in that way (except maybe xenophobia, which I think has a similar explanation for why we settled on it as a word).


But whatever word we use, is Daniel Murphy that thing? 

Evangelicals believe homosexuality is a sin. It comes from a pretty straightforward reading of a lot of passages in the Bible, none of which is probably more relevant than Romans 1:26, 27: "Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."

Yes, a ton of people have argued against reading Romans 1 that way, as well as other passages evangelicals use to support the belief that homosexuality is a sin. (I was going to list some, but there are just too, too many examples.) But a vast number of American evangelical churches continue to believe it is a sin.

Evangelicals have evolved how they speak about homosexuality in the last thirty years. Most evangelical pulpits in America today will say something like this: "Yes, some people are born with a predilection for homosexuality, just like all of us are born with biological traits that make it harder for us to resist certain sins. That means we should be compassionate of those who struggle with homosexual attraction, but that is not the same as condoning it. We can also differentiate between attraction and acting on the attraction--a man need not feel he is sinning for feeling attracted to another man, only for acting on that attraction. Even if someone does act on homosexual impulses, Christians should learn to separate hating the sin from hating the sinner. And we shouldn't think that the way someone else sins is worse than how we ourselves sin."

You might disagree with all of that. I certainly do. But it's at least an evolution from thirty years ago, when I first started attending evangelical churches. They have at least moved a little bit in the direction of recognizing reality. And there is a big difference between saying you disagree with someone but you still think you can work together on a practical, day-to-day level and saying you think homosexuals should be outright shunned in all things. We liberals used to preach this same pragmatism--you don't have to agree with us, but that shouldn't get in the way of us working together where we have a common concern.

Daniel Murphy has tried to echo that basic line. He hasn't been perfect about how he's phrased everything, but he's a baseball player, not a professional preacher. I think we should assume he meant a better version of whatever he's tried to say over the years.

Speaking of pragmatism, by the way, I might point out that about one-fourth of Americans are evangelicals. They are the reason Donald Trump is president. We might want to think about that when we consider how to talk about them.

How to deal with conscientious beliefs of stupid things 

When I started to write this post, I was going to just shame the people who piled on Murphy, say our democracy won't survive this kind of reductionism of whatever the other guy believes, and call it a day. But as I thought about it, I realized it's not that simple. It is important to distinguish between a wrong belief held for deeply held reasons and your garden variety stupidity. And even with deeply held beliefs, we treat one deeply held belief differently from others.

For example, we realize that if everyone were to embrace pacifist beliefs, the country would probably fall to an invader that didn't have such qualms. Society has a vested interest in enforcing a non-pacifist ideology. But we also recognize the importance of recognizing a deeply held belief that violence is morally evil. So we make exceptions for it, even though those exceptions would, if held by everyone, undo our way of life.

Let's consider a belief that is much more obviously misguided than pacifism. Let's consider the person who won't get her child vaccinated because she thinks there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the dangers of vaccination. By doing so, she puts the entire community at risk of diseases that have no business plaguing the modern world. Clearly, there can be no accommodating this mistaken belief. (Although we do. We don't currently force immunizations in most cases. In my son's school, for example, you can get a waiver for a religious belief if you don't want to get your son vaccinated. The point is that we OUGHT to treat these two deeply held beliefs different because of the relative threat they each pose.)

We have to treat these two cases differently, in other words. In both cases, when dealing with them, it would, of course, be good to recall Sagan's words. The person with the heterodox (heretical?) view is going to think WE are the ones misleading them. For both, we need to treat them with respect and discretion, understanding that everything we feel about them they feel about us. We can't give them both the same protection under the law, because a few people believing in pacifism isn't the immediate threat to us all that a few people not getting vaccinated is, but we should treat them both with the same respect.

The question of where Daniel Murphy and other evangelicals' beliefs lie on this spectrum of wrong beliefs is the question that made me take over two weeks to write this post. On the one hand, if evangelicals vote to deny homosexuals marriage rights, then the belief itself is a threat to the community. (Not all evangelicals vote this way, by the way. There are libertarian evangelicals who separate individual sin from government enforcement of private vices.)  But to the extent that Murphy is just saying that he thinks the Bible still says the same thing most Christians thought it said a long time ago, I think we ought to give the guy a break. There is a difference between some idiot who "hates fags" and a person who believes homosexuality is a sin as part of a much deeper held world belief.

What this has to do with another athlete 

We're in the middle of another stupid killing of a black man who didn't deserve to be killed. (If you're reading this at some period in the future, the dead black man who didn't deserve it this week was Botham Shem Jean.) Colin Kaepernick, as you may have heard, was a quarterback who stopped being welcome in the NFL because he didn't stand for the national anthem to protest police treatment of black Americans.

I didn't realize how strong the feelings of some people I knew were until I posted about Kaepernick after his Nike commercial was released:

I got a flood of messages from people who said all kinds of things that had nothing to do with what I'd posted, namely, that his beliefs seemed deeply held enough, and costly enough to himself, that they seemed worth respecting. You didn't have to agree with them, but they seemed to fit that category of beliefs deeply held enough not to hate the man.

I couldn't believe some of the responses I got. Some shocked me with their off-topic rants on "reverse racism" and how it's okay to be proud of everything but being a white person.

A lot of these reactions came from folks in Ohio, the people we can all thank for our current president. I'd like to hate on these people for what they wrote, but when I see the kind of glee liberals take in something as stupid as an organist playing Lady Gaga for at-bats by an evangelical baseball player, I wonder if our own reactions don't play a role in how Kaepernick is treated.

To be clear, I think Kaepernick is right that police behavior in America doesn't do right by black Americans. I think he has also been wrong about how he has expressed that. I think police have been unfairly demonized, when in fact their mistakes are the result of a society trying to deal with deep social ills on the cheap by leaving the outcomes of those social ills to the police to deal with. Police are understaffed, overworked, and expected to be far more perfect in their jobs than most of us are. All for a salary that puts them somewhere in the uninspiring middle of the middle class. Bad police behavior is our fault as a society. Kaepernick was wrong to wear pig socks.

That being said, Kaepernick was a lot righter about his beliefs than Murphy was about his. But they're both coming from a place of equal reflection, with the conclusions of the reflections being dependent on the relative cognitive abilities of the athletes involved. It's worth pointing out that Murphy's beliefs, while they haven't lost him his job, have had a cost to him. Anytime you express a belief that is no longer a majority belief, you're risking a fallout. The Cubs had to think about it before they took Murphy on their roster. Murphy's fallout comes when he is continually pointed out as a bigot for expressing a belief that millions of Americans who don't play baseball express every Sunday.

Murphy's and Kaepernick's costly ideologies are not equal, but they do have similarities that are worth considering. It's worth it for us, as a society, to consider how we treat those we believe to have beliefs we think wrong and even dangerous, but which are held to in good faith by their adherents, even when those beliefs cost them something.

It is especially worth it for us liberals to consider how we treat those we disagree with. Evangelicals are the reason we have a President Trump. So is the way we deal with them working?

Since I've just spent five weeks deeply mired in reading David Foster Wallace, let's go ahead and talk openly about suicide

Thanks to a three-day weekend in which I ignored my family and friends almost completely, I finished Wallace's Infinite Jest. I got through the last pages this morning right after seeing my son off to school, then had to get through a day of work with that heaviness on the brain.

I'm going to attempt some kind of cathartic post on what the big ideas in the book are so I can move on with my life and do something else. I intend--unwisely, in all likelihood--to do this without a net. That is, I'm going to try to come up with my take on the book without referring to what the many, many experts and fans of the book have already said about it. I don't want to do either an academic-style analysis or a New York Times-type critique. The book's great. We all know that. It's also been studied to death, so if I'm going to say anything even close to new about it, it's going to have to be more personal.

This post is about suicide, about my relationship to the topic, about a book that deals extensively with it, written by an author who ultimately committed it.

Suicide in Infinite Jest 

Suicide is all over IJ. The meaning of the title within the novel refers to a movie about a woman who seems to softly promise the release of death. The movie has become weaponzied because people who watch it become essentially lobotomized, unable from their first viewing to desire anything but to watch it again. Beyond that, the book spends roughly half its pages on the down-and-out, the addicts and recovering addicts of Boston. This is a population that includes some who are tormented by the shadow of the black wing of aggressive depression. (If aggressive depression is anything like it is described in this book, let me say I feel nothing but sympathy for those who suffer from it, and I do not in the least bit begrudge anyone wanting out.)

But the link to suicide goes deeper still. It isn't just an option for the mentally ill. The book is, as the title suggests, deeply indebted to Hamlet, a play we teach to moody teens every year for some reason even though suicide is all over the play. Of course, there is the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy, which is an extended meditation on suicide. It's an option that Hamlet eventually only weakly opts out of because he is concerned about what kinds of dreams may torment him in that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler has returned. There is also Hamlet's even more direct wish that "the Almighty had not fix'd his canon 'gainst self-slaughter."

Hamlet's reasons for considering suicide in many ways contradict those given in IJ. The shifting narrator of IJ at one point notes that generally, people do not seriously consider suicide because they decide that "life's assets and debits do not square." But that seems to be exactly what has led Hamlet to consider it. He is disillusioned (but not, I think, depressed) that life seems to have moved on after his father's death so quickly. If his father can be forgotten like that, what is the point of life, if it's so fleeting? Why would anyone put up with the million annoyances, big and small, just to endure to the end of a thing that means nothing?

Perhaps this isn't the kind of suicidal thinking, though, that brings action. It's not enough to override the animal impulse, the instinct to survive. Hamlet may deride himself outright for being a coward, but that's not enough to make him do what he thinks he ought to do and end his own life. His abstractions do not bring action.

And that's a key theme of IJ. Intellectuals are capable of seeing through the many holes in the answers proposed by others of how to make life meaningful and worth living. But they are only able to show the holes, not to propose something better. They're just smart enough to be miserable.  It's a theme Jonathan Franzen has picked up in his work.

Geoffery Day is one of these just-smart-enough-to-be-miserable characters. He has come into Ennet House, a halfway house for those recovering from addiction, but just can't abide the cliches that AA wants him to repeat. Don Gately, although stunned nearly to silence by Day's verbal wit, manages to make one thing clear: Geoffery is completely right that everything AA tells you is garbage, but it is also completely right that if you do what AA wants you to do, it will work. It's a complete paradox (although Don wouldn't call it that), but it's true. But Day is too smart to unlock the magic.

The Antidote to suicidal tendencies in IJ

There are a couple of classes of people who might consider suicide. There are those tormented by psychological maladies or addictions that make life so painful they override the will to survive. These kinds of motivations lead to action. IJ compares these feelings to those who are so afraid of dying in a fire they jump from a burning building, preferring the certain death of the fall to what so terrifies them. People in really awful depression are in pain, pain that's greater than their fear.

There are also those whose problem with life is more a philosophical one. Hal, the novel's rather obvious teenage simulacra of Hamlet ("Prince Hal," a janitor calls him, rather too pointedly), is one of these. He is gobsmacked one morning when he imagines a pile of all the food he will eat from that morning to the end of his life, then pictures next to it a pile of all the shits he will have to take when he eats all that food. It gives him the screaming fantods, and it's all too much to take in. He spends the rest of his few moments on stage lying down, watching his father's movies. We are left to wonder if his coming seeming madness, alluded to in the chapter's opening scene, one in which every facial expression and word he says is misunderstood, is real madness.

Both those suffering direct psychological torment and the less direct, existential kind are offered options. For the recovering alcoholic, drug addict, or depressive, there is the magical compartmentalizing cliche of AA: one day at a time. Build a wall around the day, don't see beyond it. Build it over each second of the day if you have to. Yes, it's a cliche, but cliches tend to become cliches for a reason. You cannot eat that entire pile of meat or defecate all of that shit. As Joelle van Dyne discovers, if you try to think of all the days in front of you, they will feel like they are too big a hurdle, like each day is a car you have to jump on a motorcycle, Evil Kenevil-style. But a series of jumps over one car, repeated each day, is possible.

For those who have talked themselves into an intellectual state of uncertainty, until they feel that all the uses of this world are dull, stale, flat and unprofitable--maybe not actively considering suicide, because their thoughts cannot ever obtain the name of action, but nonetheless supremely indifferent to life--for these, the options are maybe a bit more complicated. The magic of cliches might not be available to them. So what do they turn to?

One thing they shouldn't turn to, according it IJ, is a sense of world-weary, ultra-cool ennui or weltschmerz. IJ constantly reinforces for us the idea that the never-ending cycle of smart-ass American irony is not, as we tend to believe, proof that we are wise to our own foibles; it's the cause of many of our most profound social anxieties and pathologies. It's natural to yearn for earnestness. (Here, I will cheat and bring in a video that explains Wallace's thoughts on Irony, one I was aware of before reading the book):

Early on in the book, we read a paper Hal has written for school on how America's police hero evolved from Hawaii Five-O to Hill Street Blues. It went from the man of action, who moved endlessly toward a conclusion we all saw was right, to post-modern hero Frank Furillo, a man struggling to figure out his murky way in a complex bureaucratic landscape. Furillo is not a hero of action, but re-action. Hal wonders if the future of the hero will give us a hero of "non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus..." By the end of the novel, Hal is on his way to being this very thing.

The last remaining vestige of the hero of action the novel sees as possible is Hal's brother Mario, a strange mix of birth defects and Yoda-like wisdom. In a touching (i.e. schmaltzy and utterly un-ironic) scene, the trainer who comes to the tennis academy where Hal and Mario live was moved to come there when he (the trainer) was conducting a social experiment living as a homeless person. Instead of asking for money, he asked for someone to just touch him. He held out his dirty hand and asked for human contact. When nobody did this for weeks, he (the trainer) began to despair, and almost forgot his real identity and became homeless. But Mario hears him (the trainer) asking for someone to just touch him and, unable to think it is just some weird argot for "please give me money," as everyone else has, shakes the man's hand.


But let's get real here

I haven't used scholarly sources here, because this book's been gone over by scholars and fans to death. I'm not going to produce something new through doing a lot of homework. In the spirit of Wallaceian earnestness, I'd like to talk about what this book made me feel.

This book is better than anything I could ever do. If I quit my job, abandoned my family, lived to write, I'd never touch the jaw-dropping wonder of this book. And yet, the guy who wrote it killed himself at about exactly my current age. A big part of me doesn't understand Wallace's suicide. I'm like the tennis students at Enfield Tennis Academy. I think that because he wrote a book that was ten times better than anything I've ever written, he should be ten times happier.

Of course, this is nonsense. No sooner do tennis players make the big time than they begin to worry about losing their fame and sense of being special when they stop winning. Tennis is a symbol for the American dream in IJ. Once we achieve it, our options are: enjoy it (often too much, which makes us lose our edge), or work tirelessly and paranoiacally to maintain it, which begins to feel like a grind, and leads some athletes to seek refuge in drugs, alcohol, etc.

There is retrospectively unnerving foreshadowing of Wallace's death in the book. The character in IJ who is most like its author is the film-maker, a man referred to by his family, suggestively, as "Himself." Himself "de-maps" himself by sticking his own head in a microwave.

I haven't extensively looked into Wallace's life. In grad school, I was still part of the generation that believed somewhat that details about the author's life were as likely to mislead you as enlighten. I don't believe that anymore, but I still wanted to try to connect purely with the book before I learned too much about the author. It turns out that Wallace probably killed himself more out of the psychic torment and addiction sorts of problems than the existential malaise kinds.

Thankfully, these are torments I've been spared. I'm not depressed, and I'm not within a million miles of addicted. But I have thought about suicide often since I was a teenager. I've almost always thought of suicide in terms of a cold calculus, the "credits and debits" of the novel. For now, I've put the question of suicide out of mind, because I feel--for reasons I can't quite describe--that it would be wrong to go while my parents are still alive and while I still have kids to get established in life. But man, I've seen my grandmother and my mother-in-law die in nursing homes in the last ten years. I do not want to go that way, surrounded by the eye-burning ammonia stink of urine until I don't notice it anymore.

I don't want to go too early, but when the time comes, I don't want to lose the name of action and go too late. I'm worried I won't have the stamina to put up with life until I've made it long enough, but I'm also worried that when I've made it as far as I want to make it, I'll be too scared to give it up. It's a difficult balance I want to achieve between clinging to life and being ready to leave it. The thing about Infinite Jest is this: I don't think IJ goes far enough to make a convincing case for sticking around.

Instead of tennis, life just seems to me like a kind of semi-interesting board game, but one that goes on way too long, well past the point of being amusing. I have no real grudge against others if they enjoy the game, and in fact wouldn't mind making room for them at the table by bowing out myself, if it weren't for the fact I think it will hurt the chances of others I feel responsible for help them to enjoy the game themselves. So I keep playing well past the point of diminishing returns for me, until life just seems like a big pile of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrows I have to endure.

I know it's an ad hominem to say that what DFW offers in IJ must not be a good method for getting myself as far in the game as I want to go, since it didn't work for him. But doesn't that mean something? Doesn't it suggest something about the usefulness of the solutions offered in IJ for finding a way to keep getting up every morning without de-mapping oneself?

It seems absurd to say Wallace underestimated the role humor can play in survival, because I can't remember reading a funnier author. But in taking irony out of play, DFW is really taking a major weapon in the humorist's arsenal, one that can help to cope with life. Sometimes, irony is better than earnestness. Not always. I'm glad DFW made an earnest plea for earnestness, and that it seems to have had an impact on our culture. But sometimes, yes, it really is better to evade your true feelings and use humor, even douchey world-weary ironic humor, than it is to come in contact with real feelings.

Me, I use some combination of fuck-you-universe rage, emotion-dodging humor, dopamine I get from occasionally being able to help others or finding something genuinely fun to do, and bits of occasional hopefulness that somewhere in the things in heaven and earth not dreamed of in my small philosophy might be something that could make this whole tale to be told by someone other than an idiot. There is no right formula. You get through life telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself. If I tell myself enough things to get to a point where I feel pretty sure I've played long enough, I win.

I loved this book, but I'm not sure in the end it was enough of what I look for that I'm going to keep going back to it. I don't think I'll be one of those annoying DFW acolytes I've read about, sort of the literary equivalent of the worst of the Rick and Morty fanbase. Maybe that's for the best, since those kinds of fans seem to lead to the kinds of snarky, ironic critiques of themselves that DFW would have hated.

In the meantime, should the wraith of Wallace ever feel the desire to slow down enough to sit atop my monitor and share its thoughts with me, he's always welcome at my desk. I'm hope his wraith is happy wherever he is.